Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 17, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It’s easy to tell from the opening moments of New Years Day that this is the Fear Itself episode directed by Darren Lynn Bousman of the Saw sequels. The cinematography by John Spooner is harsh and shrouded in darkness, and as the episode goes on, the action occasionally (a little too often, actually) gets fractured into stuttery pixilation. The pre-credits sequence is a knockout, joining Helen (Briana Evigan) as she wakes up at 4:32 in the morning after an apparent long night of heavy partying. Hung over and disoriented, she soon discovers that she’s got much worse to deal with than a headache: The power is out, chaos reigns in the streets outside and, as the story continues, she finds that a chemical-plant explosion has turned many of the public in general and her friends in particular into flesheating killers.
These kinds of infected, zombielike cannibals are par for the corpse in movies these days, but you don’t get to see them often in network TV productions, and there’s a bit of a kick watching them rampage across the channel that brings us Law & Order and Deal or No Deal. Like Stuart Gordon’s previous Eater, this Fear installment goes for theatrical-movie-level gusto, and while not entirely successful, it’s another step in the right direction for this uneven series.
Scripted by horror-comics hero Steve Niles and Ben Sokolowski from the former’s adaptation of Paul Kane’s short story “Dead Time,” New Years Day does indeed feel like something that has sprung from the pages of an old Creepy or Eerie issue. As Helen tries desperately to get to her boyfriend’s place, where safety hopefully beckons, she has a series of unpleasant encounters with the ghouls and one threatening human, all illuminated by lots of intermittently flashing lights and the occasional spotlight from a passing helicopter. Every so often, we get glimpses of what went down for Helen at a party the night before, clearly leading to some sort of twist or revelation. That becomes fairly easy to guess by the final act, but for the most part Bousman keeps the tension consistent as he pours on the jittery style, with as many glimpses of Gaslight Studio’s grisly makeup FX as the NBC censors will allow.
Evigan (daughter of Greg, who dealt with a different brand of NBC horror as the star of B.J. and the Bear) makes for a very compelling heroine in her struggles to survive, and a sympathetic one as we see that her emotions took a beating too before the plague began. Those flashbacks help break up the zombie action, during which the aforementioned step-printing gets to be a bit much, though Bousman and the writers keep the settings and situations varied, throwing in a few effective moments of black humor (there’s a great throwaway bit involving a tarantula). Zombie junkies who have overdosed on gore from recent features may not find too much fresh meat in New Years Day, but as televised terror goes, it emerges overall as a satisfying hour.
