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Deer Woman (2005)
Director: John Landis
Screenplay: Max and John Landis
Cast: Brian Benben as Dwight
Faraday; Anthony Griffith as Officer Jacob Reed; Cinthia Moura as the Deer
Woman; Sonja Bennett as Dana; Julian Christopher as Chief Einhron; Don Thompson
as Detective Fuches; Alex Zahara as Detective Patterson
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Show) #10
By this point in Masters of Horror - at halfway through
in my viewing - the first season is actually disappointing. There's a visible
sense that, whilst it was an inspired idea to hire the most acclaimed horror
directors to helm episodes, if the scripts aren't strong enough they don't
work, more so as the restricted structure of this type of television production
drastically limits the visual distinctions that many of these directors had for
theatrical cinema for the small box. With this in mind, with a director like John Landis who only directed two major
horror films and mainly has worked in comedy for his career, he manages to at
least provide me with a laugh with Deer
Woman. As his story's protagonist Detective Dwight Faraday (Brian Benben) tries to picture multiple theories to how a
truck driver was turned to mince by way of deer hooves, the same two
metaphorical figures involved (the truck driver and the woman he went out a bar
with) a repeatedly shown in each scenario, wearing different clothes, all of
which end like the music video for Queens
of the Stone Age's No One Knows.
In a series where a major failing is that they're failing to provide eye-catching
and memorable scenes that short form horror storytelling should provide, with
the exception of one or two stand outs, this entire passage of Deer Woman is such refreshing change of
pace.
It's as much, from the director
of An American Werewolf in London (1981)
and Innocent Blood (1992), that Landis is directing an openly comedic
episode. Other episodes have had humour, but the entirety of everything I've
watched so far has had a seriousness to them all. Landis with his son and future cultural commenter Max decided to pen a farce instead. It's
a story whose explanation is already told to us the viewer in the title and the
opening - that the figure behind random killings of men is a deer woman, an
American Indian mythological figure of a beautiful woman whose half-deer. The lack of mystery is replaced by one of the
series many depressed cop protagonists having to catch up with us and being
unable to accept the absurdity he's finding out. What's dismissed by a random
American Indian character as an old, misogynistic tribe tale in the deer woman
becomes something that utter jars with modern life, and that's where the story is actually concerned about alongside the
gags.
Far from glib and insulting
however, this is yet the same episode where you see the ghastliness of a Native
American themed casino where patrons have to suffer through a mechanical deer's
head telling god-awful pun jokes. The lack of a deeper message on the surface
doesn't mean there's ideas still to read into Deer Woman, the inexplicable nature of mythological creatures
running around modern civilisation far more appropriate than trying to
rationalise them. It's befitting the Deer Woman, played mute by the utterly
gorgeous Cinthia Moura, is a force of
nature whose motif for targeting men makes little sense, barring hints at it
happening centuries ago and always involving anything evoking colonisation of
Native American land. That and how she's merely a force with no resolution
either, a protagonist and his friendly ally Officer Jacob Reed (Anthony Griffith) always behind her.
This is also an episode where a scene where Faraday confesses guilt for the
death of a partner is seen as a metaphor for John Landis dealing with the aftermath of The Twilight Zone: The
Movie (1983), the tragedy of the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two child
actors one which, alongside the reputation of that accident, would weigh
heavily on a person's life if they were in the director's chair when the
tragedy happened. If the case, that scene does bring a level of emotional depth
that none of the other Masters of Horror
can touch.
That's neither to dismiss the
humour to which Deer Woman can be
bizarre as it is slapstick - men crying over dead monkeys against muggers being
stabbed by potential victims with their own knives. That tone where the only
rationalise why to deal with these bizarre murders is to imagine a deer man
carrying a woman off like a Universal horror movie monster is far more
rewarding in dealing with mythology as someone to "modernise" and
complete de-fang their iconography. Far from the insulting nature of codifying
such figures, letting it loose into the modern world and leaving its cast
baffled is more aspirated. And as this played out, I laughed and laughed a lot,
and considering my eventual reaction to Joe
Dante's Homecoming (2005), which
wanted to be taken serious as a legitimate political polemic, Deer Woman is one of the strongest
entries and an example of when not being blatant in one's messages means far
more in depth.
