‘Creepshow’ Season 3 Episode 3 Recap: “The Last Tsuburaya” + “Okay I’ll Bite”

Turns out Joe Lynch’s “Familiar,” the short that rounded out last week’s episode of Creepshow, was indeed a herald for better things as this third episode of Season 3 is a delight from start to finish. The first half is Jeffrey F. January’s “The Last Tsuburaya,” written by Batman: The Animated Series alum Paul Dini & Stephen Langford, an exceptional piece featuring a truly loathsome hero, a carefully thought-out premise, and a follow-through that honors the kind of mordant irony that should drive every episode of this series. In it, billionaire asshole Wade Cruise (Brandon Quinn) swoops in to buy the never-before-seen, crated and locked away, last painting of illustrator of monsters and other terrible things Tsuburaya (Joseph Steven Yang). Not a bad thing for the super-wealthy to be art collectors, except Wade has outbid a museum curator (Gia Hiraizumi) for the piece and not only doesn’t intend it ever to be seen by the public, also doesn’t intend it to be seen by anyone except for himself. It’s a diabolical and painful plan — an act of unimaginable selfishness that forms the center of the short and, by itself, it would’ve been enough but then January and company throw another twist into the mix with the manifestation of a really cool-looking demon.

Hypercritical of the wealthy and of a patronage system that creates private exhibitions of what should be public art, it also takes time to fill in its margins with stories of how these feckless parasites view money: instead of changing, or even saving, a person’s life with it, they’d rather just burn it for cheap, sociopathic thrills. “The Last Tsuburaya” made me really angry in a delicious way. I hated Brandon Quinn enough that I realized I was using him as a composite of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg: all the pale, malignant, human garbage ruining this world in the pursuit of their joyrides into the lower atmosphere. It takes a very smart piece to make this guy a villain and then, in the middle of it, to make him the hero somehow who is engaged in mortal battle with a demon he’s released. And then, as if it all weren’t now finally enough, “The Last Tsuburaya” finds a satisfying justice in an ironic punishment for Quinn that encapsulates his crimes against art and, accordingly, his hopes at ever being freed from his torment. Smart and efficient, it does more in a very short period of time than seems possible. I can’t tell you how excited I am to see this series picking up steam again.

“Okay I’ll Bite,” written and directed by John Harrison from a short story by Harrison, isn’t as good as “The Last Tsubaraya,” but that’s just a minor quibble considering how very high a bar that would be to overcome. On its own merits, “Okay I’ll Bite” features a well-rounded protagonist in poor Elmer (Nick Massouh), who’s been imprisoned for euthanizing his terminally-ill mother and kept there by corrupt prison guards who use his genius at synthesizing toxins for a steady supply of much-in-demand prison opium. Elmer’s only friends in the joint are a menagerie of spiders he keeps in glass jars, feeding them worms he collects from the jar, and talking to them like confidants. There’s something else he’s keeping behind the loose brick in his wall, but, then, that would be telling. As his parole hearing is sabotaged and the heat gets turned up for him to produce more contraband, an act of violent betrayal triggers Elmer and he uses the old texts he’s smuggled in to enact a ritual to… well, that would be telling, too. 

What I’ll say is that the pleasure of “Okay I’ll Bite” isn’t so much that it’s at all surprising, but rather the care with which Harrison and Massouh develop Elmer as a human being with a tragic backstory that makes sense given his predilections, and with a character trajectory that is simultaneously horrible and also maybe not so horrible for Elmer. I was invested in Elmer’s story. It’s simple. Once you sink that hook, I’ll play along with the rest of it. When a spider dies, I felt bad for Elmer and I felt bad for the spider, too. There’s a really gnarly effect in the middle of it that I’m going to have a hard time shaking given how it combines a couple of my fears, and a careful series of casting decisions that demonstrate that Harrison is sensitive to representational issues and ethical about execution. I want to call out a tracking shot, too, where Harrison dollies along several cells that looks just fantastic: exactly like a scrolling along of cells in a comic strip, lit and designed in such a way as to evoke a stylized comic book reality. It’s a minor installment, but an honorable one. I’m into it and officially excited for what the rest of the season will bring.

READ NEXT: Creepshow Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: “Stranger Sings” + “Meter Reader”

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 3 on Shudder