Phantasm (1979)

Director: Don Coscarelli

Screenplay: Don Coscarelli

Cast: Angus Scrimm as The Tall Man; A. Michael Baldwin as Mike Pearson; Bill Thornbury as Jody Pearson; Reggie Bannister as Reggie; Kathy Lester as the Lady in Lavender; Bill Cone as Tommy; Mary Ellen Shaw as the Fortune Teller; Terrie Kalbus as the Fortune Teller's Granddaughter

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #139

Synopsis: Having lost his parents not that long before, Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) is worried his older brother Jody (Bill Thornbury) will leave him. This concern is amplified when he witnesses, after the funeral of one of Jody's friend, the undertaker (Angus Scrimm) lift the coffin from the open grave by himself and place it in a hearse. This "Tall Man" is a maleficent being, part of a sinister series of sights including hooded dwarfs, a mysterious woman in lavender (Kathy Lester) who seduces young men and kills them, and silver spheres that float in the air and produce harmful weapons from their forms. With his older brother Jody and Reggie (Reggie Bannister), the hippy iceman cream and friend of the brothers dragged into this by pure accident, Mike attempts to confront this horrible conspiracy at the funeral home in their home town.

And thus begins Phantasm, that rare franchise where even when a bigger budgeted sequel come to be, has been always in the hands of its original creator Don Coscarelli. Even when he passed directing what may be the final entry, Phantasm: Ravenger (2016), in favour for David Hartman to take the chair he has had direct involvement in all of the five films. Looking ahead, it's a question whether this franchise and his decision to make them a connected, large scale mythology is actually successful for me personally, as much of a risky gamble as would a studio milking the success of the first film their own way. What's interesting though is that, returning in 2016, this is the only franchise (excluding remakes and staying in one single world in chronological order) to have spanned from when most of these iconic horror films of the seventies and eighties first came from, American independent genre films or creations from very small studios and figures like New Line Cinema (A Nightmare On Elm Street) or Moustapha Akkad (Halloween). It has witnessed the boom of gory genre cinema in the eighties (Phantasm II), the decline in the early nineties (Phantasm III), the straight to video era (Phantasm IV), and now the retrospectives of these films, streaming culture, cult film viewings and a selective screen theatrical tour (Phantasm V). Whether the series works altogether depends on the viewer, but I appreciate the wide scale of time within American horror cinema it has passed through regardless of my final opinion on the collective franchise trajectory.

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The first can thankfully stand by itself, and what's fascinating is that, after its director first began by making a drama and a comedy for his two features, Coscarelli decided to make a horror movie that sincerely tackles death and the grieving process. Phantasm is a film which pushes at its obvious restrictions, that it story mainly has to take place around the funeral home but with the advantage that its tone is rich nonetheless. It's a unique film, obsessed with a premise that cuts into people with a real fear and predating Coscarelli's later film Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) that was about old men dealing with their own aging mortalities. With Phantasm however it's from the perspective of a young boy, Mike's journey through the film played out as much as a dream representing his fears of separation from his brother as it is real and morbid.

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With the advantage of how good the cast is - Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man, Baldwin and Thornbury, and Reggie Bannister who would become to Phantasm what Bruce Campbell would to the Evil Dead films - it plays like a nightmare from a young boy's perspective entirely. Where the source of evil is just a very tall undertaken who wears a black suit, a figure who merely walks calmly out of the shadows to snatch people away. Something that evokes primordial fears of childhood that grow more serious as one becomes a teenager. That shouldn't discount how fun the film is as well, as capable for humour and moments of character interaction which feel sincere and affable, but is a film whose atmospheric music by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave fits the already ethereal tone. That the film is openly more stranger than this, when the hooded dwarves and dimensional portals are involved, isn't a detriment to this but is a build up for a film that eventually starts to slide in and out of reality. So drastic at points it's difficult to tell what is merely Mike's anxieties and what's actually chasing him and the people close to him.

From http://horrorfreaknews.com/wp-content/
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Weird is apt as Phantasm in structure is a haze, shifting between dream sequences and narrative with unpredictability. As such a film unintentionally straying off narrative as its also done on purpose to represent the emotional concerns laying at its heart. That the film openly blurs genre is as much a factor. Part old gothic horror, the funeral horror like an Italian genre film setting but real architecture, to the older Fortune Teller who makes a brief appearance and places Mike through an actual supernatural encounter warning him of the future (and franchise long narrative) he would find himself in). Crashing into suburban American and then the sci-fi starts to abruptly appear as well adding to the bizarreness. I'd argue the later films pared this material a little bit too much down as there are details more rewarding here because of this unconventional potpourri of influences, details which show Phantasm's origins from the strange melting pot of seventies independent horror cinema but still rewarding, particularly the inclusion of the Lady of Lavender, a figure who could've been borrowed from an old turn of the century horror tale as a tempter of people to their doom, placed within a seventies modern small town and managing to be able to still seduce guys at the bar.

