‘Creepshow’ Season 4 Episode 6 Recap: “George Romero in 3D” + “Baby Teeth”

The sixth episode of the fourth season of Creepshow on Shudder opens with a love letter to the series’ other “father,” George Romero. There are immediate references in the opening to Richard Bachman, too, so both paternal bases are covered right from the jump. The short, “George Romero in 3D” occurs in the last days of Sarah’s (Kyra Zagorsky) little, brick-and-mortar used bookstore: customer-less and about to have its rent doubled by the harsh realities of late stage capitalism. Her bookish boy Martin (Graham Verchere) helps out along with their lone employee Dawn (Megan Charpentier) when they come upon a couple of issues of an old comic book that may be lost George Romero masterpieces. Excited to find something that might get them enough money to stay open for a few more months, Martin puts on the included 3D glasses to find that doing so teleports a zombie from the comic to the real world. To fight it, he summons… well, he summons George Romero (Sebastian Kroon).

What follows is, I’m very sorry to report, tedious at best. The zombie is only visible when the glasses are on, but despite there being ample bloody evidence of the zombie’s existence, Sarah resolutely refuses to acknowledge their peril. It’s frustrating not just for the viewer, but for Zagorsky, I think, for though she’s game, an extended sequence where she needs to ad-lib her mulishness starts to pull the curtain back a little on what it might have been like to play someone of Sarah’s particular density. Much of the short plays like that: people too smart for the script forced to play it all in first gear. Most frustrating is resurrecting poor Romero for a piece with so little depth and development — something of which even the least-regarded of Romero’s work could be accused. There’s a scene where Romero hotwires a fuse box to cause a ceiling fan to spin faster, and then the zombie climbs on a box for some reason and gets the top of its head “helicopter’d” off. I get the reference. I also get how tortured was the path this film took to make the reference. It wasn’t worth it.

A little better is John Harrison’s “Baby Teeth” which conflates the story of the Tooth Fairy with Gaelic fairy mythology, centering on helicopter mom Miranda’s (Rochelle Greenwood) terror over her awful daughter Shelby’s (Alison Thornton) likelihood to be carried off into the wood and wild. Opening with a weird trip to the dentists where Shelby is drugged up and bloody and leading directly to a series of unpleasant exchanges where Shelby demonstrates what a terrible person she is while Miranda acts the doormat, the short proceeds to do not a lot until a wonderful Tooth Fairy puppet shows up, looking for its due. I was reminded cozily of Dan Curtis’ Trilogy of Terror television anthology movie, the last segment for which involves a single woman, Amelia (Karen Black) hunted by a terrifying little doll. It takes a while to get going, but once it goes, it cooks.

My concern for Creepshow is not that it’s uneven — after all, even the best anthology series tend to be uneven. It’s inevitable. No, my concern is the way in which Creepshow is uneven. It vacillates between little masterpieces and genuinely disastrous failures of both premise and execution. I wish it were not so because I love horror anthology projects. I take them personally. When the series fails it feels like it does so because the stories haven’t been developed and the production has been rushed. Better to extend the season — or, more to the point, the downtime between seasons — to let the meat marinate a little longer; the slow cooker to work its magic over a few more drafts and, perhaps, a few more fresh voices. This framework is something like a perpetual motion machine, but it does need a touch of inspiration to get it started. I will always want more, but I’m willing to wait for it to finish cooking. 

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.