Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Creepshow: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 10, 2023

Has the world really run out of people deserving some form of comeuppance? That "moral of the story" ambience was something that initially set another famed anthology series, The Twilight Zone, apart from its kin (and/or imitators, as the case may be), and it has also been a recurring element in many of the episodes in the three prior seasons of Creepshow. There still is comeuppance here, but it's kind of handled discursively at times, and frankly some of the people getting "their" comeuppance may not seem like they're particularly evil or misguided. Like all the other seasons, each episode in this season offers two arguably semi-linked vignettes, with the same whimsical comic book panel introductions that have graced previous years, but once again without a lot of actual Creeper content.

For those wanting reviews of the previous seasons of Creepshow, please click on the following links:

Creepshow: Season 1 Blu-ray review

Creepshow: Season 2 Blu-ray review

Creepshow: Season 3 Blu-ray review

That seeming ambiguity of someone who doesn't particularly deserve "bad karma" (so to speak) is apparent in a number of the episodes, but one in particular may serve as a salient example. "Smile" revolves around an award winning photojournalist, and while a flashback is too calamitous to really get much context, it seems like this photojournalist, James Harris (Matthew James Downden), was involved in something like what transpires in Salvador. It actually takes a while to get to that flashback, but the first part of the episode details an awards banquet attended by James and his wife Sarah (Lucie Guest), where he's been feted for a disturbing picture of an adult male and a little boy struggling in a raging river while a firefight explodes all around them.

Now, James may in fact be a kind of smug poseur, but he doesn't seem particularly evil, and he's an attentive husband and evidently father to their son, who is frolicking at home with friends while his parents are out on the town. But after the banquet a number of peculiar things start happening, with little Polaroid photographs being left for James and Sarah to find, all of which seem to prophesy some less than wonderful things are about to happen. Suffice it to say that James turns out to be haunted by the memory of what actually happened during that photo shoot, but there are two problems with this entire thesis. First of all, the "denouement" is arguably not clearly presented, though there are enough hints dropped to get the general, um, picture (sorry, photojournalist pun unavoidable). But even given that denouement, as Sarah rightly tells James after his quasi-confession, there's probably nothing he could have done anyway and what happened obviously wasn't his fault.

That doesn't keep "karma" (as whacked out as it is in this story) from proceeding, leading to absolute tragedy for James and Sarah. It's certainly a sad episode, but it just doesn't have that "moral sting" that the best Creepshow episodes have offered. Several other episodes don't even go this far in terms of offering a "moral", though some of them, like the season opener "Twenty Minutes with Cassandra", have some decidedly piquant subtext to them.

Other entries this season ply an expectedly wide gamut of ideas and storylines, and some are admittedly quite interesting and at times cheekily funny in the best Creepshow tradition. That aspect is probably best exemplified by "The Hat", a darkly humorous tale of an aspiring horror novelist named Jay (Ryan Beil) who is suffering from a rather severe case of writer's block. When he visits his agent Nicole (Marlee Walchuck), it turns out she has the old hamborg hat worn by Jay's favorite horror novelist Stephen Bachman (David Beairsto, though you may think it's J.K. Simmons based on a photo in Nicole's office). Suffice it to say Jay ends up with the hat, puts it on, and is suddenly magically and manically able to churn out thousands of pages seemingly overnight (to him, anyway - his architect wife keeps reminding him months are passing). The "reveal" here is kind of spectacularly gruesome, and while there is comeuppance for one particularly obnoxious character, there's also a kind of innocent bystander who gets a slap from fate, so to speak.

Creepshow: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Creepshow: Season 4 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Shudder and RLJ Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. As with the previous seasons of this series on Blu-ray, this is another fine looking set of transfers that offers nice detail levels for what I've called this show's whimsical and gory aspects. The palette is once again nicely suffused almost all of the time, with nice pops of color throughout many episodes and some especially evocative gradings toward blues and yellows at various times. A wide variety of contexts in various episodes once again allows for a veritable glut of stylistic flourishes, which can also extend to things like production design, and fine detail levels are typically excellent on the wide variety of props and costumes utilized. Again as with several of the previous seasons of Creepshow, some of the practical creature effects are kind of hilarious, and the CGI tends to be effective. As mentioned above in the main body of the review, this season continues the series' tradition of offering "comic book" panels to introduce each episode, and some episodes have brief quasi-panel interstitials that can intrude for a moment. Line detail on all of this content is typically excellent.

Creepshow: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Creepshow: Season 4 offers another nicely immersive DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that continues this series' generally nice approach toward sound design. The plethora of monsters and critters and other things that go bump in the night (or even day) help to regularly engage the side and rear channels, and certain selected moments, like the above mentioned flashback to the war scene in "Smile", can really erupt with considerable force and good discrete channelization of individual sound effects. The kind of Danny Elfman-esque score by Christopher Drake is also well presented and is clearly positioned in the side and rear channels. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. Optional English and Spanish subtitles are available.

Creepshow: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The "law of diminishing returns" seem to be afflicting not just "comeuppance" with regard to Creepshow's Blu-ray releases. We haven't had a comic book included since Season 2, and now for the first time in the series' history on Blu-ray, there aren't even any on disc supplements. Maybe someone at RLJ needs some comeuppance. Per previous seasons, packaging does feature a slipcover.

Creepshow: Season 4 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I have generally hugely enjoyed the previous seasons of Creepshow, and while this fourth season has a number of interesting ideas and storylines, I can't help but feel a certain amount of lethargy is starting to intrude. This season has the typical assortment of "ooey, gooey" creatures as well as a mutant monster or two, along with the regular assortment of actual human beings behaving badly, but it also kind of curiously tends to focus on seeming "innocents" who continually have tragic things happen to them. Those qualms aside, the Blu-ray presentation is typically excellent, though RLJ and Shudder seem to be slowly but surely closing down supplemental material on these Blu-ray releases. With caveats noted, Recommended.