Fear Itself: Episode 2 Spooked

If I have a problem with this episode it's that Eric Roberts isn't the best choice for the lead. I know in real-life Roberts has had run-ins with the law, and I haven't seen him in a lot of things, but as an actor here he just feels too clean to portray the sleazy character he's supposed to be. Perhaps if they'd mussed up his hair a bit, or let him grow a beard, but he does not come across as an alcoholic, ex-cop, Private Investigator, who blackmails his own clients.

Harry Siegal (Roberts) was a cop who killed a suspect he was interrogating (Jack Noseworthy) in order to find a missing child. He lost his job and pension, but moved onto Private Investigation. He's hired by the latest in a long line of suspicious wives, a woman named Meredith (Cynthia Watros). Meredith insists that he set-up shop in the house next-door to her own, but unbeknownst to Harry the house is haunted.

I use the word “haunted” in a general sense. It's never made explicitly clear what's in the house, and it doesn't seem tied to people who died in the house. It's just determined to drive anyone who comes inside to suicide Harry begins experiencing bizarre visions that eventually tie in with his history. He's first faced by Rory, the suspect he killed, but eventually flashes back to a childhood trauma, playing with a gun and accidentally killing his own brother (Jake Church).

The final twist is like a rabbit hole, getting more messed up the more you think about it. Meredith was Rory's brother, who went to the house in an effort to see him again. She sent Harry in hoping to destroy him. She claims that Rory protected her and told her to seek out Harry...or perhaps the forces of the house told her to. I prefer the latter interpretation: The house saw that it could get an extra soul by letting her go, so it did.

The final confrontation isn't quite like anything I've ever quite seen. Two individuals mutually hate each other, and are mutually indifferent to their own deaths. So, does murdering the other still have any meaning at all? The episode finds a way to avoid answering that question, when Harry is accidentally shot by his own partner (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.).

The episode isn't the best, but it's pretty decent. Most of it is a fairly standard supernatural horror, with a really good climax. I'd say The Sacrifice was better by far, but this isn't bad.

Wednesday Review: 31

Someone should really tell Rob Zombie that there are easier ways to see his wife chained up than making a movie about evil clowns.

That said, however, it’s good to see Zombie back on his game. While the Halloween films weren’t horrible in my opinion, Lords of Salem was an utter bore. What Zombie does best is sleaze, and now the king of modern exploitation has returned.

This movie isn’t as good as The Devil’s Rejects, but that lightning will only strike once. You can’t expect Zombie to change the game every time he plays. Furthermore, this film did give us one of the best horror villains in quite some time with Doom-Head. He’s a truly fascinating mixture of the intellectual and the savage in a way that I’ve never really seen, and definitely set apart from Zombie’s past villains.

The premise of this movie is that a group of Carnies in the 1970s are kidnapped on Halloween by rich people who pay evil clowns to hunt victims for sport. These rich people are led by Malcolm McDowell in a role that could very easily be an older version of Alex from A Clockwork Orange (ignoring the final chapter of the book, obviously). It’s one thing to portray and evil sadist taking great pleasure in the pain of others. McDowell is a man who sees the pain of others as a routine part of his life, and if anything seems almost bored by the game he runs. I don’t think we ever see an emotion from him stronger than annoyance. I imagine a life of breaking people through public service would have turned Alex into exactly this man.

The movie gets one thing absolutely right: every character, good or evil, has a distinct personality. Sometimes you love to watch them die, sometimes you hate it. However, every death, not matter how gruesome, has an impact on you. That’s exactly the reaction you need from your audience to set a great horror film apart from a good one.

Aside from the premise of “fighting evil clowns” there isn’t a lot to the plot until the end, and there’s only so much I can say about that without spoilers. I have mixed feelings about the ending. Zombie combines a major cliché subversion with another major cliché. In this case, however, I’m not totally sure either of these were really earned, but explaining why would be spoilerific. Perhaps another day. This is certainly a film I’d like to do a regular review on at some point.

That said, I recommend this movie. It’s a lot of fun, and if you like Rob Zombie you’re going to get exactly what you expect.

Fear Itself: Episode 1 The Sacrifice

(Note: Wikipedia and the DVD set give different episode orders. It doesn't really matter, since it's an anthology show, but I decided to stick with Wikipedia. I've also decided to keep my initial comments about the show in early reviews to reflect my opinions at the time of writing, even if my opinions changed as I continued to re-watch it.)

