‘Creepshow’ Season 4 Episode 4 Recap: “Meet The Belaskos” + “Cheat Code”

Creepshow Season 4 Episode 4 starts with vampire-cum-race melodrama “Meet the Belaskos,” in which human kid Alex (Matthew Nelson-Mahood) gets into a Romeo & Juliet imbroglio with vampire kid Anna (Karis Cameron), inflaming the bigotry of Alex’s redneck dad Chuck (Brendan Taylor). Tragedy ensues, but not before a world is hastily-established in which vampires are a real thing (a la Charlaine Harris, the mastermind of the True Blood universe) but are a discriminated-against minority (again, a la Charlaine Harris). I wonder if it would’ve been better had it directly referenced the Sookie Waterhouse series?

As it is, there’s a quick shot of a “help wanted” sign in the window for an all-night diner warning “Vampires Need Not Apply” and a lot of Chuck’s snarling racism, explained by how his wife was killed by vampires and came back one night, Salem’s Lot style, floating outside of his window. In a reality in which vampires aren’t mindless monsters and Chuck had the chance to figure out how to continue being married, it’s hard to sift through all the issues. What minority can you become later in life? You could come out as gay, I suppose, and you’ll definitely become disabled at some point, but which has inspired so much revulsion in Chuck that he kills his wife? Probably it’s not so specific and at some point, I guess that’s the problem I have with it.

Nelson-Mahood and Cameron are exceptional as the young lovers. Their courtship is sweet and the one’s sacrifice for the other lands with a real sense of emotional cost. The adults are essentially straw men for the clumsy race thing that, frankly, wouldn’t have been missed. I respect horror’s ability to speak to civil concerns but it has the potential to do more harm than good when handled sloppily. Making the vampire parents paragons of love and acceptance in the face of slavering, unreasonable hatred is perhaps putting too fine a point on it. Still, almost all is forgiven when Anna finally goes full-vamp at a playground; there’s that touching scene of young love (that doesn’t make sense within the lore of it in an “wait, E.T. can fly, can’t he?” kind of way); and good, Hammer Studios-esque gore to put a cherry on the sundae as it were. It’s great when it’s not getting in its own way is what I’m saying.

Alas, “Cheat Code” is a fairly broken concept not salvaged by performance and direction. In this one, dad Jeff (Lochlyn Munro) digs up an old 8-bit cart in an attempt to build a relationship with his affable teen son Dave (Connor Wong) who, for no reason I could discern, really resents spending time with him. Resistant to the game at first, a “Paperboy” concept, it looks like, Dave finds himself hooked. Turns out, though, if you enter the wrong cheat code into it, the player gets sucked into the game with mortal consequences. Drab and overlong, much of it feels like time padding up to a weird conclusion that I thought was going to explain the origins of the cart, but really just plays like more random shenanigans. The problem with a premise lacking legible rules, though, is that there’s no suspense when rules are violated — and the problem with a premise that’s so obviously designed for an uplifting ending is that if you don’t have the muscle to pull that glimmer of hope out from under us, tension is also defeated. Easily the weakest installment so far in the fourth season — there’s some wisdom I think in burying it here in the middle. 

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available