So since I finished all of the episodes in the big torrent I had downloaded, I’ve been having to actually kind of work to get further episodes, hence only having one to discuss this time. The episode I watched this morning was called Pick Me Up. It was directed by Larry Cohen (he directed It’s Alive, and wrote the Maniac Cop movies) and was written by David J. Schow (wrote The Crow and like, some of the Critters movies) based on his own short story.

It starred Fairuza Balk (who I assumed was dead) and Michael Moriarty and some dude I’ve never heard of. Basically the story is about two rival serial killers up in Washington. One is a hitchhiker and one is a truck driver, and they basically get into a turf war. Fairuza Balk plays her typical Fairuza Balk character, a damaged, dangerous loner chick who doesn’t want to take any shit from anybody. She ends up becoming the prey of both rival killers, and the episode centers around their mutual hunting of her.

It’s fucking BAD ASS premises, and I really wish they’d followed through with all of the sweet potential it had. But it didn’t. It was competently directed and went along pretty well until the last ten minutes or so. Then it kind of felt like the writer didn’t really know how he wanted to end it, so he ripped off the wrap around story from The Twilight Zone movie. You know, the one where Dan Akroyd is the ambulance driver and John Lithgow is all relieved to be off of the oh so scary jet and then Dan turns around and says “You want to see something REALLY scary?” and yeah, badassediness ensues.

Oh, btw, that was a spoiler. I’m not too worried about it, because as soon as they’re in the ambulance, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen. It’s not what SHOULD have happened. I mean, I hate to be obvious but it would have been WAY cooler if it turned out that Fairuza Balk was actually a killer hunting them both. Then it could have ended with her going off to kill more people. That would have been super sweet. But oh well. I don’t make these decisions.

One thing that REALLY choked me was this: The two killers are in Michael Moriarty’s truck with Fairuza Balk between them, and Michael Moriarty (who seemed to be doing an impression of a drunk Christopher Walken) tells the joke about the woman who finds the frozen rattlesnake and then nurses it back to health and the rattlesnake bites her and says “Listen bitch, you know what I was when you picked me up.”

That would have been fine had Quentin Tarantino not written the EXACT SAME THING in Natural Born Killers. It was far cooler and more effective in Natural Born Killers than it was here. Doing it again was just, like, plagiarism.

This episode is the point where I start to feel like the “Masters of Horror” aren’t so much “Masters of Horror” as “Some dude who once made a horror movie, even though it was retarded.”

Don’t get me wrong, I know the pool to draw talent from isn’t huge, but it does kind of taint the integrity of the title “Masters of Horror” ya know?

In related news from Fangoria:

WTF? Night of the Living Dead 3D
Okay, like… what? I’m not complaining or anything. Do whatever you want. I’ll check it out if I get the chance. And I’m always down with Sid Haig.

The Hills Have Eyes 2
I’m not even gonna go there.

28 Weeks Later
Oh come on!

But, you know me. I’ll give em a chance. Could be good. Could suck balls, but could be good. None of the above are directed by the original film makers. Whatever. I thought it was interesting.

A couple of decent ones, for very different reasons.

The first was called Cigarette Burns. The first installment in the series by horror legend John Carpenter.

I should say off the bat that I’m not the world’s biggest John Carpenter fan. I’ve seen quite a few of his movies, and I’ve yet to see one that really blew me away. Though, I must admit, I still haven’t seen The Thing, which people tell me is most awesome. I dug Halloween well enough, and respect what it did for the horror genre, but honestly, I wouldn’t put it in my top twenty horror movies.

I’m just looking over his filmography, and yeah, I’m not seeing a whole lot that really did a lot for me. Starman was pretty decent I guess. I never liked Big Trouble in Little China. I didn’t like the Escape From New York/L.A. movies. Christine fucking blew hard. The Fog was weak. Vampires was gay. Prince of Darkness was alright. Memoirs of an Invisible Man was retarded. I never saw In the Mouth of Madness. And, again, I never saw The Thing, though I mean to eventually.

But this isn’t a “talk shit about John Carpenter” post. It’s actually a pro-Carpenter post. For two reasons.

The first is that his installment in the series was actually really good.

The second is that, no matter what I think about his previous work (and that he seems like kind of a douche when you see him in interviews and such) there’s no getting around that the guy is a genuine horror legend. Most of the people who’ve contributed to this series are famous for one or two horror films. Even John Landis, who I totally dig, is really famous in the world of horror for one movie (and, well, the Thriller music video.)