For anyone unfamiliar with this show, it's the unofficial third season of Masters of Horror. When HBO decided to cancel MoH, Lionsgate had already sunk an investment into the third season, and tried to recoup some of it's money by moving the show to NBC and changing the name. The gore had to be substantially toned down, and many of the “Masters” were unwilling to return for a network show, so the notability of the directors dropped significantly. Breck Eisner, who directed this first episode, didn't even direct a theatrical horror film until his remake of The Crazies two years later.

That said, however, I think that this show is underrated. While it never reached the heights of MoH, it also never sank to the same depths. The show is, overall, a lot less experimental, and so it maintains a much more consistent quality.

Four criminals running from the police have a break-down. Navarro (Reamonn Joshee) was wounded in their latest robbery, and the others are forced to carry him. They find a settlement with three sisters and an elderly man (Bill Baksa), who live in isolation from the rest of the world. The sisters initially seem helpful, but standoffish. However, they quickly begin to isolate the men from each other.

Virginia (Mircea Monroe) lures Diego (Stephen Martines) into the barn under the pretense of sex, and traps him in a pit. Chelsea (Rachel Miner) sews Navarro's mouth shut, while Tara (Michelle Molineux) feeds the brothers, Point and Lemmon (Jeffrey Pierce and Jesse Plemons). Just as Point discovers Navarro's now-staked corpse, a creature (Walter Phelan) attacks.

I love the reveal of this episode: The creature is a vampire that followed the settlers from Romania. The creature turns its victims with a bite, and none of the settlers were able to kill it. The only option they had to prevent an exponential plague of vampires from overtaking the Earth was to live with it far away from civilization, luring in victims to keep it fed and happy, and killing them when they turn.

I'm not sure if I should call the sisters anti-Villains or anti-Heroes. By the end of the episode the two survivors, Chelsea and Point, have teamed up in a final effort to end the creature. However, it's not clear if Chelsea has had a change of heart about their methods, or if the creature has simply become uncontrollable.

The twist of the episode works...kind of. Chelsea and Point are able to burn the creature, but Point has been bitten, and so Chelsea closes the gate of the community again to begin feeding travelers to Point in order to keep the evil appeased. I like the irony, but the sisters had no difficulty dealing with young vampires earlier in the episode. In fact, the entire premise is based on their ability to do so.

Maybe Chelsea just knows that Point will be as much of a badass vampire as he was a human. Or maybe she's supposed to have developed feelings for him, and can't bring herself to kill him. I don't really buy either of these, though. Still, it's an anthology show, so twists are to be expected, especially when writers are desperate to avoid happy endings.

I'd say overall this episode got Fear Itself off to a solid start. Nothing up to the standards of The Washingtonians, but a hell of a lot better than Fair Haired Child.

Masters of Horror: Episode 26 Dream Cruise

There was originally supposed to be a tradition that every season of Masters of Horror would include one episode set in Japan by a Japanese director. Since the show ran for only two seasons, we had only two such episodes: Takashi Miike's Imprint and Norio Tsuruta's Dream Cruise. It's sad that this tradition doesn't carry over to Fear Itself, where the only Asian-born director was Hong Kong's Ronny Yu, who was likely recruited for directing Freddy vs Jason.

Dream Cruise feels far more distinctly foreign than Imprint. While it has an American protagonist (Daniel Gillies), the Japanese characters never speak English among themselves as they did in Imprint. I'd say that Imprint was largely about the American character, representing as much his fantasies about Japan as the reality.

Dream Cruise, on the other hand, has the American protagonist largely as a witness to supernatural events that are culturally foreign to him. One of the two main flashbacks in the episode is a vision created by a Japanese ghost, and given to a Japanese character. So, while this was made for an American audience, I imagine that it could be viewed happily by Japanese Cinema buffs as well.

The final precursor to my review is this: The episode was shot as a 90-minute feature, but shortened to 60-minutes for broadcast. I understand that the DVD release featured the 90-minute version, but I purchased the series through Amazon, which features the 60-minute broadcast version. I apologize for any cut material I fail to cover.

The protagonist, Jack Miller (Gillies), is an American lawyer who has worked in Japan for several years. In spite of this, he acknowledges that his Japanese is still terrible, and so the Japanese characters have to accommodate him with English. Jack's story is defined by two main traits: an all-consuming fear of the water, due to his failure to save his brother Sean (Ethan Amis) from drowning as a child, and his affair with Yuri (Yoshino Kimura), the wife of his client Eiji Saito (Ryu Ishibashi).

