Masters of Horror: Episode 10 Sick Girl

An interesting note about Sick Girl: This episode was originally intended to be directed by Roger Corman. However, he pulled out, and thus we ended up with Lucky McKee. As with William Malone, McKee is someone whose work I'm not familiar with, but McKee shows far more capability as a director than Malone did. This episode is much heavier on laughs than on horror, but I’m not complaining. Still, I do find myself curious how Corman's style would have worked for this episode. My suspicion is it was originally intended to be fun trash, rather than the somewhat classier black comedy we ended up with.

The main character is a lesbian entomologist named Ida Teeter (Angela Bettis), who is growing increasingly lonely as she's unable to find a partner who isn't creeped out by the pet insects she keeps around her apartment. Ida notices an attractive girl named Misty (Erin Brown aka former soft-core porn star Misty Mundae) hanging around the school, and asks her out. They go on a date, and lightning strikes, their personalities clicking perfectly. I’m a bit unclear on Misty’s role, as she initially seems to be a student at the school (albeit not in Ida’s class), but later in the episode seems to have no responsibilities and can fall into the role of a homemaker for Ida.

At around the same time Ida approaches Misty, she also receives a package containing a mysterious insect that she can’t identify, despite her best efforts. There's no indication of who sent the bug, but Ida is still fascinated by it as an unusual specimen. The night Ida first brings Misty home, the bug gets loose, sneaks around the apartment, and is able to bite Misty undetected.

The episode then follows a number of plot threads, but unlike the storyline of Fair Haired Child, nothing feels extraneous. All the developments are eventually paid off, and they interconnect, both physically and thematically. There’s also symbolism dripping from every scene, but this is a story where the overt works just fine.

The three main story lines are: the insect, Ida’s relationship with Misty as Misty grows sick and Ida cares for her, and dealings with Ida’s homophobic landlady, Lana (Marcia Bennett). There are also some entertaining and exposition-laden scenes with Ida’s co-worker Max (Jesse Hlubik), whose a pervert who seems to relate to Ida in a “one of the guys” sort of way. Over the course of the episode Misty grows aggressive and increasingly insensitive, as Lana flips out over both the presence of Ida’s pet insects, and the realization that Ida is a lesbian.

The ending is the perfect mixture of irony, humor, and horror. Ida discovers that Misty had been infatuated with her since Ida was a student, who had studied entomology under Misty’s homophobic father (the father is never shown on-screen). Misty’s father sent the bug, which used a strange toxin to control birds and mammals and hijack their reproductive systems to make more of its own kind. He had hoped the bug would infect Ida, causing Misty to reject her. He panics and sends Ida detailed information on the bug when he (somehow) finds out it bit Misty instead, but it’s too little too late.

Misty, under the bug’s influence, frightens Lana into falling down the stairs to her death, turns into a…bug…thing, kills Max, and infects Ida. It ends with them blissfully pregnant, under the bug’s influence, and waiting to give birth to broods of insects that will kill them both. The inconvenience of dying no longer seems to be a major concern for them.

I don’t want to comment too much on the symbolism, beyond the obvious “homophobes see gay people like insects.” I suspect more was intended, but some of that could be me reading too much into it. The episode's real strength, however, is in the leads. I get the feeling that this episode was written to avoid the standard gay stereotypes of having one partner be butch, as another was feminine. Instead, both partners are shy, socially awkward, and with a healthy mixture of masculine and feminine traits. The episode actually did the impossible and wrote gay people as something other than walking stereotypes. This shouldn't deserve a gold star, but sadly it kind of does. That's how shitty our culture is.

The episode benefits from good humor, some very talented and charismatic actors, and a director whose work I now very much want to check out more of. Beyond that, who doesn't love seeing a homophobe get her comeuppance? While it’s not Cigarette Burns, it’s one episode I have no qualms about recommending.

Wednesday Review: The Shallows

The Shallows is a pretty straightforward film: A surfer is bitten by a huge shark, and trapped on an island that will disappear at high tide, while the shark waits in the water for her. As time ticks by her wound festers, and she tries to think of ways to get away, signal for help, or hurt the shark.