Even guys like Dario Argento and Takashi Miike, while famous for being big time horror film makers, they’re really mostly famous to people in their respective homelands. I imagine that the majority of people in America (and *sigh* Canada) don’t know who they are. They’re important to us film geeks, but that’s about it. The rest of them… well, they’ve made a name for themselves for one or two movies. Stuart Gordon did The Re-Animator, Don Coscarelli did Phantasm, Joe Dante did Gremlins, Tobe Hooper did Chainsaw, and so on.

But John Carpenter?

He’s one of those guys like Wes Craven or George Romero whose name is synonymous with horror movies. It’s his bread and butter. Sure, he’s made the odd non-horror movie (Elvis for instance) but there’s no getting around that when people start prattling off horror film makers, he’s going to be one of the first names that comes up.

So I was kind of excited to see what he’d do with the series, even if I didn’t really have high expectations.

So when I said the episode was called Cigarette Burns, I was wrong. It was actually called John Carpenters: Cigarette Burns. That’s something he does and it kind of fucking pisses me off.

Ya know, I don’t care HOW great you are, including your name in the title of the movie (or, in this case, episode of a TV show for christ’s sake) is just an egotistical and selfish way to work. A lot of people go into the production of a film. Sure, okay, you directed it. That’s one job. Oh, and if you’re John Carpenter, you did the score on your casio keyboard. One more job. You might have co-written it. But you know what? Unless you did absolutely every single job on the set of that movie, as well as the pre-production AND post-production, it is no long just YOUR movie. You better have dragged cables and set up cameras and did all of the editing and sound mixing and set design and make up and blah blah blah. You get my point. So it’s John Carpenters: Vampires. John Carpenters: Prince of Darkness. Fuck off dude. John Carpenters: Cigarette Burns. Give me a fucking break, man! It’s one episode of a TV show. You can’t come in and start claiming ownership of one episode of a pre-existing show. Fucking chump.

That’s a little pet peeve of mine, in case you couldn’t tell.

Anyway. Breath Joe.

Okay, we’re good.

So yeah, the episode was actually pretty decent. It centered around this mysterious movie that a collector has hired this dude to find. Basically the movie was produced by The Devil or something and when people watch it, they go nuts and start killing each other. The whole episode is about this dude’s quest to find this movie. The really hairy shit is when you start to find out what all went into making the movie and what actually happens when you watch it. It’s pretty dope. It makes me want to make movies produced by The Devil.

One of the really cool aspects of it is the way he illustrated exactly WHY this dude is getting more and more fucked up as he gets closer and closer to actually finding the movie. They do a good job of building up his back story while keeping the flow of the story going, so that by the time things come to a head, you’ve got a decent understanding of what this guy’s all about.

So, after all of my shit talking, John Carpenter managed to pull out one of the best episodes of the series so far. Not THE best, but one of them. It really kind of stands out against the others as being a genuine film rather than an episode of a TV show. Most of them, even the John Landis episode, felt like they were made with TV in mind. Carpenter seemed to approach it like any other movie. He had a limited budget (as they all do) but he made it work. I’m looking forward to seeing his next installment, Pro-Life, starring Ron Perlman.

The next episode I watched was Sick Girl. Now, this is the episode I’ve most looked forward to watching, and I made myself wait until I saw it in sequence (rather than watching it first) both because I want to watch them all in order, and also because I wanted to save it, because I had really high hopes for it.

The reason I was so excited for it is because it was directed by Lucky McKee and starred Angela Bettis.

In case you didn’t know, one of my all time favorite movies is May, which also starred Angela Bettis and was directed by Lucky McKee.

The episode was great. In fact, it pretty much felt like a happy little afterthought to May. It was sillier and the production design was quite different (this had a real almost John Waters campiness to it) but thematically it was very similar.

Basically it’s about this chick, Ida (Angela Bettis) who’s a, like… bugologist. Whatever that’s called. She’s way into bugs. She collects them and studies them and works at a university and researches them. She’s also a lesbian who can’t ever get into a relationship because chicks are turned off by her bug obsession.

Then she meets this chick, Misty. Misty is an artist and has had a crush on Ida but is timid and hasn’t approached her. Ida is also way shy so it’s all like “omg!” when they finally hook up.

