'Sandwich of Terror' Serves Comedy That Tastes Scary

Do you like your sandwich with extra condiments and Scream-y comedy? How about wry chicken salad, over-the-top bologna, and witty meat loaf in equal installments between two slices of bread? Sandwich of Terror is a bizarre and wacky horror-cum-comedy series that moves from dry to spicy to overly moist (more food references!).

Directed by Jeremy Westphal and produced by Escape Pod Films – a Brooklyn-based comedian and filmmaking troupe behind web series wonderful Scissor Cop – Sandwich takes George Romero’s 1980s Tales from the Darkside as its leaping point, and is both a parody of that not-quite-classic as well as a postmodern smorgasbord of its own entity.

In the same structured build-up as Tales from the Darkside, each installment (fyi, there are two ‘st

ories’ per 5-minute episode divided by quick-cut, weather breaks or program announcements from fictional ‘local feed’ WXZT) begins with a deep-voiced narrator riffing on a different sandwich as a greater metaphor. I.e. in episode 2’s “Friend of Faux?” the intro wonders whether friends, like Tofurkey (and Jon Golbe from Playboy Interns!), are often claiming to be something they’re not.

The story structure of Sandwich not unlike that of sci-fi classic the Twilight Zone either, with a light or neutral premise leading to a dark unfolding. With Sandwich it’s all about over saturating expectations, whether it’s a boy who thinks he sees an evil clown in his closet that turns out to be his drunk uncle dressed like a clown, and then later discovers, to his mother’s indifference, that there really is an evil clown ‘right over there!’ or the guy who’s afraid of witches and keeps summoning up witch simulacra, until at last a real witch presents herself in a true case of self-fulfilling prophecy.

For the last half of Sandwich‘s latest episode, “Any Witch Way You Can,” the narrator, appropriately enough, even gets in on the action of stripping the stucture’s housing down to its two-by-fours: he just can’t be bothered to complete another bad/hokey sandwich metaphor.

Escape Pod may be yet another of the growing ranks of comedy troupes doing web videos, but there angle is fresh and original enough to be worthy of taking notice. And by their for-now-final fourth episode of Sandwich, they really hit their stride, with underground experimentation transforming itself into comedy gold. Check it out here.