CREEPSHOW: SEASON 3 (2021)
Label: Acorn Media International
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: Cert. 15
Duration: 295 Minutes
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.78:1)
Directors: Greg Nictotero, Joe Lynch, John Harrison, Axelle Carolyn, Jeffrey F. January, Rusty Cindieff
The Shudder Original anthology series Creepshow revived George A. Romero and Stephen King's ode to the ghoulish tales of E.C. Comics back in 2019, this third season now on Blu-ray from Acorn Media International in the UK offers twelve new terrifying tales for fans of pulpy and macabre stories, hosted by the cackling Creep, usually in animated form, but sometimes in the animatronic flesh.
Episode 1 of season three starts of with "Mums" from director Rusty Cundieff (Tales from the Hood), from a story by Joe Hill (NOS4A2), wherein a woman named Bloom (Erin Beute) is murdered by her domestic-terrorist husband (Ethan Embry, The Devil's Candy) and buried in her beloved flower garden. Her son unaware that his mother is dead, just thinking she's away getting treatment for drug addiction, plants some seeds he finds among her possessions in the flower garden, after accidentally spilling his blood on them. The next day he's surprised to find that they've produced some fast-growing and peculiar looking mums with skull-shaped features and petals with human-like hair. The mums fed by Bloom's corpse turn into a blood-hungry flower/zombie hybrid, and those who killed her get fed to the vengeful bloodthirsty flowers. The second half of the episode is "Queen Bee" directed by Greg Nicotero. In it a trio of teenagers, Trinice (Olivia Hawthorne, Horror Noire), Deborah (Hannah Kepple, Cobra Kai), and Carlos (Nico Gomez), sneak into a locked-down hospital floor to see their pop-star hero Regina (Kaelynn Harris, Lovecraft County) give birth, only to find that she's a shape-shifting alien wasp-creature with the ability to put others into a glowing green-eyed, hive-mind thrall. Once they're discovered they'll be lucky if they only get stung, and not food for her larvae! I love me some creature-feature and the design of this Queen Bee are pretty great, and it's a solid b-side to the first segment.
Episode 2 features "Skeletons in the Closet" from Nicotero and "Familiar" directed by Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2). In "Skeletons in the Closets" super horror-film fan Lampini (Victor Rivera) is about to launch a new movie prop museum which boasts quite a collection of movie prop memorabilia that was largely collected by his late father, including the original actual human skeleton used to create "The Creep" from the original Creepshow film. However, the arrival of rival collector Bateman (James Remar, Dexter) threatens to derail the opening when he says he has evidence that one of the skeletons was recently stolen and he's gonna tell the cops unless he gives him one of the props. Lampini and his girlfriend kill and make Bateman's corpse into one of the museum displays, but Bateman's bones reanimate and set out for revenge. This one has some fun nods to Psycho, Phantasm, and a killer skeleton fight straight out of Jason and the Argonauts. In "Familiar" lawyer Jackson (Andrew Bachelor, The Babysitter) and his sculptor girlfriend Fawn (Hannah Fierman, V/H/S) visit a fortune-teller named Boone (Keith Arthur Bolden, Lovecraft Country) who tells the lawyer that a dark presence is following him. He takes little heed to the warning but starts to see a dark entity following him around., so he returns to the fortune-teller who informs him that the entity is a dark spirit known as a Familiar, and it must be trapped and disposed of. Following directions from Boone he traps the entity and dumps the magical crate he's trapped it in into a nearby flake, only to discover the demonic spirit has possessed his girlfriend. I didn't love this episode, it was a bit dull and middle-of-the-road, but the design of the familiar entity was pretty terrific.
In Episode 3 we have "The Last Tsuburaya" and "Okay, I'll Bite", the first story having to do with a lost artwork by a late artist Tsuburaya who known for his gruesome depictions of ghastly ghouls and monsters. The long lost piece, which has never been seen and is still sealed in a wooden box, is being given to the artist's last known surviving descendant, a store clerk, who in turns immediately sells it to billionaire Wade Cruise (Brandon Quinn), with the stipulation that he must sell it to him before anyone else can look at it. Cruise hosts a reveal party at his home, but after he opens the box revealing the paining only to himself, he then sets it on fire, destroying it, so that no one else can ever see it! The arrogant billionaire is unaware that he has set free the demon depicted in the picture which comes back to haunt him. In "Okay, I'll Bite" pharmacist Elmer Strick (Nick Massouh, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It) is in prison for helping euthanize his terminally ill mother. In prison becomes a pawn in a crooked prison guard's opium peddling business, and when he's up for parole the corrupt guard cooks up a fraudulent charge against him to ensure he is denied parole, keeping him in prison to continue cooking him batches of opium. Strick has become quite enamored with spiders during his incarceration and keeps a collection of them in his cell in glass jars, except for one special one that he keeps hidden away inside the wall. When the prison officials announce a fumigation of the cell block Strick fears for his eight-legged friends and ensures, with the help of an Egyptian spell scroll, that no harm will come to them. The spider effects in this one are pretty cool, and we get some eye-trauma that would have made Lucio Fulci a happy boy I am sure.
