Main cast: Ann Turkel (The Woman), Marni Thompson (Gena), Lena Blackburn (Mary), and Terence Stamp (The Host)
Director: John Warwicker
At this point, The Hunger has completely used up the big names that it boasted at the early parts of the season, and it’s mostly down to no-name directors and no-name actors to hold the line.
Still, it has the cojones to try to adapt Karl Edward Wagner’s Hastur-tainted The River of Night’s Dreaming into an episode, and it’s the kind of story that will normally be an awful fit for its run time due to the nature of the story.
This episode starts out in the same way as the source material: Gena, a prisoner gets a lucky break when her prison bus crashes into a river, allowing her to run free. However, this one is set in present day, which only allows the protagonist to utter the most daft and annoying lines ever like she’s a bratty teen in a Hot Topic store.
She soon comes across and breaks into a home belonging to a lady, only to end up her prisoner of sorts.
Gena soon realizes that things may not be what they seem when it comes to the woman and her family. Alas, escape to freedom isn’t as easy as she initially imagined…
Perhaps wisely, this episode strips away the psychological horror of the source material, as there’s no way it can do that kind of thing justice with its runtime. Unfortunately, it also strips away everything else, leaving it very clear by the end Gena’s fate. The result is a very generic story.
However, it would have still be watchable if the people behind this show decided to introduce the worst budget special effects ever to create a spooky atmosphere. Scenes turn annoyingly bright red for no reason, while other scenes turn blinding neon yellow. I suppose this episode just wants to drive all its audience into a seizure.
There are scenes that get the distorted fish lens effect, again for little reason, and others get framed like someone is watching the whole scene from a telescope. Also, dramatic scenes are slowed down like they are viewed from a dying turtle in its death throes, again for no reason other than to create maximum annoyance.
Sadly, all these effects only make the show resemble the result of someone letting a baby crawl loose all over the controls, resulting in a chaotic, haphazard sequence of but ugly special effects that nobody asks for and do nothing whatsoever aside from making everything look like the inside of a puke bucket from the point of view of someone experiencing a drug overdose.
There is a long scene of woman on woman that, I don’t know, maybe could have been hot if it hadn’t been presented like someone puked a zillion neon colors and other epileptic seizure-inducing distortions.
To sum it up, this is a terrible thing to behold. The story is mediocre, the acting is only so so, and the whole episode is executed like it’s heralding the demise of good taste all over the world
In other words, the episode itself is like a bargain bin The King in Yellow when it comes to driving the audience up the wall. Hastur would be proud of this thing, for all the wrong reasons.
