Masters of Horror: Imprint (2006)

Imprint has the questionable honour of being the episode of Masters of Horror that wasn't actually shown on American TV during the first run of the series. And it's pretty easy to see why: though many of the episodes featured violence -- even graphic violence and sexualised violence -- none of them went quite so far as Imprint. Anyone who's familiar with Takashi Miike's body of work (notably Ichi The Killer and Audition) would probably expect as much from him; and Imprint is just as violent and downright nasty as both of the aforementioned movies.

Sadly (you knew that was coming, right?) it lacks many of the redeeming factors those movies had. It's visually stunning, sure, but it's not quite as compulsively watchable as Ichi The Killer, nor as quietly menacing as Audition. This is just splatter.

Interestingly, it's filmed in English, rather than Miike's native Japanese. Or at least it claims to be filmed in English. If you witnessed Miike's cameo in Hostel, you'll know that his English isn't brilliant, and between the Japanese girls speaking English with impenetrable accents and Billy Drago mumbling the whole time, this is all but incomprehensible. It's not helped by the fact that the sound on the DVD is dreadful: one minute everyone's speaking so quietly you can't make out what they're saying, and the next we've cut to a torture scene so loud your neighbours will probably be calling the police before you've found the remote control to turn it down. To add insult to injury, there aren't even any subtitles on the DVD.

Once you've battled past all of that, the story isn't even worth it. Sure, the torture is horrible, the heartbreak is pretty touching, but the girl with the hand growing out of her head is just fucking stupid. Seriously, this series has a terrible habit of starting off promisingly before blowing it all with one crushingly retarded move, and that was Imprint's mistake.

A girl with a fucking hand growing out of her head. A talking hand, at that. Someone get me a drink. A strong one.

Masters of Horror: The Fair-Haired Child (2006)

The definition of ‘master’ really has been pushed to its limits by this series. The directors seem to fall into one of two camps: either they’ve not directed anywhere near enough to be considered a master, or they’ve directed lots of things, but anything half-decent happened decades ago, with their more recent output being, bluntly, shit. William Malone falls somewhere between the two, because he’s only made a couple of movies, none of which were very good. Which actually puts him further away from being a master than most of the others. But I digress.

Right, The Fair-Haired Child. Well, it’s basically the old monkey’s paw story, again. (Filmmakers really love that one at the moment, don’t they?) A couple try to resurrect their dead son, but have to make a hard bargain to do so. And when they get him back, he’s not really all that happy about it, anyway. Thrown in is another narrative in which a young girl is kidnapped by the couple and kept in their basement ready to be sacrificed to some unknown evil, which might appear at any moment.

There are some pretty cool scenes in the first half, with some real tension being built up by the utter weirdness of it all. As is all too common lately, though, the second half squanders it all with a hugely unsatisfactory ending.

It’s quite pretty to look though, I guess, and the monster’s quite scary, even if it is in an Asian-influenced clicking-and-crawling dead thing kind of a way. So this isn’t a complete waste of time. But it’s not great, either.

Masters of Horror: Jenifer (2006)

Yet more proof that Dario Argento really has lost the plot, Jenifer is a very silly, simple story packed with lots of gore and so predictable you could fall asleep after the first ten minutes and figure the rest out. The male lead is so stupid it hurts, and the sex scenes are gag-inducing. Which may or may not be a good thing, out of context, since this is horror after all. But trust me: it’s not a good thing.

This is rubbish. Like Pelts, it’s so far over the top that it all becomes laughable, destroying all tension, suspense or fear it had almost managed to gather along the way, and the ending just makes me want to smack my head against a wall. Or the back of my hand against someone’s face. Like everyone involved in making this nonsense.

Masters of Horror: Dance of the Dead (2006)

Now, here’s a real master of horror, at last! I’m talking more about Robert Englund than Tobe Hooper, but this is one of the better episodes from the first season, so he’s not all bad either.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world defined mostly by fast cuts, flickering lights, and teenage rebels who all look like heroin addicts in their late 20s, Dance of the Dead follows one particular family whose youngest daughter is about to find out something very, very, very disturbing indeed. Her life is unpleasant enough as it is: Peggy lives alone with her mother, working in a rundown diner, with a deceased sister and father. Maybe it’s that hard life that’s aged her so that she looks about ten years older than she’s supposed to be? Not that I’m worryingly preoccupied with that fact, mind you. Anyway, things are bad enough already, but then a group of cracked out good-for-nothings turn up in the diner and make alternately threatening and seductive faces at her. Clearly, this is enough to convince her to run away with them, take all manner of drugs, and go to a club hosted by Robert Englund. Not a nice place to be, but even that’s nothing compared with what’s about to happen…

The grotesquery in this episode is much better handled than in most of the others: disgusting and creepy without being ridiculous, just gross enough to be disturbing without being so over the top that it becomes laughable. Which is a lightness of hand I wouldn’t really have expected of either this series or this director, so that was a pleasant surprise. The frenetic editing could have been toned down, but it’s a look, a style that feels deliberately chosen rather than just a result of someone wondering what this button does … and THIS one…

It comes in at a respectable second place, then. It’s still no Sick Girl, but it’s head and shoulders above the rest of the series.

