Flickers on the Wall: Masters of Horror (Part 2)

Last month, I started an examination of Masters of Horror, a short film horror anthology conceived as a direct-to-video project. Broadcast on Showtime and seen by almost no one, all thirteen movies have now been released on DVD, separately and in a box set. The title, or at least the label of “Master,” was a joke for the participants, and many of these masters have not earned such a lofty accolade, yet the show is the most impressive program of its type since the original The Twilight Zone. Why? It isn’t enough to say that the episodes are good. Most are, though a few are forgettable. Nor is it sufficient to mention that some of horror’s best and brightest are involved, since so are a few who are better described as drab and dank. This is a case of the whole improving upon the pieces and to explain why, I need to discuss each film. In part one I covered episodes one through four, movies that are certain to bring a smile to the twitching, crazed face of the average genre fanatic. That brings us to:

Ep 1.5: Chocolate {Director/Writer: Mick Garris}

Of course it had to fall apart somewhere; Chocolate is that place. Well, fall apart might be a little harsh since there’s still some enjoyment that can be milked from Chocolate, but we’re dealing with a much lower plane. It’s hardly a surprise. When you pick up an anthology book, do you rifle through the pages to get to the editor’s contribution—you know, the story where standards don’t apply because the boss wrote it? As series producer, I’ve got nothing but respect for Mick Garris, but as mini-auteur, I’m left wondering if he’s seen a horror film or read anything outside of Steven King in the last twenty-five years. I’d have said fifty years, except it’s clear he’s seen 1978’s The Eyes of Laura Mars with its “I can see through the killer’s eyes” plot. Now Mick and I may be the only living humans who admit to liking Laura Mars, but even I didn’t need a cheap, gender-switched version. And if that was the goal, at least have John Carpenter direct, since he wrote the original script and was unhappy with how it was altered.

Chocolate gives us Henry Thomas (of E.T. fame, all grown up) as a lonely, recently divorced artificial food taster. It’s hard to fathom why he is so naive (this guy always tells the truth, and it’s always a bad idea) and the reason why he’s unhappy. He’s got a good friend and can pick up hot babes in grocery stores for quick sex without breaking a sweat, but I’ll take it as a postulate that he’s lonely. Jamie (that’s Thomas) starts off covered in blood and doing his best imitation of a ‘40s noir character. There’s been a death, and the police want Jamie to tell his story once again. A bit contrived, but OK, who am I to complain about an old Hollywood cliché? He explains that one morning he woke up tasting chocolate, which was odd since he hadn’t eaten anything but vegetables. Over the next few days, he’d suddenly found himself tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling, or feeling the events in someone else’s life. This can be troubling when trying to drive, but rather fun when the other person is masturbating, particularly since the person is an attractive blonde. Jamie, who’s a schmuck by any definition, falls in love with the woman, and when things go violently wrong for her, sets out to find her.

While it’s all mildly entertaining, and watching Thomas mime the female role in missionary sex is a riot, Chocolate doesn’t have much going for it. The noir bookends are out of place, and none of the characters make much sense. We spend time with Jamie’s friends and family in the first thirty minutes, then they all disappear. Why were they written in at all? The nudity and sex is almost erotic, and definitely funny, but not scary or dramatic, yet Chocolate takes itself seriously in the end. Perhaps as a romantic comedy this would have had wings, but its half-breed existence leaves it easy to forget.

For fans of Max Headroom, Matt Frewer shows up as a punk rocking buddy. As always, I enjoyed his performance, though it was clear he thought he was in a farce, but it made me a bit sad, thinking he deserved better roles in better projects than he’s gotten.

Rating: Sub-par.

A Master? Knowing masters, and even hiring them, does not make you one. Garris has spent most of his directing career translating Stephen King, normally for the small screen. That’s enough to put him out of the running.

Ep 1.6: Homecoming {Director: Joe Dante. Writer: Sam Hamm}

It’s all about politics. There’s no way to talk about Homecoming and stick to neutrality, and that’s the idea. This is smash-you-over-the-head-and-rub-your-face-in-the-shards political truth without a breath of subtlety, and how you view it is completely dependent on your feelings about G.W. Bush, the Iraq war, and all the many, many lies. The goal here was simple. For years, everyone has danced around the truth, too petrified to say anything. Even after it was clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was never a threat and wasn’t even a major player in international terrorism, that the administration lied over and over and over again, and that right-wing stooges outed a spy and spun reality for anyone susceptible to slogans, the press has tread lightly, and the arts have only commented in vague metaphor. Homecoming exists to end that. It isn’t trying to persuade anyone that Bush is a cruel bastard surrounded by hypocrites and vicious true believers; it takes that as a given. After seven years (five during filming), if you haven’t taken a stand, one way or another, no film is going to influence you. Rather, its message is to other filmmakers: Time to stop playing nice and letting the truth die. “If you’re going to code the message, which is the way horror movies have always done it, that’s fine, but it’s not going to reach an audience like a movie that’s overt, and this is not exactly subtle,” says Dante. “Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. But everybody’s afraid.”

