Main cast: Karis Cameron (Anastasia Belasko), Matthew Nelson-Mahood (Alex Roach), Brendan Taylor (Chuck Belasko), Donavon Stinson (Doug Roach), Lisa Durupt (Helena Belasko), Andrew Long (Vampire Hunter), Andrew Nadanyi (Vampire Hunter), Jonathan Vellner (Vampire Hunter), Hugo Steele (Vampire Hunter), Sari Mercer (Mother Roach), Connor Wong (Dave), Lochlyn Munro (Jeff), Hanna Huffman (Reina ), Nikolas Filipovic (Spencer), Kelly Ann Woods (Spencer’s Mom), and Kyle Strauts (The Alien)
Directors: John Esposito and Justin Dyck
There’s a new family moving in to Mapleton, and they are vampires. Oh, don’t fret, vampires live openly in this segment alongside humans, and Mapleton is a “fully integrated neighborhood”.
Hopefully, it’s better than the last place the Belaskos lived in, as the daughter Anna got into trouble with some folks that, for some reason, don’t like the idea of having vampires as a neighbor. Mind you, the Belaskos seem nice, living on processed blood products instead of getting their food fresh from the source, and Anna actually hates being undead.
Doug Roach, their neighbor, isn’t pleased at all with the vampires moving in next door, however. Is history going to repeat itself?
Meet the Belaskos is a pretty incompetent segment with some huge mixed messages.
It attempts to tackle the issue of prejudice and xenophobia, with Doug Roach and his friends being the bad guys. However, the bad guys are portrayed to be bumbling, incompetent losers too dumb to be taken seriously. Hence, the gravity of whatever ham-fisted message this segment is trying to drive home is lost.
On the other hand, the “good guys” are literal monsters that wipe out their prey easily in the blink of an eye without sustaining even a single cut. They are also all about bloodthirsty and savage mob justice, just like the “bad guys”.
Hence, when this segment shows me that the bad guys are idiots, and the good guys are ruthless and efficient killers—hence giving the “bad guys” a valid reason for their xenophobia, as the latter are the food for the former, after all—well, let’s just say that I’m not feeling the message of peace and love that the segment is trying to sell me.
Mind you, the episode is otherwise alright in a hokey baby’s first doomed star-crossed teen romance way, but it’s not going to be making profound cultural impact anytime soon.
Also, the adult characters are the more entertaining ones, so to have the episode focused on the stereotypical teens and their vapid love story is another misstep. Make those teens interesting if they were to be the main focus of the story!
In the next segment, Cheat Code, Jeff is thrilled when he discovers a box of the ancient console he used to play a lot when he was a kid, along with some game cartridges, including Weird Wednesday.
He ended up in the newspapers as the local top-scorer in that game, and he might had been national champion had they didn’t mysteriously cancel the tournament and recalled all copies of the game. Well, clearly some copies of the game didn’t end up in the landfill.
Weird Wednesday has never been completely by anyone before. Jeff and his son Dave decide to be the ones to do that, and yikes, they will soon discover why that game was recalled all those years ago…
This one is pretty silly, but it captures the campy ridiculous vibe of a Goosebumps-like kiddie story nicely, so I can’t hold that against it. It also has a wholesome happy ending, which is nice considering how shows like this one tend to go for cynicism and “everyone just dies in the end because, LOL”-ish so-called subversion these days.
Unfortunately, the teenage characters are annoying, and I can only wonder how bad Lochlyn Munro needs the money to keep showing up in shows like this one. Still, the whole thing remains just at the right side of being watchable, so no one gets hurt at the end of the day.
