Okay, this sort of a follow up to my review of John Carpenter's episode: "Ciggerette Burns".
In the Masters Of Horror series major horror directors are given a choice of hour-long scripts and the opportunity to impress us with a short film. I have now seen four of these: "Ciggerette Burns", "Sick Girl", "Pro-Life" and "The Black Cat".
Ciggerette Burns
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(click image for imdb link)
I wasn't really sure what to expect from Masters Of Horror, but this disc contained a whole bunch of trailers for other episodes. Just looking at trailers, the ones which stood out for me were a zombie film from Joe Dante and a quite absurd (silly and funny) entry from John Landis called "Deer Woman".
It's worth noting that this is actually a later release than the deeply flawed "Ghosts Of Mars" and it bodes well for Carpenter's upcoming movie "The Ward" to see that he really hasn't lost his touch.
While the extras on the DVD go on about "The Thing" and "Halloween", Cigarette Burns is much more akin to "In The Mouth Of Madness". In fact it's pretty much the same premise, just replace evil apocalyptic book with evil apocalyptic film reel. The idea of this is that the main protagonist is being hired to track down the last surviving print of a horror movie called "La Fin Absolue Du Monde" (The Absolute End Of The World). Yeah, very subtle I know. There's a bit of clue that things are going to get a little stranger though in the image above and I'm not going to spoil it any more than that. This is not a clone of "In The Mouth Of Madness". For one thing it's more subtle (probably due to budget constraints), so you can forget tentacled monsters (awwww!). Since Carpenter cannot throw monsters from inside the silver screen at us, the movie has to very suggestive about the power of this film and it does a great job.
An annoying minor element which detracted from my suspension of dibelief, however, was the protagonist's attempts to speak French. Naturally his actual French is fine since it's in a script and naturally he doesn't need a good accent since he's not playing someone who is actually French. However, whenever he attempts to speak French there are points when I don't think actual French people would understand him. There's a point where I think he says that he'll be back in twenty minutes but I was left wondering "was that supposed to be 'vingt' that he said just then? It sounded like veagh." Just moments earlier we were supposed to believe that this guy was able to understand an overheard conversation in French down the telephone. I'm not convinced he could successfully give anyone his telephone number in French, never mind understand a private telephone call by fluent French speakers. Naturally this isn't terribly important, but it irritated me nonetheless.
As you might imagine, another element which needed to change from "In The Mouth Of Madness" was the ending. Now the ending to "In The Mouth Of Madness" was absolutely brilliant and by comparison the ending to Cigarette Burns is quite disappointing. Still, it's not too bad and I have to say that this short film was light years ahead of what I'd been expecting.
I'd give this 4.5/5
Sick Girl
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When this first arrived I wondered why I ordered this movie in the first place. I was much more interested in the following two titles. However, looking a bit more carefully I realised that the director, Lucky McKee, is actually the director of "May" (review pending). I was very happily surprised to find that what followed was a really sweet and funny story about a woman obsessed with bugs (it's her profession btw) and her infatuation with a girl who appears to work in the same building as her. I could call this a "romantic comedy with bugs", but perhaps I'd do better to say that it felt like a Buffy episode. Like any good Buffy episode, there's a feeling of fun all the way through and there comes a point where it gets very silly indeed. I personally didn't think there was anything at all predictable about the ending (and I'll leave it at that).
The female protagonist has often found that her girlfriends up and leave when they find out about her obsession with bugs. She decides to take the advice of her (very) straight male co-worker and avoid letting any new girlfriends know about this obsession. It's quite interesting how it's made very clear that the straight male co-worker is a pervert while the lesbians have a good healthy relationship, especially considering the views expressed by another character later on. The male co-worker's more obnoxious aspects are played for laughs, but with enough balance so we can still understand why he and the protagonist remain friends.