I was really shocked by the positive reviews this movie was getting. The trailer had convinced me it would be little more than disposable shlock. Looking at it now, the film did two things very right, while the trailer got them all wrong.

Firstly, the trailer features a very prominent view of the shark, and the shark looked terrible. I was honestly reminded of Sharknado, and found myself asking if this was a parody. Based on the trailer I was actually fairly surprised the film was getting a theatrical release.

Secondly, the trailer presents a line by two other surfers in a way that gives the impression we’re supposed to fear them (while also showing them both die). I’ve talked in the past about my problem with horror movies that makes the lives of the protagonists incredibly depressing even before the monster comes. While it can work, in most cases it’s far more tragic to watch people who are generally happy and have enjoyable lives to lose suffer.

Thankfully, both of these fears were false. The movie falls back on the technique of Jaws, and goes over half the movie without showing the audience a clear view of the shark. By the time we reach the shot in the trailer, while the shark still looks bad, the audience is invested enough to not care.

As for the depressing part...no. The other surfers are just two cool guys who our protagonist spends an afternoon hanging out with. While it’s strongly implied her mother died, she mentions going to this particular isolated surf spot because other mother told her about it, it’s clear that she’s coping with the tragedy as well as can be expected. This is a happy person, and watching her fight to survive, we feel deeply for her.

The movie, much like Green Room, plays out in a very Hitchcockian manner, but with more gore. You give the audience information, make it clear that the protagonist has a limited number of things she can do, and many things she cannot do, and watch her attempt to solve the problem. As the minutes tick by, we get the sense of the situation becoming more and more desperate. It’s an old way of telling a story, but it’s a good one.

I do have some issues with the resolution given to us. However, I can’t really address that without spoilers. I’ll suffice it to say that this movie features some truly dumb moments. Still, I care enough that I can accept most of them.

So, while I expect the film to be out of most cinemas by the time this review goes up (since someone decided to give me a long gap in my horror releases, and then cram a bunch of them together), I do highly recommend it. Catch it in a second-run theatre, or stream it. I think it should play well in either format.

Masters of Horror: Episode 9 Fair Haired Child

When assessing film, I've heard arguments about whether “bad” is simply the absence of “good,” or if truly “bad” films need to do something to make you hate them. I think I’ve decided to call Fair Haired Child “bad” without anything especially atrocious in the episode. My problems can be boiled down to two simple thing: too much going on, and truly atrocious Dawson’s Casting. Neither of these led me to actively hate the episode, simply to wish it would hurry up and end.

I’m told by tvtropes that our protagonist, Tara (Lindsay Pulsipher), is supposed to be 13. Her actress was 24 when this episode premiered. She finds herself kidnapped and locked in a room with Johnny (Jesse Hadock), who the episode refers to as 15, but who is played by a 19-year-old actor. Eventually, she finds out that Johnny drowned many years ago, and she’s the last of twelve children who his parents have to sacrifice to bring him back from the dead permanently. He will transform into a monstrous form (the titular “Fair-Haired Child”) and dismember her.

When I say there’s too much going on, I refer primarily to Johnny’s parents (William Samples and Lori Petty). In a two-hour film they likely would have worked better, but here we get far too much on them: their guilt over their son’s death, their life as musicians, and their arguments over the ethics of what they’re doing. All of this just feels like a distraction from Tara and Johnny, whose relationship could have been better developed with the time.

The ending of the episode really drives this home, as Johnny is finally made articulate after spending most of the episode mute. He tells his parents that he was always jealous of their musical talent, wishing he could find a talent of his own. He announces that he finally has. He’s great at bargaining! The evil force that his parents invoked to revive him with twelve child souls has been talked down to reviving Tara with only the souls of two adults (I'm sure you can guess how that ends).

This falls flat mainly because it serves to remind us of how little we’d really gotten to know Johnny. He cares about Tara...and that’s all we know. Now this important character trait of “jealousy” is being told to us in the last moments of the episode, and serves only to give his parents their inevitable comeuppance.

As for the Dawson’s casting, maybe they couldn’t find better actors of the appropriate ages, but it really kills the mood. Even though we’re told Johnny is supposed to be 15, Tara and his parents speak to him as if he’s substantially younger, so I suspect a rewrite. I imagine that this episode would have been far more disturbing if Tara had actually been played by a 13-year-old, and Johnny had been aged down to 10.

