They did it again! Right in time for the Fourth of July, Fear Itself pulled out a showstopper with their fifth episode, entitled ‘Eater‘. I’m just going to go ahead and give it a 5 out of 5 before we play any meandering down the path games. It’s freaking brilliant, so lets not waste space serenading it, Merry Readers, let’s tear right into the meat of this review!

This week, the episode’s directed by Stuart Gordon whom you may know from such classic films as Re-Animator and Space Truckers. As simple as the story line here is, he told the story in a completely spell-binding way. Here’s the basic gist of how it goes: we got a rookie lady cop who goes by Bannerman and tonight she’s going to get to stay in the station with her peers to watch over a cannibalistic serial killer known as ‘The Eater’.

Simple enough, right? First off, I’ve got to applaud the casting decision for this episode
because happily I didn’t recognize any of the actors or actress which is amazing since I’ve seen just about each one of them in other films. To me that speaks of both the actor’s ability and the director’s skill at emphasizing the character rather than the person portraying the character.

Rookie Bannerman is played by Elisabeth Moss of Mumford and Girl, Interrupted. She’s new on the force, yadda yadda. Mainly she’s a horror fan and therefore somewhat intrigued by the prospect of interacting with a real live cannibal. She gets picked on by the other cops for her rank in the pecking order and throughout the show plays a really believable character, shifting seamlessly from emotion to emotion as the circumstances warrant. You come to actually like her as far more than the heroine/victim of a horror movie.

Now the rest of the cast did excellent jobs, but I want to focus on ‘The Eater’ himself, Mr.
Stephen R. Hart. He’s a giant Canadian who stands a whoppin’ six foot eleven inches tall. I have no clue what that translates to in metric but here’s an ballpark estimation: FREAKIN’ HUGE! Not only does he pull off his role as a disgusting creep with finesse, he’s got to be doing black magic because there’s no way I believe the guy’s fifty years old like the IMDb says. According to his bio he’s not only a skilled carver, cartoonist, singer and sculptor, he guarded the Canadian Olympic team back at the 1976 games! Un-frickin-believable. Oh, and he’s also the lead singer of a ‘dance metal’ band whose music is similar to Rammstein. If he looks familiar to you, that’s probably because he was in Resident Evil: Apocalypse.

Okay, we’ve established that the show featured great characters and told a story that all took place INSIDE ONE BUILDING on a single night. The camera work here sucked you straight into the story from the word go and made the characters all seem a bit bizarre and unsettling which played perfectly for the events within the story. Glittersoul became somewhat obsessed with actor Stephen Lee’s (The Negotiator, Ghoulies III) resemblence to John Goodman. You know not just anyone can play a Goodmanesque character and Glittersoul should know cause she’s seen plenty of Roseanne!

On top of the excellent cinematography this movie did something that few films, much less television shows, ever manage to do to me: gross me out. I didn’t flinch at Silence of the Lambs and every zombie flick I’ve ever seen came across silly. I even saw some twisted Italian cannibal movie where they killed real animals, but this show? Nasty - no other word describes it. I mean like Hostel-style revolting. That’s pretty impressive because I ended up really resenting Hostel for not having enough story value, but Eater fares much better. The disgust worked the way I think gross outs in films ought to work, they intensify the story, they don’t take it over.

Yep, it’s pretty much perfect in my book. Way go, Fear Itself, you’ve brought us quite a
decent helping of solid horror. Keep it up, NBC!!

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

Tags: fear itself, horror, television

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