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Right To Die (2007)
Director: Rob Schmidt
Screenplay: John Esposito
Cast: Martin Donovan as Cliff
Addison; Julia Benson as Abby Addison; Robin Sydney as Trish
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #21
For director Rob Schmidt, being chosen for a series called Masters of Horror is a deeply unfair situation for him; if this had
a completely different series title, it would just be a great opportunity for
him to make himself stand out, but the title of the series is rife for belittling.
His only known film in horror is Wrong
Turn (2003), not a work with a legacy yet and more known for five
straight-to-video sequels that came afterwards. I give credit to Schmidt however here as, when others
would have picked on him for being included as a "Master", few should
care about his placement amongst legendary directors as Right To Die is a fun, gristly revenge tale from beyond the grave
that makes up for a situation he got dropped into in the first place.
When the wife of an adulterous husband
Cliff (Martin Donovan) is maimed in a
car crash, an skinless figure in the hospital on life support, said husband is
in the position that he can terminate her life legally. Said wife Abby (Julia Benson) however, whenever she flat
lines, can haunt him and anyone else by spirit, leading to gruesome results.
Why Right To Die succeeds is that,
whist its not a deep take on assisted death, the resulting tale of a wife's
scorn, especially in hindsight, is as sickly humorous as you'd hope and never
falters in any scene. It exaggerates real life, of adultery and poisonous
relationships, like many a great tale like this one with considerably more
death and gore involved.
There's a streak of the
misanthropic where everyone barring Abby's character, including her mother, is utterly
loathsome adding to the macabre nature of the material. A sense of the
immensely perverse helps Right To Die,
immediately revealed when a supernatural seduction scene with a very voluptuous
Julia Benson turns into something
from The Shining (1980). Alongside
the tangled web of cast involved, including the husband's mistress Trish (Robin Sydney) who works at his dentistry,
it's spiced up with a lot of material to work with. With an utter coward in the
male lead perfectly played by Donovan,
as a bumbling individual with a darkness to him, you have the perfect centre
for a narrative that can go from the intentionally ridiculous, such as the
dangers of being in a magnetised room, to the gruesomely ridiculous in an
improvise surgical operation near the end. Schmidt
also, brilliantly, leaves the closure of the story off camera, rather than
tying the loose ends together. Thus leaving Right To Die on an open ending that feels satisfying due to the
final twists before and because the punch line hit the viewer just before the
end credits despite this open ending. As a result, everything you'd want from a
horror anthology episode...that just happens to be from someone who likely
gained scorn for being included as a "Master of Horror". Thankfully,
amongst legends of the horror genre, he pulled his weight and succeeded even
above other episodes from said legends and made any controversy about his
inclusion pointless to worry about.
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The Screwfly Solution (2006)
Director: Joe Dante
Screenplay: Sam Hamm
Based on a short story by Raccoona
Sheldon aka. Alice Sheldon
Cast: Jason Priestley as Alan; Kerry
Norton as Anne; Linda Darlow as Bella; Brenna O'Brien as Amy; Elliott Gould as Barney
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #22
After the disappointment of Homecoming, not only do Joe Dante and screenwriter Sam Hamm redeem themselves with The Screwfly Solution, but they also
create both one of the most disturbing episodes of the two series, and the most
elaborate in terms of scale. Whilst Homecoming
felt like a liberal love fest invading a strong universal nature, thus
compromising it, the tone of The
Screwfly Solution is successful and as a result is a bleak, gruelling
apocalypse narrative. Out of the entirety of Masters of Horror, it's probably the most ambitious. Immediately
the visible use of digital cameras, ones which could move in elaborate turns
and extreme close-ups, provides a drastic change in look for immediacy alongside
the larger use of resources in cast and locations the episode also has. The
subject matter itself is vast, following a change in the male brain from an
unknown cause that causes the entire gender to kill women when sexually aroused
or provoked, almost a pathogen which slowly invades nearly all men in the
United States. It's the one story of these two series so far that could've been
released as a feature film, but does enough with just fifty five minutes as it
stands.
It encompasses various nods to
environmental and social concepts, but the main one in gender and sexuality is
blunt. It's as unsubtle as Homecoming,
but the more universal nature of The
Screwfly Solution cuts to the bone. The author of the original short story Alice
Sheldon was a female science fiction writer of great significance, who mainly
wrote under a male pseudonym, and one who wrote The Screwfly Solution in 1977, in the midst of a huge feminist wave
of that period. In terms of adapting the short story for this 2006 episode,
aspects of the adaptation aren't perfect, flaws which can be picked at in terms
of the logic and how the story is told, but particularly in this era it hasn't
dated. Unlike Homecoming which is
already a time capsule, this episode could actually be as frightening, even
more so, for a male viewer than a female one in an era where the term
"men's rights" has been tainted by toxic masculinity and questions of
misogyny are in the mainstream.
Even some of the broader, less
subtle ideas like this strange virus being shown through religious fanaticism,
anti-female belief of men, don't feel trite when one considers the various ways
religion has been tainted since its beginning through how men have headed their
foundations and tampered with the scriptures for personal power. It would be
absurd to think any of this farcical, even though it's an extreme fantastical
depiction, because it touches upon real issues of misogyny and anti-woman
violent that are sadly real. No sane viewer would dismiss this as politically
biases as the topic is beyond left and right wing politics and touches on
something much more real and disturbing. You could not paint this as being
politically bias especially as in this world, even a loving husband like Alan (Jason Priestley), whose wife Anne (Kerry Norton) becomes the lead, could be
infected by this virus. Instead The
Screwfly Solution evokes a more disturbing idea for male viewers let alone
female viewers that men (even I the writer of this) could all possess a
reptilian, dark part of the brain if the wires in our brains were crossed. One
where incredibly casual violence against women and even murder could take place
on airplane flights or in the street without a bat of the eye.
The apocalyptic nature of the
story is followed to its fullest, as miserable as such a story would eventually
become, with an additional plot twist involving the episode turning into
science fiction not a protective shield for the horror of the material but
playfully shoving a knife in the viewer's back. Even the faintest of humour has
a morbidness to it before being swallowed up in the bleakness. And helping is
not only how confrontational and nasty the material is, but the performances. Kerry Norton is good as the main
heroine, whose role is tougher as this story can only go to a grim conclusion.
Also of significant mention has to be Elliott
Gould, probably the biggest actor in terms of reputation to have appeared
in the series so far and contributing one of the most memorable characters, the
one completely sympathetic male figure never touched by the virus, who is the
one sole lightness in his humour when everything is as twisted as it is, but
also has the dramatic talent to play this character who has to watch the events
unfold over the world as he tries to find a cure for it all. It's the kind of
story which certain viewers may not be able to stomach, especially for those
expecting the series to be entirely fun in tone, but Joe Dante in one of his darkest hours does manage to show so much
ambition here that has to admired.
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