‘Creepshow’ Season 3 Episode 1 Recap: “Mums” + “Queen Bee”

Shudder’s superlative Creepshow anthology series starts its third season off with a pair of duds, sad to say. The best episodes of Creepshow capture the camp quality of the film upon which it’s based and, more to the point, the EC Comics upon which the film was based. A collaboration between titans George Romero, Stephen King and Bernie Wrightson (for the graphic, the very graphic, novelization), it was a loving tribute to the wise-cracking, nasty, sex-obsessed, deliciously-cynical series that single-handedly resulted in a self-censorship code for comics that among other sundry niggles prohibited the words “horror,” “terror,” and “weird” from code-signatories’ covers. Crossing the CCA (Comics Code Authority) meant wholesalers and most major resellers would refuse to stock your title. An argument could be made that what the defenders of middle-American morality were most concerned by with EC Comics wasn’t the blood and naughtiness so much as the strong progressive streak of publisher William Gaines’ work: his direct assaults on racism, domestic assault, and capitalism, among other things. EC Comics was the counterculture at the beginning of the 1950s and it was fire.

The first short in S3 E1 is “Mums.” Adapted from a Joe Hill short story by Greg Nicotero and the great David J. Schow, directed by Rusty Cundieff, it follows the fate of young Jack (Brayden Benson) whose mother Bloom (Erin Beute) want very much to escape the clutches of evil redneck Hank (Ethan Embry). Hank, it seems, has gone full MAGA, walking around with an assault rifle and catching a lot of accusations of fascism that he’s probably earned. After a brief altercation, out of sight of young Jack, he kills poor Bloom and buries her in her beloved garden. Because this is what it is, Bloom comes back. “Mums” follows the template: the righteous in death returning to exact vengeance, but the method of the violence lacks irony and humor, while the politics angle is mentioned and then left to fallow. It’s possible that just the fact that Bloom is a “tree hugging liberal” provides the humorous subtext to Hank’s death by vegetable, but I found myself wishing that there were any kind of talk about climate-change denial or deforestation. It wouldn’t have taken much.

As it is, “Mums” is a straightforward construct that relies entirely on its special effects for whatever payoffs they can provide. For what it’s worth, they’re fine. Jack feeds the unnatural crop with some of his blood and then things Hank reaps what he has sown. For a piece about secrets buried that refuse to stay buried, though, there should have been more meat on the bone than a decent creature effect. Make it broad and angry. If not now, then when?

Worse is the concluding short, “Queen Bee.” This one, written by Erik Sandoval and Michael Rousselet and directed by Greg Nicotero, follows a trio of teens as they cyber-stalk, in a friendly way, their favorite singer, Regina (Kaelyn Gobert-Harris). The title probably a play on Beyonce’s nickname, Regina (“queen,” get it?), is very pregnant and in a closed off wing of a hospital when our teen heroes get wind of her location and devise a plan to sneak in to witness the royal birth. Their first act once inside? They murder a security guard. That this act is never really reckoned with tells me that there’s not a whole lot of thinking going on here, just one foot set clumsily in front of the next with nothing so much as a plan to guide it.

That’s a shame, because dealing with the dangerous cults of personality that spring up around these megastars would’ve been an interesting topic to tackle. Alas, “Queen Bee” is again just a life support system from a practical gag made worse by naive plot points like a mind-controlling screech that can be blocked out with cotton balls. I mean… I don’t think so.

In an episode about a magnetic entertainer, why not have her music be the key to her Kreskin-like abilities? And what is the end-game of this monster? Is she trying to create an entire hive of BTS-like mind-scrambling super-groups? In lieu of something exciting, why not something witty? What it is instead is a trio of over-matched youngsters (Hannah Kepple, Olivia Hawthorne and Nico Gomez) gamely trying to rescue a slipshod, slapdash contraption that really feels just like an excuse to make a monster. A monster, as it happens, that they promptly over-light and feature on screen for long enough that it loses any menace it might have had and starts to be unintentionally funny. “Oh hey, Regina. Nice larvae.” This Creepshow series has had moments so high that I have faith this is an aberration. I mean, I really hope it is.

READ NEXT: Creepshow Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: “Skeletons In The Closet” + “Familiar”

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 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Creepshow Season 3 Episode 1 on Shudder