Episode 4 opens with the Axelle Carolyn (Tales of Halloween) directed "Stranger Sings" wherein
divorcee/gynecologist Barry (Chris Mayers, Bad Candy) meets the kindly Sara (Suehyla El-Attar, The Signal) at a coffee shop and walks her home. He thinks she's a dating prospect but after accompanying her to her house he finds out that she's working with a centuries old Siren named Miranda (Kadianne Whyte, Greenleaf), both of whom want to use his medical knowledge to perform a special surgery. We definitely don't get enough siren horror these days (or ever), so this was a nice change of pace, a fun twisted take on meet-cite gone wrong with some fun low-budget creature-effects. The b-side is Joe Lynch's "Meter Reader", a sort of post-apocalyptic exorcism story where travelling exorcists called Meter Readers travel the wastelands in search of demonically possessed victims to cure them, i.e. lop off their heads. This opens with a cool little exorcism job and then back to this particular Meter Reader's family, who have to contend with his own potential infection. You can really feel the budget shortfall here with the wastelandi magery
looking pretty shaky, but once we get inside the home where most of it takes place the claustrophobia, domestic tension and dread are pretty good.
Episode 5 first comes at us with "Time Out", a Twilight Zone-esque tale about a magical armoire that has a mysterious temporal anomaly inside. College kid Tim (Matthew Barnes, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty) inherits the armoire after his his grandmother's death, it having been a spoil of war is grandfather acquired during WW2. The family keepsake has the ability to accelerate time while your inside it, while time outside is unaffected. The armoire requires a key that unlocks it from the outside and the inside, and Tim sets up a study inside of it and uses the unique temporal properties of the cabinet to get ahead in his studies at law school and year's later to do the same at the law office where he works. Eventually the temporal acceleration catches up to him physically, and a mishap involving the misplacement of the key turns his dreams into dust. Next up is "The Things in Oakwood's Past", a gory animated tale about a town where the entire population disappeared back in 1821, and in the current day a mysterious carved wood crate containing what is believed to be a "time capsule" has been unearthed in the town square. Local TV reporter Mac Kamen (Ron Livingston, Office Space) and a town librarian/historian Marnie Wrightson (Danielle Harris, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers) are instigating the objects connection to the previous disappearance, only to find out it's not a time capsule at all, but a portal to Hell that will unleash a blood-hungry demonic horde. This animated tale looks pretty great, incorporating different styles that are eye-catching with some truly horrific gore, this is easily my favorite segment of season three.
For the season capper we get "Drug Traffic" and "A Dead Girl Named Sue", the first one being a tale about a politician Evan Miller (Reid Scott, Venom) who as part of a campaign stunt
charters a bus load of US citizens to the US/Canadian border as commentary on the US healthcare system's lack of access to affordable drugs. While there crusty border security officer Beau (Michael Rooker, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) notices that a woman (Mai Delape) is giving her sick daughter Mai (Sarah Jon, Mr. Jones) a lot of pills, and pulls them aside for interrogation, but denying the young girl the medication unleashes a Krasue, a spirit that is basically a disembodied head with the spinal column and internal organ trailing below it with no body, which embarks on a bloody rampage. This was a solid entry, I liked the political angle, and especially enjoyed how the young girl's mother will do anything to see that her daughter survives. The image of the floating head with the entrails hanging below it it super creepy. "A Dead Girl Named Sue" is a black and white tale that takes place in 1968 during Romero's Night of the Living Dead, wherein a smalltown police chief Evan Foster (Christian Gonzalez) and a vigilante posse use the undead uprising to get some justice for a young girl kidnapped, raped and murdered by predator Cliven Ridgeway (Josh Mikel, Renfield), the vile son of the town's Mayor who for years has quite literally gotten away with murder. I love the newscasts straight out of NOTL, the black and white smalltown atmosphere, the initial tension between the chief and the vigilante mob, it all makes for a wonderful little tale of smalltown justice set in a NOTL setting.
Season three was a bit of step down for me compared to the first two seasons, while I thought there were some pretty terrific creature designs and practical effects throughout the season the stories themselves didn't quite pull me in. Anthology series going back to Tales from the Darkside, Twilight Zone, and Tales from the Crypt have always been hit or miss, so that's not unexpected, but this season seems to have toned-down the black humor aspect of it, which is something I guess I missed this season. Nothing here quite hit on the level of Season 2's "Public Television of the Dead", "Night of the Living Late Show" or "A Creepshow Holiday Special: Shapeshifters Anonymous", nor Season 1's "Grey Matter", "Bad Wolf Down" or "Skincrawlers". So while overall I wasn't quite as enamored with this third series, but three best for me were "The Things in Oakwood's Past", and the season finale double-feature quite a bit.
Audio/Video: Creepshow: Season 3 (2021) arrives on 2-disc region-free Blu-ray from Acorn Media International in 1080p HD widescreen (1.78:1), as with previous seasons this was shot digitally there are no issues with source related blemishes, colors are strong and well-saturated, , particularly during the animated comic panels and the garish colored lighting. Having re-sampled some of the streaming versions of the episodes I can say that these on-disc HFD versions are vastly superior tot he streaming counterparts. Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with optional English subtitles, like the previous two seasons the sound design is pretty great; dialogue is cleanly delivered, sound effects are impactful, as is the Christopher Drake (The Lair) score on all the segments.
Extras for season three include a 25-min Amazon’s Comic-Con@Home Panel Interview moderated by Entertainment Weekly’s Clark Collis featuring Greg Nicotero, Mattie Do, director Rusty Cundieff, and actors Michael Rooker and James Remar. There's also 38-min of Behind-the-Scenes Raw Footage with some cool making-of stuff including the staging of some of the effects shots and testing out the practical effects, and a Behind-the-Scenes Photo Gallery. The 2-disc release arrives in an oversized UK style keepcase with a flipper tray housing the two disc, the single-sided wrap features the same key artwork as the U.S. release.
Special Features:
- Amazon’s Comic-Con@Home Panel Interview (35:08)
- Behind-the-Scenes Raw Footage (38:12)
- Behind-the-Scenes Photo Gallery
Screenshots from the Acorn Media Blu-ray:
Extras:
