Chadzilla ROARS!!!

Masters of Horror: Right to Die (Season 2, Episode 9 - 1/05/2007)

"Wake me."

Abbey (Julia Anderson) and Cliff (Martin Donovan) are an estranged couple that have their marital problems put on hold by a horrible car accident.  One that leaves Abbey a charred and comatose husk.  Cliff does not want his wife to live in that condition, so he takes steps to let her die with dignity.  But then Cliff learns that every time Abbey's heart stops, her vengeful spirit appears to attack him and/or those close to him.  Fearing that if she dies, he dies, Cliff begins to fight for Abbey's right to live...

I approached Right to Die 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.

Right to Die lost me from the get go because it cheats, and badly.  The opening, pre-crash dialog between Abbey and Cliff is filled with several foreboding pauses and odd glances.  Something felt off and, long before Abbey became a comatose crispy critter, I realized that important information was being kept from me.  Screenwriter John (Graveyard Shift) Esposito and director Rob (Wrong Turn) 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.

On a technical level, the episode is competently directed and acted.  Schmidt does manage to generate some tension and delivers a solid jolt or two.  He also gives the gorehound viewers some truly disgusting images to drool over.  But none of that can detract from a weak and poorly thought out script that makes an even greater mistake in not giving the viewer a character to root for or empathize with.  Right to Die was just a bunch of unlikable people getting tortured and burned.  By the episode's end that was the only thing I could relate to, as I felt more than a bit tortured and burned myself.  This is one Masters of Horror episode I will not be adding to my collection.

Masters of Horror

Two stories adapted from the first season of Showtime's popular anthology series Masters of Horror.

Incident On and Off A Mountain Road - Adapted by Chris Ryall from a teleplay by Don Coscarelli & Stephen Romano, based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale.

"I believe anything can happen to anyone...anywhere...at anytime."

A young woman with a dark and troubled past literally runs into a monstrous serial killer and his latest victim while driving on a mountain road in the dead of night.

Joe R. Lansdale's short story Incident On and Off A Mountain Road was a brisk and efficient little yarn with a nasty I-didn't-see-that-coming twist ending that elevated it from entertaining escapism to memorable chiller.  The teleplay adaptation by writer/director Don Coscarelli, with the assist of Stephen Romano, fleshed out the lead character's back story and Moonface's way life with decidedly mixed results, but it kept the dark heart of Lansdale's story beating.  This comic adaptation works as a wonderful example of just how cinematic Lansdale's writing is and just how unnecessary Coscarelli and Romano's additions to the story were.  Hey, I love Angus Scrimm has much as the next Phantasm fan boy, and his performance in the episode is a wonderful showcase of his range as an actor, but his character added nothing to the story except the necessary padding to make it fit the required hour running time.  No matter the format, be it narrative prose, sequential art, or cinema, less will always be more.

Dreams in the Witch-House - Adapted by Ivan Brandon from a teleplay by Dennis Paoli & Stuart Gordon, based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft.

"She's coming.  She's coming for you."

After renting a room in a decrepit house, a graduate student is plagued with horrible nightmares.

Talk about a nasty ending!  Unlike Incident, Dreams in the Witch-House lets you know what is coming.  The story teases the viewer (or reader, in this instance) with the possibility that the dreaded event will not come to pass, only to stomp the life out of that hope before striding into the darkest regions of horror.  It's a chilling and very effective story, arguably the darkest episode of Masters of Horror first season.  (Miike's controversial Imprint, which shares some disturbing imagery with Dreams, was never broadcast.)  It has been more than a few years since I have read the Lovecraft story that is the episode's source material.  So I cannot compare and contrast the episode, or this adaptation of it, with the original story.  Taken on its own merits, Dreams is a dark, smart and scary.  It is also completely unafraid of going well past the safety line.  In other words, it couldn't be anything other than a Stuart Gordon film.

While the art for Incident was sharp and cinematic, Dreams has an impressionistic dream-like look, which is not all that surprising, considering the story's surreal subject matter.  However the approach does undercut the dramatic back bone of the story more than a little bit.  The artwork works best during the almost dialog free nightmare sequences, but it falls somewhat flat during the character building moments.  Nonetheless, it chills when needed, so it's all good.  Comic reading fans of Masters, Lansdale, Lovecraft, Don Coscarelli and/or Stuart Gordon are sure to find something to enjoy in this two story collection.

Masters of Horror (Season 1, Episode 1) Incident On And Off A Mountain Road (October 28, 2005)

"It's time to do the unexpected."

When Ellen (Bree Turner) literally runs into a serial killer (John  De Santis) and his most recent victim (Heather Feeney) she must draw upon the brutal training of her survivalist husband (Ethan Embry) in order to survive.

Writer/director Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Beastmaster) takes Joe R. Lansdale's tension filled short story Incident On And Off A Mountain Road (available in the anthology High Cotton) into territory that is far too familiar and, just like every other Masters of Horror entry to date, plays like a taut and terrifying 30-minute episode padded to fill a 60-minute time slot.  Some of that padding, the stuff involving Ellen's relationship with her abusive husband, works to the story's favor, giving Ellen's character much needed expository shading.  Coscarelli also does a good job of integrating the background flashbacks into the story proper.  Less successful is the adaptation character creation of Buddy (Angus Scrimm, the Tall Man in the Phantasm series).  Although wonderfully played by the far too underused Scrimm, Buddy is nothing more than a device to inform the audience of the mysterious killer's motivation and methods, and to add a few more needed minutes of running time.  Buddy also weakens Ellen's character in a subtle way.  In the short story, Ellen is utterly alone when facing Moonface (his victim is already dead) and she has to draw upon her own inner strength and survivalist training in her fight to the death.  But the adaptation has Ellen briefly captured and needing the "calm and collected" Buddy to show her a method of escape.  I can't help but think that Coscarelli would have served Lansdale's story better if he had kept Buddy out of it and just placed a greater focus on Ellen's husband, going into far more detail in regards to his training of Ellen, so that he could appear to be a sort of in absentia coach to her as she battles Moonface.  That certainly would have given the episode's brutal twist ending the ironic sting that it so desperately wanted to have.

