‘Creepshow’ Season 2 Episode 3 Review: “The Right Snuff” + “Sibling Rivalry”

After an exceptional start to the second season followed by a fairly disappointing installment, episode three of Shudder’s Creepshow Season 2 locates the anthology series back on solid ground. Start with Joe Lynch’s “The Right Snuff,” a film about two astronauts on the verge of the great unknown. (I should mention that I consider Joe to be a friend, making reviewing his work a difficult moral conundrum – not because I won’t be honest about the work, but because a relationship with the filmmaker inevitably colors any assessment in ways that I won’t always be aware. I’ll leave it to you how much I’ve been influenced by it.)

I love “The Right Snuff.” I love it because it deviates from the easy masterplot of financial greed being the root of ruin and I love it because on a microbudget and short shooting window, Lynch creates a solidly-performed piece that reminded me a lot of the grim O’Henry twists of EC Comics. Credit, too, co-writer Paul Dini who, among his dozens of credits, also penned one of the two or three best single episodes of the Batman Animated Series, “Heart of Ice.” Dini, along with Stephen Langford and Greg Nicotero, has scripted with “The Right Snuff” a miniature psychodrama involving astronauts Alex (Ryan Kwanten) and Ted (Breckin Meyer). 

Alex is a flyboy whose dad was the first man on Mars, casting a long shadow on his son’s career that Alex hopes he will finally escape when his ship makes first contact with an alien species. His co-pilot, Ted, is a brilliant scientist who has invented a device that can manipulate gravity fields. After a near miss that Houston and the press back on Earth credit to Ted’s intelligence rather than Alex’s flyboy bravado, the cracks in their relationship start to show. In short, bold dashes, “The Right Snuff” shows how Alex’s fragile emotional state is a result of the expectations his father has placed upon him. Though overused as a concept, the show is a shorthand for toxic masculinity: how the inability to express emotion manifests itself in anti-intellectualism and violence. When Ted is chosen to be the first human to greet a new race of aliens over the already-seething Alex, something’s gotta give. With smart use of the snuff of the title as well as a shoutout to HAL that I appreciated in the background, “The Right Stuff” is a broad passion play, it’s true, but it marries its camp elements, some excellent gore, and a few essential truths that hit just right. 

I liked Rusty Cundieff’s “Sibling Rivalry” as well. The whole thing stolen by young Maddie Nichols as high schooler Lola, trying to tell her guidance counselor Mrs. Porter (Molly Ringwald) about how her brother Andy (Andrew Brodeur) is trying to kill her. Nichols has a distinct Riki Lindhome quality to her: bright, effervescent, funny. Her repeated deviations from the thread of her tale of terror in Melanie Dale’s script are handled effortlessly, engagingly. I liked especially the way that when the twist in the story comes, it’s actually been set up in an honorable way throughout the first half.

There’s a rhythm to it, too, and just having Molly Ringwald say something about how hard high school can be is a delight. Without giving away the house, I would also say that the make-up design when it occurs is fantastic. Richard Edlund, eat your heart out. The best thing I can say about it is that it reminded me a lot of one of the vignettes from Stephen King and Bernie Wrightson’s Cycle of the Werewolf where the resolution is actually a celebration of young monsters. I wonder if there’s a literal connection there, given that a dog who makes a cameo in “Sibling Rivalry” is named “Dolores Claiborne.”

After an episode in this second season that only gets worse in the rearview, Creepshow finds its way again here in a twofer that demonstrates how much room there is to grow in this format if the formula is kept uncomplicated. “The Right Snuff” and “Sibling Rivalry” know what they’re about and go about doing it in an engaging, even joyful way. More of this, please.

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 3 on Shudder