I was a bit surprised to realize that William Malone is the first Master whose work I’m completely unfamiliar with. I’ve heard that FearDotCom is terrible, but I’ve never seen it. Nor have I seen either of his Tales from the Crypt episodes, I read through his entire IMDB page, and couldn’t find a single thing I’d seen that wasn’t this very episode.

That said, assessing him only on his work here, I find him to be uninspired at best. The Fair-Haired Child isn’t especially scary, and many of the visuals that attempt to be frightening are cheesy. Even Incident On and Off a Mountain Road succeeded in making the episode look scary. Here, there’s just nothing.

I say avoid this episode, unless you’re just determined to see the whole show. I don’t feel any strong hatred towards this story. In fact, I don’t really feel anything towards it. It just kind of is…

Masters of Horror: Episode 8 Cigarette Burns

When I realized I'd reached Cigarette Burns I leapt for joy...then I stared blankly, trying to figure out how I was going to talk about an episode dealing with such abstract concepts. While many of the other Master of Horror episodes are good, I would actually give this episode the distinction of being the single greatest work of John Carpenter's career.

This episode is clearly a follow-up to his Lovecraft-inspired Apocalypse Trilogy (The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness). Most obviously it deals with some of the same themes as Mouth of Madness. Where that film was about the hunt for an evil author, here our protagonist, Kirby Sweetman (Norman Reedus), is searching for an evil movie, Hans Backovic's Le Fin Absolue Du Monde (The Absolute End of the World).

The element that gives Cigarette Burns the edge over it's predecessor is that it doesn't make the film the point. In Mouth of Madness Carpenter attempted to show us reality being torn apart by simply having things happen that didn't make any sense. I'm not saying that didn't work, nor am I claiming that we don't get some freaky imagery here, but the primary focus is on the humans.

Kirby follows a fairly straight-forward series of leads, each of whom has been directly or indirectly exposed to the film in some way, and each having had a different reaction to it. When the film is eventually watched we're shown only a few brief glimpses of it, and what we see is creepy. But far scarier is the idea that these people experienced something that actually justifies their behavior. The most memorable of these is a film critic who wrote a review of the film. He felt that his original review was “a joke,” and has spent years locked in a cabin, typing his “new review” to explain the film to the world. His entire cabin is now full of stacks and stacks of paper, all composing a single review.

The story benefits from the fact that pretty much every line spoken about the film can be interpreted in multiple ways, and watching it three times I've come up with at least half a dozen versions of what Le Fin Absolue Du Monde actually is. The film appears to have been made, at least in part, by filming the desecration of an angelic being, but even the nature of that being is never made explicit. My personal favorite explanation is that God gave the Angel to the film's director, and the horror of the film is that God is evil and takes delight in torturing his creations.

Whatever the nature of the film, it's implied that most people are too frightened to seek it out, even if they claim to want it. In another story the events might seem unbelievably convenient. Kirby was able to talk to only a few sources before being told to go see Backovic's widow, who agrees to give him the film. But when Kirby arrives at the late Backovic's penthouse, he's told that no one else ever made it up the elevator. Any of the previous people to seek the film could have found it, if they really wanted to.

As he closes in on the film Kirby begins to see Cigarette Burns appear in his life. Whenever they happen, Kirby's life suddenly cuts away to something else. In their first appearance he experiences a flashback to his addict wife's suicide. Later, when Kirby's life is in danger the Cigarette Burns signal a skip in the action. This happens on two occasions, both resulting in Kirby miraculously coming out on top of the conflict off-screen, surviving what should have been his death.

Kirby himself is a perfect balance as a protagonist for this story. He has enough characterization to give his journey meaning, but not enough to distract from the film. While his back story is mostly implied, we can gather he's a cinephile with a reputation for finding rare prints. His life fell apart when he became addicted to heroin and married another addict. He got a loan from his father-in-law to open a theater, which makes very little money due to his obsession with obscure art-house fair. Then, his wife committed suicide, and his father-in-law demanded repayment, threatening to close his theater.