From http://horrornews.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/
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With the late Angus Scrimm the centre of it, an older character actor who could've appeared in an old fifties western, this feels like a film fed from the old American b-movies from the forties onwards, taking its cues from a still untapped psychotronic well. One deep enough that it works effectively as much for psychological effect as well as being creepy in its oddness. Considering the importance of Mike's perspective as a character, ultimately the one whose viewpoint is in the middle of all this film's events, its appropriate in terms of a film dealing with fears of the mortal threads of life against the adolescent fever imagery that the material is barely touched upon in great detail, even the iconic silver spheres only seen twice or so, but has so much potency it lead to an iconic reputation.

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Personal Opinion:

A film that upon reflection for this review is growing qualities as I contemplate it, in hindsight to having gotten through most of the sequels which have their varying qualities, realising the virtues that mean more with the original feature that they came from. This is especially as I've not watched any of these films since my early twenties or even younger, over ten years, when once there was only four entries not five. To revisit Phantasm which virtually no memories in the slightest of any of them barring the ending of Phantasm III (1993) is like seeing the film from virgin eyes, and it appeals to me both for its home-grown qualities and that ultimately, it's a horror film as its meant to be, a campfire tale of human emotion that also happens to be an oddball crowd pleaser.

Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

From https://decentventriloquists.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/phantasm-21.jpg

Cutting Moments (1997)

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.
com/images/I/41YXW67BSRL._SY445_.jpg

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #138

One of the short films covered for this review is Douglas Buck's Cutting Moments (1997), a notorious but acclaimed short film. The review however stems from a complication anthology of shorts from a company named EI Independent Cinema that originally came out on VHS, the compilation's name taken from the titular short itself. The film was released in Britain from ILC Media, a long gone company whose released included horror titles that would eventually get blu-ray releases a decade later and, more bizarrely, hentai anime like La Blue Girl Returns (2001) and hour long features like Alien from the Darkness (1996), material that emphasised the more unsavoury stereotypes of anime, many of them involving tentacles being used inappropriately, and a decision for all of them foreordained to fail as, unlike the more palatable and interesting anime they also released like the Project A-Ko films, none of the hentai anime even in the current 2010s would be passed uncut still by the British Board of Film Classification let alone back in the early 2000s DVD boom, even the most stringent of believers in free speech like myself aware that butchering these releases for their content comes with an understandable reason from the BBFC.

In amongst these type of releases was also Cutting Moments. The anthology is really a compilation of late eighties to mid-nineties shorts. No bookends, no narrative to connect them, just a compendium of five shorts intercut literally with a knife cutting through a white sheet to separate the shorts. The shorts were wisely placed in order from the most absurd first progressing to the bleakest in Cutting Moments itself. The shorts visibly come from different years, an accidental connective tissue found in that, even if some have really shaky acting or sluggishness to them, they all are evidence to the blurring lines between genre and its polar opposite of artistic and dramatic work, where in reality the more unconventional genre works slip between drama and other areas of cinema pretty easily. Independent cinema, where these shorts come from, especially those of the lo-fi or underground sort are in the centre of two parallel sides. Especially as these are all American productions, they belong to a large melting pot in the middle of these parallels part of the United States' vibrant and rich alternative cinema. One side is genres in their strictest sense (monster films, slashers, pornography) etc., the other side from John Cassavetes to experimental cinema, both sides with a tendency to blur together a lot more than one presume with them being polar "opposites" on the surface.

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Crack Dog (Dir. Casey Kehoe, 1988):

With that in mind, let's not kid ourselves about Crack Dog being anything else but a weird idea its creator had brought to life. Arguably the weakest of them all, the closest to a silly premise like from Troma, but still amusing because it never lasts long enough where its doomed to dwindling results. In a post apocalypse, or an urban squalor so dire it's close to an Italian post apocalyptic film in look, a man has a sentient dog, with a pink Mohawk and spiked collar, who wants him to take the dog to try out some crack for the first time, invading a crack dealer's apartment violently to do so. It's one virtue, in spite of its silliness, is that it possesses the same squalid absurdity of New York City based horror films from the eighties like Basket Case (1982) and Street Trash (1987). Apt as Vic Noto, who played the Hobo King of the Junkyard in Street Trash, is in the very tiny cast emphasising this fact. It's a short out of all five that feels the most direct to such bizarre genre films from tgee time, making a nice beginning nonetheless in spite of its innate flimsiness.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZsXXNqz_8kI/hqdefault.jpg

Don't Nag Me (Dirs. Tim Healy and Gino Panaro, 1987):

Another man, a traumatised WWII veteran (Tom Healy), murders his Australian wife only to confess his guilt, explaining at the electric chair how she continued to nag him after death. This begins the blurring of genres as I mentioned, a drama in structure that just happens to also be horror and also intentionally comedic in a dark way. The virtue of a short like this, whilst predictable and far from perfect, is the sense of personality seeing people rarely found in Hollywood films in these roles, more realistic with verisimilitude as a result. As a short, there's not a lot to actively discuss, when the experience is more in just watching it for yourself, but this personality both adds to the film and gives me something to talk about. That its low budget gives it far more character in what it has to do in terms of locations and sets. A main performances from an older man that's interesting regardless of whether its good acting or not technically, his appearance and how he performs his role interesting in terms of both the short and looking outside at the short. A surprisingly amount of subtly in detail also helps what is a sickly humoured, one which whilst obvious I appreciated immensely.

