We All Scream For Ice Cream (2007)
Director: Tom Holland
Screenplay: David J. Schow
Based on a story by John Farris
Cast: William Forsythe as Buster;
Brent Sheppard as Kent; Maxwell Neck as Kenny; Tim Henry as Papa Joe; Lee
Tergesen as Layne; Laura Drummond as Darlene; Colin Cunningham as Virgil
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #26
First scene. A father begs his
young son to not eat an ice cream he has in his hands. He refused, unwrapping
it and taking a bite. Said father melts into a puddle of ice cream, a sweetly
sick and delicious death. Immediately my attention was piqued by We All Scream For Ice Cream, in which a
local community is terrorised by an undead ice cream man dressed as a clown
called Buster (William Forsythe) out
for revenge against a group of boys, now adults, responsible for his death. It
evokes, well to not beat around the bush, It
(1990) based on the Stephen King
novel (and its subsequent 2017 re-adaptation), but what you should get here is
not It's tale of adults dealing with a monster of their pasts, but the gristly
horror stories of yore with misanthropic comeuppance.
Sadly that doesn't come to pass.
Instead it follows Layne (Lee Tergesen),
one of those boys as a man now being targeted by Buster, even responsible for a
major part of his death, who is always seen throughout the narrative as a good
man. From the episode's director Tom
Holland, there isn't necessarily an issue with playing the material
straight. We are talking of the man whose reason for becoming a
"Master" for this series is because of a film like Fright Night (1985), a film which no
one can argue didn't deserve him getting a slot in this television franchise
even if that was the only horror movie in his filmography. It was a rock solid
vampire film where the hero was a clearly defined hero, the villain a clearly
defined villain. Unfortunately it was also a film which had memorable
characters and a feature length running time to flesh them out which isn't available
for We All Scream For Ice Cream.
This episode should've been utterly
cynical with more sympathy for Buster himself as the transgressed against clown,
especially with how sympathetic and good Forsythe's
performance is. It should've been like Poetic Justice, the third segment of Tales from the Crypt (1972), in which Peter Cushing plays an utterly lovable
man destroyed by a bastard played by Robin Phillips, the comeuppance is utterly
deserved. What it calls for is actually what Holland is more than capable of as, even with flaws, he managed
perfectly to capture this tone with Thinner (1996). Ironically, in context
of this episode, it was a Stephen King
adaptation from his Richard Bachman pseudonym
days in which with utterly grim humour almost none of the characters were
innocent, all detestable human beings, and there was an absurd edge both in the lead
actor's weight related prosthetics and what can only be described as an actual
evil pie made with human blood.
Sadly the episode here is not
this. Everything wraps up nicely, a literal vanilla ice cream without even a
grit of a weirder flavour added, not even a 99 flake of taste if you forgive
the dumb ice cream puns. It's over emphasised by Tergesen not being that compelling as a lead, as much because he's
given a bland saintly figure to play as much as the lack of good
characterisation in the script. This is sad in the case of We All Scream For Ice Cream as it means that it suffocates a
legitimately great performance, that deserved better surrounding it, from Forsythe. Not as the undead clown his
character becomes but, completely playing against his tough onscreen persona,
the living Buster. A guy with a learning disability who however finds the
perfect calling in life as an ice cream man, able to bring humour and magic
tricks into selling his wares, even able to make something as incontinent as
having to provide a lot of change back into part of his act to please the child
customers. A man who could arguably be the happiest person alive were it not
for some dumb, insensitive teenagers managing to kill the poor guy during a
botched prank. This performance, in the flashback scenes, is legitimately up
there as one of the best performances of the whole Masters of Horror seasons. But it's a shame the whole episode
around this performance is average at best.
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Sounds Like (2006)
Director: Brad Anderson
Screenplay: Brad Anderson
Based on a short story by Mike
O'Driscoll
Cast: Chris Bauer as Larry Pearce;
Laura Margolis as Brenda; Richard Kahan as David; Michael Daingerfield as Jim
A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #27
Brad Anderson, growing up with cinema really from 2004 onwards, was
a hot new critical darling at this point when he directed a Masters of Horror episode. Session 9 (2001) was a cult sleeper and
by the point of The Machinist (2004),
fed by the publicity of actor Christian
Bale's extreme form of method acting to play an emaciated lead, Anderson was looked upon as a new
director with some excitement. One would presume at that point he would've
become like Vincenzo Natali, a fascinating
cult genre director whose new film would immediately illicit some interest due
to his reputation of sculpting genre into distinct quirks, in Anderson's case by way of psychological
drama to go from The Machinist and Sounds Like. Unfortunately after Transsiberian (2008) he had a long
delay until Vanishing on 7th Street (2010)
and The Call (2013), a Halle Berry thriller co-produced by World Wrestling Entertainment's film
branch WWE Studios. After that he's
sadly not had as much attention to him himself as a director like back in the
mid 2000s.
Sounds Like is arguably, in mind of this, one of the best of Season
2 amongst stiff competition, making this history after this production quite
sad. It's also one less interested in ghoulishness, but dark psychological
drama instead. Chris Bauer, in a
great performance, plays Larry, a quality control supervisor at a software
company's call centre, his frankly superhuman sense of hearing useful in
allowing him to even pick up on when an employee is about to burst into rage at
a customer over the phone. Sound design becomes a major part of the story, in
which Larry's bottled up grief for his young son's death becomes a key to
madness, like a Lowercase album as ordinary sounds like the shuffling of book
pages to rain drops on a car windscreen become amplified, the visual tone of
the episode using extensive use of inventive camera techniques including a lot
of micro-shot images of objects and even flies to emphasise how this gift becomes
his downward spiral. All inventive for a TV episode but also dramatically
important, , as Larry starts to slowly unravel in his sanity, between his wife Brenda
(Laura Margolis) and her desire to
have another child to his increasingly erratic behaviour at work. The result's
in the area of Roman Polanski's
psychological horror like Repulsion
(1965), slow burn drama which draws out alien, nightmarish signs of the
protagonist's insanity in ordinary surroundings, the most extreme being the
sounds of whining Larry hears in one
scene only for him to discover a litter of offspring in the wall.
It's a sad story ultimately, a
tragedy which does so much in less than sixty minutes that it's perfect
throughout, without need for expanding it out further to a feature length. In
vast contrast to some of sillier episodes, it's a complete tonic that stands
out for a more cerebral, quieter work. It becomes more extreme and gristlier as
it reaches its climax, as the noises in Larry's ears vary from complete
disarming silence to the kind of sounds which evoke what Edgar Allen Poe wrote in The
Telltale Heart, of a motif tormenting a guilt person to despair, but never
ignoring the calmer tone and that it's still about a father who never overcame
the death of a child. As with The
Machinist, its symbolising real emotional damage by way of the character's
world unfolding for them. As a Masters
of Horror episode, it feels like with Lucky
McKee's Sick Girl (2006) a new
talent outclassing veterans. And yet sadly, whilst still making films, one
wishes Brad Anderson's name came up
more often as it did around the mid-2000s, growing up reading the likes of Total Film that took interest in him.
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