Now, Ida gets a mysterious package in the mail and it turns out to be this crazy Brazilian bug. The bug gets loose and chaos insures. SEXY girl-on-girl chaos!

That’s the gist of it. It’s a very very strange episode, but it works. Especially if you’re already familiar with Lucky McKee’s style. You’d have to have seen May to be familiar with his style, because that’s pretty much all he’s done up to this point.

It’s silly and not particularly scary, but it’s interesting and entertaining as hell. It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone, in that some episodes are really fucked up and disturbing, and some are just… interesting and/or weird. It’s definitely gory and disturbing enough to qualify as horror, but it’s less of a horror show than any of the others so far.

One thing we learn about Lucky McKee though: he seems to like making Angela Bettis make out with other chicks. In May she was making out with Anna Faris (before cutting her head off) and now she’s all over this Misty chick.

Oh… I just googled the chick that played Misty, Misty Mundae, and man… whoa.

She was kind of pretty in the episode, in an almost punky, Tori Amos listening weird-chick lesbian sort of way. I just found out that apparently everything she’s done before this episode was direct to video softcore horror porn. Like “Satan’s School For Lust” and “An Erotic Vampire in Paris” and “Lord of the G-Strings.”

It’s not particularly exciting or anything (cause she was naked a lot in the episode) but it surprises me. I don’t know why, but it does.

Anyway, whatever.

It was cool to see Lucky Mckee do something else. He’s supposedly got a movie coming out called The Woods that I’ve been hearing about forever, but they still haven’t given a release date for. It’s got Bruce Campbell in it. I hope it’s good. It was nice to see Angela Bettis again too. She even slightly mixed it up from the other two things I’ve seen her in. In May she was a socially awkward troubled loner. In the TV remake of Carrie she was… a socially awkward troubled loner. In this though, she’s a… well… lesbian socially awkward troubled loner… with a weird voice. And Bettie Page hair.

Next up is… well… shit. I don’t know. That’s the end of the episodes I have downloaded. Now I’ve gotta try and track down the rest of them. In fact, the only reason I had this episode downloaded was because it was the first one I grabbed. The second one was the Takashi Miike episode, and then I got a torrent with the first 8 episodes. Now I gotta get episode 9, 11 and 12 and then get started on season 2.

Well crap. I hope I can get at least a couple downloaded and burned before tomorrow night. This has become something of a routine for me.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say about these two for now.

For the record though, here’s my wishlist of film makers I’d like to see get a crack at it. I’ll use the criteria established by the people they’ve already hired (I.E. they don’t really have to be horror MASTERS to participate)

Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel)
Alexandre Aja (High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes remake)
David Cronenberg
George Romero (I was wrong when I said before that he’d done one… well shit)
Roger Corman (I’d love to see what he does producing something like this)
Sam Raimi (I know he wouldn’t do it, because he’s oh-so-important now, but the Evil Dead movies will always have a warm place in my heart)
Quentin Tarantino (not really a “horror master” but COME ON! That would be DOPE)
Richard Donner (known more for doing Lethal Weapon and Superman and The Goonies, but he also did The Omen, so much respect)
Peter Jackson (again, probably wouldn’t happen, but hoo-boy, if he could bring some Dead Alive action, that’d be awesome)
Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses didn’t do much for me, but boy did I ever love The Devil’s Rejects)
Terry Gilliam (not so much known for horror, per se, but strange enough that I’d love to see what he does with it)
Clive Barker (of course)
Bernard Rose (Candyman, Paperhouse)
Paul Verhoeven (has made some really, really shitty movies. But then again, so have most of the people who’ve done episodes of this show. The good can outweigh the bad)

Okay, now I’m getting tired. I probably left about fifty million other people off of this list that should be there. Feel free to give me shit.

So yesterday I got to watch a couple of halfway decent episodes.

The first was called Homecoming. It was directed by Joe Dante. Most notably, he’s famous for directing The Howling, Gremlins and The `Burbs. It was good to see Dante doing something that’s a little more straight up horror than what he’s been doing lately. The last really scary thing he did was his segment (the best segment I might add) in the Twilight Zone movie, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. He also did one of the cooler episode of the 80s Twilight Zone series, The Shadow Man, about a boy who finds that a mysterious “shadow man” lives under his bed, and will do his bidding. It’s FUCKED and scared the bejesus out of me when I was a kid. Why isn’t “bejesus” in the MS Word spell checker?

