DVD Picks: Gregory Horror Show

For starters, it's needlessly choppy. I presuming that the Gregory Horror Show was shown as a small interstitial clip every week. But the 25 "episodes" in this serial format just makes the show seem unbareably repetitive and predictable. Fifteen seconds of some really poetic narration by the lost soul, a camera move into the hotel door with a scream and the title card, then 1:45 of really stiff and boxy animation. So you know, only three people worked on the show's "graphics production", in other word animation, character design, lighting. 

The plots are okay, but they're nowhere as sophisticated as the starting narration would suggest. The whole show tries to do the whole Lewis Carroll-thing, but it falls well short of being actually meaningful or even original. They try to extract blood from their guest, but she escapes unscathed. Instead Catherine the nurse takes Gregory's plasma. Why does she have such an inexplicable fetish? She doesn't seem to be into vampirism. Then there's a cook that tries to kill the guest for smoking, as it kills her taste buds. Bravo to him, but her nicotine enriched habit is irrelevant to her complicated love life.

All throughout, it never lived up to its promise of being scary, or even the least bit shocking, instead staying just needlessly repulsive. At least they could have played up the camp, but it seems barely aware of the stench of its own camembert. Creator/writer Naomi Iwata demonstrates that she's clearly able to create a more challenging and intriguing work, but instead settles for mediocrity. The animation created by Ontario community college CG-animators in their freshman year is leaps and bound above this drivel. The guest isn't from Hades lair, this DVD is.