Own The Complete Series Or Just Your Favorite Episodes
By Clicking On The Individual Volume Icons Below!
Own The Complete Series Or Just Your Favorite Episodes
By Clicking On The Individual Volume Icons Below!
Title:
Masters Of Horror: Season One (So Far…)
Region:
One
Genre:
Horror of course…
Episodes
Available On DVD As Of This Writing: Cigarette Burns, H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreams
In The Witch House, Incident On And Off A Mountain Road, Chocolate, Deer Woman,
Sick Girl, Homecoming, Jenifer, Dance Of The Dead, Imprint, Pick Me Up
Stars:
Norman Reedus, Udo Kier, Ezra Godden, Chelah Horsdal, Jay Brazeau, Bree Turner,
John De Santis, Ethan Embry, Angus Scrimm, Henry Thomas, Lucie Laurier, Matt
Frewer, Brian Benben, Cinthia Moura, Anthony Griffith, Angela Bettis, Erin
Brown, Jesse Hlubik, Jon Tenney, Thea Gill, Robert Picardo, Carrie Anne Fleming,
Steven Weber, Robert Englund, Jonathan Tucker, Jessica Lowndes, Billy Drago,
Youki Kudoh, Michie, Toshie Negishi, Michael Moriarty, Warren Kole, Fairuza
Balk, and Laurence Landon
Writers:
Drew McWeeny, Scott Swan, Dennis Paoli, Stuart Gordon, Don Coscarelli, Stephen
Romano, Mick Garris, Max Landis, John Landis, Sean Hood, Lucky McKee, Sam Hamm,
Steven Weber, Richard Christian Matheson, Daisuke Tengan, and David J. Schow
Based
On Stories By: H.P. Lovecraft, Joe R. Lansdale, Mick Garris, Sean Hood, Dale
Bailey, Bruce Jones, Richard Matheson, Shimako Twai, and David J. Schow
Masters
Of Horror Anthology Series Created By: Mick Garris
Directors
AKA The Masters:
John Carpenter, Stuart Gordon, Don Coscarelli, Lucky McKee, John Landis, Mick
Garris, Joe Dante, Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, Takashi Milke, and Larry Cohen
Series
Executive Producers: Steve Brown, Morris Berger, John W. Hyde, Mick Garris,
Andrew Deane, and Keith Addis
Feature
length: Approximately 60 Minutes Each
Extras:
Filmmaker Commentaries, Writer Commentaries, On Set Cast and Filmmaker
Interviews, Vintage Fantasy Film Festival Interview Clips Hosted By Mick
Garris, Trailers, Filmmaker Biographical Notes With Select Credits
DVD-ROM
Extras: Screenplays, Screensavers, Original Short Stories Where Applicable
Languages:
English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and Dolby Surround Sound
Subtitles:
English Closed Captions
Packaging:
Amaray Keep Cases
Chapter
Stops: 8 Per Film
Sound:
Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and Dolby Surround Sound
Years
of Television Broadcast: 2005-2006/DVD Release: 2006
Home
Video Distributor: Anchor Bay Entertainment
MPAA
Rating: Not Rated
Reviewer:
Mark A. Rivera
Everything Comes Full Circle…
When
I was an undergraduate in film school many years ago I made all sorts of rather
trashy super 8 and 16mm films that were primarily inspired from watching too
many 1970s exploitation flicks on video long before it became “cool” to look
back at them. However I found directing at times to be quite tedious because
student film crews and student actors can be flaky in keeping their commitments
at best so I would scale down my films so that I only worked with two or three
people and usually either shot the films myself or had a friend who was more
technically inclined shoot for me. After my first year I had some doubts about
whether or not I chose the right major because shooting on film is expensive.
One two-minute black and white silent film I directed ended up costing me $500
dollars and that’s dirt cheap compared to what some students spend and it must
seem like a joke considering how much money I imagine students must spend now on
their class film projects. While video was used occasionally for practice, there
was no high definition video or even digital video available for students to
play around with before they spent their savings on rolls of film and lab
developing costs. My doubts were erased the following summer when I did a
internship on The Cosby Show and discovered that what I really wanted to
do was write. A year later I earned an award for excellence in screenwriting
from my film department and though it was not a union job and I did not sell the
script I wrote back then, I did manage to get my first paid screenwriting job
from an independent filmmaker who read my script and asked me to rewrite his. It
was not a lot of money compared to what Writers Guild members get, but two
thousand dollars seemed like a lot of money to me when I was a student and it
was cool to have actually done something I liked professionally and get paid for
it too.
Now
while I was writing there was a fellow student who won the same award I won the
year after me and he was a huge horror fan. His scripts were very commercial
horror stories along the lines of the slasher subgenre and so forth.
