When assessing film, I've heard
arguments about whether “bad” is simply the absence of “good,”
or if truly “bad” films need to do something to make you hate
them. I think I’ve decided to call Fair Haired Child
“bad” without anything especially atrocious in the episode.
My problems can be boiled down to two simple thing: too much going
on, and truly atrocious Dawson’s Casting. Neither of these led me
to actively hate the episode, simply to wish it would hurry up and
end.
I’m told by tvtropes that our
protagonist, Tara (Lindsay Pulsipher), is supposed to be 13. Her
actress was 24 when this episode premiered. She finds herself
kidnapped and locked in a room with Johnny (Jesse Hadock), who the
episode refers to as 15, but who is played by a 19-year-old actor.
Eventually, she finds out that Johnny drowned many years ago, and
she’s the last of twelve children who his parents have to sacrifice
to bring him back from the dead permanently. He will transform into
a monstrous form (the titular “Fair-Haired Child”) and dismember
her.
When I say there’s too much going on,
I refer primarily to Johnny’s parents (William Samples and Lori
Petty). In a two-hour film they likely would have worked better, but
here we get far too much on them: their guilt over their son’s
death, their life as musicians, and their arguments over the ethics
of what they’re doing. All of this just feels like a distraction
from Tara and Johnny, whose relationship could have been better
developed with the time.
The ending of the episode really drives
this home, as Johnny is finally made articulate after spending most
of the episode mute. He tells his parents that he was always jealous
of their musical talent, wishing he could find a talent of his own.
He announces that he finally has. He’s great at bargaining! The
evil force that his parents invoked to revive him with twelve child
souls has been talked down to reviving Tara with only the souls of
two adults (I'm sure you can guess how that ends).
This falls flat mainly because it
serves to remind us of how little we’d really gotten to know
Johnny. He cares about Tara...and that’s all we know. Now this
important character trait of “jealousy” is being told to us in
the last moments of the episode, and serves only to give his parents
their inevitable comeuppance.
As for the Dawson’s casting, maybe
they couldn’t find better actors of the appropriate ages, but it
really kills the mood. Even though we’re told Johnny is supposed
to be 15, Tara and his parents speak to him as if he’s
substantially younger, so I suspect a rewrite. I imagine that this
episode would have been far more disturbing if Tara had actually been
played by a 13-year-old, and Johnny had been aged down to 10.
I was a bit surprised to realize that
William Malone is the first Master whose work I’m completely
unfamiliar with. I’ve heard that FearDotCom is terrible,
but I’ve never seen it. Nor have I seen either of his Tales
from the Crypt episodes, I read through his entire IMDB page,
and couldn’t find a single thing I’d seen that wasn’t this very
episode.
That said, assessing him only on his
work here, I find him to be uninspired at best. The Fair-Haired
Child isn’t especially scary, and many of the visuals that attempt
to be frightening are cheesy. Even Incident On and Off a Mountain
Road succeeded in making the episode look scary. Here,
there’s just nothing.
I say avoid this episode, unless you’re
just determined to see the whole show. I don’t feel any strong
hatred towards this story. In fact, I don’t really feel anything
towards it. It just kind of is…
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