Kirby was hired by a man named Bellinger (Udo Kier), who is determined to see the film before he dies. Initially Kirby simply wants to clear his debt with his father-in-law, but becomes increasingly fascinated by the film. He's exactly the type of person who would be drawn into the film's web: a cinephile, an addictive personality, and a desire to know what happened to his wife's soul.

I don't recommend this as an episode of Masters of Horror, I recommend it as one of the finest pieces of horror ever filmed. It's probably the closest anyone has ever come to truly filming Lovecraft. I could probably write a volume just giving different ways of understanding it. Don't just read what I'm saying, watch this episode and make your own interpretation. Ironically, Cigarette Burns is probably the closest the real world will ever come to producing Le Fin Absolue Du Monde.

Wednesday Review: Ghostubsters (2016)

Walking into a review of this movie is basically sticking my foot in a shark tank. There’s no opinion I can express that won’t make someone mad. So, saying I like the movie, I await the misogynists tracking me down

That said: Chris Hemsworth character is the weakest part of this movie. This isn’t because Hemsworth is a bad actor, or because the film is bashing men. Rather, it’s because Kevin is so stupid and useless that the decision to continue employing him completely killed my suspension of disbelief. He went above and beyond the standard “stupid secretary who doesn’t care” into utter absurdity. This even continues after Patty (Leslie Jones) points out that she has a cousin who is at least marginally competent, and would work for less. I jumped for joy when Kevin was possessed, and I could finally see Hemsworth being charismatic and funny.

That out of the way, however, this is probably about as good as you’re ever going to get remaking a classic film. Yes, there are references to the original, but for the most part the movie is doing its own thing. Story-wise, I suspect some aspects of the canceled Ghostbuster 3 scripts may have been used. The villain, while underdeveloped, feels like something of a logical follow-up to Gozer (I’ll discuss this more when I do a regular review of the film someday). Plot-wise this movie is arguably less of a rehash of the original than Ghostbusters 2.

The characters, however, are where this movie really shines. For the most part, none of these characters are direct translations of the original team, but they all feel fleshed out and developed to one degree or another. Kate McKinnon gets the fewest character moments, but makes up for it by being awesome to watch. More significantly, they manage to make each character believably smart without defining them exclusively by their intelligence, or failing to distinguish them.

The trailers did a poor job of representing this film, but I’m honestly not sure how I would have done it differently. This isn’t a film that’s easily summed up in clips a few seconds long, because much of the humor does come from establishing the characters and watching them interact. Yes, there’s childish humor, but in the context of the movie we can tell that it’s the characters, rather than the writers, who are childish.

Is it as good as the original? No, not really. But it isn’t trying to be compared to the original. It’s trying to be a new film about the concept of busting ghosts. As that film, it works.

Masters of Horror: Episode 7 Deer Woman

Credit where credit is due: I was able to figure out how to talk about this episode only after I had a chat with GoingRampant about it. The episode just seems so weird that it's kind of hard to know what I should be saying. Rampant, however, pointed out the comparison to the werewolf legend. Obviously, the legend of the werewolf is now so widespread that signs of a werewolf attack could potentially be recognized as such by law-enforcement officials who found a body under circumstances that fully fit neither an animal nor human attack. Yeah, they wouldn't believe it, but the concept would at least be familiar to them, and a detective desperate enough to consider supernatural explanations would at least let his brain drift in that direction.

This episode, however, deals with a Native American legend far more obscure, and thus more baffling to police. The Deer Woman, a woman with hooves for feet, who has sex with men, and then tramples them to death. The results are both horrifying, and hilarious. Furthermore, even after ruling out the mundane, police are still confused as hell since they don't know the legend.

Personally I suspect the main character, Detective Dwight Faraday (Brian Benben), is intended to be autistic. He's considered a burn-out, and it's implied the department keeps him on working “animal attacks” mainly as a reward for previous service. Where the other detectives overlook evidence that doesn't fit their personal theories, he obsesses over details, even when they lead to downright bizarre conclusions. A redneck appeared to have been killed while highly aroused, by an unusually large deer (or one that put all it's weight on two legs) that somehow got into his van, then kicked it's way out. The other detectives write the hoof-marks off as a sledge-hammer, despite the shape, while Faraday continues to think of scenarios.