In under an hour, Dante takes on the war and how it was sold, Guantánamo Bay, 2004’s Florida election fraud, television pundits, and evangelical preachers using God for political gain, and he does it all with zombies. It all takes place with America in an unstated war and an election coming up fast. David Murch (Jon Tenney) is the go-to spin doctor for an unnamed George W. Bush, working directly under a pseudo-Karl Rove (Robert Picardo). On the equivalent of the Larry King Show, Murch meets a sleazy, freelance, extremist commentator (think Ann Coulter) and is confronted with a mother, grieving over her son lost in pointless combat, but deflects her criticism by claiming that his one wish would be to bring back the dead soldiers so they could say how proud they are that they died for an important cause. The president picks up that statement for his stump speeches—but not for long once veterans leave their coffins. The undead want one thing: to be heard. So how to you shut up the dead?

This is a fun ride, unless you’re still clinging to “We fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” in which case you’ll hate every second, but you won’t be able to ignore it. There’s plenty of humor (black as pitch), but the portrayals aren’t broader than what’s on cable TV. Can you get wackier than the real Ann Coulter? Is it really horror? Well, as Dante puts it, “This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans.”

Homecoming is cathartic. It’s an anthem. And it is the best example of why Masters of Horror works. By allowing the filmmakers to create (almost) whatever they wanted, with no editorial meddling or discussions of commerciality, we get something that wouldn’t fly at the theaters.

Rating: Superior

A Master? As I’ll point out again for the next episode, anyone who makes a good werewolf movie (or even just a fair one) gets a place on the masters’ list, and Joe Dante managed that with The Howling. Besides working for Corman and on numerous lesser horror works, Dante also directed the darkly humorous holiday classic, Gremlins, and its sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Ep 1.07: Deer Woman {Director: John Landis. Writers: John Landis and Max Landis—John’s son}

John Landis continues the light tone of the series with the most comedic tale of the set. Known primarily for flicks like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and Trading Places, Landis effortlessly combines humor, horror, gore, and sex. It’s not like he hasn’t done it before. Deer Woman is a companion piece to An American Werewolf in London, in case you’ve been concerned about how to organize your DVDs.

Burnt-out and sarcastic Detective Dwight Faraday (Brian Benben) is having a bad day, but then he always has a bad day. Due to an incident in his past, he’s been assigned to “animal attack” duty. That and he’s the go-to guy for weird cases, and this is a really weird case. At a redneck truck stop, a huge glob of ground beef has been found in one of the cabs. It turns out that meat used to be the trucker, making it a homicide, which takes Faraday out of the picture. But he just can’t let it go, not after realizing that the victim was crushed to death by hooves, and with the help of pleasant, Doctor-Watson cop, Officer Reed (Anthony Griffin), he’s going to catch the perpetrator. Is he looking for a psychopath who carries animal legs as weapons? Or might it be a marauding deer that sneaks into parked trucks? Or maybe, just maybe, could it be the legendary Native American Deer Woman? Well, I guess the title kind of gives it away.

Landis gives us plenty of blood and body parts, but the focus is on humor and on a minute-to-minute basis, he’s never been funnier. The script is packed with witty, quotable lines delivered with rapid-fire timing. Of all the Master’s of Horror episodes, Deer Woman has the best dialog; this is the writers’ film. Like An American Werewolf in London and his follow-up vampire flick, Innocent Blood, the comedy doesn’t denigrate horror or parody it. All the pieces work together.

There’s no attempt to build mystery or to explain things. How and why don’t matter. As a Native American the cops meet at a casino explains: “Why does everything have to have a ‘why’ with you people? You know, it’s a woman with deer legs. Motive really isn’t an issue.”

What stops Deer Woman from being the first clear masterpiece of the season is the ending. It doesn’t have one. The action peters out, and while that’s clearly the intent, that doesn’t make it interesting to watch. The climax and the best jokes all come earlier. It’s a film in search of a denouement.

