STAR RATING: ***** Brilliant **** Very Good *** Okay ** Poor * Awful
Masson (David Hewlett) is a grave robber, who gets by stealing artefacts from the deceased, lying in their graves. However, he's fallen on hard times, and pressure from the undesirable clientele he does business with drive him to pull off a daring job on the body of the recently deceased husband of a wealthy widow who recently visited the local funeral parlour. However, this time Masson may finally have met his match, when he crosses some furry scavengers who have their own eyes on the ball.
The second part of Guillermo Del Toro's COC tales runs at a similarly short run time as the last episode, once again not developing the most fleshed out of stories. Like Lot 36, we are presented with a similarly unsympathetic, slimy character, this one veering into outright criminality. But this time around, we have the first of a recurring theme in future tales, with the story taking place within a period setting, allowing it to escape the trappings of modern times, and exist organically within a period of darker, less developed backwardness.
Without a fully fleshed out story at hand, here the attention falls on the visuals, Del Toro's trademark staple, and here these are stripped of any sense of wonder, and instead focus on creating a nightmarish, gruelling experience, a feeling of tight claustrophobia, which anyone who feels uncomfortable with rats should avoid, but, like I said, with such an unsympathetic character at the helm, it's hard to empathise much with his predicament. From a visual perspective, it acheives this quite well, but without any strong story development, it doesn't quite have the impact it should.
It's adapted from a short story by Henry Kuttner. Even within the framework of this, it struggles to really create enough depth to work on screen, but at least visually it is effective. ***
Masson (David Hewlett) is a grave robber, who gets by stealing artefacts from the deceased, lying in their graves. However, he's fallen on hard times, and pressure from the undesirable clientele he does business with drive him to pull off a daring job on the body of the recently deceased husband of a wealthy widow who recently visited the local funeral parlour. However, this time Masson may finally have met his match, when he crosses some furry scavengers who have their own eyes on the ball.
The second part of Guillermo Del Toro's COC tales runs at a similarly short run time as the last episode, once again not developing the most fleshed out of stories. Like Lot 36, we are presented with a similarly unsympathetic, slimy character, this one veering into outright criminality. But this time around, we have the first of a recurring theme in future tales, with the story taking place within a period setting, allowing it to escape the trappings of modern times, and exist organically within a period of darker, less developed backwardness.
Without a fully fleshed out story at hand, here the attention falls on the visuals, Del Toro's trademark staple, and here these are stripped of any sense of wonder, and instead focus on creating a nightmarish, gruelling experience, a feeling of tight claustrophobia, which anyone who feels uncomfortable with rats should avoid, but, like I said, with such an unsympathetic character at the helm, it's hard to empathise much with his predicament. From a visual perspective, it acheives this quite well, but without any strong story development, it doesn't quite have the impact it should.
It's adapted from a short story by Henry Kuttner. Even within the framework of this, it struggles to really create enough depth to work on screen, but at least visually it is effective. ***