Abstract Spectrum: None

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMGM1MjUyZTQtYjFhNi00NWQwLWEyMzYtZWQ0ZGFjYWYy
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A Bowl of Oatmeal (Dirs. Dietmar Post, Lawrence Gise, Matthew Bezanis, David White, Leslie Hucko and Hsia-Huey Wu, 1996):

Skipping forwards into the mid-to-late nineties, you get to the weirdest one of the five, a short that was still etched into my brain over a decade since I first saw it in this compilation. A short that can only work at this length but evokes an utterly unnatural premise not from the supernatural but a grimy, ugly realism. A man (Pietro Gonzales), in poverty and spending most of the film in dirty y-fronts and vest, makes a bowl of oatmeal only for it to start talking to him. His ego, inexplicably in the form of this meal, tries to get him to live his life, to meet people and take up hobbies. One idea to take up crafting however leads the man to steal vast quantities of meat from butchers' vans to create something to fill the void of loneliness. It's a bizarre viewing experience made more so as their weirdness comes from a vein of depression. Downbeat, dirt strewn environments are where this short takes place, showing the city centres of the nineties as being as bleak and depressing to be within as they could be in the eighties shorts, and the man's living quarters a depiction of his fragile mind as all this takes place.. This obscurity amongst obscurities called A Bowl of Oatmeal manages to be effective in the smallest of lengths.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

The Principles of Karma (Dir. Craig Wallace, 1996):

This short feels time stamped to its era of its making, attempting a nineties Greg Araki film but with the obvious difficulty in trying to encapsulate what makes the likes of The Doom Generation (1995) both loved and reviled. It doesn't look the same at all - not a colourful, aesthetically precise work like Araki's - but does takes the Generation X  mood instead from his work. Originally The Principles of Karma was the one that really let the anthology down, and a lot of that is to do that, eventually, its plot of a deadbeat high scholar being indoctrinated into a pre-Fight Club world of subversion by a TV repair man does peter out. The initial idea that he and his team of masked figures are kidnapping teenagers to un-brainwash them from drab suburbia is a shot of subversion, but not reaching the heights of an Araki film, or the highest watermark of this type of eighties and nineties cinema, Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), in terms of actually being subversive in a genre bending way.

Far more interesting, and why The Principles of Karma has grown in quality for me, is the first half following our stereotypical Gen-X'er's miserable, Möbius strip like life. Get up, get beat up at school, wait at the bus station for hours, get home only for his parents to be glued to the television and barely register him, go up stairs to listen to music, sleep, repeat. Even if he's your stereotype of this type of person he, alongside having nice taste in fashion with a t-shirt with Akira (1988) on it, is sympathetic as the film maker uses proto-comedy torture by extending this cycle for most of its running time. The pay off with the TV repair man could've be completely excised, more found in this initial and far more rewarding example of how utterly miserable high-lower class to middle class life if for anyone, not just Americans in the nineties like this character.

Abstract Spectrum: None

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

From http://offscreen.com/images/articles/_resized/cutting_moments.jpg

Cutting Moments (Dir. Douglas Buck, 1997):

After the other shorts, Cutting Moments is a drastic change. It's completely opposed to the other shorts, clashing violently against them but was wisely made the last of them all. Both because it's the best but because of how unremittingly bleak it is, ending the anthology for anyone to feel emotionally destitute but the only short appropriate to have ended on. While its notorious for its level of violence¹, the more sobering and rewarding surprise is that it's a psychological drama which never gets to its sickening violence until the last ten minutes or so, forcing you through the bleakest suburban drama possible first. It builds slowly with a discomforting chill based in reality. A completely disconnected couple (Gary Betsworth and Nicca Ray) have major personal issues, barely talk to one another, and their son is about to be taken away from them into custody. The issue for the later is unknown but it's a catalyst for an even greater sense of distress that fills the short's mood like a painful silence. (Possibly even abuse as there's a shot of the boy's Power Ranger dolls laid in what the shot evokes as a sexual position, one which nonetheless makes the father, watching his son playing in the garden, uncomfortable and hints at a back story the director wisely never elaborates on, making it more distressing).

It builds from this, an aesthetic like the other shorts build from lo-fi verisimilitude, where the props feel like they were donated from the production crew's own homes or from a charity/Samaritan store. Unknown actors, who in this case share a great performance together of immense coldness and the sense of these two both having to suppress emotional angst, emphasis that named stars can actually be a deterrent in how arch and artificial they could be in such roles; in place of unknowns and actors from theatre etc here who carry the weight of this short superbly. Then, when the wife dresses up to try to romance her husband only for him to ignore her for a sports game, she first takes an scouring pad to her lips to remove the lipstick than cuts them off with scissors.