Masters of Horror (Season 1, Episode 9) The Fair-Haired Child (January 6, 2006)

"Beware the Fair-Haired Child."

Judith (Lori Petty) and Anton (William Samples) abduct young Tara (Lindsay Pulsipher) to use as a sacrifice, so that their dead son (Walter Phelan) can live again.

I have been eager to see director William Malone's (House on Haunted Hill, Fear Dot Com) episode of Masters of Horror from the moment that I first saw its creepy-as-hell trailer.  Of course, as fate would have it, The Fair Haired Child is the last episode to be released on DVD.  (I assume that I will have to wait a similar length of time to get Joe Dante's acclaimed second season episode, The Screwfly Solution.)  While the episode isn't a high water mark for the first season, Dario Argento's Jenifer and Larry Cohen's Pick Me Up 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.

Viewed as an exercise in style-with-some-substance, The Fair Haired Child works beautifully, weaving together a surprisingly solid narrative that plays more like a dark fairy tale than a horror story.  The only thing that felt "off" about it, in retrospect, was the opening scene.  The mocked, ridiculed and oh-so-bashful Tara seen attending school bears no resemblance to the strong willed girl that Judith and Anton trap inside their basement.  Just a little glimpse of the strength hidden inside her would have been nice.  I have read some pretty harsh comments about Lori Petty's performance, yet she didn't strike me as being that bad.  Considering the lengths that her character has gone to bring back her son, her being a little cold and emotionally off just felt right.  But I do think that William Samples performance was much better.  Maybe it was his tortured by guilt shtick that made him easier to relate to.  Rounding out the small cast is Walter Phelan as Johnny, the sad, silent, and suicidal boy in the basement.  Genre savvy viewers will be quick to guess what it is that makes him so sad, silent, and suicidal, but the payoff is still worth the somewhat sloppy introduction to his character.  The child itself is just plain weird and creepy, which, come to think of it, is as good a way as any to describe the episode itself.

Masters of Horror (Season 1, Episode 3): Dance of the Dead (November 11, 2005)

"The world has big teeth, it eats girls like you for kicks..."

In a war ravaged America (nine million dead from repeated terrorist attacks) young, innocent Peggy (Jessica Lowndes) decides to take a walk on the wild side with Jak (Jonathan Tucker, Pulse).  What happens to her on that walk, and what she discovers about her own past, destroys her innocence forever.

Of the thirteen episodes from the first season of Masters of Horror, Tobe Hooper's Dance of the Dead 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, Masters of Darkness) by the legendary Richard Matheson (father of the episode's screenwriter, Richard Christian Matheson), Dance of the Dead, in its original form, was a dark, disturbing, and depressing look at the death of an innocent young girl's soul.  Tobe Hooper's version of that story manages to retain the dark, but it loses most, if not all, of the disturbing and depressing aspects.

Part of what made the original story so disturbing was the casual manner in which the young girl's innocence was swept away.  Matheson's short story, as constructed, would make for a great half hour short. But an episode of Masters of Horror is contractually obligated to be an hour long, so director Tobe Hooper and screenwriter Richard Christian Matheson pad things out with extraneous scenes and details that only bog down the central story.  The duo also make the mistake of personally linking the grotesque performances that take place in the Doom Room to Peggy's family, which robs Peggy's corruption of any and all sense of tragedy.  If her mother hadn't been such a scuzzball, or if her sister hadn't...well, then Peggy might have escaped from her little dalliance on the wild side with nothing more than a hangover and a collection of unpleasant memories.  As dramatized, the events that befall Peggy are more pathetic than they are tragic.  Dance of the Dead should have dug under the viewer's skin every bit as effectively as the fictional weapon Blizz ate away the skins of its victims, instead the episode just twitches and jerks around like one of the Doon Room's dancing corpses and, just like said corpse, it eventually collapses.

Masters of Horror (Season 1, Episode 10): Sick Girl (01/13/06)

Ida Teeter (Angela Bettis, May) 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, Screaming Dead), 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...

Having been impressed with director Lucky McKee's May, which featured an outstanding performance by Ms. Bettis, and being a pretty big fan of Erin (Misty Mundae) Brown, my hopes were more than a little bit high going into Sick Girl.  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.

My biggest problem was with Angela Bettis's over the top performance as Ida.  While Bettis is a fine actress, just watch May or Carrie 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, The Woods), 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.

Anchor Bay does its usual fine job of stuffing the DVD with extras.  There is the aforementioned documentary, Blood, Bugs and Romance: An Interview With Lucky McKee, a chatty commentary that is more like a casual conversation than it is a discussion of the making of the episode, and on set interviews with Bettis, Brown, and Brad MacDonald.  Fans of McKee, Bettis, and/or Brown shouldn't be disappointed with the goodies.  Their opinion of the episode, however, may differ greatly.