Crazyhead – review

Directors: Al Mackay & Declan O'Dwyer

First aired: 2016

Contains spoilers

Crazyhead was a short-lived British TV series that ran for a short 6 episode run. I didn’t pick up on it when it aired but it has recently dropped to Netflix and it was an impromptu watch.

Filmed in Bristol the show follows Amy (Cara Theobold), a young woman who had been medicated due to hallucinations. She has finished treatment and is taken of her meds but immediately "hallucinates" again, seeing a man’s head change – looking rotted and as though it is burning from the inside. Soon, however she meets Raquel (Susan Wokoma), a demon hunter who tells her that she is a seer – one of the few who can see when a person is possessed by a demon (we later discover that Raquel is not a seer but even rarer, she is half-demon born of the almost impossible circumstance of a mortal woman being impregnated by a possessed man).

Amy and Raquel

The first episode begins with a scene set after that meeting, with Amy and Raquel manhandling a bound and gagged woman, Suzanne (Riann Steele), from the boot of a car. We then follow the run up to that event with Suzanne becoming accidentally possessed when she knocks over a demon chasing Amy, with her car, killing the host and the demon possessing her. The two are taking the captured and possessed Suzanne to try and exorcise her. They succeed in this but, whilst the demon is driven out, Suzanne dies.

feeding

They bury Suzanne out in the woods but soon she is back, covered in mud from the shallow grave and with an overwhelming desire for blood. Raquel does further research and discovers that the exorcism failed because of her presence (as a half-demon), which then drew back Suzanne’s soul into her dead body and she now craves blood to replenish her lost lifeforce. They name her as a revenant rather than vampire and the lore is fairly simple, a need to feed, impervious to a lot of damage (as she is already dead) and that is about it.

captive and starved

It isn’t long before leader of the demons, and psychiatrist, Callum (Tony Curran, Eat Locals, Blade 2, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen & Underworld Evolution) is trying to use Suzanne to get at Amy and Raquel. The series was actually rather good fun. There is a tendency with some British series to develop, what I would call, a BBC-syndrome – dumbing down narrative and character dialogue, whilst simultaneously adding a childish humour to a show. This had humour (driven often through Amy and Raquel’s dialogues but ably supported by other cast members, not least Curran as Callum), which was in part sexually based, in part absurdist but never to the point where it felt like it derided from the show but rather complimented the dark fantasy setting. Worth catching as a short watch. 6 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK