Masters of Horror-Volume One
Cigarette Burns/Dreams in the Witch-House
(AB Region 0 PAL DVD)
(2005)
review by Blackgloves

Mick Garris's "Masters of Horror" series aired on the US cable channel, Showtime, at the tail end of last year and seemed to offer an ideal (and rare) opportunity to bring no-holds-barred horror to TV--gathering the genre's best living directors in one place to do so. Garris, who had previously been at the helm of television versions of "The Shining" and "The Stand", formulated the show as a means of giving a high-profile platform to some of horror's biggest names, and the prospect of unleashing such legendary masters as Dario Argento and John Carpenter; Takashi Miike and George A. Romero on a nation of unsuspecting couch potatoes proved a delicious one, and the series was greatly anticipated by many horror aficionados.

Now, Anchor Bay UK provide British fans with the chance to view the series (although it is currently also being aired in the graveyard slot on one of the satellite channels, Bravo) in the first of several two-disc Special Editions which will each present a couple of episodes along with a plethora of related extra features. The sets are undoubtedly an attractive proposition--especially if you're a fan of any the directors showcased; but many felt that, despite the series enabling its makers to lard each show with as much gore & nudity as they pleased (thanks to the greater freedom enjoyed by non-network TV), the fast shooting schedules and special requirements of TV script writing conspired to smooth out many of the directorial quirks and idiosyncrasies of the star names employed at the helm--leaving a rather homogenised finished product.

The two episodes featured on this first set get much closer than most to capturing the spirit of their respective directors' classic work and are probably the best episodes to spearhead the coming DVD releases. But, the attachment of so many great horror names to the project seems to have served to generate a feverish level of publicity for what turns out to be (on this showing) a watchable but strangely unremarkable series.

John Carpenter is arguably America's greatest living horror director. If you're young enough never to have seen "Halloween" or "The Thing" then you should check out those films rather than this first episode of "Masters of Horror" to understand why he earns the title. "Cigarette Burns" is a competently made piece of TV with occasional flashes of inspired lunacy--and enough references to Dario Argento to excite the hardened horror cinephile--but its attempt to capture the cult appeal of esoteric art-house horror is compromised by the need to box its ephemeral subject matter into a fifty-five minute long, exposition-heavy screenplay that leaves it feeling grindingly slow-moving, yet far too short to do its interesting ideas true justice.

The episode starts in just the promising manner one would expect from a film that is directed by the man who made "Halloween", and has a writing team (Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan) which includes a reviewer from a famous internet movie site! Cody Carpenter's theme music is a great pastiche of his father's own tribute to Goblin's "Suspiria" theme ("Halloween") and the opening night-time sequence, which depicts Norman Reedus's car pulling up in the driveway of a baronial house that turns out to belong to euro-horror icon, Udo Kier, could have come from that very film! This opening firmly establishes the episode's territory--and the story soon develops into a wily variation on Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" with nods to Polanski's "The Ninth Gate", Argento's "Inferno" and Nakato's "Ringu" along the way.

I've mentioned at least four of my favourite films in that last paragraph ... and for a time, it seems like this episode just might live up to expectations. Kier plays a menacing film collector called Bellinger: a rich man with a penchant for obscure art-house euro-horror. Reedus is Kirby Sweetman: a film programmer for a flea-pit revival house in downtown L.A. (we later see that it is currently screening Argento's "Profondo Rosso"). Sweetman is haunted by the suicide of his heroin-addicted girlfriend and is in debt to her embittered father whose initial loan enabled him to buy the cinema. But the father now blames Kirby for his daughter's death and he wants his money back forthwith! An offer of a large amount of cash from Bellinger to track down an obscure French film called "La fin absolue du monde" is, consequently, difficult to resist--despite the movie's macabre and thoroughly disreputable history.

This lost film is said to have caused mass rioting and homicidal frenzy among members of the audience at its premiere at a French film festival in 1971; it, and its director, Hans Backovic, subsequently disappeared and all prints were allegedly destroyed ... except one! Kirby's film buff excitement at the idea of a lost "killer" film and his need to find money quickly, lead him to accept the challenge to find and bring Bellinger the remaining print for his own private screening ... even when the strange collector shows him a "prop" he has acquired from the original film set: a living, wingless angelic being manacled to a rotating turntable -- its ripped-out feathery wings displayed above Bellinger's desk!

