‘Creepshow’ Season 2 Episode 2 Review: “Dead & Breakfast” + “Pesticide”

The second season of Creepshow continues with what feels a little bit like a filler piece, stashed behind a stunner of an opening episode with the thought that maybe it can coast by on the strength of borrowed good will. These two shorts aren’t the worst that I’ve seen from this superlative series, but they don’t plow any new ground on the way to being something a little less than satisfying. I think of programming the order of these bits a little like the thought that goes into ordering tracks on a vinyl album release. You open and close with bangers and, for the rest of them, you try to put them in the best light.

Start this one with “Dead & Breakfast” – a return, both of these are, to the standard Creepshow masterplot of the evils attached to the pursuit of money. If there were an overarching theme to the series so far, it’s that money is the root of all evil. In this segment, siblings Pam and Sam Spinster (Ali Larter & C. Thomas Howell), desperately trying to keep their B&B open by capitalizing on the notoriety of their dead aunt, find themselves eventually swimming in money for all the wrong reasons.

Written by Michael Rousselet & Erik Sandoval and directed by Axelle Carolyn, “Dead & Breakfast” is pretty standard fare. Pam and Sam invite internet haunted ghost hunter Morgue (Iman Benson) for a free stay and its attendant free publicity and then something goes wrong via livestream. I worry that attention is paid to all the wrong things – a moment, for instance, where Morgue explains her screen name doesn’t matter nearly as much as clarification of the O Henry fates of Pam & Sam. Howell is great as a guy who doesn’t really buy into all this marketing stunt mess, but Larter confuses as someone who seems to genuinely believe her aunt is a psycho killer because… why? Is she proud? Is she nuts? Is she right? If she’s not driven by greed but by the desire to honor a family legacy, is that the delicious twist? That she does through her untimely demise? There’s stuff here to unpack about fandoms that grow around human monsters and how the internet provides tribes for outcasts who used to be shunned for the greater good – but it’s not unpacked here. What’s left, then, is a series of unfortunate events, a lack of gore and creeps, and a lot of not very much that feels like it goes on forever.

Money is the center of “Pesticide” as well. Written by Frank Dietz and directed by series showrunner Greg Nicotero, it follows disgusting pest exterminator Harlan (Josh McDermitt) as he’s enlisted by mysterious Murdoch (Keith David) to exterminate the greatest pest of all: the homeless. This sets the stage for Harlan’s hallucinations of giant bugs attacking him and for the great Ashley Laurence to make an appearance as a child psychologist having to deal with Harlan’s indelicate interruptions. A few of the effects are good – I’m a sucker for practical giant bug models – but in the service of something that feels thematically weightless. There’s no real attempt to make the homeless population noble or worth saving in some way; there’s no real lesson for Harlan to learn and in fact having him go on some sort of Christmas Carol redemptive arc is contrary to Harlan’s character; and there’s no real thought given to the motivation/mythology of the Murdoch figure. Maybe he’s the devil. Maybe, given Laurence’s presence here, he’s a cenobite though those guys were always more direct in their symbolism.

At the very end, there’s a call out to the original The Fly that I kind of wished had been the beat they started on. A redux of The Incredible Shrinking Man mixed with that Vic Morrow episode of The Twilight Zone: The Movie where the killer of bugs finds himself their literal prey. That has an Edgar Rice Burroughs feeling about it. This? This just seems like a straight line from loathsome protagonist redeemed somehow by his suffering. Creating a martyr from a monster feels antithetical to the Creepshow ethos. Alas. Luckily, we’ve still got eight installments, four shows, to go.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Creepshow Season 2 Episode 2 on Shudder