While Faraday is trying to sleep we get several mental reenactment of the event, and by his own admission the most probably is that an attractive woman beat the man to death using a deer's leg as a murder weapon, and even that he writes off as “stupid.” The others are even more bizarre, and by far the most entertaining part of the episode.

I don't really consider this episode scary, mainly just because the Deer Woman would be such an easy threat to avoid to anyone who isn't a complete moron. Don't go to a secluded place to have sex with a mysterious woman who won't talk moments after meeting her. Literally, asking “how are you?” would have prevented every death in this story.

Racially, this episode is kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, Faraday's partner, the only black character, bites it. Furthermore, director John Landis and his son Max are credited as the only writers, indicating there was little input from any actual Native Americans. Even the actress who plays the Deer Woman herself is Brazilian (Cinthia Moura). I will, however, give them a tiny point for a fairly non-stereotypical bit-part. They learn the legend of the Deer Woman from a bartender at a Native American casino. Rather than play him as a Noble Savage, or some kind of Mystic, he's portrayed purely an adorable mythology geek. He doesn't believe a word of the legend, but thinks the story is hilarious.

As for whether or not I'd recommend the episode, I lean yes. It certainly doesn't stack up to...really anything else Landis has ever done. It also falls short of pretty much every previous episode, except Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, and maybe Homecoming. However, it does have a level of charm to it just through sheer goofiness, and Detective Faraday is an excellent character, who an entire series could easily be built around. It's a shame he didn't have a better episode.

Masters of Horror: Episode 6 Homecoming

Looking back, I really do feel like I’ve been using too much plot summary up until this point. I’ve decided that I’m still not going to avoid spoilers, but I’m likewise not going to dwell on explaining things that don’t directly affect my opinion of the work. This is certainly an episode for which the ending doesn’t seem especially important, as it’s merely an exclamation mark on the themes of the previous hour.

Homecoming is like a time capsule, and it’s not easy to talk about a decade after it was made. It embodies the despair of the mid-2000s, and the backlash against Bush in the aftermath of the Invasion of Iraq. It hits pretty much every hot button topic of that era, including the Florida recount, the ban on photographing dead soldiers, Karl Rove existing and, of course, the WMDs that weren’t there. Practically the only moment of the episode that isn’t politicized is when a zombie is asked for his ID before he can vote, which I find retroactively hilarious.

David Murch (Jon Tenney), a presidential speech writer, who tells a grieving mother on national television “if I had one wish, I would wish for your son to come back, because I know he would tell us how important this struggle is.” This is picked up by the President as a talking point…until it actually happens. American soldiers begin rising from the grave, not to eat flesh, but to cast their ballots for the President’s opposition.

Naturally, this creates chaos in the President’s administration. It’s suggested that only soldier’s discontent with the war are rising, because if they died for a cause they believed in they would be at peace. So, they have hundreds of zombies walking the streets, many bearing obvious death wounds, shocking the American public, and telling everyone that they were “killed for a lie.”

It’s not really surprising that Joe Dante directed this. Gremlins is pretty light on actual scares, and wasn’t exactly subtle in its humor. While Robert Picardo is awesome as a fictional counterpart to Karl Rove, I seriously doubt the real Rove would actually brag to his coworkers that he sold a war on “horseshit and elbow grease!” Hell, the entire episode is full of pundits who yell loudly about how they’ve deceived the American people in the middle of their offices.

The only character who seems remotely believable is “Jane Cleaver” (Thea Gill), and she’s realistic mainly because she’s impersonating Ann Coulter. It’s kind of hard to go over-the-top with that. Hell, I’d actually be more surprised to find out that Coulter did believe the stuff she was saying.

It’s well made, certainly, but the biggest problem with this episode is simply the question of who it would appeal to. When it was made, yeah it was awesome to watch for anyone disgruntled with the Bush administration. I feel that today hating only one side of the political spectrum seems almost quaint to most people, and whether or not we should have invaded Iraq in the first place feels like a debate that’s played out.