When Eiji invites Jack and Yuri out on a boat trip, they suspect that he's onto them and planning their murder. He was able to marry Yuri because his previous wife disappeared. While there's no proof that he killed her, and she was known to be mentally unstable, the suspicion is obvious.

We see Eiji scowling a lot aboard the boat, and constantly dropping snarky hints to Jack and Yuri that he knows. But before Eiji can attempt his murder plot he is forced to go down into the water to investigate problems with the propeller, which turns out to be caused by the ghost of his murdered wife, Naomi (Miho Ninagawa). He's killed by the propeller, but reconstituted and possessed by the wife, who wants revenge on Yuri.

At the same time, the boat begins receiving radio broadcasts calling out Jack's name. Jack, not realizing the true nature of the supernatural attack, suspects that his brother has returned for revenge. I'm not sure the exact moment he figures out that the hostile ghost isn't his brother. Yuri has a vision which she explicitly tells Jack about in the last fifteen minutes, but I'm not sure if Jack had stuck with the “brother” theory until that moment. It doesn't hugely affect the episode either way.

Naomi's attack escalates over the course of the episode. She holds Eiji's body together for a while, but eventually discards it, and attacks Jack and Yuri with powers including hallucinations, water manipulation, more of the aforementioned possession, and generally whatever other powers the plot requires her to have. I don't say this as a criticism, merely an observation. This is a Japanese ghost story, it isn't supposed to make sense.

Sean does, eventually, show up in a protective capacity. However, I feel that this is something of a missed opportunity. Sean makes only two real appearances, the first to snap Jack out of a Naomi-induced hallucination that nearly led him to kill Yuri, and again to fight off Naomi when she tries to drown them. If you're going to have two ghosts, from two wildly different cultural mythologies go to war, you should give them each plenty of screen-time. Instead, Naomi dominates the entire latter half of the episode. While I know she isn't really supposed to make sense, I'm utterly baffled by why Naomi is revealed to be the one calling Jack's name, instead of Sean. It eliminates any build-up to Sean's presence.

To touch on the performances, I would say that Gillies does an effective job, but nothing special. Kimura, though, is something of a weakness. She's not terrible, and does fine in all the Japanese scenes, but she seems to have trouble conveying strong emotions when speaking English. This is a bit surprising, because her Wikipedia page says she was born in England. I suspect that she may have crippled her acting range a bit by exaggerating her accent. It would probably have worked better if she just reverted to Japanese whenever her character panicked, even when she and Jack were alone.

Ishibashi, though, really steals the show prior to his possession. In my first viewing, I saw him as an entertaining Ham, verbally building up to the murder he was planning as he taunts Jack and Yuri. On the second viewing, though, I think I caught a deeper level. We find out via Yuri's vision that he killed Naomi because she was a loveless marriage for money, and she had intentionally made his life Hell for some time. Killing a woman he actually loves for falling out of love with him is on the razor-edge of his twisted moral code, so he's putting the act off and debating it while making a show of bravado.

I'm somewhat interested to see the 90-minute version of this, and think I'll likely come back to review it at some point. I hope Sean has a greater presence. Even in it's current form, though, I recommend it.

Wednesday Review: Blair Witch

As one of the few people who actually likes Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, I feel validated by how godawful the “real” sequel to The Blair Witch Project turned out. The original film was probably the single most complete piece of cinema I have ever seen. There was nothing further that we could be shown that wouldn’t simply spoil the mystery. So, Book of Shadows chose to simply go in the direction of mind-screw and present us with a meta story examining the original film as a phenomena.

But now, many years later, we finally have a true sequel. And make no mistake, this is a sequel. Everything in the original film has been turned up to eleven, as suddenly the Witch goes from a mysterious threat that might be supernatural, to a nearly god-like force of nature. The threat she poses goes from scary to cartoonish over the course of the film.

I’m not the first to note that the attempts to update the film go nowhere. The character’s bring a drone gets stuck in a tree and their cell phones stop working immediately. All the new technology is just there to say “ha ha, the Blair Witch still wins!” And that is only the beginning of the increasingly absurd list of powers the Blair Witch now seems to possess. I won’t spoil her full abilities, but suffice it to say that by the end of the movie she’s a full-on reality warper.

