'Stan Against Evil' is light, if violent, entertainment - Los Angeles Times
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Review: ‘Stan Against Evil’ is light, if violent, entertainment

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With Wednesday’s premiere of IFC’s “Stan Against Evil,” while Starz’s “Ash vs. Evil Dead” continues its second season apace, basic cable can boast two similarly titled, bloody comedies in which a politically incorrect, reluctant hero battles a supernatural threat.

Both embrace B-movie conventions. But where “Ash” is epically mock-epic, transferring Sam Raimi’s big-screen “Evil Dead” aesthetic whole to the small one, “Stan” is very much a TV show. Created by comedian, podcaster and “Simpsons” vet Dana Gould, it’s a sort of “Mayberry RFD” strained through “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” with as many bad words as basic cable will allow. There is a bit of a through line, a low-lying arc; but it’s basically episodic television, each week giving its heroes a new sort of spook to understand and dispatch.

Evie Barrett (Janet Varney, “You’re the Worst”) is the new sheriff in a town whose previous sheriffs and constables have for more than 300 years met horrible untimely deaths, since a Colonial constable burned “172 falsely accused witches.” The single exception is the eponymous Stanley Miller (John C. McGinley from “Scrubs”), newly and significantly widowed and ruefully resigned from the post; his relationship with Evie will be, as one would predict, initially strained. Gruff in a squinty way, like a down-market Clint Eastwood, Stan has a penchant for colorful if not especially clever similes (“I’m going to rip you open like a bag of Pop-Tarts,” “come at you all eyes and teeth like a wolverine in spandex”). He worries that taking sugar in his coffee might make him look gay.

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“Stan Against Evil” is light, if violent, entertainment. The jokes are moderately funny, the characters two-and-a-half dimensional. Contrasting Stan’s lazy misogyny, the series takes a vague but discernible feminist tack. Not uncommon to the genre, the storytelling can feel reverse engineered, with prophecies and curses crafted to prop up the desired plot points; the supernatural mechanics can seem at once practically necessary and not worth bothering about.

Directed by Justin Nijm and Jack Bishop, whose previous work is mostly in short-form comedy (Funny or Die videos and such), “Stan” is busy enough and its players — also including Nate Mooney as the Barney Fife deputy and Deborah Baker Jr. as Stan’s daughter, an awkward, aging young woman in a unicorn TV shirt — appealing enough to keep you interested if not really invested. McGinley does sprinkle a little pain and poignancy into his performance when the script gives him leave, but depth is not what’s on order here.

The monsters are made of masks and make-up and rubber molds. There is puppetry. Stage blood and slime are squirted and splattered higgledy-piggledy. Canted camera angles out of “Caligari” and “Batman” and the odd fish-eye shot provide quick, familiar shortcuts to spookiness. These are not marks against the show but essential rather to its low-budget, low-grade, handmade charm.

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‘Stan Against Evil’

Where: IFC

When: 10 p.m. Wednesday

Rating: TV-14-LV (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with advisories for coarse language and violence)

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