Masters of Horror: Episode 11 Pick Me Up

Why is Fairuza Balk in this episode? Could someone please explain that to me? It’s not that I have anything against Fairuza Balk, but her character seems entirely redundant to this episode’s storyline. I’m thankful that director Larry Cohen minimized her time, having her disappear for most of the first half of the episode. Still, we’re left with a perfectly good episode, with one obvious glaring flaw. She seems to have been written in because a story about two dueling serial killers wouldn’t have a hero otherwise.

The episode opens with a classic horror set-up: A bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere, stranding all the passengers. Serial killing truck driver Jim Wheeler (Michael Moriarty) offers them a ride. Two passengers agree to go with him, two others and the bus driver stay behind to get picked off by hitchhiking serial killer Walker (Warren Kole).

Names aside, the two eventually find out about each other, and each believes the other to be a trespasser in his territory. They’re relationship is complex. They don’t seem to be offended by the idea that their competitor wants to kill them, in fact it seems to be expected. And they share a mutual admiration for each others' skills. Their conflict is primarily in philosophy: Wheeler, while willing to kill the inconvenient, believes in seeking out dangerous prey. Walker, on the other hand, freely slaughters anyone who happens to be available, and sees Wheeler as pretentious.

While the episode does seem to suggest that this is their first encounter, the two have great chemistry. I imagine that you could cast these actors in almost anything and they’d fit together perfectly. I don’t even really care who wins, I just want them to keep talking for as long as possible.

And then we get to Stacia (Fairuza Balk). She was on the bus at the beginning of the episode, but decided to walk to a hotel. About twenty-five minutes in she appears again at the hotel. After a long day of killing people, Walker and Wheeler end up in the same hotel, with rooms on either side of her. After this point the episode becomes absolutely desperate to keep her alive.

Walker wastes time making scary noises, causing her to flee the hotel. She then accepts a ride from Wheeler, who she believes to be a cop hunting Walker. Wheeler decides he needs her as “bait” to lure Walker. Let me repeat that: Wheeler thinks he needs her as bait to lure in Walker, who is already actively planning to kill Wheeler! This is how desperate the episode is to give Stacia an active role.

Now, does this kill the episode? Absolutely not. However, her presence affects absolutely nothing, and her overacting can bring down an exciting moment like a joke that’s just been explained. All of her scenes could have been replaced with more interaction between Moriarty and Kole, or just more kills. I talk about her presence as a distraction mainly because it’s such a gaping and obvious flaw. We don’t need a sympathetic perspective. We’re horror fans. We can deal with Villain Protagonists.

This is definitely an ending worth talking about: After Stacia causes a crash (that could have happened without her), she’s injured, and the two Duke it out. All three of them end up picked up by two serial killers who drive an ambulance and look for injured people to murder. Meanwhile, I have a big stupid grin on my face at what is probably one of the best endings in this entire series.

This episode is just awesome! It’s pure bloody, campy fun from beginning to end. If you can watch it and not enjoy it you need to seriously rethink your entire outlook on life. No, it isn't scary, but who. cares.

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.