Masters of Horror Season 2 Part 7 and Conclusion

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The V Word (2006)

Director: Ernest Dickenson

Screenplay: Mick Garris

Cast: Arjay Smith as Kerry; Branden Nadon as Justin; Jodelle Ferland as Lisa; Michael Ironside as Mr. Chaney; Lynda Boyd as Carolyn

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #30

The director career of Ernest Dickenson has horror films like Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995) and Bones (2001) with Snoop Dogg. Of also considerable importance is that, until after Malcolm X (1992) he was Spike Lee's cinematographer from his film debut and including Do The Right Thing (1989), whose visual look is as much of that film's legendary status as other factors. The V Word, a vampire story, certainly looks visually interesting, a shadow filled atmosphere set within suburbia where two teenagers Kerry (Arjay Smith) and Justin (Branden Nadon) decided to go to a funeral home at night to see a real corpse. Unfortunately one of them is bitten by a vampire, later revealed to be Mr. Chaney (Michael Ironside), once a math teacher known for paedophilic tendencies before his un-death, trying to get the two boys to join him within his circle.

The film unfortunately is stuck with how overdone vampire stories are. They need more creativity to work. So many, in written and visual form exist that it's not the plots which stand out but their design, their characterisation and tones which need to. Sprinklings of potential ideas abound but none go anywhere. That it starts, as one character plays Doom 3, with the other in an argument with his father over the phone, having separated from his mother and dating a secretary. Said father figure is removed halfway through the plot and is worthless, wasting an interesting plot point. It tries something interesting in depicting the first signs of the vampire "virus" infecting someone, a half awake dazed figure their mother and little sister presume has stayed up all night in the more successful scenes, but it never gets expanded upon more. When the prologue has finished the episode is halfway through and about to end on a generic conclusion, preventing a lot else happening. Even Michael Ironside doesn't get as much as one would wish considering how always reliable he is, standing out as an inherently sinister, nearly Count Orlock form of vampire who walks around with an umbrella and has an insidious back-story that would add more threat for the young teenage leads.

I'll argue Season 2 of Masters of Horror is still better than Season 1, but there's still episodes like The V Word which have virtues but the plots don't have a lot to them. Episodes which surprisingly last over fifty five minutes but with if little in terms of events having happened, exposition taking up so much time when a vampire and its mythos is pretty well known by now for many. The result here is immensely disappointing and has little to actually write about.

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Dream Cruise (2007)

Director: Norio Tsurata

Screenplay: Naoya Takayama and Norio Tsuruta

Based on a short story by Kôji Suzuki

Cast: Daniel Gillies as Jack Miller; Yoshino Kimura as Yuri Saito; Ryo Ishibashi as Eiji Saito

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #31

Sadly Masters of Horror Season 2 officially, and for my own viewing marathon, ends with the worst episode of all two season. It's feature length, eighty three minutes uncut, is as much of the problem. But this episode is also where a lot of the problems with the Masters of Horror brand really shows its ugly face. It should be exciting to witness Dream Cruise. A second Japanese co-production which learnt from the mistakes of forcing Japanese actors to phonetically speak in English, as Takashi Miike's Imprint (2006) was stuck with, by having a bilingual script in English and Japanese subtitles from actors who can speak both languages. A story, significantly, based on a short story by Kôji Suzuki, the original author of Ringu, whose life has more than likely be canonised by how many adaptations that story has happened let alone sequels and remakes. Unfortunately Norio Tsurata was chosen to direct said episode.

Tsurata is a director of a lot of horror films, but none of his work I've seen has stood out. Nor does he have the personality that even a flawed director like Jôji 'George' Iida had, who even when the films are failures still have so much to appreciate. Tsurata feels invisible with his work as a director, which doesn't stand outs even by itself in terms of their stories. The first I saw was Premonition (2004), arguably an okay film about supernatural newspapers that predict ominous events. It was still however, within the context of the J-horror boom and the market for it in the West, pretty average. Heavily reliant on cheap jump scares and only helped by how surprisingly nihilistic the film's conclusion was. Ring O: Birthday (2000) on the other hand was just tedious, already with the issue of being a prequel (even if based on a prequel story written by Kôji Suzuki) and a miserable experience to sit through.

