Reviews Series / GuillermoDelTorosCabinetOfCuriosities

Series Tonight`s Feature: Staring at Things! (A Review of Episodes 5 - 8)

Following on from my previous review, here are my thoughts on episode 5 - 8 of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities.

• Pickman's Model: Adapted from the horror of HP Lovecraft, Model is filmed in a classic gothic horror theme, with an emphasis in psychological and moral damage. Our artist protagonist is driven to madness by the paintings of his colleague, a mysteriously intense man who depicts nothing but scenes of horror. I liked the tone and conceptualisation, but a lot of the work is undermined just by how terrible Crispin Glover is as the colleague, him putting on a comically bad accent from God knows where. It's also probably the most gratuitously gory, out of a very gory season.

• Dreams in the Witch House: Another HP Lovecraft story. This one is about a lad who can communicate with his dead sister in the afterlife, a habit which attracts the attention of a dangerous being. This is the second worst. A cool witch monster concept gets wasted, playing a dumb slasher-movie villain. And that Witch is the high point in a plodding, boring episode that doesn't know how best to make use of its various elements.

• The Viewing: A mysterious billionaire invites the greatest minds in science, literature, music and spirituality to his house for a private viewing. But a viewing of what? Eh, tough luck finding out; The episode takes far too long to get to that point. Instead it wastes too much time with the characters sitting around, exchanging inane conversation and drugs. The intrigue is the main appeal, and once we finally are allowed to see the thing that we were all waiting to see, it turns out to be a let down. Another weak episode.

• The Murmuring: Put together by the minds who brought us The Babadook, The Murmuring is thematically very similar, following a haunted bird watcher who suffers with deep personal loss. Compared to Babadook, I found this one pretty dull. The horror elements are clichéd and unfrightening, the downtime between them is plodding and miserable. It's very much a mood piece, but one I was not in the mood to enjoy.

Overall, there is a good mix of ideas, but they all trend towards the same sort of lurid, gory, cheesy spectacle. I would have liked to have seen more types of horror. All the episodes had the same problem of being too long, and I suspect they might have been originally conceived as half hour pieces that had to be padded out on Netflix's insistence. I often found myself losing patience, which is a tension killer. I wasn't scared by what I was seeing, but some of the episodes are strong enough for that not to matter.

Series Tonight`s Feature: Jerks! (A Review of Episodes 1 - 4)

Just in time for Halloween, we get Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiousities, a throw back to the days of horror anthology serials. There is an element of Hitchcock when del Toro appears before every episode, introducing them with a suitably lurid and dark sense of humour. As to the episodes that follow, I'll mini review all eight.

• Lot 36: James Neely is once again playing a misanthrope, though this one is far less friendly than his turn as Buster Scruggs. Neely plays Nick, a miserly, selfish dealer who purchases abandoned storage units at auction. He's an intriguing scamp and utterly unrelatable. the big problem with the episode is that it is fairly predictable, and most of the run time is spent with us waiting for the asshole to get his inevitable comeuppance. There's not a lot going for it, besides some fun suspense created by a simple light switch.

• Graveyard Rats: We get another wretch protagonist, but one who is somehow sympathetic. A turn-of-the-century grave robber desperately needs to score a rich corpse to pay off his mob debts, but his efforts are thwarted by an ever increasing rat population. The robber is so pathetically craven throughout, so poetic in his constant babbling, that you can't help but feel bad for him. I liked this one more, though it is let down by the simple fact that unless you have a particular phobia of rats, they just aren't scary.

• The Autopsy: A mortician is called in to investigate the strange deaths of a group of miners. We finally get a noble protagonist. I really like the horror element - which has a deeply unpleasant and novel villain - and I love the resolution. It takes too long to get to it though. I feel like the first half of this episode could be removed and nothing would be lost.

• The Outside: This is probably the most distinct from the rest, choosing to place a lot of its horror in bright spaces, daylight and pastel coloured rooms. It follows a bank clerk's obsession with fitting in with her airheaded, wealthy colleagues; an obsession that drives her to the point of madness. This was my favourite of the bunch; it was the least conventional, it reminded me a lot of Edward Scissorhands in terms of theme and aesthetic, and that's a positive comparison to get to make. You don't know where it is going to go, you feel bad for the characters involved, and there is a good mix of banal and surreal horror. My only criticism (and one that can be applied to the rest of the episodes) is there is some time wasting going on to pad out the run time, culminating in an unnecessarily long ending shot.