Main cast: Steve Buscemi (John Dennis), Jodie Markell (Sue Weatherby), and Charles Kay-Hune (Ted Weatherby)
Director: Sara Driver
Salesmen always check into the worst places for the night in this kind of show, and poor John Dennis is no different.
His sleep at Mom’s Motel is marred by the couple next door having what seems like a violent fight, with sounds of things being thrown around all. The woman from the next room, Sue Weatherby, soon shows up at his door asking for help against her violent husband Ted.
She’s hot, so John lets his little head does his thinking for him, which is a bad mistake because this is Monsters, not The Red Shoe Diaries…
Bed and Boar is noteworthy in that it stars Steve Buscemi before he makes it big as the fellow in 30 Rock that “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme. He’s Steve Buscemi, so yes, he does what one would expect him to do here.
Aside from that, this episode makes little sense. It is as if the people behind the script decided that it would be cool to have a pig-man as the main attraction of the episode, and then work the story around that scene.
I don’t know if many scenes had been cut out from the final version to meet the run time, but the end result gives rise to more questions than answers. Why would men that come in contact with Sue become pigs? Why does she need John to help her anyway—is she looking for a new pig-headed sex slave or something? Why would Ted try to warn John away from his wife only to want to kill him later? What is the whole thing all about anyway?
Even then, the episode focuses heavily for the most on Steve Buscemi running around like a popcorn on a stove, either on his own or with Sue, and the pig thing shows up only briefly, probably because these people have no budget.
So yes, it wants to be primarily comedy, but while Mr Buscemi can do comedy, the screenwriters behind this show can’t. What results is a tiresome, repetitive showcase of comedy that misses the mark and falls flat on its face practically from start to finish.
Predictably enough, Mr Buscemi’s performance is the sole saving grace of this episode, but really now, go watch Forever Ambergris instead if you want to see him in a much better anthology episode.
