CSI - Check In and Check Out

I was binging CSI: Las Vegas on Sunday afternoon (into the evening) when I came across an episode just perfect for horror fans (and fans of the film for which it echoes, Vacancy), Check In and Check Out, about a specific room (114) at a sleazebag hotel featuring three separate murders where savagery and brutality (absolute overkill) are quite distinctive, with those responsible seemingly unaware of committing them, soon to be determined as themselves victims of an “LSD spray” which, once absorbed into the body, induces a severe psychosis. While the one behind it all (the proprietor of the hotel, encouraged by his increasing sick desire to see bad behavior in all of his rooms, recorded secretly for his own entertainment and jollies within his own “peep room”, monitoring the activities of those staying there) will undoubtedly bring about familiarity, the rage killings are so horrific the episode leaves a lasting impact. A head smash into a bathroom sink, a victim’s legs mutilated, crime scene photos of a hammer-bash victim, corpses of a sweet humanitarian couple stabbed repeatedly with scissors, and a vicious broken-bottle butchery all explicitly, vividly, and viscerally receive attention, testing the viewers’ stomachs and endurance. I was taken aback by this episode, and when you watch a “human hamster ball” riding down a suburban street loaded with a bloody, battered corpse and aren’t as shocked as you were with Check In and Check Out, that is saying something. Nick Stokes drawn to a suspicious religious kook living next door to the room (who was willing to tolerate a monitor in his closet and a drug bag in the wall just so he could continue to remain in the room without being thrown out) while DB is becoming disgruntled with the ongoing returns of his CSIs to Room 114, as well as, Hodges being sprayed in the face with the drug resulting in his going berserk, the episode certainly has its share of startling developments. The CSIs are tested for sure with four homicides including suspects as diverse as a kindly schoolteacher (trying to comfort a student who hoped to seduce her), a homeless man with bloody feet and the scissors nearby him (given away by scabies, seen after by the visiting couple notably charitable towards the rejects of society), husband just trying to sneak a smoke (unknowingly behind the murder of his wife, although he believes someone else did it), and just some guy staying in the room who tied himself to the bed and sliced apart his own legs from his body! What the drug spray does to innocent people and the results are quite tragic. This might have the inexplicable series of crimes tied to one specific room, because of the bloody red meat featured throughout this doesn’t shy away from provoking the squeamish to flee the screen for a vomit bag. The proprietor of the hotel, being interviewed by a repulsed Brass, is your typical CSI creep, totally devoid of the enormity of his misdeeds, totally involved and invested in the reactions of what the drug spray produces, all the violence right in his wheelhouse…his giddy embrace of all that has transpired in that room appropriately gets under the skin.

***/****