Thanks to a 10-day-old baby in the house, I was able to blaze through all 13 episodes of ‘Harper’s Island’ in the last few days. This is CBS’ limited run episodic slasher series that apparently tanked hard and will never again see the light of day. For me, I hope they Blu-ray this thing and I’ll be the first person in line to buy it. It’s just my gut reaction and I know the show has its faults, but it is easily better than the last two big screen slashers I saw – those being ‘My Bloody Valentine’ and ‘Friday the 13th’.

Completely disregarding my feelings, critics kicked this show in the ass and left it to bleed on Saturday nights. And so did everyone else in America. It’s a shame, too, because for all the horror shows that came out in the last few years – ‘Supernatural’, ‘Masters of Horror’, ‘Fear Itself’, – this is the only one that delivered anything interesting in concept or execution. Well, except for that one crazy Takashi Miike episode of ‘MoH’ with the ladies in make-up and Billy Drago and putting pins under the fingernails, etc. That was nice. But really, everything else has been hogwash. And what makes ‘Harper’s Island’ not hogwash?

Firstly, the concept is classic slasher and works perfectly for TV. Henry Dunn (Christopher Gorham), a kid from the island, is coming back to have his wedding at the Candlewick Inn and all his friends are coming, too. Even pixie-ish Abby Mills (Elaine Cassidy), Henry’s best friend, is coming which is crazy nice of her seeing as how her mom was brutally murdered and hung from a tree on the island 7 years ago. She was a victim of John Wakefield (Callum Keith Rennie, very intense but never overplaying), a crazy dude who killed a whole buttload of people and is still spoken of in fear, even though he was shot dead at the end of all that mayhem. But of course, once everyone is back on the island, people start dying and that’s really the best part of the idea. Since slasher movies are all about the body count and TV shows always love to pub up when a major-ish cast member is going to die, ‘Harper’s Island’ brings both of those flavors together. At the end of each ep, the killer takes out somebody important. And everyone alive starts suspecting everyone else alive. Is it the Sheriff? Henry’s crazy brother? John Wakefield himself? Nothing about the mystery is ingenious, but it’s well played and keeps things moving.

Luckily, CBS wasn’t too shy about the gore, either. In the first episode, an actor who is surely – SURELY – too big a name to get killed off immediately is totally killed off immediately (are these roles called Drew Barrymores? That’s what I’m calling them) by getting cut in half and left hanging in mid-air. And it’s not the last time you see this corpse. People are set on fire, impaled, split down the middle… and each episode is named after the sound of these kills – ‘WHAP’, ‘CRACKLE’, ‘THRAK, SPLAK, SIZZLE’. It’s a nice touch. It’s a series committed to the slasher idea.

The episodic structure also helps to quell one of the biggest complaints about slasher movies – poor character development. Not that ‘Harper’s’ is Shakespeare, but there’s so much more room to get to know the characters and to fill out this world, at least as much as any prime time network show. So it’s not just quip quip quip, aren’t we clever, sarcastic twenty-somethings and then the blood starts to fly. Even if you don’t really feel anything when the characters die, you at least understand that someone in their world would. And there is at least one pair of deaths that came dangerously close to actual emotion. A strong cast doesn’t hurt. Elaine Cassidy is immediately lovable and stays that way, even while lugging a shotgun around in the closing episodes. Gorham is kind of ugly, which is nice, because when they put pretty dudes in the hero roles of these things, I just want them to die post haste (Sorry, Jared Padalecki). There’s really not a bad performance in the bunch. Can you say that about the last ten slasher movies you saw?

Sadly, this isn’t a rave so much as a note to anyone interested that ‘Harper’s Island’ is solid, workmanlike horror. It’s more a comment on the poor quality of other horror that ‘Harper’s’ shines like a shiny beacon from the shore of scary entertainment. This should be as bad as it gets, but Lordy, Lordy, it sure ain’t.