Anyhoo.

The script was by Sam Hamm (most famous for having his script rejected for the first Tim Burton Batman movie) based on a short story by Sci-Fi writer Dale Baily.

Basically the story follows a white house spin doctor named David Murch as he campaigns for support for the war in Iraq. When talking to a Barbara Cummings-esque mother of a dead soldier, Murch says that if he had one wish, it would be that her son could come back to life and tell her how proud he was to have served and died for his country.

This wish backfires on him when the bodies of dead US Soldiers start coming back to life as zombies. The only difference between THESE zombies and the, well, scary zombies in other movies, are that THESE zombies don’t want to eat your brain, they want to VOTE.

So yeah, that’s the gist of it. The entire thing is a anti-war protest. I didn’t mind so much, because it was entertaining and, well, I agree with it for the most part.

Besides, here’s the thing: It was interesting to see someone use zombies to represent something other than what they typically represent.

Traditionally, zombies represent a fear of getting old and dying. Losing your faculties and being incapable of relating to younger people. Death is something that is escapable and terrifying. Specifically, getting OLD and dying. Not just dying in general, but falling apart. Rotting while still alive. Losing your ability to think. Losing your personality to old age and the various conditions associated with it. Death by old age is an unstoppable, lumbering, incommunicative monster that you can’t reason with or really fight at all. It envelopes you and you just… disappear.

Think about almost every zombie movie ever. The zombies are mindless, unstoppable, lumbering death. You can’t talk your way out of it. You can’t do ANYTHING to stop it… except kill the brain. IE, don’t think about it. That’s the way to stop zombies. Killing the brain. Just like the only way to stop your fear of getting old and dying is to stop thinking about it. Like with zombies, you can’t stop it entirely. Rarely are zombies entirely wiped out. It’s always about holing yourself up in some building and trying to survive, but in the end, there’s just too damned many of them. They WILL win, eventually. You can try not to think about them, but eventually, you’ll die, and you’ll become one of them.

That’s fucking scary.

In this film though, zombies represent something else entirely. They represent guilt. Now, the writers didn’t try particularly hard to disguise this. I mean, zombies come back and say “hey, you fucked up.” You can’t get much more direct than that. But whatever. That’s the nature of short stories. They tend to get right to the point. Had this been a feature length film (and it could have been) I think they would have been a little more subtle.

In this case, it was guilt about sending soldiers off to die for a cause that didn’t exist. The soldiers just want their voice heard. There are a lot of levels to this blatant message, but they all point to the same thing.

What I really liked about it was the fact that we’ve got two very different approaches to the people defending the “guilty” party. On one side, we’ve got Murch, the guy who does what he does because of his own need to justify a horrible (though accidental) thing he did in his youth. Then you’ve got this political author and commentator, Jane Cleaver, who lusts for power and attention. As things get heavier, we watch these two characters implode either with guilt (Murch) or with blind desire for power (Cleaver) and we see how both of those approaches work against fighting these “zombies.”

In the end, while perhaps being a bit TOO preachy, it was a well made and entertaining horror flick. I do think it could have worked even better as a feature length film, though I don’t know how well of a reception it would have gotten from the general public. Hence, it’s inclusion in the Masters of Horror series.

The next episode was Deer Woman, directed by John Landis and written by Landis and his son, Max.

NOW we’re getting somewhere. John Landis is a genuine film legend. While probably more famous for his comedies (The Blues Brothers, Animal House, Three Amigos, Trading Places) he’s also known for making the quintessential werewolf movie, An American Werewolf in London. Landis started the whole idea of doing a funny horror movie that’s still friggin scary. American Werewolf WAS funny, but it was also fucked up. I mean, the guy’s dead friend coming back to talk to him all rotted and fucked up looking, with his face all falling off and gross, telling him to kill himself? If that’s not fucked up and scary, I don’t know what is.

So this episode brings back an actor I completely forgot about, Brian Benben. Now Brian Benben used play a character called Martin Tupper on a show (created by John Landis btw) called Dream On. It was a pretty retarded show, but I watched it constantly when I was a kid. It was nice to see him acting again, and it’s weird how ten or fifteen years can age an actor.