All in all, this is really good fun. There's a gag regarding a Chinese restaurant the protagonist and her co-worker like which I'm silently giggling at as I remember it. The characters all feel full of life and well-developed. Then again, I'm not sure if perhaps people will view this episode as not being frightening enough. It feels creepy like a few episodes of Buffy did and while some of the effects seem a bit on the cheesy side, like with Buffy, this fits with the general sense of fun.
5/5
Pro-Life
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So yeah, this is the one I'd been properly looking forward to. It's another John Carpenter and with that poster (see above) how could I resist? (Besides, I needed to see this for completion's sake.) My excitement was raised by the presence of Ron Perlman as the aggressive pro-life zealot.
The basic gist of the story is that a girl accidentally runs out into the road in front of some doctors from the local family planning clinic. She appears to be in shock, so they figure the best thing to do is to take her to the family planning clinic, since it is essentially a hospital. However, her father (played by Ron Perlman) who is actually not allowed within a certain distance of the building, is very angry to find out where his daughter is. While he's making threats from the outside, the doctors inside have found out about the pregnancy and have realised that there's something supernatural involved.
In the end this episode turned out not to be sure where it wanted to take things. I was actually really upset by the way that the story ended in such an unjust way and the lack of justice in it does not even seem to be properly acknowledged. The film seems to trail off with "oooh, think about that for a minute" music. My view was that there wasn't enough to think of and that important things were not yet resolved.
I'm going to include a small (but mild) SPOILER text in white below saying just what I found so unjust and why I feel it wasn't properly dealt with:
An abortion doctor is killed in the most disgusting way. Ron Perlman's horrible character seems to get off scott free. The scriptwriters seem happy to hurt the abortion doctor, but unwilling to hurt the sick bastard pro-lifer. The "not yet resolved" thing mentioned earlier is that gitt still breathing and not even being dragged to hell. Also let's not forget that the raped girl at the centre of the story doesn't get a chance for any kind of revenge either.
Spoiler is above in white text.
It was really upsetting because the acting is good, the effects are good, the plot is engaging, but the unresolved issues are pretty unacceptable. It's another case of a film which works fine right up to the point where it lets you down at the end. Perhaps other people will find the ending less disappointing than I did, so your mileage may vary:
3/5
The Black Cat
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I was very excited to hear that this featured Stuart Gorden and Jeffrey Combs, the director and the star of the awesome "Re-Animator". Expecting it to be like Re-Animator was a big mistake. This short film is based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. If you are a big Poe fan I think you'd love it. There were a few references to Poe's various works scattered around that I recognised, so I'd be very surprised if there weren't many more that I didn't recognise.
Sadly my lack of familiarity of Poe may have caused me to miss something important. I didn't find this film terribly funny and I never quite felt like I understood the central character. It also featured a pet peeve of mine which was a ghostly bad guy that follows no real rules. While the perceived cause of the tragedy and general weirdness that ensues in the film is the eponymous "black cat", the film nevertheless feels very much like a ghost story. Now my problem with ghost stories is that they often suggest that if you do something for the ghost, like catch their murderer or something, the ghost will be appeased and rest in peace. Meanwhile the ghost gets to do pretty much anything it wants, especially if it does things which have some relation to its life or death. The all-powerful nature of ghosts and the arbitrary use of those powers really bugged me. Such stories will often show ghosts murdering one person, yet in another case maniacally laughing as they <i>nearly</i> kill someone else. Why did they kill one but not the other? The answer to that question is either some arbitrary answer to do with which people most offended the ghost's sensibilities or, more often, they were just lucky i.e. the all-powerful ghost wasn't feeling so all-powerful on that occasion for some reason.
So, back to the black cat, there's a feeling that the cat is responsible for bad stuff, but the cat turns out to be pretty powerful with very little rhyme or reason to its actions. Rather than feeling a growing sense of fear or unease, I just found myself rather bored. As I have said earlier, I would probably have been a great deal more entertained if I recognised more of the references to Poe's works, but sadly it just felt like one thing happening after another with no real reason for me to care.