The marketing campaign has already made sure everyone is aware that this movie is about the brother of Heather from the first film searching for her many years later in response to some mysterious footage popping up on Youtube. It’s a silly premise, and it’s made sillier by the apparent revelation that no one had been that far into the Burkittsville woods in years. At minimum Blair Witch 2 acknowledged that once the story of the Blair Witch got out, the woods teamed with tourists.

I think I’ve decided that Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett work best with horror-comedies. You’re Next was brilliant, both tense and hilarious. Their segment in The ABCs of Death was side-splitting. But, for me at least, The Guest failed for exactly the same reason as this film: an overpowered villain who fails to be either scary or compelling.

My ultimate problem with this film, however, is a pretty major spoiler: we’re shown the Blair Witch. The camera is pointed directly at her multiple times, and we get brief but clear views of her. Congratulations to Wingard and Barrett! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a horror icon ruined quite so quickly as the Blair Witch who has now transformed into a knock-off of Mama.

So, for God’s sakes skip it. I’ve suffered for you, there’s no need to sacrifice yourself to this piece of crap as well.

Masters of Horror: Episode 25 The Washingtonians

I was asked shortly before writing this what my favorite sub-genre of horror was. I was surprised to realize I didn’t have a prepared answer. It wasn’t a question I’d thought about much. However, I was able to answer quite easily: Horror-Comedy. I think that’s why I’ve been looking forward to this episode as I've gone back through this show. It is one of the most absurd stories I’ve ever seen, but somehow manages to remain quite creepy.

According to this episode, George Washington took up cannibalism while at Valley Forge, and converted many other Founding Fathers to his way of thinking. He was known for feasting on the flesh of virgin girls, and his cult apparently ate both Thomas Jefferson, and the entire First Continental Congress. The Washingtonians continue to this day, living in a small town in Virginia filled with people who are obviously crazy. Maybe most people wouldn’t suspect “cannibals,” but their unhealthy interest in the age of young girls would likely land the entire town on a few watch lists if this episode occurred in anything resembling reality.

Mike Franks (Jonathon Schaech), along with his wife and daughter (Venus Terzo and Julia Tortolano), returns to the home of his late grandparents for his grandmother’s funeral, and makes a shocking discovery going through the effects: A human-bone fork and a letter written by “G.W” stating his intention to eat the children of the nation.

Mike informs his Grandmother's friend Samuel Madison (Myron Natwick) of the letter, and Samuel promptly flips out, demanding the letter. The Washingtonians begin assaulting his family with horses, hatchets, swords, and muskets, while dressed in colonial regalia, in an attempt to get the letter. While they do wait until nightfall, they make absolutely no other attempt at stealth.

The satire is obvious: Tradition and patriotism are fundamentally irrational motivations. The Washingtonians speak of cannibalism as a point of pride, simply because it’s part of their heritage. We even get a history professor (Saul Rubinek) to lecture Mike on how history is written to justify the beliefs of the society, with the truth being an afterthought.

The fact that the episode is still so utterly terrifying is a tribute to Peter Medak’s talent as a director. The Washingtonians are so utterly demented that you’re afraid even as you laugh. Maybe I don’t think that they could operate in secret for a quarter millennium, but seeing a family of three surrounded by these blood-covered maniacs is still chilling.

Tortolano really steals the show, however. She shows a degree of competency rarely seen in actors so young. Furthermore, her characterization is fairly unique: she has debilitating fear of everything, to the point of being unable to walk to the other end of the house alone without panic. This is a character trait that’s sometimes used in male characters, but rarely in females. I suspect this is because female vulnerability is generally seen as a positive trait, so this is an interesting play on gender roles. She never overcomes her fear, but I don’t find that to be a problem. It’s not easy to overcome your fears just as sociopaths are trying to eat you.

I’d say this is, without a question, my favorite MoH episode. It’s hilarious, terrifying, witty, well directed, well-written, and well-acted. Also, props to the Washingtonian who pulled a musket on SWAT Team members armed with machine guns and bullet-proof vests, for sheer chutzpah.

Masters of Horror: Episode 24 The Black Cat

I love Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs. That said, however, this is not what I would have expected from them. It isn't horrible, but I honestly have no idea what tone they were going for. It varies wildly between drama, camp, and gore, and the depiction of Poe seems to be based on the now-discredited biography written by Rufus Griswold. Whether Gordon thought that Poe really was a drunken madman, or just thought it would make a good story, I don't know.

