Main cast: Thora Birch (Susan Thornhill), Amanda Plummer (The Music Professor), Luke Edwards (Wes), Timothy Olyphant (Eli), Tracy Middendorf (Lucinda), Shirley Knight (Mrs Finch), and Henry Rollins (The Host)
Directors: Tobe Hooper and Paul Shapiro
Susan Thornhill is the kind of “introvert” that whines about having not many friends while rudely swatting away classmate Wes’s awkward attempts to invite her to come to a concert along with him and his friends, even mocking him in the process. Why go through the bother of making friends when you can whine about your life, after all?
So, to avoid Wes, she takes a detour into a nearby maze and lo and behold, she comes out to an entirely different version of her world, one where most people are already dead and those that are still alive have gone cray cray. What is happening here?
The Maze is another predictable segment—the protagonist learns that time is precious, so it’s best not to turn down any opportunity to get some nookie or something like that—but it also has the additional misfortune of being as dull as watching beige paint dry.
Most of the scenes are just Susan wandering around abandoned hallways and rooms, and the sole cray cray villain is nowhere as interesting enough to liven up things. All in all, this one is a snooze.
Next up, welcome to Harmony, population 1,165. It’s also a place where you cannot play or listen to music, ever, or you will die.
However, the rebel without a clue Eli, who is just passing by when his car breaks down just outside of this town, attempts to convince these folks that there is nothing to fear. Stand up and rock and roll, people! What can go wrong?
This one gives the game away with an opening scene of a poor kid dropping dead from listening to a Walkman. His mother catches him at it and strangles him to death with the cord of the Walkman, yikes.
This one… oh boy, I feel like this segment has no idea what it wants to be. Again, this is a predictable segment, with a story line that I’m sure had been done in other anthology series in one guise or another, but it doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be some dark comedy or what.
The opening scene with the mother killing her son is played up straight, but the rest of this segment dips in and out of comedy here and there that I’m not sure how to take the whole thing seriously. Even at the climactic moment, the bad CGI notwithstanding, the ending line feels more like a quip than anything else, so I guess it’s a… comedy?
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. This segment isn’t strong or memorable enough to warrant a lot of time analyzing it anyway, and Tim Olyphant looks way hotter in other shows and movies that he’s in.
All in all, this is easily one of the most unmemorable episodes so far on this show.
