Main cast: David A MacDonald (Captain Talby), Callan Wilson (Private Rivers), Kid Cudi (Doc Kessler), Nelson Bonilla (Sergeant Quist), Jeffrey Combs (Obersturmführer Reinhard Schmelzgerät), Kate Freund (The Woman in White), DJ Qualls (Clark Wilson), and Antwan Mills (Detective Moseley)
Directors: Rob Schrab and Greg Nicotero

I keep hearing that American comics are approaching their death rattle era, and I can only wonder whether that is true from looking at the illustrated comic panels on this show. Compared to the illustrations used as transitions on the first Creepshow movie as well as in Tales from the Crypt, the illustrations in this episode are flat and lifeless, and the way the artist drew the humans suggested that this person is either not paid enough to turn in a halfway decent work or is probably drawing something for the first time ever. Even the animation of the Crypt Keeper equivalent of this show is abysmal, as it is barely moving. How is it that a show that came out in 2019 feels much more dated and limited than something that came out more than 20 years prior?

Oh yes, the show. In the first segment, Bad Wolf Down, the last four members of the B Company manage to scramble their way to what looks like a police station abandoned with mangled corpses left behind as decoration, while Nazi soldiers led by Reinhard are in hot pursuit. It’s in the heat of World War 2, and it looks like this is it for the men, until they find that there is also a mysterious lady in the house. She’s a werewolf, oh no. Is she a friend or foe?

Boy, this is one stupid, stupid segment. Never mind the inconsistency of Reinhard speaking in English instead of German when he’s by himself, while the woman in the police station babbles in German conveniently so that the soldiers don’t seem to get that she is telling them to stay away. Maybe “No!” means something else in the American English language, who knows. After all, America already has its own version of football and measurement units.

Still, as stupid as that is, it’s nowhere as stupid as the soldiers. Private Rivers acts like he has never left home before, much less a soldier in the war, while Sarqeant Quist is the obligatory asshole of the team that just doesn’t know when to rein it in. The black guy is… well, he’s every token black guy in a team. All of them miss out on obvious red flags and behave more like actors wearing soldier uniform instead of actual soldiers. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Combs does a three dollar version of his usual mugging and shrieking, hence his character coming off like the imbecile sibling of his character in The Frighteners.

The wolves look lame, the climactic moment is lame, and everything about this segment is as lame as a tortoise with only two legs hobbling painfully towards a finish line ten feet away.

Next segment up, The Finger. Clark Wilson, the protagonist, breaks the fourth wall by addressing the audience, so I wonder whether the title of this segment is also meant to be fourth wall-breaking too.  Clark calls himself one of the few people that walk in LA, picking up things he finds discarded on the street pavements and all, because he feels that, like these items, he too has been discarded. In other words, this guy is a hoarder of all the crap he finds while walking around the neighborhood.

So, one fine day he finds a severed finger, so like any normal, sane person he takes it home. accidentally pours beer on it, and lo, it soon morphs into a monster-thing that he calls Bob. While Clark wishes that he can violently retaliate against the people that piss him off on a daily basis, Bob has no such hesitance and soon it is happily killing the people that cross Clark. This sounds great on paper, but Bob also leaves plenty of evidence of its murder sprees for Clark to deal with. Oh dear.

This isn’t a scary story segment as much as it is DJ Qualls constantly giving me this dead-eyed creepy hobo look through the screen to talk pretentious, vapid emo crap non-stop. Yes, life sucks, join the line and shut up in the meantime. Half of this segment is Clark looking at me and talking to me like I’m tied up in a chair in his place and he’s just killing time before doing something nasty to me. Sadly, something tells me this terrifying effect is unintentional on the part of the people behind this thing. I suspect they really think they are creating a sympathetic, likable underdog in Clark when this character is more like a loser with disgusting hygiene and cracked sanity.

I don’t mind if he were insane and twisted inside—and he is—I just wish he’d stop looking at me and talking to me like I somehow am a fellow soulmate of his. No, far from it, that guy is disgusting and all his “oppression” actually is the result of him being a disgusting human being that causes the people around him to react accordingly.

There is an intriguing possibility that maybe Bob is all in his mind, but eh, who cares to think so much about this super obnoxious, smug, “I think I am so very smart!” segment.

Bad Wolf Down makes me cringe at how bad it is and The Finger makes me want to crawl up and die from secondhand embarrassment for everyone involved in making that piece of crap. In a way, this episode is terrifying, but certainly not in the ways envisioned by the nincompoops behind this show.