Family Man (2008, Ronny Yu)

Ronny Yu’s entry is my first dip into Fear Itself, aka Masters of Horror season 3. As before, I’m counting them as movies even though they’re obviously not. Don’t know if I’ll be watching more of these until either the promised uncut DVDs come out, or it becomes apparent that they never will. Yu, who brought the Freddy, Jason AND Chucky series to new heights (but whose Jet Li retirement film was so bad, Jet Li had to cancel his retirement) brings no style at all to this slightly gruesome but otherwise standard twilight-zoney story.

A guy from Tigerland and the new Star Trek is a bad criminal who murders families, and a guy from some show called Eureka is the perfect church-going dad, then as they both lay dying in a hospital, they switch bodies and our good dad is in prison being tried for the death penalty while the bad guy is trying to deal with work and family.

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Written by a guy who did some Carnivàle episodes. Not really a horror story, just an identity-swap thing with a twist ending: dad escapes from prison, there’s a fight, they switch back into their real bodies, but the criminal has murdered dad’s family as dad, so now dad will go back to prison, haha. John Landis’s season-two Family beats this by a mile. This ep was an okay time-waster, not worth watching again on the DVDs… can’t imagine what would’ve been cut out.