To spoil the ending: It's all a dream. The entire point of this story is that Poe (Combs) was desperate for money to treat his wife's (Elyse Levesque) tuberculosis, and had a bad dream that inspired him to write The Black Cat (I have not yet read that story, so I can't comment on the relation between it and this episode).

I suspect they made this episode a dream mainly so that they could feature a series of bizarre events that would have been mentioned by Poe's biographers had they actually happened. I certainly think it would be common knowledge if his wife had been prematurely declared dead, and he tried to burn down their home with her body in it, after hanging his cat. Honestly, I think this episode might have worked better if they'd simply declared it to be an alternate universe, and left it at that.

To address the actual plot: Poe's gets into a conflict with his cat, Pluto. He seems to be looking for excuses to blame the cat for the problems of his own alcoholism. He gouges out the cat's eye for distracting him, even as he's ignoring his writing to drink. He blames the initial “death” of his wife on the cat killing their other pets, even though she was primarily upset about Poe's drinking. After the cat and his wife both return from the dead, the cat with a white mark where Poe's noose had been, he kills his wife with an axe he swung at the cat and walls her body up in the basement (yes, The Cask of Amontillado, I know that one). The cat somehow gets into the walls with his wife's corpse, and mimics the sound of her screaming to draw the police. Poe runs, and the dream comes to an end, with the usual “everything is fine” moment. There's no shocking final twist, Poe writes his story and the episode ends.

I'm discussing the plot briefly because there isn't a lot to discuss. This episode moves slowly, and by the end is rather tedious. If they were going to make the whole story a dream, I would have at least expected some effort to make it a truly thrilling dream. Surely the director and star of Re-Animator could have managed something appropriate to that task.

The episode is well made, with good production values and acting, but I can't really recommend it. It's like a slow drama occasionally interrupted by bits of ham and gore in the style of Re-Animator, as if even Gordon was getting bored with this story.

Wednesday Review: When the Bough Breaks

(note: I’m always a bit reluctant to comment on racial politics, as a white male, but it does seem significant here as this is a movie with a primarily black cast that received mainstream advertising. While the movie mostly avoids stereotypes, I am a bit concerned that it might go in the opposite direction into cultural white-washing. I’m hardly the best person to judge where the safe zone between these two extremes lies, and it’s hardly the responsibility of PoC to meet my expectations of what they should and shouldn’t be, but this is something that I noticed and felt I should mention.)

When the Bough Breaks is one of the greatest disappointments I’ve seen in quite some time. It had an absolutely thrilling trailer that had me hyped. Even as a pro-choicer, the idea of a surrogate threatening a pregnancy as a tool of extortion is scary to me. It’s the same fear as The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: the fear that you trusted your child to someone evil.

It’s a shame that the movie can’t live up to the hype of that trailer. This isn’t exactly a case of dishonest marketing. Rather, the movie fails at every aspect that can’t be shown in three second clips. The characters are either flat or inconsistent, the plot relies on both heroes and villains acting like utter morons, and every single plot point and emotion is told to us in mind-numbing detail rather than shown.

The movie has all the subtlety of a sack of bricks applied directly to the face. The couple wants a child, so scene after scene has them admiring children in public, or admiring items in stores intended for children. We also get constant displays of conspicuous wealth, because apparently the horror genre didn’t learn from the first Purge movie that people don’t relate to the fabulously wealthy in peril.

The movie doesn’t really seem to know what kind of villain it wants in Anna, the surrogate. It’s not that she comes across as complex or nuanced, it’s as if she comes across as all over the map in terms of motivation. In some scenes she’s sociopathic, in others she seems to be as much a victim of her own circumstances as the couple. The only consistent trait is that she seems to be an idiot, which may be her, or may be the writers.

The final confrontation is driven entirely by the stupidity of both the heroes and the villains. On the one hand, our protagonists somehow fail to realize that their problems could be solved with a quick call to the police. On the other, Anna manages to put herself in a position where she could be stopped by a quick call to the police. It’s as if the characters made some kind of truce, “I won’t do the smart thing if you don’t.”

So, no, I don’t recommend this movie. There’s nothing to recommend. Even as a bad movie it fails, because if I wanted shallow characters, delivering ham-fisted exposition, in a plot that makes no sense, I’d rent a Kirk Cameron film.

