Acorn Media International / Shudder
After a long, hot year of Other Months, Spooptober is finally upon us, and what better way to celebrate this spoopiest of seasons than with season two of The Creep Tapes, which has just dropped on Blu-Ray from Shudder? (Other than repeatedly listening to “The Monster Mash”, obviously).
Season one proved that there was way more mileage in Mark Duplass’s insufferable serial killer than we could ever have imagined, pushing both the premise and the format into some surprising new direction. Season two ups the ante on that, with an even crazier set of episodes in which the world’s most annoying murderer finds himself in a series of increasingly bizarre situations, almost always of his own making.
If you’ve seen the movies and the first season, then you’ll know him (and his alter-ego Peachfuzz) as the more bloodthirsty offspring of Alan Partridge and Larry David. And if you haven’t, then go watch those first, at least the first season. Although each movie and episode is very much a standalone proposition, there’s a development to the character and the way his stories are told that rewards sequential viewing. Also because they’re all really good.
By this point the found footage format has become more of an æsthetic than a set of rules — if you’re looking for the places where the conceit falls down so you can say it breaks immersion, you’re watching the wrong show. But still, season two kicks off, as did the first, with a relatively straight take on the genre, albeit with a delicious twist — the subject here is the always-excellent David Dastmalchian, playing a fan and copycat who very quickly realises you should never meet your heroes.
Other highlights include Duplass tending a menagerie of tiny model animals (who are menaced, of course, by an adorable and tiny Peachfuzz) and that staple of sitcoms, an honest-to-goodness Christmas episode. But my personal favourite is the episode in which he stages a Saw pastiche which fast degenerates into “bungling escape room operator” farce.
I’ve long thought there should be more weird sitcoms out there. Marvel Studios have had a crack at it with the excellent WandaVision and the much-maligned (though I absolutely loved it) She-Hulk, while Widow’s Bay straddles the gulf between sitcom and drama by being a horror Northern Exposure. But for a true horror sitcom that is both grim and hilarious, you can’t really beat The Creep Tapes‘ six short episodes; so it never really gets the chance to outstay its welcome and it’s a perfect watch for those cold (finally) Spooptober evenings.
Also a perfect watch given that season three has just started on Shudder — Duplass promises more of a glimpse into his backstory this time. Now I’m not usually a fan of ODing on lore — see what’s happened to Alien and Hellraiser for an idea of why (I could go on for ages about how Pinhead started losing his power as a monster as soon as we all started calling him Pinhead) — but given the inventiveness and glee with which The Creep Tapes goes about its bloody work, I reckon this might just work.
More is hinted at in season two than the films or season one; and I’m not gonna lie, I’m kinda intrigued now. The advantage here is that the horror and humour don’t come from his being an unknown force (like the Alien) but from his being an unimaginably hapless mess of a human being, which positively invites that kind of exploration.
I’ve been putting off watching any of season three until I got this written, so without further ado I shall go and watch that.
Happy Halloween, kids!
-Justin Farrington-
