Masters of Horror Season 2 Part 5

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.

From https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/--HrJf0bVX7o/TySx1erLFNI/AAAAAAAAAjQ/eVcrhBItBLU/s450/weallscreamclowndownclowndown.jpg

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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.

From http://images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/10000000/
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