Sixteen years ago, Ethan Embry played a woman's abusive survivalist nut husband in Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, Phantasm director Don Coscarelli's contribution to the series Masters of Horror, one of my all-time favorite horror-themed TV shows and one I would love to see get a revival. So the season 3 premiere of Shudder's anthology series Creepshow (which continues the franchise George A. Romero and Stephen King started with the '80s films Creepshow and Creepshow 2) won me over instantly when Embry showed up in the episode's first story Mums as a woman's abusive survivalist nut husband.
Directed by Rusty Cundieff from a script by David J. Schow and Creepshow's creative supervisor Greg Nicotero, Mums is based on a story by Joe Hill, Stephen King's son who had an acting role in the original Creepshow. Here Embry plays Hank, who is more than just a survivalist, he's actually a domestic terrorist planning to carry out a bombing with his buddy Conner (Lowrey Brown). Hank's hippie wife Bloom (Erin Beute) is planning to leave him, which he might be fine with since he's sleeping with their friend Beth (Malone Thomas), if not for the fact that Bloom intends to take their young son Jack (Brayden Benson) with her. Hank doesn't seem to care about Jack very much, but at the same time it's so important to him that Jack not leave their home that he kills Bloom and buries her in the garden. And we know by now what happen when a scumbag murders somebody in the world of Creepshow: their victim is going to find a way to get revenge from beyond the grave.
Bloom's method of revenge allows for some neat special effects, and was somewhat reminiscent of both the classic tale Little Shop of Horrors and the animated wrap-around story from Creepshow 2. Which isn't too surprising when you take into account Bloom's name and where she was buried. This is classic Creepshow material, so I enjoyed Mums quite a bit on the story and horror effects level, and enjoyed the segment even more due to the presence of Embry in a familiar role.
But almost every Creepshow episode is split into two stories, and the second half of this one didn't work as well for me as the first half did. The second story is Queen Bee and was obviously inspired by Beyonce's nickname. Directed by Greg Nicotero, this one was written by Erik Sandoval and Michael Rousselet - and the writing is goofy as hell. I suppose it's ridiculous on purpose, but it's still jarring because the characters' reactions to events are so stupid. Those characters are Trenice (Olivia Hawthorne), Debra (Hannah Kepple), and Carlos (Nico Gomez), teenage fans of a famous singer named Regina (Kaelynn Harris). When they hear that the pregnant Regina has gone into labor and taken over a whole floor of the local hospital so she can give birth in peace, the teens set out to sneak into the hospital and witness the birth themselves.
These teens are idiots, and an example of their strange reactions to things is how they just brush it off and forget it when it looks like they might have killed a security guard while sneaking into the hospital. When Regina turns out to be an inhuman creature and her body morphs into a giant insect during the birth process, one of the teens asks, "Is that supposed to happen?" Queen Bee is an okay story overall but it's really stupid, too much for me to even find it amusing.
So I liked one story of the season 3 premiere more than the other, but that's the way it goes with anthologies. The enjoyment level goes up and down from story to story, and there's always hope that the next will be even better. Even when Creepshow presents something that I find underwhelming like Queen Bee, I'm still very glad to have this series to watch on Shudder. The good vastly outweighs the bad, and I think the show is a worthy extension of the Creepshow brand.
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