2.5/5
In the Masters Of Horror series major horror directors are given a choice of hour-long scripts and the opportunity to impress us with a short film. I have now seen four of these: "Ciggerette Burns", "Sick Girl", "Pro-Life" and "The Black Cat".
Ciggerette Burns
(click image for imdb link)
I wasn't really sure what to expect from Masters Of Horror, but this disc contained a whole bunch of trailers for other episodes. Just looking at trailers, the ones which stood out for me were a zombie film from Joe Dante and a quite absurd (silly and funny) entry from John Landis called "Deer Woman".
It's worth noting that this is actually a later release than the deeply flawed "Ghosts Of Mars" and it bodes well for Carpenter's upcoming movie "The Ward" to see that he really hasn't lost his touch.
While the extras on the DVD go on about "The Thing" and "Halloween", Cigarette Burns is much more akin to "In The Mouth Of Madness". In fact it's pretty much the same premise, just replace evil apocalyptic book with evil apocalyptic film reel. The idea of this is that the main protagonist is being hired to track down the last surviving print of a horror movie called "La Fin Absolue Du Monde" (The Absolute End Of The World). Yeah, very subtle I know. There's a bit of clue that things are going to get a little stranger though in the image above and I'm not going to spoil it any more than that. This is not a clone of "In The Mouth Of Madness". For one thing it's more subtle (probably due to budget constraints), so you can forget tentacled monsters (awwww!). Since Carpenter cannot throw monsters from inside the silver screen at us, the movie has to very suggestive about the power of this film and it does a great job.
An annoying minor element which detracted from my suspension of dibelief, however, was the protagonist's attempts to speak French. Naturally his actual French is fine since it's in a script and naturally he doesn't need a good accent since he's not playing someone who is actually French. However, whenever he attempts to speak French there are points when I don't think actual French people would understand him. There's a point where I think he says that he'll be back in twenty minutes but I was left wondering "was that supposed to be 'vingt' that he said just then? It sounded like veagh." Just moments earlier we were supposed to believe that this guy was able to understand an overheard conversation in French down the telephone. I'm not convinced he could successfully give anyone his telephone number in French, never mind understand a private telephone call by fluent French speakers. Naturally this isn't terribly important, but it irritated me nonetheless.
As you might imagine, another element which needed to change from "In The Mouth Of Madness" was the ending. Now the ending to "In The Mouth Of Madness" was absolutely brilliant and by comparison the ending to Cigarette Burns is quite disappointing. Still, it's not too bad and I have to say that this short film was light years ahead of what I'd been expecting.
I'd give this 4.5/5
Sick Girl
When this first arrived I wondered why I ordered this movie in the first place. I was much more interested in the following two titles. However, looking a bit more carefully I realised that the director, Lucky McKee, is actually the director of "May" (review pending). I was very happily surprised to find that what followed was a really sweet and funny story about a woman obsessed with bugs (it's her profession btw) and her infatuation with a girl who appears to work in the same building as her. I could call this a "romantic comedy with bugs", but perhaps I'd do better to say that it felt like a Buffy episode. Like any good Buffy episode, there's a feeling of fun all the way through and there comes a point where it gets very silly indeed. I personally didn't think there was anything at all predictable about the ending (and I'll leave it at that).
The female protagonist has often found that her girlfriends up and leave when they find out about her obsession with bugs. She decides to take the advice of her (very) straight male co-worker and avoid letting any new girlfriends know about this obsession. It's quite interesting how it's made very clear that the straight male co-worker is a pervert while the lesbians have a good healthy relationship, especially considering the views expressed by another character later on. The male co-worker's more obnoxious aspects are played for laughs, but with enough balance so we can still understand why he and the protagonist remain friends.