Brian plays a guilt ridden detective in a small Washington town. He accidently killed his partner a few years back and has been all mental ever sense, and no longer covers homicide. He’s been relegated to “animal attacks.” That works out pretty well when the body of a trucker is found completely pummeled to shit by a deer. They aren’t 100% sure it’s a deer (on accounta deers don’t usually turn humans into a pile of hamburger) but there is deer DNA and hoofprints at the crime scene.

While this sounds like a pretty stupid ass premises, it actually works pretty well. The episode feels a lot like a cross between Twin Peeks and The X-Files, if those shows had been written and directed by John Landis. So Brian Benben goes about investigating the murder, and more murders pop up and yada yada yada. The end.

I didn’t say it was a great story.

It’s pretty average story really. Like I said, story wise it was like an episode of The X-Files. BUT, it was directed by John Landis. There for it was entertaining as hell.

AND it had hot hot titties in it.

It’s definitely one of my favorites so far. It was just the right amount of cheese and horror, just like American Werewolf was. It also had a super hot coroner, played by Sonja Bennett. I don’t know who that is, but when I google-imaged her, I came up with this picture of her making out with Alison Lohman wearing an Alice in Wonderland costume, which pretty much makes her god in my book.

PS
Now that Brian Benben is older, he looks like a cross between Jon Stewart and Kevin Costner.

So I’m detecting a couple of patterns here.

The first being that it seems that every night I’m watching more episodes of this show and then posting about them. Whatever, it’s what I feel like writing about. Lord knows that there isn’t a whole lot else going on in the horror world that’s exciting. Not until Eli Roth or Alexander Aja put out more movies.

The other pattern is “husbands anally raping their wives” on this show. The last time was in Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, where the abusive husband breaks out the classic “If you’re gonna ACT like a whore, I’m gonna fuck you like a whore!!” line and then brings on the anal rape.

In tonight’s episode, the always worthless Steven Weber (the guy from Wings, who played Jack Torrence in the horrible, horrible remake of The Shining, which I’ll get to later) plays a cop who gets wound up over killing his first perp, is having sex with his wife, then decides to go for it, disregarding her obvious displeasure in backdoor lovin. It’s not QUITE the same kind of anal rape as the “I’m gonna fuck you like a whore” guy, but the fact that it’s Steven Weber makes it almost worse I think.

The whole thing’s gotten me thinking about something an old boss said to me. He said that he thinks that 90% of the anger and rage in America comes from husbands who are frustrated because their wives won’t let them put it in their butt. While I think this says a lot more about my boss than it does about America, it makes me wonder if maybe he’s on to something.

The fact that Masters of Horror exists solely as a venue for horror film makers to put their most fucked up and deep rooted demented shit on screen makes me think that there IS a certain degree of a need to punish women for having the power to withhold sex. I mean, most horror IS typically directly linked to sexual repression. Look at Dracula for crying out loud. That whole book is a massive tribute to not being able to get laid. Bram Stoker was a seriously repressed freak.

But I’m getting off track.

The first episode I watched tonight was a ridiculously goofy little thing called Jenifer. It was directed by Italian horror legend Dario Argento (Suspiria) based on a short story by comic book writer Bruce Jones. Actor and episode star Steven Weber wrote the script.

The story centers on a cop who saves this girl from being hacked up by a crazy old dude in a trench coat. He shoots the crazy old dude and saves the girl. Once she’s saved, he finds out that her face is all fucked up and retarded looking.

So Weber gets understandably a little tense after killing someone for the first time. He goes home and is a total dick to his family. Then when his wife starts getting all naked and sexy with him, he decides he wants to put it in her butt. She disagrees but he doesn’t care and then she freaks out and storms off. Weber stands there looking like a doof, which is what he generally does.

So then Weber gets all bunged up about what happened to the fucked up retarded chick. He goes to the mental institution where they’re keeping her, sees her naked and realizes that she’s a fucked up looking retarded chick with a smokin’ hot body.

So feels all bad for her and takes her home to live with him like Edward Scissorhands.

Anyway, I won’t rewrite the whole episode here. Basically he takes her home, wife freaks out because there’s a smoking hot retarded naked chick with a fucked up face in her house. Yadda yadda yadda. Smokin’ hot fucked up face retarded chick eats a cat. Wife and kid leave. Weber takes smoking hot fucked up face retarded chick out into the woods to let her go free but ends up having sex with her. Yada yada yada. Retarded smoking hot fucked up face chick kills a few people. Weber takes her up into the woods again, this time to live with her and make a life out in the wilderness where she can eat little forest animals and he can have sex with a retarded chick with a fucked up face and a smokin’ hot body.

