Cody says goodbye to Creepshow season 3.
Shudder's Creepshow anthology series wrapped up its third season with the show's longest episode to date. At 55 minutes, the season 3 finale beats previous record holder The Last Tsuburaya / Okay I'll Bite (season 3, episode 3) by two minutes - and it also takes the season out on a high note. I really enjoyed both of the stories that made up this episode.
Drug Traffic reunites director Greg Nicotero (who serves as creative supervisor on Creepshow) with Michael Rooker, who played the unforgettable Merle on The Walking Dead, which Nicotero executive produces, frequently directs, and provides the special makeup effects for. Here Rooker plays Beau, the lone officer working passport control and customs at a small place on the U.S. / Canada border. An American politician (Reid Scott) is returning from Canada with a busload of citizens that he took there so they could buy medication, pointing out the problems with the American healthcare system. The sickly Mai (Sarah Jon) and her mother (Mai Delapa) have brought back too much medication for Beau's liking... but taking it away from Mai turns out to be a terrible mistake.
The script for this one was by franchise newcomers Mattie Do and Christopher Larsen, who drew inspiration from a Malaysian myth I had never heard of before this. Apparently Mai is a creature known as a penanggalan, which is basically a vampire, but not the Dracula sort. This vampire's head detaches from its body and it floats around with its organs hanging from its neck. It's quite a visual, and Nicotero and his crew did a great job of bringing this creature to the screen. And she did a great job of making a mess of her co-stars.
After meeting this nifty, underrepresented creature, we move on to a segment that deals with some very familiar creatures: zombies. But A Dead Girl Named Sue deals with zombies in an interesting and unique way... and also wins points with the fact that it's set on the Night of the Living Dead, the one Creepshow movie director George A. Romero made his 1968 movie about. The segment is even in black and white like Romero's film was. A Dead Girl Named Sue was written by Heather Anne Campbell, another writer earning their first Creepshow credit, and based on a short story written by Craig Engler, the General Manager of Shudder.
This segment was directed by John Harrison, who worked with Romero a lot back in the good old days and even composed the score for the first Creepshow. He's no stranger to the Shudder series; A Dead Girl Named Sue is the seventh segment he has directed for the show.
We know this is set on the Night of the Living Dead because the radio news reports heard throughout the segment - and the TV news reports glimpsed on a television - are the same reports used in the Romero classic. The reports inform us that the unburied dead are returning to life and attacking the living, but Harrison keeps the zombie hordes sweeping across the Eastern third of the United States off the screen, saving the sight of a zombie for the moment when it will be most effective. In the meantime, the story centers on small town characters who are planning to use the chaos of this zombie event to carry out some street justice and make the mayor's son Cliven Ridgeway (Joshua Mikel) pay for the crimes he has been committing against them and getting away with thanks to his father.
When we meet Cliven, he proves to be thoroughly unlikeable, although Mikel delivers such a great douchebag performance that I had fun watching him. Mikel also played a thoroughly unlikeable character on The Walking Dead, but he had long hair at the time. He has gotten a haircut since then, and I didn't even recognize him with short hair.
It's clever the way A Dead Girl Named Sue plays out at the same time as one of the horror genre's greatest classics, and it seems quite fitting that this is the story the season ends with, since the season 2 finale Night of the Living Late Show also took us into Night of the Living Dead, although in a very different way.
Just be careful with the subtitles, because they get a line wrong late in the segment and that mistake has caused some serious confusion among Romero zombie experts. Honestly, actor Cristian Gonzalez's delivery of the line is difficult to understand, so it's understandable how the mistake happened. But the line is "put her in a drawer", not "put it in a jar".
I feel like Creepshow season 3 was a great success overall. It has its ups and downs, as you expect from any anthology show, but I'm quite pleased with it as a whole. I just hope the show's host The Creep will get a bit more screen time in the next season, because there wasn't enough of him in this season for my liking.
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