Unfortunately for him The Silence Of The Lambs had changed the market and
for years it seemed as though all the studios were turning out were variations
on the same kind of film and most of these movies were poor copies at best with
the noteworthy exception of Se7en. My friend was a huge fan of Mick
Garris and would constantly talk about meeting him at a convention and I have to
admit at the time I had no idea who Mick Garris was though that would gradually
change through the successful television collaborations Garris and Author
Stephen King would bring to the small screen that included The Stand, The
Shining, and most recently Desperation. Long after finishing college
and then graduate school I would continue to learn more about Garris and to
develop a respect for his work as both a writer and filmmaker though I found
myself to be more interested in the sci-fi genre than horror films because it
seemed as though every film was trying to be a variation on Scream and
when that finally died down (no pun intended), the successful remakes of The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn Of The Dead has lead to Hollywood
remaking films from the 1970s and 1980s, but often losing in translation what
made these films classics for the generation of fans that grew up watching them.
To add insult to injury, instead of bringing in filmmakers with a track record
and experience to explore new possibilities, most of the horror films released
were made by talented young people who felt disdain for the original films they
were being paid remake as if somehow because a film was being redone for a new
generation, that meant the original no longer had any relevance, which of course
is ludicrous since most of these “artists” would not be working had the
films they were asked to remake did not exist in the first place.
Unfortunately
sometimes it takes a few years of living to look back and appreciate the magic
perfected by generations of filmmakers going back over a century ago. I think
this is natural and not something that has just happened in the last fifteen
years. For me horror films like An American Werewolf In London, Halloween,
and the cinema of George A. Romero will always hold a place in my heart as
classics because I grew up with them, but for example when John Carpenter’s
1982 remake of The Thing came out, I discounted the idea of even watching
the original classic until I was older because Carpenter’s The Thing
was the film with state of the art makeup and gore effects for it’s time and
when you’re a young boy, monsters tend to be more interesting than the people
fighting them. So the same thing that occurred with me as a kid of the 1980s is
occurring now in the 2000s, but while there is hope that today’s young
filmmakers will one day give the original films and the films that inspired them
from decades before a chance to truly be appreciated, it was a travesty that so
many great filmmakers from the 1970s and 1980s could not get a feature film
produced on their own terms and many had become generic television directors
earning a good living directing episodes of popular sci-fi, cop shows, legal
dramas and so forth.
Enter The Age Of The Masters…
Now
enter Mick Garris who had started as a contributing writer to genre magazines
like Starlog and Fangoria as well as hosting a public access cable
show showcasing many of the same filmmakers who are now contributors to the e Masters
Of Horror anthology series. As Garris states on the DVD for Chocolate,
he took the responsibility of bringing together colleagues and friends who were
all established in the horror film genre and some like John Landis actually had
more credits in the comedy genre too. I think the biggest gripe for the
filmmakers was not being able to make the kind of film they wanted to make in
the studio system without having to alter elements to fit one demographic or
another. This occurs in all genres regardless if it is that art house film
everyone is paying too much to see in one lone theater in big cities like New
York and this occurs with the various terrible straight to video sequels that
come out every month or so. Thus things would soon turn full circle for Garris
for now he was the creator and an executive producer as well as a participating
filmmaker in the premium cable television anthology series Masters Of Horror
and in the process he has given colleagues and friends as well as the up and
coming horror auteur the chance to make a one hour film with feature film
quality and no interference from executives. The filmmakers are free to tell the
story they choose to tell within the budget allotted to them. The results in my
opinion have made horror films and anthology storytelling exciting again. Masters
Of Horror and TNT anthology series Nightmares And Dreamscapes From The
Short Stories Of Stephen King are among the best programs to have aired over
the past year that fall into the genres of horror, dark fantasy, and drama. I am
more of a science fiction fan than I am a horror fan, but right now I find the
prospects created by Masters Of Horror to be far more interesting than
much of the current crop of genre television on both cable/satellite television
and over the air broadcast TV.