The ironic twist at the end is pretty obvious (pretty much from the beginning of the show you know how it’s going to end) and really, the whole thing was just… goofy.

It does address an age old moral dilemma though. The one that has plagued man since the dawn of time.

What would YOU do if you had a retarded chick with a fucked up face and a smokin’ body who lived in your house and constantly wanted to have sex with you, but also ate your cat? Would you keep her around and have sex with her? What would you do?

That’s the question I think every man has to ask himself at some point or another. Is it okay to have sex with a retarded chick who’s got a fucked up face and eats cats but has a smoking body and is constantly jumping your bones?

I think it might be.

But I don’t know. If I’m ever in the situation, I’ll probably just wing it.

The other episode I watched was called Chocolate, and was written and directed by Mick Garris, the show’s creator, based on his own short story.

Boy was this one a doosey!

Wait a minute… does “Doosey” mean “massive pile of steaming crap?”

The episode follows Henry Thomas, who played Elliot in E.T. (and looks like Ted Bundy now) as he realizes that he’s “psychically linked” to some chick. He starts seeing what she sees and feeling what she feels. He falls in love with her (based on the few minutes of her life he experienced where she’s having sex, drawing, masturbating, getting beat up by her boyfriend and then murdering said boyfriend) and becomes obsessed with finding her. He tracks her down to her home in Vancouver, BC (which apparently looks like the fantasy world of clay people the girls in Heavenly Creatures created… either that, or Homer Simpson’s fantasy candy land where even the dogs are made out of chocolate)

So he finds her and things get… DUN DUN DUN… DEADLY!!

This was… excruciating… to watch. Even the presence of Max Headroom wasn’t enough to save this sinking turd in the toilet that is Mick Garris’ talent.

Now, most people who’ve known me for any length of time have, at some point or another, heard me rant about how much I loath and despise Mick Garris.

For those of you who don’t know, Mick Garris is bestest most special best BFF buddies with Stephen King. Garris has directed most of the made for TV miniseries made from King’s books. He did Sleepwalkers, The Stand, Riding the Bullet, Desperation, Quicksilver Highway and, worst of all, the remake of The Shining.

Mick Garris is my horror arch-nemesis. He represents everything that I hate about the majority of movies adapted from Stephen King’s books. What’s even worse, Stephen King seems to dig what he does, because he keeps letting him butcher his stuff.

This is a guy who made a name for himself by turning my two favorite King books, The Stand and The Shining, into dumbed down, watered down, borderline retarded piles of TV movie crap. Coloring book versions of the novels. Garris and King managed to suck every ounce of life and energy from two extremely vibrant and riveting books and plop them onto my TV screen like a couple of long dead jack rabbits, scraped off of an Arizona highway. The Stand became a soap opera for 12 year olds, on par with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and The Shining became a joke of an AA commercial.

That’s enough of a reason for Garris to be on my shitlist. The fact (well, opinion. I guess) that he’s simply a terrible film maker is just the icing on the cake.

One could argue that it’s King’s involvement in these particular projects that made them so terrible. One would also have a good point. King has an extremely bad track record with movie projects that he actually gets involved with. I can’t think of a single Stephen King movie that he has a credit on (beyond “based on the novel by-“ or “Cameo by-“) that didn’t suck serious cock. It seems that the farther a Stephen King movie gets from Stephen King himself, the better its chances for survival are. Hell, the best Stephen King movies don’t even have his name on them. Stand by Me and Shawshank Redemption come to mind first.

I’ve never questioned that the majority of the suckiness in Mick Garris’ movies was the fault of Mick Garris, but I’ve yet to find a way to prove that he sucks outside of the reach of Stephen King.

Tonight’s episode of Masters of Horror was the answer.

We learn from this episode that Mick Garris has absolutely no sense of pacing, story telling in general, ability to direct actors, ability to write interesting and believable dialog… oh, and that’s he gay.