Tom Savini, who did the horrifying practical effects that take place, called this film the sickest he ever worked on but the change to realistic gore, involving consensual mutilation and self harm, is closer to Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and a sequence in Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972) involving self mutilation of the genitals with glass. Internal emotional harm portrayed in a grotesque and extreme metaphor, something rarely to be acted out in real life but as appropriate in a story for portraying this breaking point for both characters. No one will leave the film feeling anything but being stabbed in the gut, even when it comes to this violence sombre and successfully serious in tone. As the final shots are Polaroids of the eventual crime scene and the reactions of horrified police officers and people to come take the son away to safety, still playing outside in the yard, it's the bleakest thing to leave this anthology from but that's not a bad thing considering the short's incredible accomplishments.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) The version of Cutting Moments from the titular anthology is censored for the old 2000s UK DVD. That doesn't however stop the impact in the slightest, so I advise caution for any potential viewer which whatever version they see. It's a short you're prepared to see, rather than accidentally stumble over or be forced to see, even if you'll feel as awful as I did afterwards in doing so.

A Night to Dismember (1983)

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Director: Doris Wishman

Screenplay: Judith J. Kushner

Cast: Samantha Fox as Vicki Kent; Diane Cummins as Mary Kent; Saul Meth as Adam Kent; Miriam Meth as Blanche Kent; William Szarka as Billy Kent; Chris Smith as Sam Kent; Dee Cummins as Vicki Todd

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #137

Synopsis: Locked away from killing two neighbourhood boys, Vicki Kent (porn actress Samantha Fox, not the British Page 3 pin-up) is released in 1986 from a mental institution back to her family. Her sister Mary (Diane Cummins) is not too pleased with this development, devising with their brother to put Vicki back in the institution. Things are never simple though. People are dying in horrifying ways. The family's already cursed by a series of strange, alarmingly prolific deaths. There's a detective, presiding over the film as the narrator, sniffing around their home. And there's voices coming from the hat box.

How does a film as illogical as A Night to Dismember exist, a genre film author Stephen Thrower in Nightmare U.S.A describe as being made in Purgatory rather than the New York state it was in? Well, when a disgruntled film lab technician burns the building down, destroying a large chunk of your newest project, you either give up or do what Doris Wishman did and try to scramble together a new version. Having marketed a trailer beforehand, which involves an entirely different story involving demonic/psychic possession, the Queen of Sexploitation felt she had to still provide a finished product. One built from surviving fragments, clips from the trailers, outtakes and even clips from her previous films to put together what is a remix film of a work that never actually existed. For the most part A Night of Dismember is a pretty gruesome horror film inspired by slasher films. Even if the effects are obvious Wiseman, no stranger to extremity having made roughies (a sexploitation subgenre with an emphasis on violence) and porn, does make a film of the era. (Fake) head placed in a fireplace. Head squashed under a car wheel. Decapitation. A heart being punched out of someone's chest. Axes. Material which is blood soaked. However the look of the film, due to its materials, evokes how Herschell Gordon Lewis' films in the sixties which were paradoxically nasty but have the same quaintness of middle America. As parts of the film use old footage, there's a piece of that kitsch here that permeates the entire work.

From https://thecultcorner.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/kent-newspaper.jpg

Montage theory suggest that when individual shots are placed together they create an emotional or intellectual reaction in a viewer. How the shots are put together can drastically change this. Then you factor in how avant-garde filmmakers like Bruce Conner used pre-existing footage to create films like A Movie (1958) which create reactions in viewers trying to put this material together, collages of material that should not connect together but provide an effect nonetheless even if it's an intellectual consideration. You may find it utterly absurd to bring this idea to an infamous film from the same director of the Chesty Morgan films, but A Night to Dismember is a really peculiar case of what happens when a director attempts to make a film from existing materials rather than create new footage. One with a plot put together in continuity editing, from meagre pieces as a result of a rare circumstance of failure.

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Noticeably, this film is not meant to be like a Bruce Conner film, meant to be a horror film following a single plot continuity. A string of murders that may be the guilt of a psychologically damaged young woman named Vicki, being driven insane by her siblings out of spite or misdeeds by someone else. The circumstances are in truth a working director attempting to make a product from off-cuts, like Owen Land's Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1966) for a drive-in theatre audience. When this happens in b-movie or genre cinema, it can lead to some bizarre emotional effects on the viewer. None intended, but the result of trying to scramble together a full feature length film from barely a lot. Think Coffin Joe's Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind (1978), an apt title for this type of film, a collage of deleted and previously censored scenes from other films strung together by a loose "plot". A Night to Dismember is already from a director notorious for low budget films like Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965), with post synch dialogue, shots of feet and decor to hide the dubbing in actors mouths, and having to work around quick schedules. A film which is build from fragments in an attempt to make a story in itself a literal hallucination of a deranged mind.

