Main cast: William Katt (James), Rachel Hayward (Elizabeth Lassiter), and David Bowie (The Host)
Director: Alain Desrochers
No, not Ramsey Campbell! The Seductress is based on his short story of the same name, although as par for the course with this show, huge creative liberties had been taken to make sure that no one will ever confuse this thing with the source material.
Author Elizabeth Lassiter visits her boyfriend Alexander’s place and discovers that he has pentagrams, voodoo dolls, and everything black and red in his room. She also finds photos of her in his cabinet, indicating that he has been stalking her without her knowledge.
Like any sane person would, she flees the place as she’s not into whatever weird stuff he’s into. Then, he leaves a suicide note under her door.
Instead of thinking that he’d spared her the awkwardness of breaking up with him, she just has to visit his place again, and invites more awkwardness by talking to his mother. That woman openly tells her that Alex was dabbling in the family ways, and he cast a spell on her to make her desire him. Oh, and she invites Elizabeth to come look at his body.
This is what Elizabeth gets for not just letting things be, I tell you.
Clearly not having learned the value of circumspection, she soon falls into a whirlwind romance with James—she works really fast, let’s just say, maybe because this episode needs a soft core naughty scene chop chop—and I am sure nobody is shocked that the whole thing is a set up by Alexander’s crazy woo-woo mommy and her friends.
William Katt and Rachel Hayward seem to be laboring under the belief that they are in some sizzling love story, and they do have some chemistry between them, which makes me wonder whether I’d rather watch that love story instead of this episode.
This is because as a woo-woo story, this one is predictable, and the pacing is spotty to the point that the love story and the woo-woo part feel like two very different things forcefully thrown together to make an episode.
Furthermore, the final scene is super lame because of the bad CGI and the lack of a good payoff.
All in all, this is a flaccid episode that fails to capture any of the eroticism or scare of the source material.
