Fear Itself Season 1 Episode 5

As soon as you hear the shaman-esque mantra featured in the episode intro and then realize the serial-cannibal bears indian heritage** (and that is like three minutes within the episode), you can say you've seen it all, and yes, you have. What you expect is exactly what you see. You expect to see the mystical serial-cannibal to escape his cell, eat the male cops and lure the girl cop to believe they are playing tricks on her just to eventually eat her, right? Yup, right. You expect the face hidden behind the boots and the bloody plastic bag is the boss's, right?? Exactly!!

Watching "eater" is pretty much like watching one of the old "Friday the 13th" franchise movies, you know what's coming, it's not even scary, and actually it's even kind of laughable.

Despite the unoriginal story some technical aspects of horror shows were well done, like the low lighting, blinking lights and and power cuts, noises, the dirty old ambient of the police office, all very neat. Also good was the main actress (whose name i forgot now), and some very cheesy laughable trash stuff, like the so totally fake evil laugh, the pseudo-gruesome cannibalism scenes, and all the molar and wisdom teeth and fangs standing where sould be the incisive and canine. **no offense intened please! just a refference to the whole native/black magic/horror cliche.

I'm a huge Elizabeth Moss fan, so most of the rating is just for her presence. It was predictable, poorly developed, tedious, and worst of all was the resolution. Suicide was really the only way out?

Major plot problems too. The door's locked? It's glass. I wonder if it might break? HEY! You have a gun- you could shoot it out. Had you tried, you'd find out you had no bullets in it *before* that became life-threatening.

Hey, you got the upper hand on him! He's on the floor! Now, rather than maintain your advantage and pummel him into pulp, run away and allow him time to recover!

And so on...

Ignoring the unoriginality of this episode the worst thing about it was just how mediocre it was. There was nothing memorable, different or even remotely scary about this episode. Even though I just watched it two days ago it is hard to remember what happened because it was so bland. The classic horror moments were used and they were weak, the fake scares that should of made her suspicious just made her seem dumb. The worst thing about this was that she never questioned any of the weird things, why was everyone sweating so much? why did the Sargent come back to work? why didn't she go outside to call for back up instead of just going up to the open jail cell? On top of her stupidity, the gore wasn't scary just gross but the end at least didn't try to pull some ridiculous twist and she showed that she was very serious about her job. Overall another weak installment. And what was up with him being 'cajun'?

The show is a very pale shadow of Masters of Horror and has used every cliché in the book, which makes for very boring television. Now onto the episode itself, this episode is a copy of a episode of a British Horror series called Urban Gothic, the episode in question also called "Eater" is based around a Police station which has 3 officers stationed there and there is also a cannibal who was caught at the start of the episode, there are one or two differences, in the US version the lead is female and in the UK version the killer moves from body to body instead of being able to shape shift, also in the UK version the Killer disguised as the lead makes a clean getaway instead of being killed, so far this series has been terrible, I don't think I will bother with any more.

I have to admit I thought very long about what to give this episode. To me out of the series so far we have had only 1 really good episode and the rest of them have been fair or just plain bad. This episode was decent I thought. Again they tried a lot of cheap scares which just doesn't work when your targeted audience is a bunch of horror fanatics that have seen a lot of true scary things. I do have to give this episode some points though because they did have a Cajun killer which was something I can't remember seeing before, I wish they would have fleshed him out more than what they had done. As a note, and I believe this has been said by a lot of people who watch the show I think this series would be better if it was off a station like NBC and put on Showtime like Masters of Horror was or something. I really think they are being limited due to this. Anyway hopefully next weeks episode will be a lot better.

As above-- but what I want to know: there was a commercial at the start that requested Horror show director(s). Did anyone capture the URL?! PLEASE post it!!

Back to the show: I love the fact that the protagonist is a female and also like the idea of a mysterious cajun.. Having worked in a prison, these folks have their street clothes and shoes removed and are given the facility's uniform, so that aspect-- although spooky, was untrue. Also, I get tired of the bad-guy longtime cops portrayal-- it is an urban legend in itself, of which I grown weary. Police work is VERY difficult, and a vocation I (usually) respect.

I don't normally feel inclined to write a review for a show but this series has prompted me to do so. First off, let me say that I really enjor t.v. shows of the horror genre (i.e. twilight zone). However, in my opinion Fear Itself has failed to deliver what one would expect for the horror series genre. In particular this episode was very predictable right from the start (As could be said for all of the other episodes). I gave it a fair review because I like the idea of the show but often times one felt that they knew exactly what was going to happen next with no real sense of suspense. The episode's plot wasn't very original and again the main character was underdeveloped and by the end you didnt really care if something horrible happened to them or not. The main villain also left something to be desired as they to were underdeveloped and seemed to always appear one step ahead of the main character. The shows next episode will hopefully be more interesting.