For me, personally, the episode is like reverse-nostalgia. As a liberal, I remember the Bush years as a miserable time, and this episode is just a reminder of why I hated those years. I imagine someone who felt otherwise would likely just be offended by the material, and someone too young to remember just wouldn’t have anything to relate to, and would probably just take it as a black comedy.

So, all I really have is, if this sounds like it would appeal to you, awesome, watch it! Otherwise, it probably isn’t worth your time.

Wednesday Review: The Neon Demon

Contrary to a lot of other critics, The Neon Demon is a film I recommend. I enjoyed pretty much every moment of it. It’s an experience I can’t imagine will be for everyone, but if you like art house horror films, this is probably for you.

The film deals with the cut-throat world of modeling. A young woman named Jesse goes to LA to try to become a model, and immediately finds herself the object of lust from everyone she meets. This puts her in a position of great power, while simultaneously making her a vulnerable target to those around her. Saying more than that would give too much away, and this is a movie you need to see for yourself.

The problem with discussing it is that, even talking in broad terms, the movie is open to a lot of interpretation. I’d kind of like to go through the entire movie scene-by-scene to discuss my thoughts, but obviously I won’t be able to do that, even for my eventually regular review. Furthermore, I imagine that pretty much any thoughts I put forward about the movie run the possibility of being countered with “that’s no what it’s about!”

To me, at least, this film was about contradiction. It borrowed visual and auditory cues to tell the audience what we should be feeling, even as the story playing out inspired quite different emotions. It used the periods of long silence to project hopelessness, even as our protagonist was full of hope and strength. It used bizarre, surrealist imagery that would normally imply a protagonist is mentally ill, without giving us any real indication that our protagonist is mentally ill. Indeed, there are some events that couldn’t possibly be her perspective, but are still just as surreal.

Elle Fanning gives us a truly great performance. No, she’s not the beautiful Goddess that the film makes her out to be, I’m fairly certain that’s just more of the contradictions, but she manages to portray a role that falls somewhere strangely between the innocent and the vamp. She occupies a place in the Madonna/Whore dichotomy I’ve never really seen filled before, and she does it well.

By the time this finally goes up (I’m writing it prior to my viewing of either Independence Day: Resurgence or The Purge: Election Year) it’s likely that the theatre count will have already dropped quite substantially for this movie, but if you can see it in theatres do so. If not, catch it on streaming. If it’s the kind of movie you like, you won’t regret it.

Masters of Horror: Episode 5 Chocolate

Chocolate is directed by show-runner Mick Garris, the guy behind most of the Stephen King mini-series. If you told me that this was written by Stephen King, I wouldn't be surprised, but Garris himself is credited as the sole writer here. Presumably, he learned a thing or two from King.

The episode is told in flashback by a man named Jamie (Henry Thomas), who just committed a murder. He's explaining the events leading up to the murder to the police. I suspect the notion of an unreliable narrator was intentional here, as the story he tells sounds like something a stalker would come up with to justify his actions.

Jamie was living an unfulfilled life, surrounded by fulfillment. In his job he developed artificial flavors for snack foods, but he was on a diet. He was also sexually and artistically unfulfilled following his divorce, while his friend and co-worker Wally (the always magnificent Matt Frewer) indulged in all the pleasures he could ever want.

Jamie's tedium is interrupted, though, when he begins empathically experiencing the life of a female artist named Catherine (Lucie Laurier). It begins with the simple taste of chocolate in his mouth before the experiences expand to encompass episodes in which he experiences all five senses.

I suppose since none of this is Jamie's intention, we can't really criticize his morality at experiencing her life without her knowledge. For a time, at least, this seems beneficial to Jamie. Experiencing her life drives him to experience his own more fully, and he's able to get laid and indulge in junk food again without the guilt he experienced before.

However, these episodes also become dangerous. He experiences her sight while driving, and nearly dies because he can't see the road. His ex-wife and child also walk in on him with another woman in his bedroom because he's experiencing Catherine's sex with her boyfriend at the time, and can't intercept them before they enter (why they walk away from him when he appears to be having a seizure I don't claim to understand).

