Review - Fear Itself: Community

Mary Harron outlines an important lesson in the fact that you should always read the fine print . . .

In this Fear Itself installment entitled Community, we find Bobby (Brandon Routh) and Tracy (Shiri Appleby) looking for the home of their young dreams. What they find may turn out to be anything but.

It seems as though The Commons would be the perfect little gated community and on the surface this is exactly what it is. Unfortunately for our young couple, there is a dark underbelly to this beast that would absolutely eat you alive if you don’t abide by the rules or produce exactly what you agreed to when you signed on the dotted line.

In my opinion, if you are looking for a new home and your best friends have recently been turned down to live in the community due to some “weird” reasons this is probably not the house or the community for you. It’s amazing what we will overlook for a deal that seems just too good to be true. You know what they say about those deals that seem too good to be true, right?! At least in this case, this saying was very much the case.

Another tip off that you are in an area you might just want to get out of would be if you are asked to be a part of the community’s association board and the main issue you are going to review is the fact that someone’s been didling one of the neighbors. Add to that the fact that there is recorded footage of aforementioned didling that the association actually has in its possession – and this is not the husband’s recording. I won’t even get into what the solution ends up to be.

I want to call out a couple of characters that I quite enjoyed in the episode. First, Phil (John Billingsley) who was the quirky neighbor who is just sick and tired of life in the Community: he added some comic relief for me but I would have loved to have seen or heard more about his history. He seemed just dying to blurt out the truth about all the madness but never really got there. Second, Candace (Barbara Tyson) really played the psychotic and controlling enforcer of the rules quite well. I loved how she went from warm and understanding to cold and calculating all in the same breath.

This was a good episode on a lot of levels however; I didn’t really enjoy the ending. There were a lot of things that took place that didn’t make much sense without some sort of explanation or reason. I may have enjoyed it more if the episode itself had more time to play out. I don’t think it really translated well to the abridged Fear Itself time frame.

Directed by
Mary Harron

Writing credits
Mick Garris (creator)
Kelly Kennemer (written by)

Episode Cast (in credits order)
Brandon Routh ... Bobby
Shiri Appleby ... Tracy
Barbara Tyson ... Candace
John Billingsley ... Phil
Charlie Hofheimer ... Scott
Brooklyn Sudano ... Arlene
Peter Strand Rumpel ... Ron
Tom Carey ... Simmons
James D. Hopkin ... Andrew
Meredith Bailey ... Heather
Alex Fatovich ... Meryl
Jordan Schartner ... Ken
Ecko Goffic
Graham Laschuk
Amelia Rose Kohan

rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Bonita Friedericy ... Debra Fabre (uncredited)