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I loved Family Man and I’m really liking the series so far.  To me, Sacrifice was the weakest.  It looked really nice but…

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I didn’t get the sewing the lips up either.  There was no point to it except to make the episode gory/creepy.  You can’t pass these girls off as being all innocent victims when you got one of them sewing a mans lips up.

I absolutely hated In Sickness and in Health.

The Landis/Salva one was HORRIBLE. You wanna know why? Because IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE given its ending.

The way the lead character acts is TOTALLY unrealistic given that ending—she only acts that way to convince the audience of something. BAAAAAAD.

Kangas - 30 June 2008 01:43 AM

The Landis/Salva one was HORRIBLE. You wanna know why? Because IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE given its ending.

The way the lead character acts is TOTALLY unrealistic given that ending—she only acts that way to convince the audience of something. BAAAAAAD.

It was completely nonsensical bullshit.

I didn’t hate the Landis episode - don’t get me wrong, it was very problematic (for all the reasons previous outlined) but I think Landis did the best he could with an incredibly thin story. I also think that Fear Itself would benefit from being a half hour anthology show because most of the episodes don’t have enough to do for a full hour.

Back to this episode, I think that I had enough good will in the first half that it kept me from grading more harshly. I found the actors to be charming and have good chemistry for the first half; there were a lot of little funny touches in the first half of the episode that I thought were worth a chuckle. Come on - all that intense and graphic imagery of the saints was juxtaposed against weird conversations, funny little cuts (throwbacks to scream queen era) and a deaf priest. Plus, when the bridesmaids were giving the groom the hairy eyeball - that was funny!

The series is still pretty weak and I’ve been disappointed, but I still contend that on the whole it has been better than Masters of Horror.

alyssa - 30 June 2008 05:27 AM

I didn’t hate the Landis episode - don’t get me wrong, it was very problematic (for all the reasons previous outlined) but I think Landis did the best he could with an incredibly thin story. I also think that Fear Itself would benefit from being a half hour anthology show because most of the episodes don’t have enough to do for a full hour.

Back to this episode, I think that I had enough good will in the first half that it kept me from grading more harshly. I found the actors to be charming and have good chemistry for the first half; there were a lot of little funny touches in the first half of the episode that I thought were worth a chuckle. Come on - all that intense and graphic imagery of the saints was juxtaposed against weird conversations, funny little cuts (throwbacks to scream queen era) and a deaf priest. Plus, when the bridesmaids were giving the groom the hairy eyeball - that was funny!

The series is still pretty weak and I’ve been disappointed, but I still contend that on the whole it has been better than Masters of Horror.

Am I the only one who prefers Masters of Horror over Fear Itself?

I believe that I am in the small minority who enjoyed In Sickness and In Health. I thought it was an old school kind of story. It really reminded me of the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” TV Series from the 1980s. The story was simple, the twist predictable, the final shot of the villain corny, but despite all of this I really enjoyed it. I was thrilled to see that the story was the focus of the episode. It was like a clever campfire tale.

I see where they were trying to make a clever little fun story, and it probably seemed that way in concept, but the writing was just too blatantly piss-poor for me to be able to enjoy it.  I am not a person who can normally predict surprises in a story, but this was very predictable, and it it didn’t have to be that way, it was just handled clumsily. I can think of 2 or 3 simple things that could have been done differently that would have made a world of difference in the story.

As for preferring Masters of Horror over Fear Itself, I’ve only watched a handful of MOH episodes, but I’ve liked the majority of the ones I’ve seen. Fear Itself is 2 for 4 so far, in my opinion (Sacrifice and Family Man were good, the other two were not).

FreddyNOTLP - 30 June 2008 03:15 PM

I believe that I am in the small minority who enjoyed In Sickness and In Health. I thought it was an old school kind of story. It really reminded me of the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” TV Series from the 1980s. The story was simple, the twist predictable, the final shot of the villain corny, but despite all of this I really enjoyed it. I was thrilled to see that the story was the focus of the episode. It was like a clever campfire tale.

Was Victor Salva standing over your shoulder as you typed this? Go back and rewatch Alfred Hitchcock presents—they don’t “cheat” to get you. This entire episode is built upon a cheat premise.

SPOILER: The second the lead woman reads the note, WHY would she begin to act scared? She’s the serial killer. Why would she let her new husband chase her around, and WHY WOULD HE CHASE HER? His actual motivation is to hide the fact that he had dinner with a woman—so if anything, he should be acting guilty. But that wouldn’t work from the story the writer’s trying to sell you.

It was not clever—I bet Victor Salva wrote it when he was like 17 and just peddled it to them now when they came asking.