Dream Cruise continues as Tsurata's least rewarding of the trio I've seen, as a Western lawyer living in Japan, Jack Miller (Daniel Gillies) is invited on the boat of one of his clients Eiji Saito (Ryo Ishibashi). Jack has been having an affair with Eiji's wife Yuri (Yoshino Kimura), who has always viewed her husband as a cold hearted, detestable human being, something which Eiji desires to prove by driving his boat into the middle of the ocean with nowhere for the lovers to run.  It's a conventional plot, but always one ripe for good as there's also skeletons in the closet for everyone on the boat which come back, but Dream Cruise is so monotonously paced and obvious in its plotting as this slow pace is experienced that it's a nightmare to sit through.

It would be amazing how obvious the plot is if it wasn't also so tedious to suffer. The acting makes this worse in how bland it is, Gillies not compelling as a lead, his character the generic good man in spite of the plot having a lot to work with, both being in an adulterous affair with a married woman and that he's haunted by a childhood memory of seeing his brother drown in the ocean, a subplot which leads to something out of place for this type of story. More incongruous is how Dream Cruise manages to take Ryo Ishibashi, the lead actor of Takashi Miike's Audition (1999), and pulls out as generic a performance from as good an actor like him as you see, a generic evil character who is haunted alongside his wife by a stereotypical black haired female ghost, none of which stands out. It has all the hallmarks of all the series' problems. Then at a feature's length these flaws are amplified.

Dream Cruise feels like all the clichés of the era's wave of slow burn Japanese ghost stories, what was coined "J-horror" subgenre in the west, slowly dying a horrible death in a TV special here. When the appropriation of clichés from this trend, even if it's a Japanese co-production made in that country, have none of the actual dynamics which made these films rewarding for Westerners in the first place. Arguably this is an awful way to have ended the second season, especially to end the entire Masters of Horror franchise. Having watched this extra long episode with two big boxer dogs, pets who've sat in on viewings like this of horror films, the sensation of one of them laying on my waist crushing me was not only more pleasurable than the entirety of Dream Cruise but actually made getting through the final quarter bearable. The frustration felt both by a person aware he was wasting his life throughout this, and that of animals unaware of what he was going through but unable to settle and lay down, is something spectacularly awful for this TV episode to have accomplished.

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Masters of Horror Season 2 Conclusion

With this, Masters of Horror Season 2 comes to a close and I have ended both seasons as well. Having never seen Season 2 before, I'll controversially suggest that it's superior to Season 1. Sadly that doesn't mean the season was perfect. Whilst the issue surrounding the show's premise was pushed to the back - famous directing episodes which however were compromised by tight production schedules and what resources in scripts and technical content were available -  there were still problems. Mainly that if the stories weren't interesting, or well made, you get duds. Season 1 is much more erratic, and there are even episodes that were deeply overrated, but Season 2 still had failures as well. Sadly due to how the second season was released on DVD in the United Kingdom most on them were at the back end of my viewing experience, making the finale more lacklustre. The late Tobe Hooper never got a great episode in either series, nor did John Carpenter even if Pro-Life wasn't as bad as its reputation suggests. Peter Medak's The Washingtonians, Tom Holland's We All Scream For Ice Cream and Ernest Dickenson's The V Word were all victims of lacklustre screenplays, and Dream Cruise was a terrible decision in general. A lot of generic plotting plagued the worst episodes in both season. Whilst Season 1 as obsessed with troubled cops, Season 2 made this problem worse by being heavily reliant on stories about bland families put in peril, no stakes or reward in these stock types who'd be okay afterwards in every story. Ironically the best episodes of Season 2 either did the unthinkable with family archetypes, like The Screwfly Solution, or was the episode Family, which satirised this with a serial killer who made up his perfect family with the skeletons of his victims.

But the greater consistency helped this season. With only one disappointing episode acclaimed by others - Stuart Gordon's The Black Cat - and none others unlike Season, everything was interesting or actually great. So much so I can have an honourable mention with Rob Schmidt's Right to Die. Schmidt was one of a couple of directors in this season who are arguably controversial to have been chosen as "Masters". Whilst someone like Peter Medak is not known as a horror director, he at least had one canonical classic like The Changeling (1980) that qualified him, whilst someone like Schmidt is known only for a film like Wrong Turn (2003) which hasn't had the same love or cult following placed onto it. But his episode undermined this, making the point of the "Masters of Horror" title pointless by making an episode so much more appropriate to what the series should've always been. Fun, misanthropic and lurid, the one episode that evokes gristly comic books of yore but with more blood and sex. His episode argues that the two series should've emphasised getting the stories right, not necessarily the stunt casting of legendary directors unless the restrictions that undermined their creative processes weren't such an issue over these two seasons. His episode is the kind that made you want to see what someone like Rob Schmidt would do next; sadly his filmography after is not as prolific as one would wish after seeing Right to Die for whatever reason.

