TV review: Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet Of Curiosities has death and an octopus thing but is it scary?
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet Of Curiosities: Executive producer Guillermo del Toro in episode 'Lot 36' on Netflix
I had read that (Netflix) is a throw-back nod to and . The only thing unexpected about the first episode of the series is that I watched it to the end. And that end was so under-whelming, I wasn’t even sure it was over.
Lot 36 is the name of this first episode of a series of so-called curiosities, curated by Guillermo del Toro, an Oscar-winning director for The Shape of Water.
Lot 36 starts with some guy dying while chopping up a rabbit. It feels a bit forced.
Next, we’re in a truck with Nick, who is agreeing with some racist on the radio. The message is clear — Nick is a bad guy.
The story plods along. Nick needs to make money to pay off some debt he got from a violent loan-shark.
So he buys the belongings of a storage unit at an auction, sight unseen, in the hope that he makes a quick profit.
The lot in question, Lot 36, belonged to the guy who died at the start while chopping a rabbit.
Quick sub-plot segue here, so Nick can be racist towards a woman called Amelia, who claims he took her belongings when he bought up her lot, a separate lot, after she fell behind in her payments.
This is about 25 minutes into a 45-minute show, and I haven’t been scared once. That’s unusual because I’m ‘face-behind-the-cushion’ cowardly when it comes to scary TV. This feels more like a statement about modern-day America than a show that will terrify me before Halloween.
After that, it just throws The Da Vinci Code into the script to see if anything will stick. Nick opens up the lot he bought and discovers a world of Nazis, Ouija boards, and rare books. He brings these to a fence called Agatha who calls her friend Roland, who speaks German, so he must be a bad ‘un.
They go back to Lot 36 and I can barely write this anymore. It turns out the guy who died had trapped his sister there because she was possessed by the devil, or something. Anyway, an octopus thing crawls out of her decomposed head and eats Roland. Nick does a legger, the woman he was racist to earlier on can free him from the building but doesn’t and so he gets eaten by the octopus thing as well.
It’s the least scary thing I have ever watched. felt amateur and cheap at times, but some of the stories would chill your blood for you all the same.
Lot 36 felt expensive and dull. No suspense, no characters — nothing to see here. Maybe the other episodes will get a shriek. But this is the one they decided to release first. That’s terrifying.
