Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 25, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
There was an odd moment of disorientation as I watched the NBC premiere of the Community episode of Fear Itself (screeners having not been available for this one). After the opening teaser and then the main titles, the scene cut to a woman driving down a desert road, pulling over and revving up a chainsaw—and it could almost have been mistaken for the continuation of the show, rather than the cell-phone ad it actually was. And it occurred to me that the ongoing blurring of the lines between TV-commercial styles and those of movies and scripted programming has to do not just with the fact that many of the latter’s directors are coming out of the former world, but that so many televised spots are being made to mimic the feel of features and dramatic series.
OK, that’s going off on a tangent. Here’s a more germane observation: Later in the show, another cell-phone commercial started out as a haunted-house scenario, and contained at least as much if not more of a sense of menace than Community, a disappointing outing from the usually much sharper director Mary Harron (American Psycho). Scripted by Kelly Kennemer, it opens with a completely unnecessary flash-forward to a scene of tense pursuit before jumping back several months to find young married couple Bobby (Brandon Routh) and Tracy (Shiri Appleby) trying to get pregnant. Desiring a better environment for their eventual child to grow up in than their current urban digs, they take a friend’s suggestion and check out The Commons, a gated community that presents itself as the perfect place to raise a family.
Of course, anyone watching a televised scare show set in such a place will know immediately that there’s a dark underbelly to The Commons’ friendly surface, even before one of its reps uses phrases like “a finely tuned microcosm” to describe it. Thus there’s not much in the way of suspense as the smiling faces around Bobby and Tracy (including eccentric neighbors amusingly played by real-life spouses John Billingsley, a familiar face from sci-fi and horror TV, and Bonita Friedericy) slowly give way to malevolence. And the conform-or-else theme has simply been done too many times before, with more panache than has been applied here. Things get bad, but not too bad, and the stakes don’t become high enough to generate true fear—for most of the story, the threat is more bureaucratic than visceral. As a result, it almost doesn’t seem odd that after Bobby becomes quite dubious and even scared about the community in one series of scenes, he seems to lose his suspicions over the course of a commercial break.
Eventually, The Commons’ residents get serious, but even in the final act there’s more talk about the horrible things that will happen than actual payoffs. Not that every Fear Itself entry has to be as visceral as Stuart Gordon’s Eater (the series’ highlight so far; see review here), https://fangoriacom.bigscoots-staging.com/original/review-fear-itself-eater/ but both the writing and Harron’s direction seem overly muted, as if trusting the premise itself to carry the day when it really needed more surprising kinks in its development and visualization. Not to mention a leading man with more zing; Routh, who made a strong impression in Superman Returns, comes off here as one-note earnest—and the associations of that prior role lend an unintended but unavoidable touch of bad taste to his character’s final shots here.
There’s the odd resonant moment scattered about—particularly a bit where children are seen mimicking one of their parents’ more unpleasant activities—but for the most part, Community winds up feeling half-thought-out. The Commons’ perfectionist populace would never approve of such an underdeveloped product.