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Third and second place were solid stories made with great performances, both following varying forms of madness, both from directors not necessarily making horror throughout their career. Third is Sounds Like, Brad Anderson the up-and-coming director picked for Season 2 who, like Lucky McKee in Season 1, made a very different film from most everyone else. Anderson's is practically psychological drama which just happens to be increasingly more gruesome and tragic as it hangs on Chris Bauer's central performance. Second is John Landis' Family. Out of all the veteran directors who worked in both seasons, its John Landis who managed the most consistency. Even if some might disagree with me on Deer Woman from the first season, it'll be hard to knock Family, another psychological drama but played for sick laughs where another central performance, by George Wendt, is the lynchpin that all the other virtues are rested on.

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And first place, without a doubt, flaws and all, is Joe Dante's The Screwfly Solution. Whilst Homecoming from Season 1 has become a dated time piece, The Screwfly Solution whilst an exaggerated interpretation on the subject of misogyny has tragically become more relevant, making my viewing of the episode [in 2017] a more disturbing experience. It's the episode out of both seasons which feels like it's taking the greatest risk, the most experimental alongside Sounds Like with its use of digital cameras and greater, more elaborate set pieces using them. It has the largest cast and number of set pieces of all the episodes. It has Elliot Gould of all people in a major role. It's also the bleakest of the entire two seasons. Far from fun, but instead something which even if its tinged with black humour is still scary. Willing to jump into sci-fi, and utterly willing to take greater risks than many of the other episodes with an ending that's actually apocalyptic, scary and a kick to the guts. Something which ends as bleak as it should and mortify the viewer afterwards. Even taking into consideration its flaws, areas which feel potentially too broad, or not fully fleshed out, this however is so much more rewarding for me than Homecoming, taking a short story by a female writer Alice Sheldon from a  period of major feminist dialogue, and showing it had greater relevancy in the 2000s and 2010s than anything else.

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With this season, Masters of Horror ended. There was a continuation of a similar premise with producer Mick Garris called Fear Itself (2998) but, made for another channel (NBC) and with restrictions on content, I'd view that series as a spin-off rather than the third season, a one series production for another day. Altogether I admit Masters of Horror wasn't perfect. It emphasises, like anthology films, how even if you have the best of a genre together, the entries could only work if their content was actually interesting. Add to this the restricted nature of television - time schedules and resources - and it adds further potential disadvantages, that and each other episode (mainly) being fifty five minutes long, which is a lot of time to take  to tell as story. I will not lie that both seasons had a lot of generic fodder which could've done better. When these seasons succeeded - Sick Girl, Deer Woman, Pick Me Up, The Screwfly Solution etc. - they worked, but significantly these were episodes that took risks. For me altogether whilst I enjoyed the experience I admit the franchise was a failure. One which offered rewards but also showed its inherently flaws symbolically with what happened to Takashi Miike's Imprint - sever restrictions even affecting a Japanese co-production allowed to breathe from the rest, script issues and the question of what the point was of Masters of Horror philosophically, particularly as for a series that wanted to be uncensored and adult, they pulled Imprint from US cable television and undermined that ethos. I wouldn't argue against having committed to this two season marathon, just for the fact that it offered up so many different subjects. From old horror stables like vampires being reinterpreted to more modern concepts being included like serial killers. The source material for episodes - Edgar Allen Poe, HP Lovecraft, EC Comics, Ambrose Bierce etc. - is in itself the Masters of Horror Literature. Barring giant ants, as there was fifties sci-fi arguably in The Screwfly Solution, there was a lot on offer which wasn't completely success but still of interest. It just has to barred in mind that all 26 episodes are unpredictable in their overall quality. A single season made from all the best episodes is possible, and would be exceptional. Two long seasons however is a lot of material and not perfect.

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