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From HouseofHorrors.com Recent Reviews
A new visitor comes to the house: Rob Hanisey (Tyron Leitso), a man hoping to find his muse during his stay. He specializes in dark romances. He’s written four books, but he has yet to be published, so a house with free room and board must be enticing. Once he arrives, the apparition of Valerie (Clare Grant) disturbs his efforts to pen a saleable story.
Valerie on the Stairs marks the second episode directed by Mick Garris, and it improves on Chocolate. While the latter was an entertaining thriller, it had more in common with The Twilight Zone than Tales from the Darkside. Valerie is a darker, gorier, more confident trip, full of familiar horror elements. The shadowy stairs. The hidden room. The buried secret. Garris assembles the story lovingly, working off a story from Clive Barker, whose tales always have a vicious carnal touch.
This episode mixes sexuality and brutality into a queasy mixture, as interdimensional sex is just as likely as demonic evisceration. Veteran actor Tony Todd plays the demon in question, his booming voice giving off some serious echoes. He sneers and bellows enough to compensate for the fact that we probably see too much of his makeup job. Seeing a movie monster for any extended period of time is always tricky.
Even more tricky is the direction the story takes. As Rob discovers more about the relationship between Valerie and the beast, he realizes that the source of the two entities may lie in the house itself. Considering how many writers have traveled through, and how much imagination has become pent-up in the walls, is it conceivable that these two characters are just that? Characters? Stuck, waiting for an ending?
Horror metafiction isn’t exactly new. Elegant movies like New Nightmare and In the Mouth of Madness played with the idea of fictional boogeymen becoming real. As in those films, Valerie suggests that the horrible situation on display is the result of desperate writers and their hackneyed stories. Rob wants to save Valerie, but if she’s just a pulsing representation of someone’s story, what is he saving her from? And what for? There’s no telling where the boundaries of reality and illusion hit.
Tyron Leitso brings charisma to his character, although he is often reduced to being the inquisitive observer. The type of character who wandered out of the house of Usher and into Erich Zann’s drawing room. Still, he’s an attractive actor, and he treats everything with a dead seriousness. There’s almost no levity, although Jonathan Watton brings a few lighter lines, and Christopher Lloyd steals considerable screen attention. Clare Grant’s Valerie is appropriately lovely, and it’s nice to see that, halfway through the story, she puts on some sensible clothes.
I’m not so certain of the metafiction. By revealing the characters as “characters” acting out certain parts, the situation feels arbitrary. The paradox is that while I grew interested by the question of reality, I became less involved emotionally, because the people felt like puppets on strings. The twist here is that the demon wants to break free of those strings and assert himself. That element saves the story from falling apart, and keeps it moving toward a seriously weird ending.
Some may find the ending a severe disappointment, but I’m simply perplexed. I won’t argue that what happens in the final moments of Valerie fit with the universe established. Instead, I will say that it feels too whimsical and light, given how much of the episode bathes itself in darkness. But don’t watch the episode with that on your mind. Instead, watch it and appreciate how the acting is solid, and how Garris’s style matches the gothic, romantic story. Most of all, watch it to see the twisting layers of reality. It’s enough to make you go crazy. In which case, I suggest you take up writing. © Copyright by HouseofHorrors.com |
