Episode 5: Night of the Paw/Times Is Tough in Musky Holler
Director: John Harrison
Writers: John Esposito, John Skipp
Stars: Bruce Davison, Hannah Barefoot, Susannah Devereux
Run Time: 44 Minutes
The Creep stands at the door and does nothing but laugh at the animation budget for this episode. Credits roll.
Synopsis: Night of the Paw
A woman is driving fast, running from the police. She wrecks the car and is severely injured. Meanwhile, a man has a monkey’s paw, and he seems to be waiting for something. The woman from the accident rings his doorbell and passes out. He treats her wounds and cuts off a few damaged fingers. He’s a mortician, not a doctor.
She wakes up and finds the man, named Whitey, working on a dead woman. He says that he fully expects that he’ll be dead by morning, but he has plans for Angela. It’s his wife’s birthday, and he wants to give the monkey’s paw to Angela.
We see in a flashback that Marjorie, the former wife, made a few frivolous wishes that all came true. The third wish was for all the money they would need. She died, and he collected the insurance.
Then it was his turn. His first wish was for Marjorie to come back from the dead. A week later, when she doesn’t show up, he remembers she was still locked in a coffin six feet under. He digs her up, and she tries to eat him. His second wish was to put her back the way she was. The third wish was for a killer to come and remove his suffering.
The problem is that Angela’s not that kind of killer. Not only that, but now she has three wishes coming…
Commentary
With a trope like the monkey’s paw, you always know exactly what you’re going to get in the story, but the fun is in not knowing what the victim is going to get. That is very much the case this time. It’s well acted, and it’s not clear until the end what the inevitable consequences are going to be.
Synopsis: Times Is Tough in Musky Holler
A bunch of people are locked up in jail, including several police officers and the mayor, and they’ve done something as a group. The mayor screams that he can make a deal. They are all marched out of the cell as their crimes are read aloud. They’re all strapped to chairs and they’re about to be raised up to… something.
We see in brief flashbacks that each of these people have done some terrible things since the zombie apocalypse began. The people in charge now wind up the chains, and the prisoners are raised up through neck-sized holes in the ceiling.
They are in an arena. Each man’s head pokes up through a little hole in the ground, and they release caged zombies, their former victims, onto them.
Commentary
There was literally nothing to this. It’s all setup for a cool shot of the heads poking through the holes. That kind of thing might work in an actual comic book, but it fell pretty flat here.