Masters Of Horror: Dream Cruise

I enjoyed the first season of Masters of Horror, but I lost a lot of respect for Showtime when they refused to air Takashi Miike’s contribution, Imprint.  I also wasn’t thrilled that they chose to release each episode on an individual DVD release before doing a season box set.  I watched all of season one when it aired, but after the Miike incident, I ended up not as thrilled and ended up missing most of season two.  Dream Cruise was one of the season two episodes I did not get around to watching.  Coincidentally, it was also from a Japanese director and it was also the 13th episode of the season.

I had picked up the DVD at one of the pawn shops and while looking for a short film, but one that was more appropriate for the Halloween season, I decided to pop in Dream Cruise.  I figured it was around an hour long.  In fact the cover even stated that it was only 60 minutes long.  I popped it in and began to watch. 

The plot was similar to a lot of the recent J-Horror releases that have made it to America in that it deals with ghosts and restless spirits haunting people and places.  In this case a young man is haunted by visions of his younger brother, who he watched drown after failing to save him during a boating accident.  The man has never ventured back out on the water since that time, but now he is forced by a client to conduct a meeting with him out on the sea.  Further complicating matters is the fact that the client, Eiji (Ryo Ishibashi) insists on bringing along his wife Yuri (Yoshino Kimura) who has been having an affair with the young man, Jack (Daniel Gillies).  Yuri thinks Eiji is wise to their affair, and she also confides to Jack that Eiji’s first wife mysteriously disappeared.  Yuri doesn’t think either of them may make it back alive.

The plot becomes fairly predictable from this point, with the boat mysteriously cutting out while at sea and a vengeful spirit seemingly behind the actions.  Jack is sure it is his brother’s ghost mad that he failed to save him.  The reality is of course that it is the ghost of the first wife who Eiji killed on this very boat in this very spot of water.  Andof course the ghost doesn’t just want to kill her murderer, she also wants to kill the woman who took him away from her.

Around 5o minutes in, I kept thinking that it was going to take longer than 5 or 10 minutes to wrap things up.  When the DVD player showed the run time past the hour and 5 minute mark, I really wondered what was going on.  As I later found out, there was a 60 minute version for Showtime and a 87 minute uncut version which was released on DVD.  I’m not sure what Showtime chose to cut, but it was interesting that there was a longer version.  It’s also interesting that all mention of Showtime has been scrubbed from the DVDs which were released by the Starz-owned Anchor Bay.

Dream Cruise isn’t the best of the series, but it is far from the worst as well.  I give it a 2 1/4 star rating.

Masters Of Horror: We All Scream For Ice Cream

I was looking for some short DVDs and I figured since it is getting close to Halloween, horror movies would be a good thing to check out.  We All Scream For Ice Cream was another horror short from the second season of Masters of Horror.  This one was directed by Tom Holland who did Child’s Play and Fright Night.  I remember really enjoying Fright Night when I first saw it at the Keith Albee theater, so I had hopes for this one and for the most part it didn’t disappoint. 

The plot involves a childhood prank gone horribly wrong that resulted in the death of ice cream selling clown Buster played by William Forsythe.  When one of the kids moves back into town after growing up and having a family of his own, Buster shows back up and starts killing the ones responsible for his death using their own kids and a voodoo doll-like ice cream treat.  When the kids bite into the ice cream which is shaped into a human likeness, their parent melts into a big puddle of runny melted ice cream.

I enjoyed We All Scream For Ice Cream, and like Valerie on the Stairs it has some decent making of featurettes.  One deals with the making of the film while the other deals with how the make up effects were pulled off.  Both are worth watching.

I give We All Scream For Ice Cream a 9 on the Night Flight scale as well.  I remember reading that they wanted to concentrate more on monsters for season 2 of Masters of Horror, and with the demon in Valerie on the Stairs and the killer ice cream clown in We All Scream For Ice Cream, they have a couple of decent ones.  Both of these episodes were much better than some of the season one episodes.  I’m sorry they never produced a season 3 although Garris did work on Fear Itself for NBC and a Masters of Science Fiction series that I missed.

Masters Of Horror: Valerie On The Stairs

I was really excited when Showtime announced the first season of Masters of Horror.  13 short horror movies directed by the masters of the field.  I looked over the names; Tobe Hooper, John Landis, Joe Dante, Don Coscarelli, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Larry Cohen, Takashi Miike, Dario Argento, John McNaughton, and three names I didn’t recognize which included Lucky McKee, William Malone, and Mick Garris. I soon learned that Mick Garris was the executive producer for the series and was sort of the creator of the project.  He had also directed a couple Stephen King adaptations.  His episode didn’t actually hold any great anticipation for me, but it turned out to be a fairly decent one never the less.

For the second season of the show, I ended up missing every episode except for The Damned Thing and Family.  I kept my eyes open and figured I would grab the box sets at some point.  I never have gotten the box sets, but I have picked up a few of the single DVDs that Anchor Bay released.  What’s funny is that somewhere along the line Anchor Bay got bought out by Starz, so all the season 2 DVDs have every reference to Showtime removed as far as I can tell.

