CREEPSHOW: SEASON 4 (2023)
Label: Acorn Media International
Region Code: Region-Free
Rating: 18 Cert.
Duration: 202 Minutes
Audio: English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with Optional English Subtitles
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.78:1)
Director: Greg Nicotero, John Harrison, Kailey Spear & Sam Spear, P.J. Pesce, Justin Dyck, John Esposito,
The Shudder Original series Creepshow returns for a fourth season, containing six episodes with two stories each running just under an hour. As with all anthologies it has it's ups and down, but I am pleased to say that I enjoyed season four quite a bit, the love for the original film and it's aesthetic are very much on display and you can tell the team behind the scenes are just horror fans who want to make fun shorts, and for the most part they've succeeded.
In the season opener "20 Minutes with Cassandra" video game journalist Lorna (Samantha Sloyan, Midnight Mass) is having a quiet night at home, having just ordered a pizza, she hears a knock at the door, finding not a pizza but a seemingly panicked woman named Cassandra (Ruth Codd, The Fall of the House of Usher) who tells her that a monster that looks like a giant rat covered in glue is after her. Lorna attempts to call 911 but the woman throws her phone out the door, and suddenly she finds herself holed-up in her house with a woman who might not be telling her the whole truth, though it turns out that the monster is real! The flipside of the episode is "Smile" photojournalist James Harris (Matthew James Downden) and his wife Sarah (Lucie Guest, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) are celebrating his recent award win with a night out, but they find themselves photographed by a mysterious man with a polaroid who leaves a trail of near-future predicting polaroid snaps that leads them back to their home and their son Max (Max Archibald, TV's The 100) who is imminent danger, all of this tying back to James photo assignment in war-torn San Miguel, Buenos Aires where he snapped the award-winning pic of a father and son drowning in a river.
Episode two opens with "Hat" wherein struggling horror author Jay (Ryan Beil, iZombie) is suffering writers block while working on his next book. While visiting with his manager Nicole (Marlee Walchuck, The Bad Seed Returns) she shows him her collection of artifacts that belonged to famous writer, we see Ray Bradbury's typewriter, Richard Matheson's pipe, H.P. Lovecraft's Civil War bullet, and Homburg hat worn by Jay's idol, horror author Stephen Bachman (David Beairsto, TV's Kung Fu) - see what they did there? To help him get over his writing block she lets him borrow Bachman's hat, and what ensues is a tale that brought to mind the "Hair" segment from the horror anthology Body Bags, as the hat is actually a brain-sucking parasite. I love all the author folklore here, and the parasitic brain-sucker stuff looks terrific. The B-side is "Grieving Process" chef Richard's (Sachin Sahel, The 100) wife April (Rachel Drance, TV's The Flash) is viciously attacked, and while recovering her temperament changes quite drastically, eventually revealing that she is turning into some sort of a blood and flesh-feeding monster, After she attacks her doctor and kills her her husband confines her to the basement, and out of love supplies her with fresh victims which he prepares into delicious meals. This was the first episode of the season to lose me a bit, I struggled to get through it as it felt a bit haphazard.
Episode three kicks off with "The Parental Death Trap" wherein highschooler Lyle VelJohnson (Dylan Sloane, Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies), the only son of the wealthy VelJohnson family grows tired of his parents nagging about how much of a loser he is, he ends up murdering parents Archibald (Shaughnessy Redden, TV's The Terror) and Gloria (Loretta Walsh, A Series of Unfortunate Events) who come back to taunt him further as undead ghosts. Now four years later and left to his own devices he encounters Violet Meyers (Chloe Babcock, The 100), who once stood him up on the night of his prom, and they hit it off, and get married. However, Lyle's secret and a few of her own threaten their happiness, especially when the FBI start poking around looking for his parents. This was fun in a Frighteners sort of way, including a twist that I sort of saw coming but still enjoyed quite a bit. The episode 3 double-bill is finished up with "To Grandmother's House We Go" a gold-digger named Marcia (Keegan Connor Tracy, Final Destination 2) marries a rich man, and he dies soon, and she is saddled with is kid Ruby (Emma Oliver, TV's Snowpiercer), which makes her quite unhappy. However, when the kid's grandmother tells he she's dying and she wants to see the kid she sees an opportunity to inherit the families wealth and heads that way. Along the way she is involved in a minor accident and encounters a werewolf, but manages to kill it, but the lycanthropic surprises don't stop once they get to granny's house. This is another slapdash entry, I enjoyed how pulpy it was, Tracy is terrific as the annoyed and annoying gold-digger, and the werewolf carnage and creature effects were decent.
Vampire tale "Meat the Belasco" is top-billed on episode
four, in it vampires and human uneasily co-exist as the vamps regularly deal with human prejudices, despite the fact that vampires have not drank human blood for many generations. Chuck Belasko (Brendan Taylor, TV's Firefly Lane) and his wife Helena (Lisa Durupt, Puppet Killer) and teen daughter Anna (Karis Cameron, TV's Open Heart) have just moved into a new neighborhood after being attacked in the last one, but they are given a hostile greeting by their neighbor Doug Roach (Donavon Stinson, Dead Shack). Roach's teen son is not prejudiced however, and when he catches vamp-teen Anna bathing on her rooftop on the moonlight he takes quite a liking to her, and she to him, but his father interferes resulting in tragedy. I loved all the vampire easter eggs in this one, and the way it finishes up is quite touching despite some ropey digital special effects.