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The plot is effected by being so compromised that attempting to fully understand the plot is something you have to eventually jettison. A pretension person like me would argue it has real dream logic by pure accident but it's not that far from some of the bizarre dreams I've actually had in my life. Some dreams do follow a real continuity when you have them in your sleep, even if they are compacted with figures and time blurred. There are also dreams which are frantic, ones you (or at least I) have woken up from confused which remind me of A Night to Dismember, a blast of pure cut-ups of scenes and events that hurdle onwards. Sometimes, following a slither of cohesive logic, they can be understood, others no so much. With A Night to Dismember, a viewer is experiencing film that had to compensate with so much narration. A lot of this narration is actually unnecessary, forcing a viewer to also have to separate between that which isn't of use and that which is with little time before the next sequence takes place. You only have seconds to decipher and understand each piece of it as it goes, frantically going along until many will slip behind and experience the film by the end in a maddening blur. This is a film where the detective narrator was helped in his case by every family member having a diary, detailed diaries that can explicitly talk of voices coming from a hat box or dialogue like "Suddenly Vicki felt like someone was making love to her in bright flashing colors". That's the kind of absurdity brought here, non-sequiturs made more pronounced by plot threads which feel less like they should be there but to make up the feature length.

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The plot then is revealed to be a mess. When a plot does not follow a cohesive narrative, and the audience member can perceive that they haven't stepped on a film that is deliberately manipulating this structure, confusion shall arise. Aspects of the plot itself which make sense don't follow conventions either. Vicki's mental stability is capable of devouring your own sanity as a viewer. When there are voices indeed coming from the hat box, not done as a joke or with the mysterious voices not coming from a conventional place of horror like the closet. Or the screen turns red and psychedelic with mysterious hands caressing her, a lot of the sounds of distress inexplicably sounding like orgasms due to a poor choice of sound design. Some of this material is actually successful, the weirdness original and hitting successes at points, a sequence where Vicki witnesses a corpse walk out of a lake, her brother in a disguise to drive her insane, the most successful. Then there are plot points which make no sense or are superfluous, emphasised by narration which explains actions that are taking place onscreen as they are happening. Spilling into each other with an abruptness not from  a pace, carefully laid out plot but using odds and sods in the surviving material. The whole Kent brothers prologue is pointless and ridiculous - people killing people with axes only to fall on their own weapon and die; wives wandering the gardens in a nightgown so small their chests are barely kept in; and all other sorts of madness. The viewers' mind will try to connect the dots. The pleasure and pain, depending on the viewer's reaction, is from this denial of the connections, the desire to rationalise the scenes together becomes overwhelmed and breaking down.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zb8hyku64gg/hqdefault.jpg

Then there's the music and sound which is as much a violent influence on a viewer's emotions. Like other Doris Wishman films it was post synched with likely only one male voice playing all the males and a female one for the women in this particularly example. The head beings squashed by a car is clearly being sound tracked by someone making a squishing sound with their mouth. Animal mimicry is even involved. The soundtrack is even more disorientating. A collage of swinging jazz, game show music and library compositions. More unpredictable than the switches in this music is that it gets layered on top of one another. Combined with the hectic cutting of some scenes, the narrative being a constant or the limited dialogue track, and the result's a hellish sound and visual landscape you less to try to process but get sucked into and spat out of at the end. Eventually when the resolution is found, when the killer's revealed but almost everyone still dies, or gets involved in running through the same stairway like a Möbius strip nightmare, you have no idea what's exactly happened unless you rewatch and try to take in the information in carefully.

Personal Opinion:

Not for the faint of heart. You have to be prepared for this type of film, which defines every "bad" technique possible. Wonky dubbing, random music blurts, unpredictable scene changes, nonsensical plotting. For those who can appreciate this type of cinema as unintentionally surreal, imaging an alternative world where this was deliberately made this way is the way forward. One of those irrational one-offs you don't forget, swirling in my mind as a gaudy haze dream. It's certainly the most extreme of all of Doris Wishman's films by all accounts, very bad circumstances leading her to improvise a film that's arguably more rewarding in this state than was planned.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

From https://thecultcorner.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/murica.png

Vamp (1986)

From https://www.movieposter.com/posters/
archive/main/173/MPW-86856

Director: Richard Wenk

Screenplay: Richard Wenk and Donald P. Borchers

Cast: Chris Makepeace as Keith; Robert Rusler as AJ; Grace Jones as Queen Katrina; Dedee Pfeiffer as Allison; Gedde Watanabe as Duncan; Billy Drago as Snow; Sandy Baron as Vic

