KEY POINTS:
This seems like a bad version of Deliverance, said one of the up-to-no-good blokes in the first minutes of the first episode of Fear Itself (Prime, Thursdays, 9.30pm).
That was rather an unfortunate way into this first of a series of stand-alone horror stories.
It is too much
to expect that made-for-telly horror stories will have any internal logic, or much time to fill in the pesky little details. But we never did learn what the four blokes were up to out there in the snow and the wilderness. No good, was the only conclusion you could come up with.
Whatever they were up to, we could be sure they were going to come to a sticky or, in this case, a bitey end. The Sacrifice was, we guessed fairly early on, a vampire story.
So it had to have seductive babes, with fangs. These ones were blondes and had a handy way with an axe. They lived in a spooky compound with a collection of animal heads and car licence plates and a graveyard strewn with handmade wooden crosses. That was supposed to be scary.
And something even scarier lived Out There. Sacrifice was gruesome enough - if watching a cute blonde sew up a bloke's lips is what scares the hell out of you.
There were the horror hallmarks: the half-lit shadows, the creaky noises, a skull. It turned out that the girls had never left the compound. Their ancestors had come from Romania and brought with them a stowaway: The thing that lives Out There.
Despite never having left the compound, and despite being Romanian, the blondes were called Chelsea and Virginia - good traditional Romanian names - and spoke perfect American. Now that was spooky.
Last night's episode was Family Man, about a man who died (not really) in a car crash because he was driving while talking on his cellphone - to his wife about picking up some milk.
Moral: Don't talk to your wife and drive.
In the emergency room at the hospital he changed bodies with a serial killer, was arrested and banged up for life while the serial killer took over his body and his wife's body, his kids and his perfect life.
Creepiest scene? When family man, in the body of the serial killer (he kills families, of course) has a vision of his cute daughter doing a turn in a talent show.
She's dressed as a bumble bee. Aw. Or, ow. Her song goes: "I'm squishing up a baby bumble bee ... " And she does. There is blood. This is more yucky than scary.
Anyway, family man in the body of the killer manages to overwhelm two cops with guns, while handcuffed, escapes and goes back to the family home where there is a fight and the pretend family man is killed and real family man is restored to his body. Ta da!
But serial killer has killed his family, except for the bumble bee-killing kid. "Who hurt your mommy and brother?" asks a cop, as real family man comes into the room. Daddy did. Of course.
So far, so scarily silly.