"You don't know what she is! You have no idea!"
Truer words of warning were never shouted. But police officer Frank Spivey (Steven Weber, who also adapted the teleplay from an original comic book story written by Bruce Jones and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson) does not hear them. He only sees a deranged man with a meat cleaver threatening a helpless teen-aged girl (Carrie Anne Fleming, giving an exceptionally strong performance) that he has taken captive.
Frank shoots and kills the deranged man, saving the captive girl's life. But he will soon wish that he had not.
The girl's name seems to be Jenifer, and she appears to be mentally disabled to the point of being non-verbal and childlike. Jenifer also has hideous facial deformities that make her appearance monstrous. But the body beneath that hideous face is sexually ripe and eager to please the man that saved her life.
Frank pretends to fight against his growing sexual obsession, telling himself, his increasingly estranged family, and his worried co-workers that he only wants Jenifer to be taken care of and given a chance at some kind of normal life. But as Jenifer reveals that there is a monstrous nature lurking behind her monstrous facial deformities, Frank's obsession and his life both spiral out of control and whirl down into madness.
My recent trip to Italy has, and this should come as no surprise whatsoever to any long term reader of this blog, put me in the mood to revisit the work of Dario Argento. I started to do so while in Rome, where I watched his masterpiece Deep Red for the umpteenth time, and I am finally getting caught up on the few Argento films that I have missed.
Argento's two superlative episodes of Masters of Horror, however, are not among the ones that I have missed.
But I do consider his two episodes to be more than worthy of inclusion on a list of his best works (a list that includes the aforementioned Deep Red, Suspiria, Tenebre, and Phenomena, to name but a select few) and I was more than happy to kick off my Argento binge by watching Jenifer again.
Argento's first season episode for Masters of Horror contains almost all of his visual and story telling trademarks. There is the gentle lullaby that serves as a harbinger of horror, a narrative that has the slightly off kilter logic of a vivid dream, moments of shocking and unsettling graphic violence, as well as a scrumptious selection of beautifully framed shots and images.
My favorite moments in this particular episode are the very beginning and the very end, bookends that give the story the unending cyclical feeling of a fable. Favorite moments that are between the bookends are when Jenifer licks her distorted lips after she meets young Amy in a backyard, when Frank visits, and then "rescues", Jenifer from the Asylum, Frank's teenage son's reaction to seeing Jenifer for the first time, Frank's reaction to what Jenifer has left in the refrigerator, and Jenifer's reaction to Frank's reaction.
My list can go on, but I would much rather you see the episode. But, if you haven't already, I recommend that you track down the original story by Bruce Jones and Bernie Wrightson, and read it before watching the episode. That way you can better appreciate how both Stephen Weber's script and Dario Argento's directoring eye stay remarkably close to the original story. There are numerous shots that are taken directly from the comic book. Nonetheless, because the episode had to be an hour long, Weber's script does add some events and characters, especially in the second half, that were not in the original story. But the additions work and do not feel like padding.
But it is Argento's visual fidelity to the source material (it is surprising just how many shots and sequences are framed and blocked exactly like Wrightson's orignial drawings) and how he is able to meld those copied images perfectly with his own visual ideas (i.e. Jenifer appearing in a dream, unblemished and beautiful, and calling and beckoning to Frank to come to her) is just one example, of many, of Argento's utterly unique and impossible to deny, or to ingnore, directing talents.
, the Masters of Horror episode directed by Brad Anderson (
, 
) 
tries to have it both ways. On one side of the coin, it tries to deliver the gruesome and over-the-top comeuppance to a deserving character in the reknowned tradition of the beloved E.C. horror comics (
, etc). But on the flip side, it tries to present sympathetic characters trying to overcome an other-worldly assault from "pure evil." The result is an uneven horror story that both delivers the gruesome goods (the most despicable member of the Bunch gets his comeuppance but good) yet misses the dramatic mark by a difficult to define (by me) margin.
, 
) or screenwriter David J. Schow (
, 
) also felt this way, as the episode presents one character in more of a tragic light. He not only seems to be resigned to his horrible fate, but he also hints at welcoming it.
.
with a certain amount of trepidation, because its storyline (a blatant exploitation of the Terri Schiavo controversy) struck fairly close to home. My wife succumbed to liver failure, brought upon by Alcoholic Hepatitis and Cirrhosis of the liver, and wound up comatose and on life support. For two and a half weeks I was in the hellish position of having to make decisions about her care and whether or not to have the doctors resuscitate her, if need be. I opted for the most aggressive treatment, but it was all for naught. After two and a half weeks on life support, my wife of almost 13 years died. Unlike the character in this story, she did not return from beyond the grave to kick my ass into one.
) Esposito and director Rob (
) Schmidt were withholding important parts of the conversation so that the episode's "big reveal" during its final reel could be even more shocking than it already wasn't. I knew it was coming because the amount of easy to see omissions in the opening minutes spelled it out in big, easy to read letters. Another thing that bugged me was just how wrong the handling of Abbey's hospital care was. I'm sure all the burn treatments KNB Effects recreated in such loving detail are true to life, but the handling of Abbey's medical condition in the script is laughably unrealistic. There is one moment in particular, involving an attempted skin donation, that is just flat out insulting to the intelligence of anyone that has ever had to wait for a transplant donor, or had a loved one in an intensive car unit.
, 
) takes 
) into territory that is far too familiar and, just like every other 
, 
) episode of 
and Larry Cohen's 
qualify in that department, it is one of its stronger episodes, visually speaking, and contains some truly unsettling moments. It was well worth the wait.
). What happens to her on that walk, and what she discovers about her own past, destroys her innocence forever.
seems to be the most reviled. While it isn't all that successful, it isn't nearly as horrible as I had been led to believe. Based on a short story (available in Dennis Etchison's similarly titled anthology, 
) has difficulty keeping a girlfriend because her love of creepy insects (she is an entomologist, after all) is, well, creepy. Following the advice of her lab partner and best friend Max (Jesse Hlubik), Ida asks out Misty Falls (Erin Brown, 
), but does not mention her fascination with creepy insects. The secret cannot be kept, however, because Ida has received a strange new specimen in the mail: a carnivorous insect whose bite causes a horrifying metamorphosis in its victims. The specimen gets loose and bites sweet, lovestruck Misty...
. While the episode did not disappoint, it did not impress me all that much either. While I enjoyed the episode's almost Cronenberg style manner of examining how quickly a hastily formed relationship can go sour, with one partner becoming a literal monster (that'd be the Cronenberg part) almost overnight, I also found some of director Lucky McKee's directing choices off putting.
to see how good she can be, her perfomance came across as stiff and eccentric to the point of parody. This undermines the early romantic scenes with Brown, who steals the episode from Bettis by virtue of her natural way of expressing her character's awkward feelings and the shyness resulting from them, because it looks like Bettis would rather be anywhere else but with Brown. The one and only time the approach works in the story is when Misty, already well into her change, explodes into a literal venom spewing rage. Ida, already upset from a confrontation with her homophobic landlady (Marcia Bennett, 
), can only tearfully cower as Misty rants, raves, and hurls foul mouthed insults directly into her face. In one of the bonus feature documentaries, McKee states that this is his favorite sequence in the episode, an opinion that I share. Both actresses communicate the raw emotion of an utterly out of control fight beautifully. If only the rest of their interactions could have felt so real. But the episode is well worth seeing for Brown's performance, both before and after she becomes a fanged beastie.
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