Episode Recap: Mummy Mayhem

With only five contestants left in the competition, the feeling in the house is one of respect and high stakes. The artists roll to meet McKenzie, and she tells them that their next assignment is to create a mummified Egyptian god, inspired by the updated Evil Dead movie. Giving advice on the style of the challenge via video message is the star of the original Evil Dead movies, Bruce Campbell. He cautions them that the new film is darker than the original, and they should reflect that in their makeups.

Everyone's a fan of these movies, but no one more so than Eric Fox, who chooses Ra, the god of gods. He goes for a pronounced brow and ghoulish mouth with a completely dessicated body, and chooses a slender female model in order to really sell the sunken torso of a mummy. House is also excited, but feels a little uncertain given his last look wound up on the bottom. His god is a scribe, so he fashions an index finger into a pen and makes the torso, the scroll, with lavish hieroglyphics on it. Anthony feels good about bouncing back from his weeks on the bottom, but is still cautious moving ahead in the game.

As construction continues, the lab is mostly quiet, with only occasional talk of how they - especially Eric F. - miss their loved ones. Things flow unusually well until Wayne, who promised himself he would leave enough time to do a proper paint job this week, realizes on application day that he's squeezed his paint job into last looks - not where he wanted to be. Everything gets finished, however, and when Glenn sees all of the characters onstage, he says sincerely that everyone did a tremendous job.

The judges are most impressed with Kris's work, whose paint job, though done in a simple sandy palette, brings great depth that highlights his excellent sculpting of a four-horned ram god, Khnum. Also an all-around favorite was Wayne's crocodile-headed Sobek, and though Wayne managed to do an excellent paint job, the transition from croc head to human body was a little abrupt. Ve and Neville both liked Eric F.'s Ra, which looked as though it was pulled right from an '80s horror movie, but Glenn felt that it was way too stylized. They soon agree that Kris is the winner this week, and he rejoices in their classification of his work as "camera-ready".

Not so lucky are House, who at the last minute covered his work in a flattening gold paint, and Anthony, whose headdress for Anubis was not regal enough, and who also covered his excellent sculpting with an optically confusing paint job. Ultimately, they decide that the concept on which House based his work is the more flawed, and he goes home. Though he's sad at the decision, he's incredibly proud to have made it this far, and intends to push through with even more work of his own.