PLOT: Dolores Roach is released after an unjust 16-year prison sentence, and she returns to a now-gentrified Washington Heights neighborhood. She reunites with an old stoner friend, Luis, who lets her live and work as a masseuse in the basement under his empanada shop. When the promise of her newfound stability is threatened, she must go to extremes to survive.
REVIEW: It is tough to say whether the golden age of television is thriving or ending. With the streaming wars imploding, the depth and breadth of content on the small screen has never been bigger. But, with dozens upon dozens of series, many’s quality seems questionable. The latest series to debut is The Horror of Dolores Roach. A co-production between Amazon Studios and Blumhouse, The Horror of Dolores Roach is an adaptation of the hit podcast of the same name, which, in turn, was an adaptation of a stage play. Reminiscent of the musical Sweeney Todd, The Horror of Dolores Roach is a macabre story that dips into dark comedy and horror with strong themes about class and socio-economics. While The Horror of Dolores Roach is a lot of things, consistently entertaining is not one of them. Despite a great leading turn by Justina Machado, this series fails to warrant a full season.
Justina Machado portrays the title character, a woman who takes the fall for her significant other and spent the last two decades behind bars for drug-related offenses. Now freed, Dolores returns to her New York City neighborhood to find the minority residents driven out, the rents sky-high, and no one she used to know around. With no money or prospects, Dolores runs into old friend Luis Batista (Alejandro Hernandez), owner of Empanada Loca. Luis gives Dolores a room in the basement, where she runs a makeshift massage parlor. With her stress at the breaking point, Dolores gives in at a vulnerable moment resulting in a dead body on her table. When wondering how to dispose of the corpse, Luis takes the unconventional approach of using the flesh to make empanadas. As the series progresses, the body count rises, as does satire and gore.
Evoking the Broadway musical Sweeney Todd, The Horror of Dolores Roach does not really get into the horror part of the story in the first half-hour episode. Much of the time is spent introducing Dolores via a play within the series, which recounts her cannibalistic crimes in a one-woman show. Since this series is based on a one-woman show itself, it almost feels like series creator Aaron Mark, who wrote the play and podcast, is also making a commentary about the obsession with true crime these days. Heavy with voice-over narration, the series has the rhythm of a stage play, with Justina Machado delivering a stellar leading role that is at once strong and terrifying. Machado makes Dolores feel like a real person enduring a very difficult period in her life, and director Roxann Dawson does good work capturing the dramatic part of the story. Once the body count starts, the series devolves into a spoof of itself, with only Machado staying dramatic while everyone around her seems to be playing for laughs.
Aside from Machado, the next biggest role in the series comes from Alejandro Batista. Batista plays Luis, the owner of Empanada Loca, who also has a crush on Dolores. Luis is the equivalent of Nellie Lovett from Sweeney Todd, and Batista plays the character as slightly unhinged. The series also features Kita Updike as the Empanada Loca cashier, Nellie, and neighboring business owner Joy (Jean Yoon). The trailers use Marc Maron and Judy Reyes as victims of Dolores’ murderous massage skills. There is also a great turn by Cyndi Lauper as a private investigator. The series begins with a heavier sensibility regarding the murders and Dolores’ role before abandoning any logic as the blood begins to flow. As a story, The Horror of Dolores Roach seems to have something to say about something, but it is hard to tell if there is a message buried in the plot or just the semblance of one that never quite comes together beneath the gore that gleefully flows through all eight half-hour episodes.
While expanding the stage play Empanada Loca into the narrative podcast, showrunner Aaron Mark added other characters. The series version fleshes out these characters even more, but even the eight-episode run of the story seems too long, with the material feeling stretched in many respects. The directing team, which also includes Eduardo Sanchez, Hiromi Kamata, America Young, and Edward Ornelas, hones in on the Latin-infused culture driven out of the gentrified Washington Heights area, but the focus on the gory execution of Dolores’ anger overshadows any messages this story may have wanted to tell. Despite the inclusion of the word in the title, there is very little horror to be found in this series which begins to feel repetitive as the murders and dispatching of the corpses tread water for the bulk of the series’ middle entries.
The Horror of Dolores Roach was one of my most anticipated new series of the year and left me underwhelmed. Not serious enough to be scary and not consistent enough to be funny, Aaron Mark’s series ends up feeling like a half-baked attempt at modernizing Sweeney Todd. It is a shame, as Justina Machado is stellar in the title role and creates a character with enough layers and nuance that never gets explored satisfactorily. With the podcast lasting for two seasons, this could be the start of a larger story focused on the character, but it ends in such an anticlimactic way that I did not have much appetite to revisit this story beyond this season. The saving grace is that The Horror of Dolores Roach clocks in at less than four hours, but it feels unsatisfying and dull for too much of even that brief running time.
The Horror of Dolores Roach premieres on July 7th on Prime Video.
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