Then, Catherine's boyfriend turns abusive, and Jamie experiences Catherine murdering him. This incident convinces Jamie that he has to track her down. As with Jenifer I find myself uncertain how I should feel about the protagonist at this point, and I suspect the framing narrative was intended to leave us questioning that. The fact that Catherine is willing to hear the full story from a man who shows up unannounced at her apartment, and uses phrases like “sometimes I'm inside of you,” is just downright bizarre. She then gives the impression of falling for him before turning violent, and in his words “makes him” kill her.

I'm not sure what the episode is trying to say, exactly. Perhaps that jealousy and desire should drive us to fulfill our own lives, but we should separate those feelings from the people who we feel them for. Or maybe it's just a really creepy idea for a scary story. Either interpretation works.

The best part of the episode is unquestionably Wally. Frewer creates a beautiful portrayal of a man determined to enjoy every second of his life. He eats whatever he wants without gaining weight. He also plays in a rock band, despite being old enough to know he'll never make it big, just because it's fun. He's attained complete personal fulfillment without the need for outside input.

The idea of empathically experiencing the emotions of others in this way is kind of creepy. Even if everything we're told is true we can still see where Catherine would want to stop a complete stranger from experiencing her life by any means necessary. Overall, though, I'd say the episode works best if we just assume that Jamie is crazy and killed Catherine when she rejected him. It leaves some questions open, like what really happened to her boyfriend, and why he drove so far to find an object of obsession, but I think these questions play very well in our imaginations. This episode should be included in any viewing of Masters of Horror.

Masters of Horror: Episode 4 Jenifer

I was kind of rolling my eyes when I hit Play on this episode, eagerly awaiting my chance to eviscerate it. That chance, however, did not come. I'd say this is a case in which my tastes have changed since I first viewed MoH a few years ago. At the time, I think I wanted to believe myself a refined movie buff looking for substance. Now, having chilled a bit, I find myself relaxing and enjoying the style of this very simple story, driven by the idiotic decisions of its protagonist. It's based on a 10-page comic from the 70s, clearly inspired by EC Comics, and so it does feel a bit like an extended Tales from the Crypt episode. However, that extension comes courtesy of Dario Argento, a man who never let his visual style be constrained by plot or characters, and who pumps it full of every sexily stomach-turning image you can think of.

This episode also benefits from the presence of Steven Weber. All that need be said to establish his horror cred is this: Among all the debate over The Shining movie versus the mini-series, the single point of agreement between both sides is that Weber's portrayal of Jack was better than Nicholson's. I repeat: Weber's performance of a man losing his mind was so good he is almost universally agreed to have made Jack Nicholson look like a hack by comparison.

I should note that this is basically an evil seductress story, and I'm uncertain how much we're supposed to like Weber's character. It plays on the idea of men as completely unable to resist a woman sexually. Weber is ensnared by a woman who is mentally disabled, and who realistically has very little power in the dynamic. I'm here to assess the quality of the material, not my approval of it, but I do think the episode is much stronger if you assume Weber is supposed to be an irresponsible jackass.

Frank Spivey (Weber) is a cop who shoots a meat cleaver-wielding lunatic to save a young woman (Carrie Anne Fleming), only to discover that the woman is severely deformed. She has a beautiful body, but a disfigured face, black eyes, and the mind of an animal. The dying man's last word is “Jenifer,” giving Frank a name for the woman.

Frank, fearing that Jenifer will not be properly cared for in an institution, decides to take her home. Her appearance terrifies his wife and son. Both of them find Jenifer disgusting based on her face alone before she even becomes violent. When Frank is unable to find other accommodations for Jenifer, and Jenifer eats their cat, the wife and son flee. Jenifer then kills the neighbor's daughter, but she keeps her place in Frank's life by having sex with him, apparently as part of an instinct to preserve her bond with her protector.

You're probably already seeing the problem here: Frank continuously blames Jenifer. She acts violently to anyone who isn't Frank, while using sex to sate him when he grows angry with her, and I his mind it's her fault. She doesn't know what she's doing, but it's her fault. Frank seems to be unable to bring himself to return her to an institution, even though it's clear she's highly aggressive, and not responsible for her actions (and unable to consent to sex in any meaningful way), and in need of sedation and confinement.

