Richard mutters about lady fingers while eating his own fingers. And Blake taps on her phone using her... lady fingers. Hey, it's a reach, but we have a theme.
"Survivor Type" is a pretty straightforward adaptation of King's short story from the '82 anthology series 'Terrors' and then King's '85 anthology 'Skeleton Crew'. Richard deals drugs for a second living while working as a doctor, his cruise ship goes down while he smuggles heroin from Thailand to San Francisco, and Richard ends up stranded on a rocky atoll in the middle of the ocean. With no hope of rescue in sight, and with no food, Richard injures and eventually amputates his left foot. He then eats it, and with the aid of the heroin as a painkiller, slowly amputates the rest of his legs and eats them. The segment ends with Richard chowing down on his own fingers.
There's not much to say about the segment if you've read the short story. The only change I can tell is that in the written story, Richard cuts off his left hand to eat his fingers. In the animated segment, he eats them without any amputation of his arm involved. Why the change, I don't know.
It's interesting listening to Keifer Sutherland as Richard, doing basically a one-man monologue. If you're only familiar with Sutherland from '24' and 'Designated Survivor', it's interesting/fun listening to him rant and rave as a man slowly going insane from hunger and then self-cannabalization.
As for "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead", I haven't read Joe Hill's original short story that it's based on. Joey King (no relationship to Stephen King) plays Blake, a teenaged girl on a vacation with her family. They take a detour to the "Circus of Dead" and soon discover that the acts are real... and undead. There's no explanation for what's going on. There are ushers in hazmat suits that presumably have created the zombies. Whether they're the military, or a private corporation, or something else isn't explained and probably doesn't matter.
Later, Blake says that a lot of the audience are corpses tied to the seats and disguised by the non-existent lighting. But there are some living people in the audience. So why does the circus in such an out-of-the-way spot have so many people?
The end, with Blake's father as a zombie tweeting out an invitation for everyone on Facebook to come see the touring circus, doesn't make much sense, either. So... the zombies are smart enough to tweet? It's ironic and all, but Joey King does most of the heavy lifting with her voiceover narration. Her voice is shrill rather than smooth like Sutherland's in the first segment. And you can see the end coming a mile away. It's an okay story, and very 'Creepshow'-ish. But nothing special.
Whether the special is 'Creepshow'-ish as a whole brings us the whole animated premise. It's hard to imagine they could have pulled off either segment in live action. Richard amputating himself down to a legless freak, and zombies forming themselves into piles to get over a restraining wall, would have been difficult to do in live-action on the show's budget. The animation style is suitably EC Comics-like, and it's not as much animation as stop-motion.
Overall, the Special is just another episode of 'Creepshow' It's not the best of the first season batch, and not the worst of them, either. It's good to see an adaptation of 'Survivor Type', and "Twittering' isn't bad. It's just not much of a page turner the way that some of the first season episodes like 'Grey Matter' and 'The Man in the Suitcase' were.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
"Survivor Type" is a pretty straightforward adaptation of King's short story from the '82 anthology series 'Terrors' and then King's '85 anthology 'Skeleton Crew'. Richard deals drugs for a second living while working as a doctor, his cruise ship goes down while he smuggles heroin from Thailand to San Francisco, and Richard ends up stranded on a rocky atoll in the middle of the ocean. With no hope of rescue in sight, and with no food, Richard injures and eventually amputates his left foot. He then eats it, and with the aid of the heroin as a painkiller, slowly amputates the rest of his legs and eats them. The segment ends with Richard chowing down on his own fingers.
There's not much to say about the segment if you've read the short story. The only change I can tell is that in the written story, Richard cuts off his left hand to eat his fingers. In the animated segment, he eats them without any amputation of his arm involved. Why the change, I don't know.
It's interesting listening to Keifer Sutherland as Richard, doing basically a one-man monologue. If you're only familiar with Sutherland from '24' and 'Designated Survivor', it's interesting/fun listening to him rant and rave as a man slowly going insane from hunger and then self-cannabalization.
As for "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead", I haven't read Joe Hill's original short story that it's based on. Joey King (no relationship to Stephen King) plays Blake, a teenaged girl on a vacation with her family. They take a detour to the "Circus of Dead" and soon discover that the acts are real... and undead. There's no explanation for what's going on. There are ushers in hazmat suits that presumably have created the zombies. Whether they're the military, or a private corporation, or something else isn't explained and probably doesn't matter.
Later, Blake says that a lot of the audience are corpses tied to the seats and disguised by the non-existent lighting. But there are some living people in the audience. So why does the circus in such an out-of-the-way spot have so many people?
The end, with Blake's father as a zombie tweeting out an invitation for everyone on Facebook to come see the touring circus, doesn't make much sense, either. So... the zombies are smart enough to tweet? It's ironic and all, but Joey King does most of the heavy lifting with her voiceover narration. Her voice is shrill rather than smooth like Sutherland's in the first segment. And you can see the end coming a mile away. It's an okay story, and very 'Creepshow'-ish. But nothing special.
Whether the special is 'Creepshow'-ish as a whole brings us the whole animated premise. It's hard to imagine they could have pulled off either segment in live action. Richard amputating himself down to a legless freak, and zombies forming themselves into piles to get over a restraining wall, would have been difficult to do in live-action on the show's budget. The animation style is suitably EC Comics-like, and it's not as much animation as stop-motion.
Overall, the Special is just another episode of 'Creepshow' It's not the best of the first season batch, and not the worst of them, either. It's good to see an adaptation of 'Survivor Type', and "Twittering' isn't bad. It's just not much of a page turner the way that some of the first season episodes like 'Grey Matter' and 'The Man in the Suitcase' were.
But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?