With
the second season of Masters Of Horror set to premiere on Friday, October
27, 2006 on Showtime, now is a great time to get acquainted with the series
first season, which has been released over the past months in separate volumes
by Anchor Bay Entertainment. Eleven of the thirteen episodes are now available
with two more on the way soon. When the first volumes were released by Anchor
Bay, my reaction was, “Why not release the entire series in a box set?” and
while I was told the amount of special features being added to each disc that
were produced during the production of season one was a part of the reason why
the films were being released and sold separately under the Masters Of Horror
banner, it wasn’t until I began to sit down and watch the episodes on DVD
that I began not only to understand why this approach was actually better, but
having not seen much of the first season when it aired on Showtime last year,
practically all of the episodes were new to me. There’s a certain groove one
begins to pick up on too as one goes through the various discs and while
inevitably there are some episodes or movies that work better than others, one
can really see a progression of the series as a whole collectively finding
itself while still maintaining the unique cinematic thumb prints of the various Masters
Of Horror filmmakers that have created them. Homecoming is a Joe
Dante film. It has his sense of black humor to it. Deer Woman has a sense
of humor to it too, but the style and writing and screen direction is very much
in keeping with the work of John Landis all the way to the sudden end that calls
to mind the final scene before the credits roll in An American Werewolf In
London. All one has to do is hear the signature music to know a John
Carpenter film and for Cigarette Burns, the music was composed by
Carpenter’s son Cody. Each episode is unique and some are better than others,
but that is all a matter of taste. What I thought were the best are not
necessarily what another might have liked the most. Of the eleven volumes
currently available on DVD from Anchor Bay Entertainment, my favorite episodes
turned out to be Stuart Gordon’s Dreams Of The Witch House, Don
Coscarelli’s Incident On And Off A Mountain Road, John Landis’
Deer Woman, Mick Garris’ Chocolate, Joe Dante’s Homecoming,
and Larry Cohen’s Pick Me Up. I actually like them all though because
of my aversion to insects, Lucky McKee’s Sick Girl was the hardest for
me to watch, but that does not mean it is not a good film. They are all good as
far as I’m concerned. If there is a general aspect I found somewhat
distracting with all of these films it is that at times the limits of sixty
minutes or less seems to hinder story points and there are seemingly no
explanations given for what, how, and why certain things occur as they do in
some stories. This is not bad when it adds allure and the story holds together
logically without knowing something, but for these volumes I get the sense that
in certain cases the filmmakers are getting used to the short form and simply
have more experience telling feature length stories. Short films and stories are
every bit an art form and craft as features and novels. Sometimes the abrupt
endings that occur just don’t work or in the case of a film like Larry
Cohen’s Pick Me Up, I really feel that if the final sequence was cut,
the film overall would have been more satisfying. I wish I could go into more
detail, but it would spoil the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it.
The Films…
Cigarette
Burns
has an intriguing premise that is somewhat reminiscent of Carpenter’s In
The Mouth Of Madness, but despite some memorable character moments featuring
Udo Kier, the film falls slightly short of expectations and ultimately leaves a
little too much unanswered so instead of being spooky or mysterious, the
culmination of the tale seems a bit frustrating an unresolved. Stuart Gordon’s
H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreams In the Witch House stars Ezra Godden (H.P.
Lovecraft’s Dagon) as a graduate theoretical physics student who moves into a
cheap dingy room where he runs computer simulations regarding string theory as
it relates to his research for his thesis. After several nightmares as well as
creepy warnings from an elderly tenant, the student begins to think that within
his room is a gateway to another dimension where a malevolent force compels him
to commit a terrible act. Gordon’s adaptations of Lovecraft’s work,
regardless if they are faithful or not, have always in spirit given great
respect to the late Author’s inspiring body of work and Gordon is perhaps the
premiere director when it comes to adapting Lovecraft for both the big and small
screens. So this episode in my opinion was pretty good.
Incident
On And Off A Mountain Road
is one of the best episodes from the first season. Directed by Don Coscarelli
(Phantasm), the film pits a young woman with survivalist training against a
monstrous killer known as Moonface (John De Santis) and features a supporting
character role by Angus Scrimm. This is a very engaging horror film with a neat
twist at the end. Another fun episode that ranks among the best of the
installments from the first season is John Landis’ Deer Woman, which
features Brian Benben (Dream On) as a Detective investigating a series of
murders where the victims appear to have been pulverized by a deer. Anthony
Griffith costars and he brings for lack of a better expression, a loveable good
natured quality to his character that works well with Benben’s more serious
character as the two discover that the murderer might be a creature of Native
American myth that like a siren lures unsuspecting men to their doom. The film
references An American Werewolf In London in one scene and shares the
same kind of mix of macabre humor and horror. Mick Garris adapted his feature
length screenplay, which he adapted from a short story he had written into
another of the better episodes from season one entitled Chocolate. Henry
Thomas stars as a depressed young divorced man whose life is turned upside down
when inexplicably he begins to experience the life feelings of a woman he has
never met before and soon becomes obsessed with finding what he perceives as
being his soul mate in what turns into a fateful encounter for both. This
episode features lots of nice misdirection and surprises as well as some good
acting from Henry Thomas as well as another nice character turn by costar Matt
Frewer (Max Headroom). Lucky McKee’s Sick Girl is extremely creepy and
at times it falls into the area of dark comedy as well as being in many ways a
tragic tale of star-crossed lesbian lovers. The insect monster is nightmarish.