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #136

Richard Wenk, before he directed Vamp, had already tackled vampires in a humorous way with Dracula Bites the Big Apple (1979), a short length farce in which Dracula (Peter Loewy) gets sick of Transylvania and decides to go to New York City. I really liked the short, an obvious but playful comedy which never took itself serious, imagining Dracula and a Renfield figure (Barry Gomolka) stuck in the midst of  New York nightlife, the casket full of his homeland's soil left in a taxi cab and the attempts to feed on potential victims much more difficult to accomplish in the lit up, urban environment which never sleeps. I was not expecting the short to suddenly burst into a musical number for one thing, which emphasised that Dancing in the Moonlight wasn't a bland song from a band named Toploader I heard way too much in my childhood in the early 2000s¹, but actually a good song done with an actual, accomplished music number here with choreographed hobo car washers. One which even breaks the fourth wall as the short takes nothing for granted for the sake of a joke. (It even manages one legitimately great gag I wished another vampire film did, where Dracula gets caught out finally getting a victim in his clutches in her apartment only to be at their surprise birthday party). Adding to the tone of the short was that it was shot on-location in New York City. Before the cleanup of the city in the nineties, this grungy porn theatre filled environment is utterly cinematic, as interesting here as it was in more serious horror films like The Driller Killer (1979), ending at the beach under a pier where Dracula decides to float back to his homeland using a coffin as an improvised boat.

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In comparison Vamp, his film for New World Pictures, does feel a little more cleaned up compared to the short. Vamp has a lot of the same virtues but it's not the same type of film, not as strange and inventive, removed from the real New York City locations but in its own cinematic world. Instead it's a solid if frankly conventional horror-comedy from the mid eighties. The advantage it has, taken from Dracula Bites the Big Apple, is a similar charm with the material, already playing with the viewer in the first scene when one presumes a conventional flashback to a medieval castle. Then its revealed to be an only for it to be the over elaborate introduction ritual for a college fraternity, the soundtrack of ominous music in the background starting to skip and our protagonists for the film Keith (Chris Makepeace) and AJ (Robert Rusler) to get immediately bored and stop acting the ritual out. Instead they offer the frat brothers another way to get into their fraternity, promising to bring a stripper to the house that night. Having to borrow a car from Duncan (Gedde Watanabe), a rich college student who has to pay for friendship and only wants to hang out with people, they go to a strip club in the middle of the city that's bad for any of them to have entered.  

From https://professormortis.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/snow.jpg

Even if their bargain to get into the fraternity and the kick-starter for the plot could be seen as sleazy, the two main male protagonists are played never less than likable, which is a huge advantage to Vamp particularly as there's later emotion drama brought in to the hijinks surrounding its main premise, a nightclub used by a vampire (Grace Jones) to supply her food. Less chauvinistic arseholes, more cocky but ultimately lovable scamps. Even Duncan, whose car they commandeer, never comes off as an annoying joke character, actor Watanabe playing a geek whose lack of friends, and the excitement he finds in this journey to the club, is sympathetic. Watanabe actually steals his scenes on camera throughout the film making how his trajectory plays out even more sympathetic, wishing more sympathy was there for him. How even AJ's trajectory plays out, wrong footing viewers, is as interesting, bringing more emotional weight because the actors can bring out more to these characters than caricatures.

From http://manisthewarmestplacetohide.com/sites/manisthewarmestplacetohide.com/
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Grace Jones was a huge "get" for Vamp and, compared to the divisive views of A View to a Kill (1985), the James Bond film she stars in, this feels more rewarding. Here even if it's a mainly silent role with her in various states of prosthetics for a large part of the film, Jones' real life charisma is shown. A View to a Kill is a "guilty" pleasure for me, able to find entertainment in it despite the glaring issues, one of which is that Jones really doesn't stand out in spite of the heavy handed attempt to make her both a menacing henchwoman for Christopher Walkens' and a Bond girl for the aging Roger Moore, her charisma lost in a film that's as kitsch as you could get in has a lot within it that pushes her prescience to the side. Here in Vamp, I'd argue she is an utterly beautiful woman but you also see the figure who is a living embodiment of an Amazon. Blue eyes that could cut through a person, who memorably for me in an interview for The Guardian said all men "should be penetrated at least once to know how it feels"². It's not a role to fully show her as the powerful person she's seen for many, as a famous musician and a public figure, but especially in the elaborate makeup and costumes, you still get a sliver of it, more than enough to have an impact.

From https://forgottenfilmcast.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/vamp-4.png

This cast sustains a predictable plot as does the aesthetic. Visually, not only do you have the gritty urban squalor of its urban location, but someone in the lighting crew clearly obsessed with Mario Bava and his gift for coloured gels. The colour, even for a film from the neon soaked era of eighties cinema, is bright even when its dark, managing even to make a frequently used sewer location vibrant. Colour is such a hugely neglected aspect of horror in the modern day, where digitally shot realism usually means dull browns and greys without a palette, even the deliberate lack of colour a conscious choice that can add so much to a film. The moment the transition to colour from monochrome was adapted to begot the advantage of the colour spectrum tempering an audience's mood especially for horror cinema. A lot of the eighties horror that is beloved, even when flawed, had the advantage of cinematographers, technicians for the visuals and lights, and production and costume designers who were willing to use colour to their advantage, a lot of these films now in High Definition becoming a macabre, ecstatic fest for the eyes. Even one like Vamp which contrasts it to the garbage filled urban squalor and desolate back streets has its use of colour to its advantage.