As Kirby hunts down the people who might be able to help him in his quest (a reviewer of cult movies; a film historian; even a snuff movie maker!) he begins to experience strange blackouts indicated by a kind of living "cigarette burn": a mark used by film projectionists to indicate a reel change in a movie. The ghosts of Kirby's past seem to become that much more real as he gets closer to the film; like the people who saw it at its initial screening, his life seems to be becoming part of a diabolical narrative, experiencing the inescapable power of this film, made as a weapon by a cinematic terrorist!

"Cigarette Burns" has a number of aesthetic pluses going for it: a memorable score and clever, "Ringu" influenced sound design forge an uneasy atmosphere in many scenes; classy photography by Attila Szalay ("The X-Files") often manages to bring a convincing pastiche of prime-Argento, Suspiria-era lighting style to the episode, bathing the screen in icy emeralds or deep fizzing crimsons. The special effects of the KNB EFX team, lead by Greg Nicatero, supply some of the most gruesome visual effects ever seen on television; with graphic decapitation, throat gouging, eye-stabbing and--the piece de resistance--a suicide implemented with the aid of a film projector that is as "Grand Guignol" gruesome and absurd as anything in Paul Morrissey's Blood for Dracula" or "Flesh for Frankenstein" (yet another Udo Kier connection). McWeeny & Swan's literate, knowing script does a decent job of weaving a beguiling mythology (incoherent as it necessarily must be) of danger and intrigue around this fictional film at the centre of the plot, but it was a misstep to actually show some of it at the end: after such a monumental build-up, La fin absolue de monde turns out to look like a bad Goth video shot for MTV by Oliver Stone on a bad day -- not very '1971' either! They should have made it look like a snuff movie shot by Jess Franco, surely!

The drawbacks come with the territory of TV production--notwithstanding the freedom to show extreme gore and liberal amounts of (female) flesh on screen! An unforgiving 10-day shooting schedule inevitably requires many artistic corners to be cut and is, I suspect, the main reason why the show's episodes tend to have a "standardised" look about them despite the involvement of so many original filmmakers: to get the job done they all find they have to resort to the same tried-and-tested techniques of storytelling with precious little time left for innovation. John Carpenter's candid commentary track tells how difficult it was to adjust to this fast turnover time, and the director is honest about things he might have done differently if he had had more time and more energy, "I guess I was tired that day ...," he says, commenting on one unsatisfactory scene. " ... or I wanted to go home--they had some good porn on one of the hotel channels!" (To be fare, the director does also say that he was satisfied, on the whole, with the way the episode turned out.)

The fact that the rather ersatz location of Vancouver, British Columbia has to stand in for as diverse a set of locations as L.A.; Carthage, New York; and France also contributes to a rather flat look, despite Szalay's best efforts, and the episode takes far too much time stringing long scenes of expository dialogue together in the opening half, before cutting lose with the bloody violence! Although it has many interesting ideas--like the shackled angel in Bellinger's mansion--the connection between the notion of film's power to manipulate and inspire an audience's emotions is never really connected with the sub-plot concerning Kirby's memories and guilt over the death of his girlfriend as satisfactorly as it should have been; again, it's more an issue of time constraints than ineptitude.

Ex-theatre-director-turned-horror-maestro, Stuart Gordon, has produced a small cache of classic horror flicks during his career--all based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft; notably "Re-Animator" and "From Beyond". The horror author's unique tales of internal, unnameable dread don't really translate directly to the screen very well and so those who have made use of his name, or been inspired by his literary vision, have tended to take key ideas from the texts as a starting point for largely unrelated film excursions. Stuart Gordon has perfected this approach: "Re-Animator", his collaboration with producer, Brian Yuzna, may not have had much in common with the original source material but with it, Gordon perfected an uneasy blend of gross-out humour and unsettling imagery--with the line between the two sometimes rather hard to discern.