I like Landis, but this was garbage from the word go. (and I have NEVER seen a wedding where the bride is supposed to walk herself to whereever the reception is—let’s ignore the fact that it’s the dead of night)

I just listened to the rest of the podcast where you discuss the latest Fear Itself episode, and I see what you’re saying, but I completely disagree with you. There’s nothing wrong with using a cliche or being predictable or using forshadowing as long as the story still makes sense at the end, or we’re at least held in rapt attention along the way. I don’t think In Sickness and In Health succeeded with any of that, and here are a couple of things that I just couldn’t get past:

SPOILERS FOR IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH:

1. The note said, “The person you are about to marry is a serial killer.” Not the man, not the woman - the person. Is this an “It’s Pat” skit on SNL? Are we talking about our partner in code so grandpa won’t know we’re gay? All they had to do was make the note say something like, “You are about to marry a serial killer” and do away with the whole issue of gender without being stupidly bloody obvious about it.

2. Even if that hadn’t been enough to give it away, they follow it up, within minutes, with basically, “Oh, I got this note from that silly old hard-of-hearing priest. You know, the one who can’t hear? Yeah, the deaf priest, that’s the one.”  I’m not a writer, but even I know that you’re supposed to show and not tell. Don’t tell us the priest is deaf two minutes after that weirdly-gender-neutral note arrives. All they needed was a scene later on where the priest says “Huh?” or refers to his hearing aid to turn a blatantly obvious cue into a somewhat more subtle clue.

3. As Kangas said, neither the bride’s or the groom’s behavior makes any sense in the context of the story. And since the ending was already given away in the first five minutes, we know what’s going on and it all just seems ridiculous. I think maybe they were going for the idea that the bride was afraid of being caught or found out, and if they truly played that angle in a believable way, it could have made the story really entertaining whether the ending was obvious or not.

I’m willing to forgive a lot in horror anthology shows. I don’t even care that the wedding was in an abandoned church in the middle of the night or that the bride had to walk herself to the reception or that the uncles were creepy for no reason at all. But this just reeked of bad writing. I’m not blaming John Landis - he did what he could and gave us some good imagery along the way.

And yes, I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this.

This is only the second Fear Itself I’ve watched, the other being The Sacrifice. So far, meh. And I too have spent a long time thinking about In Sickness and In Health. I wanted to like it so much but the script just sucked. It was clunky and awkward and forced. I liked the camera work and it’s great to see the Smoking Man again (blanking out on his name) but that’s about all I can say about it that’s positive. Plus the actress playing the bride bore an erie resemblance to Rachel Ray. And while we’re picking it apart, why would they plan an outdoor reception for what was apparently a winter wedding? And just how many non-sensical red herrings can one cram into 43 minutes of television?

I also agree with the comment that the show would be better as a 1/2 hour rather than an hour. I think horror anthologies in general work better with a half hour running time. Look at Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, Tales from the Crypt etc. When you have an hour the end product either ends up feeling stretched out and thin or rushed and disjointed like it should have been a full length film but they ran out of time.

Just watched Family Man—clearly the standout episode. When I saw the writer was “Daniel Knauf” I was like, “Where do I know that name from?”

He’s the guy who created the HBO series “Carnivale”, which you need to watch if you haven’t seen it. He’s a good writer, and it showed in the Fear Itself episode. 

Here’s to more episodes like that.

Just watched Eater. It was pretty hit or miss. There were some really cool ideas put to use in the episode, but in the end it wasn’t really up to snuff.

I thought Eater was ok. A few things bothered me though. One thing was when she hurt her hand she started limping, not sure how that works. The doors that were chained up were glass so I am not sure why she didn’t try to break them to get out.  The final thing was when that dude was eating that pizza, he looked so greasey and sweaty it almost made me sick.  All I kept thinking was dude wipe your face.

Eater reinforced my theory that anthologies need to be half an hour, not an hour. The first 45 minutes consisted of NOTHING HAPPENING! And the ending felt like the writers ran out of paper.

Problems: Was there a point in showing that the female cop was covered in tattoos? I thought that would come into play at some point. Did it become relevant during a pee break and I missed it?

When she was trying to convince her boss that something bad was happening, she could have started off with “dead body under desk” as opposed to going straight for the voodoo angle.

To repeat what Deathstalker said, the doors were glass. Break them.

Did I mis-read or was there a writing credit for Jonathan Shaech, the actor from, uh, Hush and I’m sure many other movies? I think he was in the new Prom Night piece o’ crap.  Anyway, the most I can say for all of the episodes of FI that I’ve seen is that they look very nice on my shiny new television. But it feels like the scripts were all swept up from the floor of the break room at an Applebee’s.