"From your lips to God’s ears."

- Minister in "The Family Man" (Fear Itself)

While we missed episode 2 of this awesome series (which Red Hawk promises to cover since he’s got a DVR), both glittersoul and I (GlowStormLion) got a chance to catch this week’s episode, "The Family Man". To our surprise, it’s far different than the first episode (our review here) in both style and storyline. Of course, that goes with the territory when it comes to anthology series like Fear Itself. The intro had the same great feel and if this series goes into multiple seasons, I think we’ll come to humming right along with it - it’s that catchy.

It’s difficult to cover the storyline here without giving up a lot of plot information, but we’ll do what we can. Essentially we have two main players, Dennis Mahoney and Richard Brautigan, played by Colin Ferguson (Eureka, The Opposite of Sex) and Clifton Collins Jr. (Traffic, Dead Presidents and the voice of Cesar in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) respectively. Dennis has a delightful little church-going family while Richard’s a derranged serial killer with a gruesome resume who the media’s nicknamed "The Family Man". After a life-altering (hehe) incident, the men’s souls switch bodies. Now there’s a serial killer in the body of an upstanding banker and community leader, while the real banker’s in prison and facing a potential death penalty.

With a story of this nature, it’d be easy enough to weave a fairly simple tale and toss in a few twists to keep things interesting. However, writer Daniel Knauf (Wolf Lake, Supernatural) gave us a much richer story than either of us expected, a story that grabs you right off the bat and just keeps getting worse: genuine horror that doesn’t rely on gore or monsters to reach the intended effect. It’s all very Stephen King-ish, taking a happy little life and ruining the living hell out of it!

Not only is the story superb, Ferguson and Collins Jr, the two leads, do such great work in this episode. I don’t mean merely playing a role, they each had to play TWO roles and keep those characters consistent with how the other actor started out. They pull this off smoothe as silk and we loved every minute of their screen time. The rest of the cast did their jobs well, so no weaknesses with the less prominent players.

Ronny Yu, who hails from Hong Kong, China, is the same dude who gave us Bride of Chucky (our review) and Freddy vs. Jason! He also made alot of movies with Cantonese titles that I’ll not pronounce because it’d just sound like I was choking. Now, Bride of Chucky and Freddy vs. Big J were great films, sure, but they don’t quite touch upon the sheer mastery it took to pull off this episode. The whole time glittersoul and I sat there commenting on how great the cinematography was. Every angle right on the money, Yu’s going to become a real force in horror if he keeps up this kind of quality, we feel.

If you missed this episode, we encourage you catch it when you can. It’s an hour long and that worked out perfectly. We think this Fear Itself might just end up being the next Tales from the Crypt. The show offers solid entertainment and true horror, something unique each week. Great job, NBC! We want more of this! Oh, and 5 out of 5 on this episode, clearly.

Until next time, this has been glittersoul and GlowStormLion - who are hurrying to take this post live. Forgive us for not having a catchy ending.

-- by glittersoul of http://www.happyhorror.com

Tags: horror, serial killer, tv

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Horror Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.