Rating: Average

A Master? His horror resume is short, but since it includes An American Werewolf in London, he gets a ticket to the masters’ list. After The Wolf Man, it is the most influential werewolf picture made, and one of the few good ones.

Ep 1.8: Cigarette Burns {Director: John Carpenter. Writers: Drew McWeeny, Scott Swan}

John Carpenter takes us back to land he’s traveled before, but some trips bear repeating, particularly if the path is different. Like his 1995 In the Mouth of Madness, a work of art has great power, and a man goes looking for the work when it would have been much better to do anything else.

The man here is Kirby Sweetman (Norman Reedus). He runs an unsuccessful art theater and tries to forget about the drug-induced death of his fiancée (or maybe wife; the details are vague and unimportant) and his complicity in it. When Bellinger (Udo Kier), a sinister, wealthy collector, requests he locate a print of the cult film, La Fin Absolue du Monde, Kirby sees it as a way out of his financial troubles with the added benefit of letting him see the movie. He should have realized the risk wasn’t worth it when Bellinger revealed his prisoner, a strange albino with the remains of amputated wings, or when he learned just how bloody its only screening was. But what film fanatic could pass up the most notorious film ever made? Sure it might make you crazy, but there’s always a price, right?

The ‘80s belonged to John Carpenter, who put out one sci-fi, fantasy, or horror marvel after another. Recent years have not been kindly to him, and it looked like one of the greats was done. Not so. With Cigarette Burns, Carpenter has returned to form with an eerie, emotional, and gooey bit of insightful entertainment. (Note to the curious, there are some things that should not be done with your intestines.) He takes plenty of jabs at the system that demands horror be toned down so as not to offend, as well as a few at himself, other filmmakers, and fans who don’t know when to quit. Film is a drug, and often it would be healthier if we could ignore it, but Carpenter knows that for true aficionados, that’s not going to happen. This is a horror film that speaks to horror film fanatics.

Rating: Superior

A Master? If I didn’t make it clear above, Carpenter is The Man. With Halloween, he’s responsible for the slasher movement (perhaps not something to be proud of, but certainly important). He followed it with the skillful ghost thriller, The Fog, his true masterpiece, The Thing (based on Who Goes There by John W. Campbell), his take on Stephen King’s Christine, and the challenging Prince Of Darkness. In between, he created exciting action science fiction and fantasy: Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live.

Ep 1.9: Fair Haired Child {Director: William Malone. Writer: Matt Greenberg}

A dark fairy tale, Fair Haired Child is the closest thing season 1 has to a movie the whole family could watch. Call it a PG-11. Gore is slight, nudity pops up only for an instant in a photo, and there’s nothing that would send young children into therapy.

It’s a straightforward story (notice my fairy-tale comment). A beautiful thirteen-year-old (Lindsay Pulsipher), who’s teased by everyone at school (I can’t think why, but then why did everyone pick on poor Cinderella? Oh, wait, there was a reason there), is kidnapped by a mentally unstable musician and his less twitchy wife (Lori Petty). After checking that she’s both a virgin and unbaptized, they toss her into the cellar with a fair haired boy who’s been drugged and is slipping into shock. As she and the boy bond, they discover that there’s something else down there with them, and it’s killed before.

If you like your horror simple and predictable, Fair Haired Child is going to be a favorite. There’s plenty of tension, characters you can get your teeth into, and some quirkiness to let you know the filmmakers were aware that this was just the Brother’s Grimm in a new millennia. The creature’s got the right dose of repulsiveness about him, though the J-horror-style jerky movements could have been skipped—that technique works better for critters from other planes of existence. There’re numerous cheats (the girl calls home, but her mother’s taken a sleeping pill and just tells her she’ll have to take a cab home from her kidnapping) to keep things moving along. I suppose fairy tales don’t handle being inspected in the full light of day. Luckily, this one keeps to the shadows.

I like my horror to be more mysterious; I knew everything way to early, but I can’t get too cranky about it since no one was trying to keep anything hidden. I’m not so forgiving about the lack of meaningful activity from the leads. Sure, there isn’t much they can do, but that brings up questions like, “Why are we watching them?” I’m fond of screen time being given to protagonists. The girl doesn’t do anything; things happen to her. Instead of anyone solving anything, events just play out, and then we get a twist postscript. A twist is no replacement for a plot.

Rating: Average

A Master? No. Malone’s most famous film is Fear Dot Com. Sorry, that doesn’t put him at the same table as Carpenter, or even in the same restaurant. I don’t think he even gets to ride a bus down the same street.

Read Part 1 | To be concluded next time >>