Main cast: Thomas Colavito (Jake Messing), Chris Grall (Derek Fonterra), Bill Corry (The Homeless Man), and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Stuart Taylor
Blazes is all about firemen and the fires they fight, so naturally the people behind Ghost Stories look at their minuscule budget and go, “Hey, let’s do it!” Hence, the fires in this episode are pretty dire in how fake they all look. I can only wonder whether these people genuinely believed that they could pull off an episode of this scale with whichever intern they manage to lure in to do the special effects for beer money.
Jake Messing is a firefighter that is about to retire in a month. He isn’t happy, because he can’t imagine himself doing anything else other than fighting fires. Seeing nothing else he can do to keep his job, he decides to take matters into his own hands. He will start his own fire, and then play the hero so that they will have to keep him! The plan works, but it comes with a snag: Jake has been seeing a homeless guy lingering around at the sites of his last few fires, and that fellow is here again.
The homeless man approaches Jake with a deal: in addition to his silence, he will also ensure that Jake will never be harmed in future fires; in fact, Jake will become the hero that he wants to be. In return, the homeless man wants one life for every life Jake saves from each fire. Instead of going “Ooh, you are the devil, aren’t you? Away with you!” our protagonist agrees to the deal. Of course, things quickly spiral out of Jake’s control.
Aside from the crap fire effects, this episode is further despoiled by some of the worst acting seen in this side of Ghost Stories. All the main cast suck big time here, uttering their lines with such emotionless monotone that it was as if they were in this episode because the producers had pictures of them doing unspeakable stuff to livestock and cadavers. This episode calls for a gamut of emotions from the main characters—fear, anger, anguish, despair—and I get is robotic read-aloud of lines from the script. The woman playing Jake’s wife is the worst of the bad actors gracing this series so far, and that scene of her supposedly choking from being in a fire sees her delivering a performance so wooden and fake that they may as well put a sack of potatoes in her place. The guy playing Jake isn’t any better either, with some of his more dramatic scenes hitting the Troll 2-tier level of awfulness. This is one episode in which “Kill it with fire!” is an apt description of the quality of acting of its cast.
Seriously, the acting here is comparable to the emotionless dubbing of Italian horror movies from the 1980s. What are the people behind this episode thinking to let this thing loose on the unsuspecting world?
The only reason this episode doesn’t get only one oogie is because the story itself isn’t bad at all. In fact, it is easily one of the strongest stories so far in this series. Thus, it’s such a shame that the cast and the dire special effects all come together to ensure that this story will never see the treatment it deserves.
