Briana Evigan is wondering what she missed after waking from a hangover on "FEAR ITSELF: New Year's Day"(2008).
© NBC-Universal
Mania Grade: B+
TV Series: Fear Itself
Episode: New Year's Day
Starring: Briana Evigan
Written By: Steve Niles
Directed By: Darren Bousman
Network: NBC
TV Series: Fear Itself
Episode: New Year's Day
Starring: Briana Evigan
Written By: Steve Niles
Directed By: Darren Bousman
Network: NBC
FEAR ITSELF: New Year's Day
By: Stephen LackeyReview Date: Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Steve Niles is quickly starting to pop up all over the place writing all sorts of horror film adaptations and television series episodes. He most recently penned the first draft of the film adaptation of his comic book series 30 Days of Night. Someone finally made a good decision by pairing Niles, a modern horror master, with an established director in the genre. Darren Bousman shouldn’t exactly be called a master of the genre-having directed the Saw sequels-but he is well practiced within it. He’s like the factory you go to when you want to manufacture a widget that has all of the expected trappings of other modern widgets delivered under budget and on time. Obviously I wouldn’t call him an innovator, but he knows how to do the modern horror film, for better or worse. Niles brings us a zombie story that features a fairly predictable twist at the end but he gives it to us from a unique perspective and sets it in a claustrophobic environment. Characters are also of a recognizable type for modern horror but in this short form they aren’t on screen long enough to get annoying as they did recently in Cloverfield.
Bousman takes Nile’s script and adds a layer of frenetic style mixing constant confusion with the claustrophobia to create an atmosphere that actually breeds some scary moments. Helen (Evigan) is grieving over the loss of a family member. The story doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the loss but it does provide enough background on it to properly set the tone for the character from whose perspective the story will be told. After some prodding one of her friends convinces her to go to a New Year’s Eve party. At the party things just get more miserable for her and she just tries to drink her misery away. She wakes later in the evening back home to find the city ravaged by zombies and the only safe place she can find to go is her boyfriend’s apartment.
The story is told with Helen fighting her way through zombies and the party revealed in flashbacks. The transitions between the current horror and the previous night’s events are slick and interesting to look at. The party again reminds me of the party scenes in Cloverfield. While the scenes weren’t shot as shaky as those in Cloverfield they still featured young shallow people partying while horrible events are being shown on a television in the background. There’s a lot that could have made this episode a failure but the perspective given too us through the fog of a hangover is a fun approach and the execution of the horrific scenes is as good as it gets on TV. Fear Itself is on a solid path of constantly improving each week. Hopefully it didn’t start getting better too late.
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