Angela Bettis gives a nice quirky performance that reminded me of a young Holly
Hunter type. Another good episode to watch is Joe Dante’s Homecoming,
which I covered separately when I reviewed the disc over the summer. To save
space on what is already a lengthy overview and review of the series on DVD, I
invite you all to click here
to read the full DVD review of Homecoming, which features a link back to
this page.
Dario
Argento directed a solid installment of Masters Of Horror entitled Jenifer,
which stars Steven Weber, who also adapted the screenplay, in a tale that has
almost a Twilight Zone like feel to it, but remains firmly entrenched in
dark carnal horror. Tobe Hooper’s Dance Of The Dead, which features a
screenplay by Richard Christian Matheson adapted from his father’s short story
is an episode that grows on the viewer with repeat viewings. Robert Englund
delivers one of his best performances in a horror film in years as the depraved
post-apocalyptic M.C. of The Doom Room. While some of camera effects can seem a
little too chaotic at times, once the viewer gets used to the style of the film,
it does enrich the viewing experience by keeping the audience always ill at
ease, but not enough to dilute the mounting tension and mystery that shrouds the
nihilistic world of the film.
Takashi
Milke’s Imprint was banned from cable broadcast, but is it really too
disturbing for American eyes. I don’t think so since Showtime could have aired
special warnings and even not show it until after 11pm and not include it in the
On Demand section where minors can view episodes just as easily as adults. The
only American actor in the film is Billy Drago, who goes to a hell like brothel
in Japan to bring back a prostitute he fell in love with on a previous visit to
Japan back to America to be his wife only to discover a winding labyrinth of
tales regarding the woman’s fate as told by another companion with a story all
her own. I definitely think this is the most artistic of the volumes I have
screened on DVD, but it gets a bit too muddled for it’s own good and it also
seems to borrow a bit from the films of Frank Henenlotter though to be more
specific would reveal spoilers. Some of the revelations are laughable and I am
not entirely sure if that is Milke’s intention as he mixes repulsive images of
torture and torment into a bizarre tapestry unlike anything seen in the rest of
the series. Finally Larry Cohen, one of the most underrated Writers and
Directors working today and a man whose work has influenced far more larger
budget mainstream films delivers an almost perfect tale of a woman caught in a
turf battle between two rival serial killers starring Michael
Moriarty, Warren Kole, and Fairuza Balk.
What
Lies Beneath…
Masters
Of Horror: Pick Me Up
will debut at stores on and offline on Tuesday, October 24, 2006. It will be
followed by the final two installments in the series entitled Haeckel's Tale,
which was directed by John Mcnaughton and will debut on DVD on Tuesday, November
14, 2006 and then Fair Haired Child, which was directed by William Malone
will debut on Tuesday, December 12, 2006. This will then culminate in the
complete 13 episode first season being available on DVD in individual volumes.
Each disc is truly packed with hours of extra value materials that include
filmmaker and writer commentaries as well as some containing commentaries with
the actors, tons of behind-the-scenes video footage including on set interviews
with cast and crew members too. When applicable there are vintage interviews
between series creator Mick Garris and the filmmakers that go back to the public
access genre film show he hosted, which is why I kind of feel that this series
and these DVDs bring things full circle for Garris and for me it returns me back
to the days when I was a film student and a fellow aspiring writer would sing
the praises of Mick Garris to me. Now I can too. DVD-ROM users also have the
added features of screensavers, complete screenplay, and where applicable the
short story that inspired the film.
All
of the episodes are presented in 16 by 9 enhanced (1.77:1) aspect ratios
complete with a picture quality that exceeds anything broadcast on television
with the exception of the high definition Showtime airings and for standard
definition DVD, the image is very solid with appropriate color saturation given
the nature of the individual films. Each disc features a choice of full English
Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound or English Dolby Surround Sound and all of the
episodes have English Closed Captions for the Deaf and Hearing Impaired encoded
as options too. The menus are well rendered and easy to navigate and each DVD
comes with collectible card with liner notes about the filmmakers.
Since
the episodes are usually released at about one or two a month, one can choose to
collect the episodes they like or one can easily collect all thirteen
individually over time since they can be found at low sales prices at retailers
on and offline. I am really impressed with both the work of Mick Garris and the
rest of the filmmakers’ films and I think the DVDs from Anchor Bay
Entertainment are excellent. Masters Of Horror has made horror on
television exciting again and while I did not watch the series when it aired
last fall, I can tell you all now that I have subscribed to Showtime this fall
so I can see the second season episodes as they premiere in high definition
beginning on Friday, October 27, 2006. Additional information on Masters Of
Horror on DVD as well as links to the Showtime website can be found by
visiting www.mastersofhorror.net.
When the final two first season volumes become available, I will add reviews of
them both here too. Thank you.
©
Copyright 2006 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.