Masters of Horror: Episode 23 We All Scream for Ice Cream

I was looking forward to this episode, because it was one that stood out well in my memory. I wish I'd remembered how insanely depressing it was. It's an awesome episode, that makes the most hardened horror fan want to break down in tears. It's definitely not what I was expecting from Tom Holland, director of Child's Play.

The premise of the story is that a group of kids played a cruel prank on an ice cream-selling clown named Buster (William Forsythe). Their intention is to distract him, and release the breaks on his truck so that it rolls down hill. The kids don't seem to have any real comprehension of how dangerous a run-away vehicle is, and with the exception of Virgil (Samuel Patrick Chu as a child, Colin Cunningham as an adult), they're all horrified when the truck hits and kills Buster.

Years later, Buster's ghost returns for revenge. He has the obvious powers for an ice cream clown ghost. He can mind-control children, freeze anything in his vicinity, and create voodoo ice cream that causes the victim to melt when eaten. So, Buster feeds the ice-cream to the children of the boys, now men, responsible for his death.

In the climax of the episode Buster is killed when one of the children eats ice cream created to destroy him, so apparently feeding it to those specific children was just for added punishment. Alternatively, it could be to give the parents least likely to produce bad children a chance at survival. Either way, the ice cream seems to be effective regardless of who eat is.Our hero, Layne (Lee Tergesen), survives mainly because he's apparently the only one aware enough of his children to stop them from randomly wandering outside in the middle of the night. Virgil, on the other other hand, is unaware of his child-by-rape, and thus has absolutely no protection.

All of this sounds like it should be a horror-comedy, which actually makes the episode more effective. It completely subverts that expectation. Buster is played as a completely realistic clown. He has a stutter, and tries to hide his fury when Virgil taunts him, and rips off his clown nose revealing that his real nose was lost in some sort of accident. He's a guy who's great with kids, but is still running a business, and is trying to not let one kid ruin the experience for everyone else.

As a ghost, though, William Forsythe does a great job of making him legitimately intimidating. He isn't the Joker. He's a guy with a job who has had enough. He makes a few jokes, but for the most part has taken off the kid gloves.

It seems to be a minor plot-point that the children have to want revenge on their fathers for some reason, but this element goes nowhere. It's made pretty clear that Buster can control the children based on even the most insanely minor fault in their parents. So, this is an element the episode would probably have been better off without, especially since the children seem to be in a trance, and constantly assert that Buster's ice cream is “the best ice cream in the whole world.”

Ultimately, this episode boils down to a great tragedy. You feel for both Buster, and for the men being punished for something stupid they did as kids. There is no good answer, nor easy solution. I recommend it, certainly, but only if you're in the mood for tears.

Masters of Horror: Episode 22 Right to Die

I'm tempted to start this review by asking “who let Rob Schmidt direct an episode?” However, that seems a little unfair, since I haven't seen Wrong Turn as of this writing. Still, this is one of the lesser Masters episodes, although it never falls to the depths of Deer Woman or Fair Haired Child None of the scares are anything special, and the story didn't do anything especially creative with it's own premise. The major scares the episode is built around are “skinless person,” “ghost,” and “unwilling organ (skin) donor,” all of which have been done before and better. The twist, while not awful, is carried out in the laziest way possible.

I've heard people complain about films that avoid focusing the camera on “mysterious” characters until the filmmakers are prepared to reveal their identities. While that is a lazy cliché, this episode takes it a step further. Large portions of the opening scene are simply not shown to us. There is no in-universe reason for this. We're not being shown a glitchy recording, and the camera doesn't follow other events. Parts of the scene are just missing. Why in God's name the episode didn't just skip this scene, establish the needed information through dialogue, and show the full scene at the end I will never know.

The episode opens with dentist Dr. Cliff Addison (Martin Donovan) and his wife Abby (Julia Benson) in a car crash. Cliff gets out safely, but the car catches fire before Abby can escape, burning her severely. For the remainder of the episode she's skinless, lying in a hospital bed, psychically attacking Cliff. He has visions and dreams of her skinless corpse attacking him. He gradually grasps that if she dies, he'll be going with her.

Cliff is told that she's in a coma, but the episode has her look at him so blatantly that there's no ambiguity about it. We also see images in her eyes when the camera zooms in on them, like something out of a Saturday-morning cartoon. Abby is awake, in pain, and attacking Cliff. Cliff is told that she'd be OK if they could find a skin donor, but without a complete body transplant she'll be dead within a few days.

