Fear Itself Episode 1 - The Sacrifice
Directed by Breck Eisner
Written by Mick Garris
** MUCHO SPOILERS AHEAD **
I almost gave up on this show during the first 10 minutes. A boring as hell intro that got more and more uneven and uninteresting as it progressed. Four not-so-legitimate gentlemen get stranded on a remote road. One of the guys is badly wounded and for reasons left to your imagination the band of baddies would not take their comrade to the hospital. Their only option is to hoof it a couple of miles away thru the snow to some rising smoke above a wooded tree line. It's important to the story that the place they are going is back in the middle of nowhere. However the back road they were traveling was paved and in perfect condition. I guess this is one of those stupid details a regular person would just let go, but it stuck with me the whole hour.
As I kept watching the episode though, it started to come around and turned into a reasonably good story with a few good effects for network television. The guys run into a trio of hotties in an M. Night VILLAGEesque setting. The story gets going when the guys start separating and the chicks seemingly turn into psycho bitches. They start putting the hurt on the fellas one by one. The gang's leader manages to get the one-up on the sisters though, and forces them into revealing what's really going on way back in the woods.
START RANT HERE: I wish they would NEVER AGAIN use the term vampire in vampire stories. I generally like vampire flicks, really I do. But there is an inherent problem with trying to pull off serious scenes when the actor's stop trying to survive against an unknown creature and start verbally using the term vampire. Right at that point it turns the script into something a 10 year old wrote. And this goes doubly so when it's a television program instead of a motion picture. Usually it turns what is a reasonably cool monster into some euro-trash lounge-lizard. Please, someone at UCLA's school of theatre, tell writers to stop penciling lines with the word vampire in it for gods sake. If it turns out to be a vampire story, the audience WILL get the gist of it, everybody has known what a vampire is since Dracula was published in 1897. No need to stop the whole freaking show, hold our hand and say y'know, it's a vampire flick. Ya don't say. OK, END RANT.
The Sacrifice has a lot in common with MoH's Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, I think fans of that will like this. Once you make it through the first act the pacing is actually done quite nicely. There's a build-up to the creature's reveal that I really liked alot. The suspense is about average for network TV, not great but there's a little bit. If you like TWILIGHT ZONEish endings you will be well satisfied with this one. I think there may be better episodes on the way, but this one is worth watching IMO, I'd give about 6 out of 10 (7 if they edit out the word vampire before the repeats start).
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"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday."
-Psalms 91:5-6
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Fear Itself Episode 1 "The Sacrifice"
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