There have been four seasons of the Shudder anthology horror series Creepshow, which serves as a continuation of the franchise George A. Romero and Stephen King started with the classic ‘80s films Creepshow and Creepshow 2, and three of those seasons have consisted of six episodes. Season 4 is one of them, so with the fourth episode we have officially entered the second half of the short season.
It begins with a story called Meet the Belaskos, which was written by John Esposito, who has been a big part of this show, having contributed stories to every season. For season 1, he wrote Night of the Paw. For season 2, Model Kid and Within the Walls of Madness. For season 3, Skeletons in the Closet and Meter Reader. Earlier in season 4, he wrote Grieving Process. But his seventh contribution to Creepshow was a special one, because this segment also marks his directorial debut.
Esposito did a fine job directing this story, which is set in a world where it’s a known fact that vampires exist among us. In fact, “Vampire Americans” are an accepted part of communities, and exist off store-bought products that apparently have blood in the list of ingredients. Feeding off people is illegal, but they have blood drinks, blood syrup for waffles, etc. The Belaksos are a family of vampires, and they’re presented like friendly suburbanites... they just have to sleep in coffins during the day and get their work done at night. The family consists of parents Chuck (Brendan Taylor) and Helena (Lisa Durupt), and their teenage daughter Anna (Karis Cameron). When they move into a new town, it’s immediately apparent that their neighbor Doug (Donavon Stinson) is anti-vampire. But his prejudice isn’t shared by his teenage son Alex (Matthew Nelson-Mahood), who catches a case of lust at first sight when he catches a glimpse of Anna. After he’s caught perving on her while she moonbathes, he and Anna strike up a friendship which turns romantic.
Yep, it’s a story of star-crossed lovers. Such stories usually end in tragedy, especially when they’re being told within the horror genre, so we can safely bet early on that things are going to go terribly wrong for Alex and Anna. They may talk about Alex’s wish of becoming a vampire or Anna’s dream of enjoying six months of continuous nights in Alaska, but Doug is sure to ruin their happily ever after.
Meet the Belaskos is an interesting, emotionally engaging story, and Esposito had me hoping things would turn out okay for Alex and Anna even though I knew it wasn’t going to. It plays out pretty much as I expected it to, and Esposito dropped some nice stylistic moments in there – although he could have gone a bit heavier on the traditional Creepshow style shots while he was at it. This was a good debut for him, though, and he has proven that he has what it takes to direct a genre short.
Almost every episode of Creepshow is split into two stories, and that was the case with this one. Meet the Belaskos is followed by Cheat Code, which was directed by Justin G. Dyck – who just made his Creepshow debut with the segment To Grandmother’s House We Go in the previous episode – from a script by the writing duo of Claire Carré and Charles Spano, who made their Creepshow debut right here.
This story stars Lochlyn Munro as Jeff, who unearths his old copy of a video game called Weird Wednesday, which he was a champion player of thirty years ago... back before all copies of the game were pulled off the shelves and buried in the desert for some unknown reason. This game is so difficult that no player has ever reached the final level, including Jeff himself. They would only go for high score. Jeff’s son Dave (Connor Wong) and his friends Reina (Hanna Huffman) and Spencer (Nikolas Filipovic) are games, so Jeff gets them into this oddball game, which is only about trying to get a guy across town while dodging various everyday objects that could be deadly to him.
But when Jeff got them into the game, he didn’t anticipate that they would actually, literally get sucked into the game. Apparently this is why Weird Wednesday was pulled off the shelves: the game is cursed and can prove deadly to its players.
Cheat Code doesn’t have much in the way of Creepshow style or tone, but it’s a fun little horror story. Dyck specializes in made-for-TV romance movies, many of them set on Christmas, so these Creepshow segments are his first attempts at directing horror stories. I don’t think he has fully captured the right horror vibe just yet, but as they say, maybe practice will make perfect.
Overall, this was a very entertaining episode of Creepshow that was a good way to roll into the second half of the season.
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