Bobcat Goldthwait's 2018 Comedy Horror Anthology Series Misfits & Monsters is a Savagely Satirical Delight
I love horror anthologies. I always have. As a child I devoured The Twilight Zone and its surprisingly solid 1980s reboot. As a teen I mainlined Tales From the Crypt for reasons above and beyond its glorious, gloriously excessive amount of T&A.
Yet for some reason it took me a solid half decade to finally get around to binging Bobcat Goldthwait’s Misfits and Monsters, a short-live TruTv series despite it bringing together two of my favorite things: horror anthologies and the writing and directing of Bobcat Goldthwait.
I am of the mindset that when a horror anthology tries to be funny as well as scary it almost invariably accomplishes neither goal and just ends up cutesy and mildly embarrassing.
It’s Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu the Bear!
The genius of Bobcat Goldthwait’s Misfits and Monsters, consequently, is that it does not aspire to be scary as well as funny.
Goldthwait’s fright fables and terror tales involve an animated bear with more in common with the title character in Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey than friendly old Smoky the Bear, a werewolf with White House aspirations, an almost impressively idiotic teen pop star who sold his soul to Beelzebub for sick moves and dope jams, a Goatman who turns out to be something much more sinister, an actual mermaid, a time-traveling doofus, a pair of seemingly sentient supercomputers with possibly sinister designs on the world and finally a squabbling musical duo who are transformed into bees.
So while there are certainly elements of horror in the series’ eight episodes there’s also science-fiction, fantasy and, more than anything, satire.
With his perversely under-appreciated, inexplicably obscure horror anthology series Goldthwait seems more interested in satire than scares.
The purest example of the show’s savage satire is “Face in the Car Lot”, a very Bobcat Goldthwait mash-up of A Face in the Crowd, The Werewolf of Washington and the political rise of reality show bozo Donald J. Trump.
The Trump figure in “Face in the Car Lot” is Swell' Del Wainwright a big-grinning used car salesman played by a perfectly cast David Koechner. “Swell” Dell’s oily yet powerful connection to the common man and the mouth-breathing dullards who inhabit our formerly great nation attracts the attention of cynical political operative Jim “Bull” Bidwell (Dave Foley).
But before he embarks on a quest to send this ignorant, oblivious boob to the White House, Bull wants to know what kind of skeletons he has in his closet. It turns out Swell Dell has all kinds of ugly baggage involving infidelity and animal abuse and the usual personal rot.
Oh, and also Swell Dell is a werewolf, a bona fide, third generation lycanthrope who undergoes a horrific transformation when he’s angry.
There’s a great line in “Face in the Car Lot” where a friend of the reporter investigating Swell Del’s hairy secret tells her, “You can’t change what people want to believe.”
It’s a wonderful moment that speaks directly to the delirious delusions of the MAGA crowd and QAnon lunatics, who want so badly to believe that the living personification of corruption, greed and pathological selfishness is secretly leading a holy war against Satanic child-eating pedophiles that they’re willing to overlook the complete lack of any evidence supporting their beliefs.
On a similar note, if they want to believe that what Washington D.C really needs is an outsider who might occasionally run amok and eat children or livestock then that is what they are going to choose to believe.
The satire in “Face in the Car Lot” is not subtle but it is funny and enormously effective. Donald Trump might technically be a real estate mogul and disgraced, impeached one-term loser but spiritually he’s a used car salesman using his gift of gab and penchant for fibbing to sell us a bogus bill of goods.
All hat and no cattle
It similarly doesn’t take much to make Trump a literal monster as well as a figurative one. Donald Trump more or less ran as a feral beast of a man, a rampaging id who never thought before he spoke or wasted a single moment on self-reflection or modesty.
In “Face in the Car Lot” Swell Dell’s secret gets out but it only makes him more popular. The American people would rather be led by a REAL werewolf than a phony politician telling people what they want to hear.
The American people in “Face in the Car Lot” don’t vote for Swell Dell despite his murderous, uncontrollable lycanthropy; they voted for him because his murderous, uncontrollable lycanthropy makes him seem real and authentic in a twisted sort of way.
In keeping with the light satirical tone of the proceedings, Goldthwait cast professional funnymen and women who make already funny material even better.
Michael Ian Black, for example, is a hoot as a fanny-pack wearing Anti-Christ and the driving force behind the worldwide success and fame of Caleb Faustini, a Justin Bieber-like goober and casual slaughterer of Ebonics.
The deluded dumbass becomes a megastar with a whole lot of help from the Prince of Darkness but the Devil gets annoyed with him continually giving God praise for his success so he takes away his powers.
This leads to a sequence where Caleb, the Devil and Caleb’s mom Alice (Mr. Show’s Jill Talley) sit down for group therapy with Carol (Chicago improv legend David Pasquesi) for a righteous parody of one of my all-time favorite rock documentaries, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.
Horror anthologies are uneven by design and nature, since the form inherently reinvents itself with each new episode yet Bobcat Goldthwait’s Misfits and Monsters maintains a shockingly high level of quality and consistency because its auteur knows EXACTLY what he wants to do and say.
"The Goatman Cometh” is a morbid riff on Stand By Me only in this case the misfit boys at its core are actually responsible for the death of the body they find themselves having to dispose of in what is truly a unique sleepover challenge.
Samm Levine plays a geek who falls for a genuine mermaid in “Mermaid”, a tale of star-crossed non-love as well as a surprisingly complex allegory about race, gender and bigotry.
The partly animated series finale, meanwhile, uses the far fetched tale of a pair of loser musicians who become bees working in an almost impossibly vast ecosystem to comment on conformity, destiny and the weird, toxic allure of MAGA rhetoric.
Goldthwait’s should-be cult favorite kicks off with another live-action/animation hybrid about a successful voiceOver artist played by Seth Green who finds himself being menaced by Bubba the Bear, an ursine doofus he voices is probably the closest the show comes to straight-forward horror but it’s just as overtly comic as the rest of the show.
When horror anthologies try to be funny as well as scary they’re almost invariably neither. Goldthwait’s series, in sharp contrast, does not set out to be scary. Spooky? Sure. Weird? Of course. Fantastical? Definitely. Gothic? Certainly. But it does not need or even want to terrify and that, ultimately, proves very liberating.
What Goldthwait’s anthology does want to be is not just funny but savagely and subtly satirical. It succeeds.
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