Main cast: David Marino (Agent Ernest Lowe), LB Lange (Ray Burlack), Janet Brice (Meg), Tim Howard, and Rip Torn (Narrator)
Director: Stuart Taylor
FBI Agent Ernest Lowe is not a happy man. Once upon a time, a pair of thieves killed a few people and ran off with $700,000. One of the thieves were killed during the getaway, while the other one, Ray—I hope I get that name right, as I am going by how they call him in this show; both the credits and IMDB never identify which actor plays which character at all—turned himself in. Now Ray is out on parole, and Ernest is itching to do some vigilante cop hero stunt to gain some closure to the case. No, he doesn’t want justice, as contrary to popular belief, this guy isn’t the straight and narrow dude like they think he is. He wants the money for himself, so that he can start his retirement in Costa Rica with style.
Blood Money is what one gets when they make a The Twilight Zone episode with, I don’t know, maybe $200. The cast must have worked for beer money or something because the overall performance here is comparable to the English dubbing of those Italian horror films of the 1980s. David Marino is especially stellar at being terrible—when his character is supposed to be dying, he utters his lines like he’s reading aloud his lines from a piece of paper while being bored out of his mind. However, the other cast members aren’t much better. The acting is so off, it’s not surprising to realize that none of the main cast members from episode appeared in anything worth mentioning before and after this episode.
Then there is the crappy CGI, shudder. The way the money glows is straight out of someone’s failed first attempt at using a special effects software, and the people behind this episode are so proud of it that they use the effect a few times over. Interestingly enough, the make-up for the ghosts is pretty decent. Maybe they somehow manage to steal, borrow, or use blackmail to obtain some good-quality zombie masks.
The worst thing, however, about this episode is how nearly everything about it is padding. After getting his hands on the money, Ernest starts seeing the decaying visages of the people killed by the two bank robbers now and then. He screams and acts like these ghosts are violating him, but the ghosts are just… there… and then gone when he blinks again. In other words, the stupid ghosts do nothing. Maybe the folks behind this episode are hoping that the ghosts will provide some jump scares for the audience, but without proper lighting, music, or good scene set-up, the end results just make me feel vaguely embarrassed for these people. It’s like seeing someone keep trying and failing in increasingly tragic ways, but they just won’t give up when they should.
Everything about this episode is just awful. Poor script, poor pacing, poor acting, poor special effects, poor cinematography, poor every-freaking-thing. Really, they should have just scrapped the episode from the start and use the little money they had for budget to instead give everyone a nice lunch at McDonald’s or something.