The flipside is a video game based tale "Cheat Code" widowed dad Jeff (Lochlyn Munro, TV's Riverdale) bonds with his teen-gamer son Dave (Connor Wong, Cruel Summer) over an obscure 80's 8-bit video game called Weird Wednesday, that Jeff was once a local champion at. He says the game was mysteriously pulled from the shelves and buried, like the infamous E.T. Atari game. Dave ends up digging the game and invites his friends Reina (Hanna Huffman, Letters at Christmas) and Spencer (Nikolas Flipovic, TV's Falling Skies) over to play. They buy their own console and copy of the game on the secondary market, discovering a handwritten cheat code on the cartridge box, but it has the effect sucking you into the game with real life of death consequences! This one was quite silly but still entertaining, it brought me back to my Atari/Nintendo heydays. A little bit of gore in this one and whole lot of 8-bit gaming graphics.
In episode five opener "Something Burrowed, Something Blue" dying billionaire Frank (Tom Atkins, Halloween III: Season of the Witch) writes a letter to his estranged daughter Allison (Kristy Dawn Dinsmore, TV's Vikings) hoping to reconcile before he dies. She's firmly against it but her fiancé Ryan (Curtis Lum, TV's Siren) convinces her otherwise. Frank offers to have them married at his estate and for them to inherit the property and his vast fortune, She refuses but Frank secretly pulls Ryan aside to convince him, he takes him to a room where he points pout an opening to a pit, telling him that a dormant destructive creature called a Minhocão lives there, and part of getting their hands on the inheritance involves feeding a sacrificial victim to it every fifteen years, but it must be kept secret from Allison. He agree, the wedding goes on as planned, and he sacrifices a drunk cousin to the beast... but things don't quite go as planned for anyone involved. I am a sucker for creature features (even a shitty digital one you only see once!) and Tom Atkins, so I was a sucker for this one, even though it's honestly not that great, but Atkin is awesome. The b-side is "Doodles" about an aspiring
cartoonist named Angela (Anja Savcic, TV's Nancy Drew)
whose doodles comes to life, though she only seems to use it for ill-intentioned revenge, which comes back to stab her in the neck in a very EC comics sort of way.
The season finale starts with "George Romero in 3-D", a mother and son Sarah (Kyra Zagorsky, The Imperfects) and and Martin (Graham Verchere, Summer of '84) operate a struggling brick and mortar bookstore, the son and his female co-worker he has a crush on discover a cache of unpublished George A. Romero 3-D zombie comics, complete with 3-D glasses that look like Romero's signature Ultra Goliath II frames. He starts reading them but realizes that somehow when you read the comics with the 3-D glasses the zombies from the pages materialize as invisible zombies in the real world, and you are only able to see them with the 3-D glasses, which was a very 13 Ghosts/They Live gimmick. The zombies start rampaging around the bookstore but thankfully an illustrated George A. Romero (Sebastian Kroon, TV's Shadow of the Rougarou) shows up to help save the day! I love pretty much anything Romero related and this is chock full Romero love throughout, we even get a ceiling fan recreation of the helicopter blades zombie death from Dawn of the Dead, plus we get some cool zombie make-up and gore effects The B-side is "Baby Teeth" wherein an overprotective mother (Rochelle Greenwood, HBO's Peacemaker) who struggled with her increasingly free-spirited teen daughter Shelby (Alison Thornton, School Spirits). The mom's been saving her daughter's baby teeth her whole life, and now that she has had her wisdom teeth removed she has a complete collection, unfortunately for all this attracts the attention of a dark tooth fairy who has come to collect! This is short and sweet, and also features some visceral mouth-trauma that rivals that of the mask-misfire scene in Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
Season 4 Episodes:
Ep. 1. 20 Minutes & Cassandra & Smile (53:31)
Ep. 2. The Hat & Grieving Process (53:27)
Ep. 3. The Parental Death Trap & To Grandmother's House We Go (48:52)
Ep. 4. Meat the Belasco & Cheat Code (47:28)
Ep. 5. Something Burrowed, Something Blue & Doodles (47:53)
Ep. 6. George Romero in 3-D & Baby Teeth (47:53)
Audio/Video: All six episodes of Creepshow: Season 4 (2023) arrive on 2-disc region-free Blu-ray from Acorn Media International in 1080p HD widescreen (1.78:1), three episodes per disc. As with previous seasons this was shot digitally and there are no issues with source related blemishes, colors are strong and well-saturate, particularly during the animated comic panels and the garish colored lighting. Having sampled some of the streaming versions of the episodes I can say that these on-disc HD versions are appreciably superior to their streaming counterparts. Audio comes by way of English DTS-HD MA 5.1 with optional English subtitles, like the previous 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. Sadly, there are no extras on this set, previously seasons sets had extras but this time around it's barebones, as it's the U.S. release.
The 2-disc release arrives in one of the larger width 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 but with the UK ratings log on the spine, front and back cover and
Special Features:
- None
Screenshots from the Acorn Media International Blu-ray:
