‘A Creepshow Holiday Special’ Is Exuberantly Reckless With Regards To Sacred Cows

Continuing to whet our appetite for the second full season of Shudder’s Creepshow anthology series, here’s A Creepshow Holiday Special telling the tale of “Shapeshifter’s Anonymous” set in the Church of St. Argento because that’s just how this series rolls. The password for entry to the support group meeting there this night? “Landis” – the tip-off that the episode might be about werewolves, American or otherwise. Robert Weston (Adam Pally) is our hero, a schlub who, three months previous, started finding little bits of fabric and bone in his stool.

“Robert Weston” is of course the real name of legendary LA disc-jockey Wolfman Jack; the were-cheetah in the group, Irena (Anna Camp) is named after the Simone Simon character from Cat People, right?; Dr. Talbot (Keith Flippen) is named after Lawrence Talbot, the original Wolf Man and hulking Ryan Chaney takes on Lon Chaney, Jr’s, name, the actor who played Talbot in George Waggner and Curt Siodmak’s 1941 Universal Monsters classic. For the lycanthrop-a-phile, there are Easter Eggs galore to uncover here.

Based on a J.A. Konrath short story, director Greg Nicotero keeps the proceedings light, shooting sequences in canted comic-book angles lit with purple and pink color filters the better to evoke the EC Comics from which Creepshow takes its cue. As the story unfolds, an apocryphal “Book of Bob” is revealed containing a lost Biblical story of God’s chosen werewolf, Bob, locked in eternal battle with Satan’s champion Kris Kringle (Tom Glynn). Saving some of the pleasures of the film, I will say that the highlight of it for me comes when our little support group engages in a bloody gun-battle with a legion of mall Santas. It’s an image I didn’t know I wanted to see, but I wanted to see it very much.

There’s delight in A Creepshow Holiday Special, in other words, and a jaunty sense of humor and pace that moves everything along pleasantly all the way to the final showdown to decide the fate of shapeshifters everywhere. I do worry, though, about the central conceit of having a Furry, and a support group tourist, Phyllis (Candy McLellan) emerge as the hero of the piece. She dresses as a hippo, she tells everyone, in her personal life because that’s what she believes she is on the inside. On the one hand, having an African-American woman owning her identity is empowering; in another, having her be an African big-game animal is problematic. There are weight and appearance issues embedded in this casting and conceit, too. Having anyone secure in the knowledge of what they are whatever their physical body represents them to be is likewise empowering; equating identity issues with a person believing that they’re an African big-game animal is, again, problematic.

Sufficed to say that I loved all of this program, except for everything about Phyllis; your individual mileages will vary. The special effects are great, there’s plenty of hilarious gore and it’s genuinely funny. But the punchline where Phyllis makes a wish that turns out not to be the wish everyone was expecting her to make plays into other cultural stereotypes that I feel, frankly, ill-equipped to parse. They made me uncomfortable and not in a way that’s particularly productive. What I can say is that it looks like a Creepshow and acts like one, too: it’s lurid in look and approach, and exuberantly reckless with sacred cows. Without a larger message about Christmas, though, what’s left is a fraught message about personal identity – deep water that should probably never be engaged without more preparation and care.

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 A Creepshow Holiday Special on Shudder