I have no idea how the fur industry
works in real life. I really doubt that showing off a single
racoon-skin fur coat at a fur show, no matter how nice it is, would
produce a great deal of profit if the maker did not have the means of
producing more of the same quality. Isn't showing what's available
the entire point of fashion shows? Jake Feldman (Meat Loaf) makes an
effort to get more coons of the same kind at one point in the
episode, but it really doesn't seem to be a major part of his plan.
That plot point takes up only a few minutes, and mainly serves for
exposition.
This really isn't a strike against the
episode, however. Dario Argento is the master of stories that make
absolutely no sense. I literally had to read the Wikipedia article
on this episode to even understand how the curse worked. Like most
of his work, this is a story driven by emotion. Here, that emotion
is effective. We don't really care about the intricacies of how
humans intend to turn a profit, the fact that they mean to turn a
profit from the suffering of other creatures at all is sufficient.
The plot is kicked off by a fur trapper
and his son (John Saxon and Michael Suchánek)
who sneak onto private land owned by a strange elderly woman named
Mother Maytar (Brenda McDonald) to trap racoons. They find that the
skins they retrieve are supernaturally beautiful, and contact Feldman
to sell them. By the time he arrives, however, both of the trappers
are dead, the younger having killed his father, and then offed
himself in a raccoon trap.
Feldman
takes the furs, determined to make a beautiful coat to show off at a
major fur show. He's also hoping to impress a stripper named Shanna
(Ellen Ewusie) he tried to rape earlier in the episode. Why he's
still allowed in the strip-club, or why she'll still talk to him, I
don't claim to know. After the attempted rape she treats him mostly
as an annoying, pushy, jackass client for the rest of the episode,
but never as a threat.
The
episode is based on a short story by F Paul Wilson. While I haven't
read the story, according to tvtropes it ended with a homeless woman
finding the coat. This woman is unaffected by the curse because she
only wants it for warmth. This episode has a much grislier
conclusion. I think this may be for the best. The curse doesn't
really see a person working in a sweat shop making a coat as any less
of a profiteer than the shop's owner or the trappers, so I can't see
how heat wouldn't be a form of profit in the eyes of the curse.
Argento's
narrative here is fairly straightforward, at least by the standards
of Argento. He plays around with chronology a bit, but in fairly
predictable ways. We're shown the gory aftermath, and then we're
shown the death. The deaths are mostly karmic punishments for the
deaths and desecration of the racoons. A woman sews up her face, a
man is gutted, a woman dies with her hand trapped in an elevator
similar to the racoon trap, and of course Feldman skins himself.
The
best attribute here, however, is Meat Loaf. After Fight
Club
it's surprising to see him as such an asshole, but he plays the role
perfectly. His attempted rape early in the episode is distracting,
and should have either had more consequences, or been left out
entirely. We didn't need that to tell us he's a sexist piece of
shit.
That
said, however, this is probably the best work by Argento I've seen to
date, although I don't claim to be an aficionado of Italian horror.
I know what I like, though, and I like this episode. It's gory, it's
fun, it moves at a steady pace, and I like Meat Loaf.
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