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Homecoming (2005)
Director: Joe Dante
Screenplay: Sam Hamm
Based on the short story by Dale
Bailey
Cast: Jon Tenney as David Murch;
Thea Gill as Jane Cleaver; Wanda Cannon as Kathy Hobart; Terry David Mulligan
as Marty Clark; Robert Picardo as Kurt Rand
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #11
Out of all the Masters of Horror episodes, Homecoming is vividly remembered for me
as the critical darling of the whole first season, all entirely in context of
it being an attack on George "Dubya"
Bush during a controversial period of his already divisive presidency.
Before this sounds like a liberal cheaply attacking a Republican president
again, it's potent in spite of my belief Homecoming
has dated as a work with a message that I view it now during the Donald Trump era. Bush Deux was the president in the unfortunate position of having
to react to the 9/11 Twin Towers disaster, one of the most monumental events in my generation's life because of how
tragic it truly was but also how the shockwaves from it (arguably) influenced
events even still. Whether his decision to go to war in the Middle East was
right is complex in lieu of an utter tragedy on American soil which no one
could've been able to decide with difficulty. Certain people look on Trump as being Satan incarnate but also
forget Bush Jr., whether it was wise
for his party to have done in lieu of said tragedy, also brought in the Patriot
Act in US law, allowing police greater power to protect their land but with all
the potential for it to be as much abused.
This isn't even an era I lived
through as a child that's entirely to do with the Americans either, as our Prime
Minister at the time in Britain Tony
Blair is still dogged by his ethics of joining the war on the Middle East
with actual court investigations involved. All of this seems heady stuff some
may find inappropriate to talk of, believing politics shouldn't be mixed into
horror, but Joe Dante decided to take
a pre-existing short story and reinterpret it as a direct comment on said
political period at a bleak time, making it impossible to ignore its real life
genesis. One cannot ignore either whether that message, when it was championed
in context, has actually any depth beyond that period now with Trump in the White House and the effects
of the wars in the Middle East leading to new concerns in the regions, whether
it has any meaning still or like Michael
Moore documentaries it's a fragile cultural fossil from only a decade or so
ago already.
Homecoming is laborious to revisit, out of time context probably
the most aged and overrated of the lot from the series. Its critical idea
should've been played as a universal one, where as with the Monkey's Paw story a wish made is shown
to be one to regret, in this case as political spin doctor David Murch (Jon Tenney) saves himself during a rare
moment of hesitance on live television by coming up with an emotionally
exploitative comment of wishing the dead soldiers who fought overseas could
return back home and vote in the presidential election taking place. He lives
to regret this decision when the aforementioned dead soldiers do return back
but are far from please with the side he's been writing speeches for.
Whatever one's political beliefs,
whether there's a "just" war in existence or not, if a morally good
man or woman, one's neighbour or even yourself, wishes to serve their country
in the military to protect their land and those of people in other countries,
that's truly is noble and self sacrificing an act. The issues stories like this
should tackle is always the moral ambiguity of said wars, or when to paraphrase
Black Sabbath's War Pigs, if the generals are treating people like pawns in chess. If
Homecoming had entirely been about
the grief of these soldiers then we would've had a great story, figures of
sadness who only bite and assault the living provoked, instead the zombie as
the memories of the lost who can still influence the living. This is seen in
the one good scene, where a decayed solder is welcomed openly by the owners of
a cafe into their building, parents of a son off in war to treat him as someone
in need of warmth and empathy, comforting him even when potential patrons are
scared off by his appearance.
Instead, from the director of
such manic, Looney Tunes inspired
madness like Gremlins 2: The New Batch
(1990), you get such a pretentious, bloated presentation for a one note
gag, its humour entirely deciding to paint right wing Republicans, in Murch or
political commentator Jane Cleaver (Thea
Gill), as selfish, vain idiots. Even when Murch has back-story suggesting
more complexity, it's cheap sympathy for him. Even Robert Picardo, as a Republican party member, is wasted as a
villain just missing a moustache to twirl. Its unsubtle and when there's living
cartoons in both left and right wing American politics to be embarrassed about,
to merely throw faeces at one side with such obvious, clanging political
comments is so simpleminded, even in the context of such a politically low
period of 2005/6 a waste of material. It's amazing for me to think this was
feared as being dangerous back when it was first produced as, nowadays, it
completely misplaces emotional sympathy for moral superiority, so right its
head's up its own arse and creases to be good horror or message.
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