Not gay in the “OMG U R TEH GAY!!” sense (though he certainly is that as well) but literally gay. No straight man would write a scene where a man is laying in bed, imagining that he’s being fucked by a strapping young Asian man with beautiful long black hair and abs like L.L. Cool J. That’s just simply not something that would occur to a straight man, and if it DID, a straight man certainly wouldn’t write it down. Nor would write a scene where a guy is picturing that he’s a woman masturbating in a bathtub. Also, the fact that the guy’s #1 fantasy chick that he’s insanely in love with is French Canadian… that says something right there.

You may say to me “But Joe, it’s perfectly normal and natural for a straight man to fantasize about these things” and I would say to you “Yeah, well you’re gay too. Gaybob.”

Not that I’m knocking gay people. I’m just saying is all.

In the end, Chocolate was a major, major pile of crap. I apparently have three more Mick Garris episodes in the series to look forward to. Oh boy. I’ll watch them, just because I want to watch all the episodes… but I have a sneaking suspicion that they’re going to suck just as bad as this one did.

I still gotta give Garris props for creating the series, but that doesn’t stop me from throwing up a little bit seeing his portrait on the DVD cover next to the portraits of George Romero and John Carpenter and John Landis, calling him a “Master of Horror”

I also fully realize that by posting this, I’ve pretty much canceled any invitation I may have gotten in the future to do an episode of the show. Oh well. I’ll just have to make my OWN show. I’ll call it “AWESOME HORROR DUDES OF HORROR!!!!” and it’ll be AWESOME.

So I watched another two episodes of Masters of Horror. The first one was called Incident on and Off a Mountain Road, and was directed by Don Coscarelli, who’s famous for making the horror classic Phantasm and the, well, not so horror classic (but highly entertaining) Bubba Ho-tep.

It stars Bree Turner, who looks strikingly like Gwen Steffani, and who is probably most famous for dunking her boobs in an aquarium in Deuce Bigalow.

It also has a role for Phantasm star Angus Scrimm, as this crazy old dude who sings and likes candy, doesn’t really do anything.

The story is pretty standard horror schlock. It centers on this chick that wrecks her car in the mountains, is stalked by some crazy, anonymous weird guy, fights back ala Rambo in First Blood, and then, once the bad guy is dead, we find out that she has a dark secret. That’s pretty much all you need to know about the story.

Don Coscarelli, while deserving his stature as a “horror master” has yet to really prove he’s truly great beyond what we’ve seen in Phantasm. Bubba Ho-Tep was entertaining, but pretty far from horrific. It was more of a comedy than a horror film.

But, like with the previous episodes I’ve talked about, I was more impressed with the freedom he had to do whatever he wanted to do. I mean, we’ve got a short film that was obviously made for TV that has people getting their eyes drilled out. Hell, he even manages to squeeze an anal rape scene into the last five minutes. Who saw THAT coming?

Not a lot to say about that one really. It was nice to see Angus Scrimm doing something other than playing The Tall Man from Phantasm. We also learn that Don Coscarelli has some sort of fascination with people getting drilled in the face and really scary tall dudes, as it seems to be a theme in his work.

The other episode I watched was by Stuart Gordon, who’s famous for the Re-Animator movies, as well as the friggin awful Dagon. Gordon once again pulls his material from HP Lovecraft, this time adapting the story Dreams in the Witch House.

I recently read this story on the recommendation of my friend Lyndsey. It, like every HP Lovecraft story I’ve ever read, was hard to get through, but worth it in the end. For me at least. It always takes me, like, a week, to get through an entire Lovecraft story. I find my brain constantly drifting off to other things.

Kind of like this post!

Back to it.

So Gordon manages to actually create a pretty creepy little short film. It gets a little cheesy in parts, but that’s purely budget, and isn’t too intrusive. Like most HP Lovecraft stories, it didn’t really pay off until the end. There were some genuinely scary moments and the whole idea of it was damned creepy. The end was especially fucked.

Gordon did a fine job adapting the story for the format of the show, as well as modernizing it.

Next up is Jennifer, directed by Italian horror legend Dario Argento. Then it’s Chocolate, directed by series creator and my arch-nemesis Mick Garris. I’ve been warned off of this one by a fellow internet person (not that I needed warning that Mick Garris sucks) but I’ve gotta watch it anyway. I mean, c’mon. It’s got Matt Frewer in it. I’ll watch anything with Max Headroom.

Now, the REALLY horrific thought that just crossed my mind…

How many of you people are actually old enough to remember Max Headroom?

Christ I’m old.