Refrigerator Full of Heads #1 – Rio Youers, Writer; Tom Fowler, Artist; Bill Crabtree, Colorist
Ray – 6/10
Ray: The original Basketful of Heads was a bizarre opening act for the Hill House line, a gory, twisted caper reminiscent of Sam Raimi that worked off a very simple concept—a magic Viking ax that knocked off people’s heads with a stroke but left the heads alive and conscious. It used that to tell a twisted, ultraviolet story of a girl whose boyfriend was kidnapped by violent criminals only for it to turn out that he was in on it in several ways. It didn’t so much end as stop, and I certainly wasn’t expecting a sequel—but DC had other plans. The new creative team of Rio Youers and Tom Fowler take the concept of the original, add in new magical artifacts, and take the tone from insane to so bizarre and over the top that it feels like a parody. The story begins with a dark prelude as a family has their home invaded by robbers, and they’re all brutally killed—except for the patriarch, who finds himself magically paralyzed thanks to a cursed dagger as his family is murdered around him.
Yeah. Cheery stuff. And then the tone shifts radically as we meet the Marshalls, a young interracial couple coming to Brody Island, the home of last summer’s madness. They’re ostensibly there for her to get some writing done and enjoy the place as a couple—but it doesn’t take long before it becomes clear that’s a lie. They seem to actually be a pair of thieves, and Brody Island is now full of violent bikers and killer sharks, for some reason. When they anger the wrong group of bikers and wind up going on an insane chase across the island, they get an up-close encounter with the ax now buried at the bottom of the water. A close encounter with a shark makes clear that it still works, and this amoral pair is left to figure out what’s next—even as some far worse villains are out there with another cursed object. If you like chaotic gore, this might be the comic for you, but to me, it largely just felt like relentless ugliness without much internal logic.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