This directorial debut proved to be a perfect, fully-formed example of the Gordon style--to the extent that his subsequent films have never really quite attained the same level of fevered insanity. "Re-Animator" constantly pushed at the boundaries of bad taste yet was somehow able to persuad that there was also an intelligence at work behind the sex and gore and innuendo. "Dreams in the Witch-House" is, predictably enough, another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation--and probably the most daring of all in terms of its grim subject matter. On his commentary track for "Cigarette Burns" John Carpenter noted how he was left alone to do pretty-much anything he liked on the series. There is some fairly extreme stuff in "Cigarette Burns" and Carpenter mentions that the only thing you probably wouldn't be allowed to get away with would be to harm a child on screen. Well, he obviously hadn't seen "Dreams in the Witch-House"! A morbid tale about fear of women and the inability to protect a child from harm, Gordon wholeheartedly takes on and runs with the disturbing themes of the story, while suffusing this modern-day version with outlandish imagery and a keen sense of the absurd. This is one case where the flat "TV look" of the show works in the episode's favour; it (and the rather glib tone of much of the film) leads you not to expect Gordon to go quite as far as he eventually does at the climax.

Walter Gilman (Ezra Godden), a handsome physics graduate working on a thesis in String Theory, moves into a dilapidated rented room in a crumbling old house. His neighbour, Francis (Chelah Horsdal), is a poor, unemployed single mum, caring for her small infant but already two months behind on her rent. The house quickly reveals itself to be a rather unusual harbinger of Polanskian weirdness: Walter can hear strange noises at night behind the oddly angled walls--which turn out to intersect at the same points as the "membranes" that connect multiple universes in his string theory thesis! (A daft idea that your house plan can influence the structure of space-time and provide a gateway into another dimension, but a very tele-visual one all the same!)

But it gets worse: Walter dreams about a rat with a human face that torments him at night with whispers of "She's coming for you!" When left to look after Francis' child while she goes for a job interview, he finds himself being seduced by a voluptuous, cowled woman who claws at his back with long nails! The visions, blackouts and sleepwalking spells escalate until poor Walter is utterly convinced that he has been targeted by an evil, three-hundred-year-old Witch, hiding in another dimension behind the walls of his room, who wants to force him to sacrifice Francis' baby as part of a diabolical occult ritual!

With a small cast and a shoot that mainly takes place on an atmospheric stage-set designed by David Fisher, "Dreams in the Witch-House" largely avoids the pitfalls of some of the other episodes: the plot is simple enough to carry off a fifty minute show, and the themes of the original story are well-exploited by Gordon's script adaptation, which adds a sympathetic female character to make the film's conclusion even harder to take! There is, of course, copious amounts of nudity and (fairly discreet, but still disturbing) gore and when we factor-in the strange undercurrent of humour threading through this bleak tale, we end up with an episode that actually comes the closest to recapturing the taboo-busting nature of Stuart Gordon's infamous debut!

Both discs in this set come with a great many themed extras that make them worth picking up if you are at all interested in the work of any of these directors.

Both feature commentary tracks: "Cigarette Burns" has two; one by John Carpenter (who is witty and affable); and another by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan who are full of excitement at having their first screen-writing project made by John Carpenter. "Dreams in the Witch-House" features a very interesting commentary track moderated by Anchor Bay Entertainment's Perry Martin, who is joined by Stuart Gordon and actor Ezra Godden; here, Gordon discusses his love of H.P. Lovecraft's stories and his approach to adapting the writers work.

Carpenter and Gordon both feature in interviews produced by Anchor Bay Entertainment that run about twenty-minutes each. These featurettes provide an overview of each of their careers in their own words. "Working with a Master" is also an Anchor Bay production (running around the thirty minute mark) and forms part of a series of documentaries where actors who have appeared in the directors' works team up to say nice, and sometimes revealing, things about them. Carpenter's film has P.J. Soles, Sam Neil, Greg Nicotaro, Keith Gordon and Sheryl Lee while Gordon's features Brian Yuzna, Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton and Ken Foree.

Each disc also includes: On set interviews with lead actors from each film; a montage of behind the scenes footage set to music and running around seven minutes each; bloopers and outtakes; stills galleries; visual effects spotlights; trailers; and a forty minute feature entitled "From Script to Screen" where we get to see several scenes getting shot by each of the directors.

There are DVD ROM screensavers and screenplays. The original H.P. Lovecraft short story is also here!

Both films come in anamorphic widescreen (1.78:1) with both 2.0 Stereo and 5.1 Surround Sound with DTS options. Subtitles for the hard of hearing are also featured.

This first volume makes a reasonably good impression with the choice of episodes; both are quite strong without being mind-blowing. But this series inadvertently tends to bring maverick filmmakers down to the level of competent TV directors rather than raising TV drama up to the glorious level these masters of horror attained with their greatest horror masterpieces.