Valerie on the Stairs was Garris’ season 2 outing.  It was based on a story by Clive Barker that dealt with a house set up as a boarding home for unpublished writers to work on getting their projects written and published.  A new tenant moves in and starts hearing and seeing things.  He soon finds out that the building is haunted by a tortured young woman and the demon that loves her but keeps her enslaved.  Both of these beings were the products of failed writing done in the building with such a passion and intensity that it brought them to life.

I enjoyed the story and with Tony Todd playing the demon known as “The Beast”, I was extremely pleased.  Clare Grant as Valerie does a wonderful job in this short time to show us the frightened victim side of Valerie where she is roaming the halls naked and being sucked through walls by the demon, as well as the vindictive spirit side where she is calling in The Beast to destroy those writers that created the tortures she had to endure and that kept her imprisoned in the building by never finishing the novel.  Tyron Leitso does a decent job as the new writer who falls in love with Valerie.  The writing group that brought these dark characters to life consists of Christopher Lloyd, Suki Kaiser, and Jonathan Watton.

The disc includes a nice making of documentary which shows how they pulled off the amazing climax.  It also includes a featurette on jump shots which are designed solely to make the audience jump out of their seats.  Both are very well done and interview all the right people.  My only complaint disc wise was the huge amount of trailers on the front of the movie.  Normally I love trailers, but it seemed like we were getting trailers for all of the season 2 episodes as well as selected season one episodes.  I eventually hit the menu button and skipped past several of them.

I thought this was a pretty decent Masters of Horror, and much better than Garris’ season one episode.  I give it a 9 on the Night Flight scale.

Masters Of Horror: John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns

I watched the first season of Masters of Horror on Showtime pretty faithfully.  I loved a few of them and some left me less than enthused.  Cigarette Burns was the only one that I watched and said, “Wow, there’s an image I’ve never seen before.”  The image in question was a beheading that occurs near the middle of the film.  Our hero has been tied to a chair and a woman is tied to another chair facing him.  The arrogant director is going on about how anything done on film becomes art while swinging a large blade around.  Suddenly he swings and sinks the blade into the woman’s neck.  He twists the blade to open the cut wider.  Blood sprays out like a geyser.  He pulls the blade out and makes several hacking motions to the woman’s neck before finally successfully removing her head.  Every decapitation that I can recall seeing in film has always been accomplished in one swift stroke.  The neck always gives way like warm butter with no resistance.  This decapitation was different.  It was more real.  By showing that there are bones and muscles that don’t just separate neatly when a blade is swung, John Carpenter pulled reality into his dark fantasy.  One underlying theme of Cigarette Burns is the pact that the director makes with the audience.  The filmmaker agrees to play by a set of rules, characters explain, and when the rules are broken, chaos ensues.  Then Carpenter himself breaks one of the unstated rules by providing a scene that plays this violent, murderous act as real instead of the fantasy version with one clean slice taking off the head and preventing any pain.  This woman was alive to feel each successive impact that the blade made with her neck until her killer finally manages to sever her head, ending both her pain and his “scene”.  The power of this one scene has stayed with me ever since.

Cigarette Burns has much more to it however.  It is the story of a young man named Kirby (played by Norman Reedus) that runs a cinema and tracks down rare films for clients.  He is contracted by a wealthy man (Udo Kier) to track down the rarest of films, a French film called “Le Fin Absolue du Monde.”  The film was supposedly shown only once.  At that screening people went berserk.  The audience began killing each other and themselves before wrecking the theater as well.  The authorities confiscated and destroyed every known print of the film.  However, Kier’s character has heard of rare underground showings and he has additional proof that at least one print has survived.  The director had obtained an actual angel that he mutilated and tortured on-screen in the film.  Kier has the angel’s severed wings on his wall and in a separate room, he also has chained to a pedestal the angel itself.  As the angel explains, it is bonded with the film.  If the film had been destroyed, it would know.

The film touches very effectively on so many different ideas and themes.  Obviously it looks at the power of film and of obsession.  It looks at addiction in both Kirby and his deceased girlfriend’s addiction to heroin as well as Kirby’s addiction to danger as he pursues the film through escalating visions as well as actual dangers like the director that was willing to kill to make his art.

Not every question is answered and not everything is explained.  Like Videodrome that I watched earlier, you are often left wondering what is real and what is a dream.  In the end it seems the film’s true power is in making people deal with their own hidden guilt while bringing out humanity’s basest animal behavior.  The manservant to Mr. Kier, who we have never seen do any act of cruelty, watches the film and ends up greeting Kirby covered in self-inflicted cuts before jabbing blades into his own eyes.  The manservant may not have done anything wrong, but then how many wrongs did he witness while in Kier’s employ that he did or said nothing about.  What atrocities may he have seen that he needed to blind himself literally for the guilt of being blind to these acts figuratively.

When Anchor Bay started releasing the Masters of Horror episodes on DVD, I felt it was kind of a rip-off to have to spend $10 for each one hour movie, but the money is well worth it with the amount of bonus features they created for the DVD.  There is a nice John Carpenter retrospective featurette as well as one on the making of the film, two commentaries, interviews, bios and DVD-ROM features as well.

Normally I would rate a one hour made for cable series episode on the Night Flight scale.  On that scale it would get a 10.  I feel that quality wise, this one hour movie can hold its own on the four star scale I use for movies and I give it a 3 1/2 on that scale.