Main cast: Jamie Kennedy (Mark Stevens), Joanna Pacula (The Immigrant Woman), Philip Baker Hall (Captain Dennis Brascom), Natasha Gregson Wagner (Sydney Cregg), Pam Grier (Dr Lewis), and Henry Rollins (The Host)
Directors: Tobe Hooper and Jefery Levy
In Cargo, the newbie cargo officer Mark Stevens discovers to his horror that the ship he’s a crew member of may be harboring stowaways or maybe even… gasp, trafficking people inside large containers!
He interacts with a group of them inside one of those containers, and they plead at him to find a way to break them free because what seems like a monster is inside there with them. It must be hungry or bored, because it is killing them one by one…
I really want to like this one, as it has the right horror overtones, but yikes, it just goes on and on, and after a while, things feel boring and repetitive as Mark just runs around, gets talked down upon by the senior crew members that seem to disbelieve everything he has to say, and the immigrants keep wailing that they are doomed.
There is nothing much these people do to introduce some variation to the pattern of this segment, as they are all stuck on a ship with nowhere to go. Thus, its running time could have just been trimmed down with the repetitive middle parts cut short or removed entirely, and the whole thing would be so much better as a result.
Also, the twist is awesome, but thinking back to everything that leads up to that point, the twist doesn’t make much sense. The whole episode doesn’t add up to present me with a coherent story, as if the twist and the rest of the episode belong to two actual very different episodes with different story lines.
I don’t know, I really want to like this one, but it just feels lacking all around.
Meanwhile, Switch sees Sydney Cregg, a patient diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, being evaluated by Dr Lewis after sending her to a series of hypnotherapy sessions.
The psychiatrist attempts one more hypnotherapy session on the young lady, only to eventually learn that sometimes, the past may be best left uncovered…
This one is another predictable segment, sadly common in Night Visions, made somewhat noteworthy in the sense that, my god, the visuals and special effects in Sydney’s mindscape are so bad that they become funny in a goofy way.
The cast members try, although Pam Grier does come off like she had been taking quite an amount of sedatives prior to filming, but all in all, this is a forgettable episode that just looks halfway bad, halfway funny to keep me from truly falling asleep.
All in all, both segments are the epitome of missed opportunities and botched execution.
This episode is not the most awful thing, as the first segment has its share of gripping moments—even if the entire thing failed to come together all that well—but it’s also not the most satisfying one to sit through.