All in all, this is really good fun. There's a gag regarding a Chinese restaurant the protagonist and her co-worker like which I'm silently giggling at as I remember it. The characters all feel full of life and well-developed. Then again, I'm not sure if perhaps people will view this episode as not being frightening enough. It feels creepy like a few episodes of Buffy did and while some of the effects seem a bit on the cheesy side, like with Buffy, this fits with the general sense of fun.
5/5
Pro-Life
So yeah, this is the one I'd been properly looking forward to. It's another John Carpenter and with that poster (see above) how could I resist? (Besides, I needed to see this for completion's sake.) My excitement was raised by the presence of Ron Perlman as the aggressive pro-life zealot.
The basic gist of the story is that a girl accidentally runs out into the road in front of some doctors from the local family planning clinic. She appears to be in shock, so they figure the best thing to do is to take her to the family planning clinic, since it is essentially a hospital. However, her father (played by Ron Perlman) who is actually not allowed within a certain distance of the building, is very angry to find out where his daughter is. While he's making threats from the outside, the doctors inside have found out about the pregnancy and have realised that there's something supernatural involved.
In the end this episode turned out not to be sure where it wanted to take things. I was actually really upset by the way that the story ended in such an unjust way and the lack of justice in it does not even seem to be properly acknowledged. The film seems to trail off with "oooh, think about that for a minute" music. My view was that there wasn't enough to think of and that important things were not yet resolved.
I'm going to include a small (but mild) SPOILER text in white below saying just what I found so unjust and why I feel it wasn't properly dealt with:
An abortion doctor is killed in the most disgusting way. Ron Perlman's horrible character seems to get off scott free. The scriptwriters seem happy to hurt the abortion doctor, but unwilling to hurt the sick bastard pro-lifer. The "not yet resolved" thing mentioned earlier is that gitt still breathing and not even being dragged to hell. Also let's not forget that the raped girl at the centre of the story doesn't get a chance for any kind of revenge either.
Spoiler is above in white text.
It was really upsetting because the acting is good, the effects are good, the plot is engaging, but the unresolved issues are pretty unacceptable. It's another case of a film which works fine right up to the point where it lets you down at the end. Perhaps other people will find the ending less disappointing than I did, so your mileage may vary:
3/5
The Black Cat
I was very excited to hear that this featured Stuart Gorden and Jeffrey Combs, the director and the star of the awesome "Re-Animator". Expecting it to be like Re-Animator was a big mistake. This short film is based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. If you are a big Poe fan I think you'd love it. There were a few references to Poe's various works scattered around that I recognised, so I'd be very surprised if there weren't many more that I didn't recognise.
Sadly my lack of familiarity of Poe may have caused me to miss something important. I didn't find this film terribly funny and I never quite felt like I understood the central character. It also featured a pet peeve of mine which was a ghostly bad guy that follows no real rules. While the perceived cause of the tragedy and general weirdness that ensues in the film is the eponymous "black cat", the film nevertheless feels very much like a ghost story. Now my problem with ghost stories is that they often suggest that if you do something for the ghost, like catch their murderer or something, the ghost will be appeased and rest in peace. Meanwhile the ghost gets to do pretty much anything it wants, especially if it does things which have some relation to its life or death. The all-powerful nature of ghosts and the arbitrary use of those powers really bugged me. Such stories will often show ghosts murdering one person, yet in another case maniacally laughing as they <i>nearly</i> kill someone else. Why did they kill one but not the other? The answer to that question is either some arbitrary answer to do with which people most offended the ghost's sensibilities or, more often, they were just lucky i.e. the all-powerful ghost wasn't feeling so all-powerful on that occasion for some reason.
So, back to the black cat, there's a feeling that the cat is responsible for bad stuff, but the cat turns out to be pretty powerful with very little rhyme or reason to its actions. Rather than feeling a growing sense of fear or unease, I just found myself rather bored. As I have said earlier, I would probably have been a great deal more entertained if I recognised more of the references to Poe's works, but sadly it just felt like one thing happening after another with no real reason for me to care.
2.5/5