FatPie42 reviews Eerie, Indiana

[froodle]

Eerie Indiana (1991-1992)

Why the hell was there only one series of this? Such a great way to finish the series of Joe Dante's work since this has everything that is great about his work. Created in between Gremlins 2 and Matinee it feels like this was Joe Dante's golden era. I actually had seen the first episode about a family who keep themselves preserved in tuppleware before.

The leading role of Marshall is played by Omri Katz, who would go on to take the lead role in Matinee. However, real credit needs to be given to Justin Shenkarow who does a great job as his partner in crime, Simon. I was convinced that I'd seen Jason Marsden, who plays the mysterious Slash X towards the end of the series, in something before, but he actually mainly does voice work for cartoons and videogames (and appears to doing pretty well with that too).

Eerie Indiana is a comedy about a place that is supposed to be the most ordinary boring place in the world, yet Marshall and Simon discover it is actually the weirdest place on the planet. Bigfoot, Elvis and telepathic dogs are all fairly typical features. Each episode riffs on a new horror theme and sometimes references to classic horror movies are just randomly inserted into an episode. The whole thing feels like a cross between the randomness of Twilight Zone and the "kids solving stuff that adults miss" formula from Buffy. Essentially it's a pretty similar format to the first Buffy series (only Eerie Indiana came out more than 5 years earlier) and for absolutely no good reason, there's no second series of Eerie, so we have no idea if it would have progressed in a similarly successful way.

The series has way more hits than misses, it regularly had me laughing out loud and even though Dante only directed 5 episodes out of 19, it feels like he had his stamp on the entire project. (Heck, he even has an acting role in one of the episodes directed by someone else.)

If you love Joe Dante's work like I do, you really need to check this out.

A+