Episode 6: Skincrawlers/By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain
Directors: Roxanne Benjamin, Tom Savini
Writers: Paul Dini, Stephen Langford | 2 more credits »
Stars: Melissa Saint-Amand, Chad Michael Collins, Dana Gould
Run Time: 44 Minutes
The creep goes fishing for corpses. Credits roll.
Synopsis: Skincrawlers
There’s a radical new weight-loss procedure that will let you lose a hundred pounds in three days. The procedure has a 100% success rate.
There’s a creature that came from a waste water reservoir inlet in the Amazon that is a strange mutant. It’s an evolved leech that eats fat.
Henry doesn’t want to do it, but two weeks later, he’s back to do it anyway. The news report mentions that there’s a total eclipse this afternoon.
The eclipse begins, and everyone starts getting stomach aches. The worms start crawling out of people and making their heads explode. Who would guess there would be problems?
Commentary
“The fat just walks away!” Where have I heard that before? Or in this case, it slithers away through a puddle of blood. The story is once again very light, but the splatter and creature effects are pretty good here.
Synopsis: By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain
Lake Champi is said to have a “Loch Ness” style creature living in it. A girl, Rose, has been researching the creature that supposedly killed her father, who was similarly obsessed with the monster. Rose’s boyfriend comes by, and her mother’s new boyfriend, who is clearly a creep himself, runs the boy off.
Rose runs through the woods and runs into something that none of them can identify at first. It turns out to be the sea monster, lying dead on the beach. This proves that her father was right all along.
Mom’s boyfriend plans to take credit and make a fortune on the corpse. They fight, and the boyfriend doesn’t see the creature’s much-larger mother come up behind him…
Commentary
It’s fine. It’s also a pretty weak story with weak, one-dimensional characters.
The original Creepshow films had a collection of short stories like this, all presented together for two hours, and it was a lot of fun. Splitting them up into pair like the series just doesn’t work so well.
On retrospect, the whole series is probably fine for kids, but overall, the stories are just too short and simple, the characters are all one-dimensional, and none of it was terribly memorable. It’s got quite a bit of star power in the casting for some episodes, and it all looks good, so it may win awards for production values or something, but I really am not looking forward to more of this next year.