From https://pic.yts.gs/yt/20160626/31739/screenshot3.png

It's this which helps Vamp greatly. The plot eventually becomes more conventional, where Kevin finds himself with Allison (Dedee Pfeiffer), a girl working as a waitress at the club who knows him from the past, really the major issue with Vamp in how it follows an expected plot trajectory and that their chemistry is far less interesting than if following Kevin and AJ or if Duncan's on screen. Far more interesting is everyone else surrounding this eventual narrative. Where Billy Drago, with a significantly better performance than in Takashi Miike's Imprint (2006), inexplicably exists in this weird urban environment as the leader of an all albino male gang who have no real connection to the plot, merely a part of the wonderland environment the protagonists cannot escape. Where bus drivers, even small girls, are vampires who live in this nocturnal reality they've stumbled into. And of course Sandy Baron as Vic, Grace Jones' lackey and the manager/host of the strip club that supplies her nourishment. Baron alongside Gedde Watanabe are the real sparks of entertainment in the film just in terms of their performances, Baron helped by Vic being a fascinating and amusing creation in himself. His untold back story, obsessed with trying to set up shop in Las Vegas, no matter how much Grace Jones ignores this idea, and playing a lounge lizard persona gives the character such a compelling dynamic, back story that doesn't need to be explained but adds richness to Baron's scenes. This type of personality is what you get the most out of Vamp. The main plot is pretty predictable, concluding as one would presume it to. Far more interesting is these quirks that appear from Dracula Bites the Big Apple, Richard Wenk's sense of humour and oddness the reason to view the film.

From https://professormortis.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/deepduran.jpg

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1) Nineties and early Millennial Top 40s music in the United Kingdom just from my memories is a weird, frightening thing. Cotton Eyed Joe by Rednex, Swedish euro dance line dance music, was a Number 1 hit in 1994 for example.

2) Link HERE to the whole interview. 

Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

Director: Wes Craven

Screenplay: Wes Craven

Cast: Heather Langenkamp as Heather Langenkamp/Nancy Thompson; Robert Englund as Robert Englund/Freddy Krueger; Miko Hughes as Dylan Porter; John Saxon as John Saxon/Lt. Donald Thompson; Tracy Middendorf as Julie; David Newsom as Chase Porter; Fran Bennett as Dr. Christine Heffner; Wes Craven as Wes Craven; Robert Shaye as Robert Shaye

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #135

After the disaster of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), Wes Craven was asked back by New Line Cinema. Craven, stuck in the position to resurrect Freddy Krueger after a sequel that was titled Freddy's Dead, and after the sequels before which were more comedy with frights, found a novel idea. One I'd argue, as it predates his 1996 meta-slasher Scream, is the far superior attempt to dissect his own work as a horror director, in the guise of the first scary Elm Street film in a long time. Where he plays himself in a cameo going mad trying to write an Elm Street sequel, locked up in a Los Angeles home like a HP Lovecraft character. Where then-CEO of New Line Cinema Robert Shaye plays himself trying to convince Heather Langenkamp, playing herself as the actress behind Nancy Thompson from the first 1984 film, to return to the series. Before this comes off as "cute", or a proto-Charlie Kaufman script, Wes Craven takes this and various cameos (John Saxon as himself, Robert Englund as himself etc.) and makes a horror film that's both creepy and with food for thought.

For me Scream was cute, to the point it's acclaim as a cerebral horror film is a detriment on all its viewings, more rewarding if you accepted its self-referential nature still meant it went through with all the clichés of slasher films no one called it out on¹. (That and my weird, temperamental relationship with slashers, which at this point a cinematic-psychoanalysis would be the only person able to figure out).  New Nightmare is a new Nightmare on Elm Street which just happens to be a meta-commentary, deciding that instead of just playing out Freddy Krueger terrorising teenagers again he should be a fictional character in this "world" on screen who is now terrorising his creators, imagining the relationship being one's work and its psychological effect in this extreme form.  It never elaborates on its main point and becomes tedious about it - that Krueger is an ancient evil that took form in a fictional horror film character - but plays with it. That as the sequels became watered down and less scary in this world, the ancient evil became stronger, and could finally escape when the franchise ended. That of its innate idea that evil can be tamed, or that the worst in life can be channelled into cathartic horror tales, which Craven thankfully doesn't spend the entire film discussing.