Eventually, Frank tries to hand her off to someone else. Unable to do it himself, he gives the key to his house to the owner of a Freak Show. He tells the owner to break in, kidnap her, and use her as an exhibit. Jenifer stores the Freak Show owner in the fridge, having disemboweled him when Frank gets home.

After the second murder, Frank and Jenifer go on the run. They live in a shed, and he starts working in a grocery store. Then Jenifer murders the son of his employer (one of the few times in the episode she shows greater-than-animal intelligence, as she knows to restrain his arms), and Frank decides she has to die. He ties her up in the woods, gets an ax, and is killed by a hunter. His last word is “Jenifer,” and the hunter becomes her new protector...so, we apparently have an ongoing line of irresponsible dumb asses who can't bring themselves to put the deeply troubled young woman with nice breasts in the care of medical professionals who can treat for her properly.

The episode works mainly on a visual level. Argento knows how to make Jenifer both enticing and disgusting, and people looking for gore won't be disappointed. However, if the implication was supposed to be that Frank was right to blame Jenifer, then this episode is just messed up. I don't “recommend” it, in the same way I don't recommend skydiving. If it's the kind of thing you're into, you don't need me to suggest it.

Wednesday Review: The Purge: Election Year

I would pay a lot to see the look on Miley Cyrus’ face when she was told that the makers of The Purge: Election Year wanted to license Party in the U.S.A.  I nearly died laughing from the song’s use in this film.  It was the single most ridiculous scene in this series to date, and that’s really saying something.

I love this series.  I think director James DeMonaco has captured the zeitgeist of the 2010s better than any other single filmmaker.  We’re living in an age when we’re angry.  What we’re angry at is incidental.  We don’t trust our leaders, and the idea that they would actually legalize crime for 12 hours every year somehow doesn’t sound that farfetched.

My reviews of the first two films will post around the end of the year, but suffice it to say: I liked the original, but I recognize that Anarchy was a massive improvement, moving away from a Home Invasion thriller to a street-level view of the chaos.  Now, for our third installment, we get a Political Thriller.

While I may reevaluate this later, I currently consider Election Year to be the best film of the series to date.  The return of Frank Grillo as Leo Barnes lets us keep the heart of Anarchy, while also giving us a much stronger narrative.  Anarchy was, for the most part, a series of events that happened on Purge Night.  Election Year, on the other hand, has a real central conflict.

An Independent female Senator is running for President on a platform of ending the Purge through Executive Action (it shouldn’t bug me that a President can’t completely overrule a Constitutional Amendment in a movie already this silly, but it kind of does).  Rather than a traditional assassination, the New Founding Fathers decide to rewrite the rules of the Purge to remove the usual exemption for high-ranking government officials, making the Senator a target for Purge supporters.

On Purge night the Senator finds herself on the run, under the protection of Leo as her head of security, and various other supporters.  The stakes are clear, the story is exciting, and the world continues to be more and more fleshed out as we really see what the nation has come to.  I’d also say this film manages to avoid having any characters that feel redundant or unlikeable, giving it one-up on Anarchy.

While I don’t want to spoil too much (and don’t want to walk into overly awkward territory), I did notice that this film made the racial aspects of the Purge more overt.  The theme of racial tension was there in the first two films, which did show the largest number of Purge victims as minorities.  Election Year, however, actually showed White Supremacists as agents of the NFFA, and had one character make racial jokes that were probably intended to make the audience squirm a bit.  I was also surprised that the film opted to feature the Crips in one scene, rather than a fictional gang.

It’s starting to come out in the news now that this may be the final Purge film, and the ending was clearly written to make the movie a suitable finale, while leaving the possibility of more sequels up in the air.  I have a lot of respect for the fact that the studio let this take us off guard, rather than practically writing “finale” across the moon the way the Saw series did.  It was legitimately surprising when plot threads that have run through the series began to resolve themselves, and the status quo was blow to ashes, primarily because I didn’t expect anything to be resolved.

That said, I do hope there are more Purge movies.  This is a concept that has held up far better film-to-film than many other series that lasted much longer (*cough*Paranormal Activity*cough*).  It’s an idea so much fun that it’s difficult not to make a good movie from it.  It would be a real shame if we only got to enjoy it three times.