"Candle Cove": Another "Channel Zero" Zero

Well, I got conned again, with another season of the Sci-Fi series Channel Zero.  But this time wasn't my fault.

 It was based on a very cool creepypasta, written in the form of posts to a message board, in which people vaguely recall a local children's show that aired for a few months in the 1970s: Candle Cove: a poorly produced puppet show about a little girl who finds herself living with pirates.  As they continue to remember, disturbing details arise.

Creepy calliope music. Pirate Percy, a puppet created from parts of old dolls. A villain called the Skin-taker.

A grinning boat who says "You have...to...go... INSIDE!"

An episode with nothing but the characters screaming: "No plot or anything, literally the characters just standing in place and screaming."  Who would produce such a scary program, and why?

It doesn't sound much different from real psychedelic "lost boy" series of the early 1970s, or the horrible children's shows of the 1950s.  Kukla, Fran, and Ollie still gives me nightmares.  And for that matter, what about the horror-fest, The Wizard of Oz? It could happen.

Fans are up to the task.  They've produced clips and full episodes of Candle Cove, a nearly complete episode guide, fan art (does it count as fan art if the original never existed?), and interviews with the producers and actors (who thought they were doing a good job).

Enter the Sci-Fi network's Channel Zero:

In this case, the show began airing in the fall of 1988, when 12-year old Mike and his twin brother Eddie (Luca Villacis) are being horribly bullied by Dane Yolen (Liam Marchand) and his cronies.

During the next few weeks, five kids are murdered, including the bullies and the nice but slow Alex (Keenan Lehmann).  Eddie vanishes.

Thirty years later, Mike (Paul Schneider) returns to investigate the mystery, and reunites with his mother and the relatives of the dead kids: the bully's ugly brother Gary (Shawn Benson), now the sheriff; the mega-ugly doofus Tim (David Lawrence Brown); and his old girlfriend.

They don't want old wounds dredged up....but, then the show starts to air again, kids start disappearing, and Mike is the prime suspect.

Then his daughter shows up, and becomes one of the imperiled kids.  Uh-oh.

Spoiler alert: Eddie killed the kids, and now has returned for Mike.

Eddie is a quintessential gay villain. He can't stand the fact that Mike has a girlfriend.  He says "We're supposed to be together always," and "Tell me that you love me more than her." He has returned for Mike, so they can be together forever.

Add to it the fact that boys and men in this world are uniformly suspicious, belligerent, angry, and violent, while women are nurturing, caring, understanding, and compassionate, and you get heterosexist garbage.

Add to it the fact that the adult male actors are some of the ugliest I've ever seen, so there's no beefcake potential, and you come up with something decidedly unpleasant.

Candle Cove has only two redeeming features:

1. This actor with the great name Greyden Bohutchuk

2. The puppet show itself.   "You have to...go...inside!" may become this generation"s "Down here, everything floats."

See also: Butcher's Block