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Instead he shows it, using a real human fear where Heather's young son Dylan (Miko Hughes) is suffering from bizarre fits and behaviour which could be early signs of mental illness or Kruger escaping the film world into reality. It piles in real topics (an actual incident where Langenkamp was stalked translated to her fictionalised self, death of a loved one) to build up a tone of psychological horror until Krueger, meaner and no longer joking around, shows up fully. The resulting film is the most elaborate of the entire series, an American horror film from the nineties in all its bombast. Less surrealism but more fantastical dream sequences. The most lavish production wise - where J. Peter Robinson's orchestra score evokes Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) than the first Nightmare on Elm Street, and an ending, evoking fairy tales explicitly, takes place in an elaborate fantasy nightmare dungeon. It's far from the first Nightmare but it feels like a final continuation. Something which feels, despite being utterly different in tone, like an actual tribute to the series. Unlike Freddy's Dead, there's a sense of meaningful spectacle here where cameos take on more meaning, John Saxon as himself and Nancy's father taking on more meaning when Saxon gets to have a larger role as a father figure, discussing the escalating personal issues Langenkamp as if she was Nancy grown up. Where the film does predate Charlie Kaufman legitimately when they're reading the script of the movie they're actually in, as far as you could go with Elm Street as you've practically broken the world for good.

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An actual closure for the series is the result, one of those rare cases where a franchise could end on a high note. Yes, there's Freddy vs. Jason (2003) but I view that as a spin-off, while I've always viewed remakes as their own franchise whether they get off the ground or not².Texas Chainsaw Massacre, while I like The New Beginning (1994) as a bizarre film, didn't end in a way most would like, the remake films their own organisms. Few, if any, argue Halloween ended its franchise well with Halloween Resurrection (2002) before the remake films came. With Nightmare on Elm Street however you can thankfully argue New Nightmare is not only a good end but one of the best films in the whole franchise. After this you do get the aforementioned Freddy vs. Jason and the 2010 remake, a cynical production I can thankfully ignore as its not part of the original franchise but a failed attempt at a new one. The original franchise as it stands was a mess, but more because of Parts 4  to 6  than a fatal flaw within itself. Where the emphasis on comedy and Freddy Krueger as a popular character, a family friendly brand even if he was a child murderer, was the issue when the series reached its peak in popularity but this aspect to its popularity was also its crippling weakness. It seems unfair to suggest when, as the franchise became popular for many who might've not watched a lot of horror, it dropped in quality but you should always blame the producers for watering down their product, emphasising the wrong details to the ones that made the series interesting. Or, as was infamously the case with The Dream Master (1988), having less than a year to create a sequel which would severely compromise any production.

From http://images4.static-bluray.com/reviews/7551_4.jpg

Production wise, even with Freddy's Dead, none of these films in spite of this later pressure and the low budgets ever dropped in quality. All the films stood out in terms of the quality of their productions, even to the point of all the films having their own personalities. Part 1 with its dark, independent horror tone. Part 2 with its weird, colourful sweatiness. Part 3 more popcorn friend and fantastical but still gristly. Part 4, the most eighties of the lot, and Part 5's sudden shift to gothic. Part 6, weird and quirky rainbow colours, and New Nightmare a sombre high budgeted nineties horror. It was always the scripts which were the issue. The emphasis on comedy and Krueger as a comedy figure even when it was tonally inappropriate. The convoluted ways to resurrect or kill off the villain when, as the merchandising sold and box office was high, New Line has the sense to capitalise on their success but with a rush to get the next film out. Deciding in one film to resurrect him by way of flaming dog urine or Krueger wearing a Nintendo Power Glove.

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The franchise at least has four great entries. Four out of seven films, even if you wished more of them were better, isn't bad either especially when compared to other franchises where even their bad entries have no virtues. The first naturally, with New Nightmare the perfect bookend few other franchises rarely had. Dream Warriors, which I once didn't like, has grown on me to the point I see all the virtues people fell in love with from the film, many likely growing up as I did with it being the first they saw or the more cherished of all the sequels, even if there are issues in tone that have to be taken into consideration. And I'd strongly argue, as people have within the current decade or so, that Freddy's Revenge (1985), the first ever sequel, has so much to appreciate in its own virtues, blatant subtexts and weirdness. And if anything, al the films have memorable moments, nuggets of gold in between faecal matter which are testaments to practical and prosthetic  effects being an art form, artists and designers who contributed as much to these films especially when the innate virtue of the entire Elm Street was that, as it was about dreams, the people behind these effects or the production design could step out of bland shocks and be imaginative. Anything from the effects in Part 2 to Screaming Mad George's cockroach sequence from Part 4 are scenes which will make every film in the series worth seeing, even entertaining in spite of later creative mistakes. Scenes you could point out to friends as proof of how inventive and well made horror films are.

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1) Reviewed HERE. The review has the added bonus of a screening where the accidental saturation in red in the projection wasn't a detraction but gave the revisit its own personality.

2) God knows where the planned 2017-8 Halloween sequel is placed in this rule of mine as it means, if it's a continuation of the 1978 film, it jumps over Rob Zombie's two remake films. 

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.

From http://horrorsnotdead.com/images/family.jpg

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.

From http://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/136_1.jpg

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.

From http://images.mefeedia.com/the-screwfly-solution-33436159-orig.jpg