Main cast: Clancy Brown (Roger Lassen), Martin Kove (The Detective), Costas Mandylor (Dan King), Charles Martin Smith (Colin), Jon Tenney (Alex), Brian Wimmer (Kevin), Cheech Marin (Dr Beneloy), and John Kassir (The Crypt Keeper)
Director: Gregory Widen
Half-Way Horrible boasts a pretty good cast, but wastes all them on a script that has all the liveliness of a gerbil stuck up the Crypt Keeper’s decayed asshole.
Roger Lassen runs a company that is on the verge of making a lot of money because it has discovered a breakthrough: a preservative that, when injected into any organic material, will preserve that material for all time. This means there will be no more spoiled foods, for one. However, the discovery of this preservative comes at a dark cost: its secret originate from the cartoon version of Voodoo County that this show is so fond of, and Roger sacrifices an employee Alex (his best friend, mind you) to a fate of being buried alive in exchange for the secret. Dan wasn’t volunteering for that gig, naturally.
Now, someone is slowly killing off the employees of Roger’s company one by one, taunting Roger in the process, and he begins to wonder whether his sins have caught up with him. At the same time, he has to keep that pesky detective from suspecting his role in the scheme of things.
Clancy Brown mugs very well, chewing scenery as the nasty and amoral protagonist, but the plot is just ridiculous. Twists seem to happen out of nowhere, pulled out of rear ends under the guise of “voodoo curses”, and nothing makes sense. Not to give away spoilers, let me just say that the murders are committed by an evil entity somehow as retaliation to what Roger is doing. The thing is, any evil force would have multiple orgasms from what Roger is doing – it will be more appropriate to say that the force of good will be the one against Roger. Given that this is not the case, the premise doesn’t make sense. So, fail.
The appearance of Cheech Marin as a cartoon-like witch doctor is so jarring compared to the somber tone of the rest of the episode, and only underscores what an unfunny joke it is.
Still, the aesthetics of this episode is not bad at all, and that last scene is actually pretty cool. But on the whole, though, Half-Way Horrible is actually horrible through and through.