The episode is obviously inspired by the Terry Schiavo case, with Cliff trying to get a Do Not Resuscitate order, while Abby's mother (Linda Sorensen) keeps appearing on television, calling Cliff an abuser. There are no actual courtroom scenes, so the mother seems to only appear to remind us that this is just like the Terry Schiavo case, because god forbid this episode not be exactly like it's inspiration.

We find out partway through the episode that Cliff had an affair with his assistant, Trish (Robin Sydney), and that Trish wants to continue it now that Abby is out of the way. Trish provides us with gore fodder when Cliff harvests her skin, desperate to save Abby and keep his own neck intact. How the hell a dentist has the skill to do that, or how he even knew Trish was a compatible donor, I haven't a clue.

The eventual twist is yet another example of a horror plot line that would have been better if it had been revealed at the beginning. Abby was pregnant, but leaving Cliff because of his affair. So Cliff intentionally set the car on fire. In retrospect, that makes his situation much more interesting. If Abby dies, her spirit will kill him. If she lives and regains consciousness, she'll be able to testify that he attempted to kill her. Instead of this story, we get boobs, as he has sex with both Trish and ghost-Abby.

I'm a bit confused about the final scene, which shows Cliff arriving and home, throwing Trish's remains in the trash can, and being greeted at the door by Abby giving him a death glare. He hangs his head and walks inside. Is he dead now? Or just haunted by her spirit? Is she stuck with him as much as he's stuck with her?

...oh, and the episode has Corbin Bernsen as Cliff's lawyer, projecting evil everywhere. I love Corbin Bernsen, but this is not his best work.

Overall, the episode just isn't worth your time. It's ill-conceived, not scary, and doesn't have a lot of original ideas.

Masters of Horror: Episode 21 Valerie on the Stairs

Clive Barker is both my favorite writer and my favorite director. I'm quite disappointed that he hasn't returned to the director's chair since Lord of Illusions, but Mick Garris does well with this adaptation. It's a bit strange as adaptations go, because while the episode is credited as based on a short-story by Barker, his website says he actually wrote a 45-page treatment specifically for Masters of Horror, which Garris adapted. If you're going to write 45 pages I'm not sure why you wouldn't just write the script, but I'm not Clive Barker.

Barker has a thematic connection to Lovecraft, but in many ways is the opposite side of the same coin. They both deal in cosmic horror, but to Lovecraft the human perception of the universe is unimportant to anyone except the human perceiving it. To Barker, however, human experiences are often the only things that matter, and it's those very experiences that can be so dangerous to us. While in lesser hands this could be like saying “clap your hands if you believe,” Barker has a way of giving ideas and concepts a visceral quality. These are creations of the most primal parts of our brains, not simply phantoms we can wish away.

A writer named Rob Hanisey (Tyron Leitso) moves into Highberger House, a boarding house established in the 1930s by a rich, frustrated would-be writer. The House provides room and board to unpublished authors until they become published. In practice this means that the house provides an indefinite home for a bunch of hacks. Some of them, like Rob, continue to have delusions of grandeur. Others, like Everett Neely (Christopher Lloyd), have long given up hope, and only continue writing at all because it allows him to avoid homelessness.

Hanisey begins to encounter a woman named Valerie (Clare Grant), running around the boarding house nude. She asks for help in trying to escape from a monster played by Tony Todd. The creature has an intentionally pretentious name, but is credited simply as “The Beast.” Rob becomes determined to save Valerie, even as the other tenants tell him he's clearly hallucinating.

Both Valerie and the Beast, as it turns out, are creations of the house. The fallen dreams of the house took shape in the form of the only really decent work of fiction produced by the residents: A collaboration between the jaded Neely, the friendly but predatory Bruce Sweetland (Jonathan Watton), and sexually frustrated lesbian ex-nun Patricia Dunbar (Suki Kaiser). Neely provided the creature from an earlier novel he wrote in his youth, Patricia created Valerie out of her anger and lust, and Bruce interviewed vagrants to provide the story with plenty of victims and appropriate deaths.

The Beast begins picking off his own authors, hoping to free himself by preventing them from writing an ending. Valerie's relation to the Beast is fascinating: while she runs from him, she often seems extremely cooperative, resisting only as the story calls for it. She willingly joins him when he kills Bruce, and offers Patricia a kiss before she dies. She recognizes her existence as tied to her role as a victim, and so she plays that role. Beneath it all, though, she's on The Beast's team.

