High school series funny, gory, likable ...and shot in Winnipeg

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Mewes: recurring role

As the demons unleashed by The Book of Pure Evil are wreaking havoc at Crowley High, a shadowy figure cloaked in a sinister red hood offers an insight and a query: "The Book of Pure Evil feeds on uncontrollable emotions and fears... Do you know of any emotionally unstable students at Crowley High?"

A guidance counsellor who's in league with the crimson-cloaked Satanic Society snaps back with a sarcastic response:

"Uh, we're talking teenagers here, right? They're ALL emotionally unstable."

And that's precisely why high school -- especially the fictional but (to locals who'll quite readily recognize that this new Space network series was shot in Winnipeg, mostly at Tec Voc School) eerily familiar Crowley High -- is a perfect environment for the nastiness locked inside this ancient and sinister tome to be unleashed.

Todd & The Book of Pure Evil, which premieres tonight at 8 on Space, is everything you'd hope for a stoner/horror/metalhead/teen-angst comedy to be -- weird, funny, bloody, goofy, coarse and absolutely committed to its delightful over-the-top-ness.

The series, co-produced by Winnipeg's Frantic Films and Toronto-based Aircraft Pictures and Corvid Pictures, follows the pot-addled and headbanger-hued misadventures of Todd Smith (Alex House), a rather average high-school slacker whose meandering path through adolescent underachievement involves mostly getting high with his best pal, Curtis (Bill Turnbull), missing classes, dreaming of becoming a heavy-metal star and wishing in vain that the object of his horndog affections, Jenny Kolinsky (Maggie Castle), would perhaps one day notice that he exists.

After making a fool of himself in a Battle of the Bands tryout, Todd is particularly dejected -- until, that is, a Jenny-shaped apparition beckons him to the school's trophy case, where nestled among the yearbooks he finds a thick, dusty volume with an odd pentagram logo on its cover.

After bribing Jimmy the Janitor (Jason Mewes, in a recurring cameo role) to open the case, Todd takes the book -- yes, the titular Book of Pure Evil -- home and starts trying out a few of its spells and incantations.

And as quick as you can scream "Off to never-never land," Todd is transformed into a freakishly fast-fingered heavy-metal guitar god. The next day, he challenges Jenny's boyfriend to a speed-metal riff-off that leaves everyone who watches clutching their bleeding ears.

And when he re-enters the band battle, Todd's newly reconfigured band, Barbarian Apocalypse, literally almost kills the entire student body. Thankfully, Curtis recognizes that this Todd isn't the Todd he knows, and unplugs the metal frenzy before it can do the ultimate damage.

But in so doing, Curtis sets The Book of Pure Evil sailing into the ether -- Todd thinks it's gone, but Jenny, whose journalist father disappeared while investigating the book's evil powers, believes otherwise. And she's right -- the book is destined to resurface again and again, in the hands of another vulnerable and frustrated teen.

And it's going to be up to Todd and Curtis and Jenny to make sure that the dark forces don't take control of Crowley High.

Todd & The Book of Pure Evil is crazy, silly fun, a very appealing kind of check-your-brain-at-the-classroom-door comedy that asks little of its audience but delivers several layers of well-crafted mischief. It's not a kids' show, by any stretch, filled as it is with coarse language, cartoonish bloodshed and blunt sexual innuendo, but it's also sufficiently clever that it could appeal to viewers well on their way down post-adolescent slide.

It's a modern-day, slightly potty-mouthed spin on the demon-kicking Buffy blueprint, with the added bonus of having its roots planted firmly here in Winnipeg. And as TV evils go, that's a pretty good kind to have.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

TV PREVIEW

Todd & The Book of Pure Evil

Starring Alex House, Maggie Castle, Bill Turnbull, Melanie Leishman and Jason Mewes

Tonight at 8

Space

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 29, 2010 D3