Masters of Horror: Sick Girl

Girl meets girl. Girl falls for girl. Girl turns into giant mutated insect and goes on a killing spree. That's the basic premise of Lucky McKee's Sick Girl, one of the best Masters of Horror episodes of the first season. While many of the other so-called "Masters" are turning out to be disappointingly well past their prime, McKee, a relative unknown, knocks it out of the park. The storyline is perfectly paced, fitting the 1-hour timeslot precisely, neither feeling rushed nor hopelessly stretched; and, crucially, it's simple enough to make sense. Which is something not many of the other Masters of Horror episodes could claim.

Perhaps even more importantly, McKee's casting is spot on. Angela Bettis, previously his leading lady in May, is off-beat and weird without being unsympathetic, and Misty Mun-- sorry, Erin Brown, is by turns adorable, touching, and actually quite frighteningly nasty. The slick and shiny production isn't anything unique to this episode, but McKee manages to make it work in ways that many of the other directors just didn't.

He does seem to have something of a fixation with lesbians, but, well, having watched this, who wants to argue with him about that?

Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns

John Carpenter's episode of Masters of Horror is one of the most unnerving episodes of the whole series. It focuses on a young man on a hunt for the Holy Grail of the film world: Le Fin Absolute du Monde. At its one and only screening, the entire audience went insane and murdered one another; the few survivors have become utterly obsessed with the film, and mostly gone into hiding. A collector is determined to see it, particularly since he has reason to believe that a print still exists; Kirby Sweetman is desperate for the money on offer, and so he sets off on a quest that'll change his life.

Cigarette Burns isn't perfect: the amount of build up and hyperbole heaped onto this legendary film would make it something beyond the imagination of most people, so for the episode to even attempt to show a few seconds of it seems like a misstep. Because actually, it starts to become reminiscent of The Ring (the American remake, naturally), right down to the flashes of a ring/cigarette burn that the victims see when their time is drawing short. There's some missing character development, and a particularly large helping of the kind of insider wank that Masters of Horror specialises in -- the odd wink to the knowing viewer is kind of fun, but Cigarette Burns is constantly elbowing us in the ribs and guffawing over its own cleverness -- but none of that manages to completely spoil the fact that this is probably the scariest of the Masters of Horror episodes to date.

Masters of Horror: Chocolate

Chocolate is one of the more frustrating Masters of Horror episodes. Not to be nit-picky, but Mick Garris doesn't really qualify as a Master -- reviewing his credits reveals that he directed a handful of Stephen King made-for-TV adaptations, and wrote some pretty decent stories in the 80s and early 90s -- though since Masters of Horror is his brainchild, it wouldn't really be fair to deny him a crack at a couple of episodes. The thing is, like the series as a whole, Chocolate is a brilliant idea buried under some pretty terrible execution.

The episode starts off with a blood-covered man in a police station, explaining himself. Never a good opening premise. His story is pretty out-there, too: seems he started having what seemed, at first, to be some sort of hallucination. He started tasting things he wasn't eating; hearing things from another place; seeing things through someone else's eyes. Somewhere along the line, he should also have realised he has the worst friends ever, since none of them seem to believe him when he says he's gone temporarily blind and/or deaf, and none of them ever offers to take him to a doctor. The final straw comes when he starts experiencing another person's sexual pleasure.

I only wish that last line were a joke.

In between writhing about in bed inappropriately, he manages to figure out that he's sharing the physical sensations of a woman who lives in Canada -- cue the ever present Masters of Horror wankiness, as he travels to Vancouver, where the series is filmed -- and she's in trouble, because she's just murdered her boyfriend. Oh dear. Having irrationally convinced himself he's in love with her, the man (I can't even be bothered to look up his character's name, he's so rubbish) stalks her around town till they have a big showdown with guns. And he gets arrested. And a really interesting idea gets wasted on wankiness. Better luck next time, Garris.

Masters of Horror: Deer Woman

A bored detective, haunted by personal tragedy and moved onto a slow beat as a result, finds himself being drawn into a weird case -- men are being killed, apparently mid-coitus, by what appears to be an animal. Specifically, a deer. But how could a deer get into a locked van, or a smart hotel room, without being noticed?

Unfortunately, there's not exactly much tension to be had with a title like that. The eponymous woman, while looking decently attractive at first glance, doesn't speak (because she's half deer, presumably) and as a result, quickly starts to seem mentally deficient. Just how none of her victims manages to notice that there's something not quite right about the grinning, nodding moron is never explained, but it's probably because they're just as brainless as she is, and as this episode seems to think its audience is.

John Landis directed one of my favourite movies of all time, so I'm inclined to want to cut him a little slack. Sadly, this episode is utter dross, without a single redeeming feature.

Masters of Horror: Pelts

While denying Dario Argento his place at the 'Masters of Horror' table would seem almost blasphemous, he is knocking on a bit now. And this utterly bizarre story about the fate of some fur traders who dare attempt to make a profit out of the skins of some mystic raccoons unfortunately goes some way to demonstrating that the glory days of Suspiria are far, far behind him now.

The central character is so utterly ridiculous, and his relationship with a lesbian lapdancer-cum-wannabe-model is so unbelievable that there's little to no emotional involvement with their fates. The gruesome deaths of several innocent minimum wage seamstresses are pretty horrific -- there's a lot of gore in this episode, and more than one moment that'll make you want to hide behind a cushion; that's a plus point, incidentally -- but by the time the episode reaches its climax, everything has become so utterly absurd that it's laughable, rather than scary.

Also, just by the by, Meat Loaf should always, always wear at least two more layers of clothing than Pelts lets him get away with. Oh dear.