Fall under the spell of Creepshow season 3, episode 4.
Stranger Sings is a very economical installment in season 3 of the Creepshow anthology series, in the way where you can notice that it was specifically written to be brought to the screen with a very low budget. There are only three characters in the story, and they make their way through a minimal number of locations.
The story was written by Jordana Arkin, who has nearly thirty years of TV and video game writing credits to her name but made her Creepshow debut here. It begins when divorced gynecologist Barry (Chris Mayers) has a meet-cute interaction with the very single Sara (Suehyla El-Attar) at a bookstore / coffee shop and ends up helping Sara carry her large stack of books back to her home. When they get to her house, Sara seems quite eager to get Barry inside, but she's not successful in doing so... until an operatic voice emanates from her house as Barry is walking away. It puts him in a trance, even makes his eyes roll back into his head, and he's compelled to enter the house. Once he's inside, we're introduced to the third character, Kadianne Whyte as Miranda - and things get pretty goofy. Although we're just hanging out with three people in a house, the story involves a mythological creature and a medical procedure that I can't imagine a gynecologist would know how to do. I didn't even know this particular procedure was possible in our world until Stranger Sings introduced it to me.
The concept is silly, but it makes for 20 minutes of mindless entertainment. It kind of fell apart for me at the ending, though. The procedure happens a bit too quickly and easily with no recovery time necessary even for a mortal character, then character dynamics change out of nowhere, and something major happens that is explained away with a short little line. It was a bit too flippant for my taste, it wasn't satisfying to me.
Stranger Sings was directed by Axelle Carolyn, who previously directed the season 2 story Dead and Breakfast. I was glad to see Carolyn working on Creepshow again, but I thought Stranger Sings was weak in comparison to Dead and Breakfast.
The second half of this episode tells a story called Meter Reader, which was directed by Joe Lynch - making this his fourth contribution to the Creepshow series - from a script by John Esposito, who has written multiple stories over the show's three seasons. This one feels like it pushes its budget a little further than Stranger Sings did, although we do end up hanging out with a small group of characters in a house again.
Meter Reader takes place during a pandemic, but this plague is of the supernatural variety - people are being possessed, and if they aren't exorcised soon enough the only way to handle them is to decapitate them. Only a small number of people, called meter readers, are immune and able to carry out the exorcisms, and one of those meter readers is Dalton (Johnathon Schaech). When Dalton runs into trouble on the job, his family - wife Maria (Cynthia Evans), son Michael (Boston Pierce), and daughter Theresa (Abigail Dalton) - are left worrying and waiting for him at home for three days. When Dalton finally shows up, things really fall apart.
Esposito did a good job of building this apocalyptic world and Lynch brought it to the screen with a nice visual style. There are ideas in Meter Reader that feel like they could have sustained a feature, but at the same time it didn't feel like there was enough going on in the story to sustain the segment's 24 minutes. It went on a bit too long... but there were some creepy moments along the way.
This was a decent way to spend 45 minutes, but it was probably my least favorite episode so far in season 3 overall. At least it was shorter than the previous episode, which is a plus.
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