This is an episode that tells you the twist in advance: After Bruce's death, Neely suggested that Rob might have been an aspect of the story that Bruce had been working on. Tipping their hand like this in advance actually makes the ending fairly surprising. Reverse psychology wins it all!

Rob destroys the Beast, but Valerie disintegrates when she leaves the House, and Rob's entire body turns to pages in the novel. The Beast failed. He was destroyed by the noble hero, and once rescued Valerie and her rescuer no longer had a reason to be.

The episode ends with me completely unsure of what did or did not just happen. Valerie says “they finished it,” so are the authors not dead? Was Rob just their hallucination? Or are there some other writers entirely guiding the story? Did Bruce write his own death?

Garris has made his career on Stephen King adaptations that stay reasonably faithful to the source material. That same style works here, where every scene is exactly as I imagine Barker would have written it. Garris has a talent for understanding other people's material. I'm glad this episode offered so few answers.

Masters of Horror: Episode 20 The Screwfly Solution

The Screwfly Solution is based on a short story by James Tiptree, Jr (a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon, who wrote science fiction at a time when it was very much a Boy's Club). The episode really has two closely interconnected commentaries: the first is on violence against women, the second is on the competitive nature of life. I found the latter commentary to be excellent, but the former to be underwhelming. If you're going to talk about something as culturally influenced as domestic violence, making the violence a biological imperative ruins it.

The idea of humans as a plague on the rest of the Earth has been done to death, but here it's done so well and so literally that it becomes fascinating again. We're conveniently introduced to two researchers named Alan and Barney (Jason Priestly and Elliott Gould) who are attempting to wipe out a pest called the “Kane Fly” by introducing chemicals that affects the instincts of the males, causing them to forget the correct procedure for mating. We're told the story of the screwfly at the beginning, so apparently the Kane Fly is just another in a long list of pests we've dealt with in similar manners.

At the same time, a plague of misogynistic religious mania appears, somehow following airborne disease vectors. City after city undergoes an outbreak in which men begin murdering women. It's explained that the disease erases the distinction between sexual urges and violent instincts in men, so that their attempts to “mate” are replaced with attempts to murder potential child-bearers.

There are a number of things in this episode that don't make sense. Firstly, I could accept the religious aspects as a result of infected men trying to justify their violence, but on at least one occasion a man is shown developing a belief in it without having been taught. A religion that spreads via literal airborne pathogen?

My other major problem is the manner in which male pride dooms the human race. The disease's affects can be stopped via chemical castration, but our military leaders apparently lack the professionalism to allow that, even in the face of human extinction. Even as a card-carrying liberal myself, I've never met a soldier who I think would refuse such an option when the situation was so dire. This plot point seems to exist simply to drive the story forward. The only male we actually see use chemical castration on himself is Barney, whose basically a “gay best friend to women” stereotype.

The ending establishes that the plague was sent down by aliens. It's never made entirely clear if they're tree-huggers protecting the Earth, or if they simply want the planet for themselves. I prefer the latter interpretation, because it fits the metaphor of the episode far better: We destroyed the Screwfly because it killed livestock, but that was for our sake, not the sake of the livestock. I likewise highly doubt that the aliens give a rats ass about the precious Kane Fly or any of the other species we wiped out.

About halfway through the episode the perspective flips, because Allan is too stupid to accept the chemical castration, and realizes he's become infected. He warns his wife Anne (Kerry Norton) to get a gun and head North with their daughter Amy (Brenna O'Brien). From that point on, we follow Anne. It makes a degree of sense in terms of the narrative. We've passed the point at which the brave scientist can save the world, and entered the point at which the desperate woman has to try to survive.

The remainder of the episode is a tense thriller, but the inevitability of Anne's death is pretty clear. Amy manages to get herself killed fairly early, though, by trusting her now-deranged father. Anne's fate, however, is just freezing to death in Northern Canada, which is probably the best she could have hoped for in this world.

This episode does disturb me. We humans are, fundamentally, just another life form. How much could a few chemical affect our behavior? Do we really have any choice when it comes to our instincts? The idea that the violence is closely linked to the sexual instinct makes it all the more hard-hitting, because we can all relate to the struggle to resist our sexual urges, let alone resist them while an alien race is effectively drugging you. While I haven't read the original story, the idea seems quite timeless.