Main cast: Fisher Stevens (Max Armstrong), Valérie Valois (The Carpet Cleaner), and David Bowie (The Host)
Director: Darrell Wasyk
Yes, The Suction Method is what you guys are thinking… and not exactly that, either. Yes, a vacuum cleaner is involved, but not in exactly the way Max Armstrong would like it to be.
Max is very disillusioned with married life in the perfect suburban neighborhood. He and his wife Kate have long fallen out of love, and the bored accountant spends his days shagging the neighbor’s wife every afternoon.
Then, one day Kate has to leave home for three days—to be with he sister, of course—and the thrilled Max envisions a whole lot of fun debauchery with his mistress.
First, however, his wife has arranged for a cleaner to come over and vacuum the carpet in the living room. The cleaner is hot and she tells Max of a new suction method that will clean up anything like never before. Max’s brain is already going to lovely places, and she’s also very flirtatious, making the smarmy dude so excited for the next few minutes to come that he feels like all his birthdays for the next five years have arrived on the same day.
He’s not that dumb, though. Suspecting that this is set up by his wife to entrap him into a divorce, he decides what the heck. He doesn’t want to keep living in this area and in this life anyway, so he’s going to take what is being offered and then get divorced!
Sadly, things are not what they seem. The poor guy is only half right about the whole thing being a set-up; he has no idea what is going to happen to him once the trap is set…
This episode does a pretty big misstep, I feel, in making Max come off as quite sympathetic. Yes, he’s a cheating goon, but the wife is a pretty terrible person too, so it’s not like anyone is a victim here. Therefore, everything boils down to this: does an adulterer deserve to die for that sin?
Nonetheless, this episode is amusing for all the right and wrong reasons. Fisher Stevens does a lot to make Max likable with his portrayal of that character—there is something about Max that is likable in spite of how much that character looks like he hasn’t taken a bath since Christmas three years ago. Also, the CGI is so, so bad that it cracks me up, and the whole thing about Redemptive Cleaners making sure that the dirt in your home never returns is pretty clever.
All in all, this is a pretty fun episode to close the second and final season of The Hunger. The whole show has been underwhelming all around, as it can never seem to decide between going all out soft porn or actually tell a good story. Most of the time, the episodes try to do both only to end up neither here nor there.
Oh well, it’s probably a good thing that it ends here and then, on a somewhat high note, instead of outliving its welcome like The Hitchhiker.
