Deer Woman

Director: John Landis
Writer: John Landis, Max Landis
Released: 2005
Cast: Brian Benben, Anthony Griffith, Cinthia Moura, Sonja Bennett

NIKKI says: Mmm... did I like Deer Woman? Not really. It's not something I would go back to. It was a bit silly, and though I recognise it had a sense of humour about itself, I still felt that strange Landis sheen over the top of it that draws me away from his other films in the same way. Why do I just dislike Landis so much? I don't know... but this was bearable, which is more than I can say about much of the other Masters of Horror episodes we've endured.

The gist is this: after a string of murders, a burned-out cop suggests the dead men are being killed by a deer-like creature. He discovers, then, a Native American legend that suggests that very thing -- a half-woman, half-deer creature exists that goes around seducing and stomping men.

Yep. And so it's up to the cop to bring it all home. Brian Benben plays the cop, and it was so great watching him after all these years. I don't think I've seen him in anything since Dream On, which counting Thriller and The Blues Brothers is only one of the few Landis thing I've really liked.

It was okay. No Homecoming, but okay.

2/5

Valerie on the Stairs, dir. Mick Garris (2006)

NIKKI says:
I find Mick Garris quite an endearing person. Whenever I see him interviewed, he appears to me rather free of ego, just a former editor made good, responsible now for some major movies and TV miniseries'. Along the way, too, he has just stumbled into becoming the old-school horror genre fan's resident flag-waver. Lord knows we need one.

It sucks then to have to say it, but Mick Garris is a terrible filmmaker. His scripts are almost always boring and corny, his direction is unsurprising and unoriginal. His style reeks of film-school technique, and he can barely build a scare with even the most horrifying of material. While the remake of The Shining was impressive, Garris's resume also contains Riding the Bullet, Quicksilver Highway, Desperation, and Sleepwalkers -- some of the worst horror films and Stephen King adaptations ever produced.

How does the man keep getting work? How has become so revered? The stature of the names he draws to his Masters of Horror series is beyond comprehension. Horror directors past and present appear to be lining up to work for him. How has the man blinded people so? Am I missing something? Didn't Stephen King himself grow up loving the Universal Monsters, Vincent Price movies, and Alfred Hitchcock? How does the master of literary horror not see the flaws in Garris's super-corny, over-the-top, under-developed work?

It's boggles our fucking minds.

Valerie on the Stairs, based on a story by Clive Barker, is among the worst Masters of Horror films. It's about a guy who takes up residence at a writer's retreat in order to concentrate on his work. Minutes inside the place, and he's disturbed by banging walls and busybody neighbours, all of whom are mysterious and creepy. The banging stops and the writer (Rob) encounters Valerie (on the stairs) who begs him to save her from an unseen force. Valerie is just a chick lit from above, so she's not really all that scary. Blah, blah, blah, Rob discovers that Valerie and the unseen force (which we eventually see in the form of Tony Todd in a ridiculous devil costume) were created by other residents of the retreat. They are in a story and Rob may just be a part of it.

I have to spoil it -- in the end, after so much blood and gore (a guy gets his spine ripped out through his mouth), we learn that Rob is actually a part of the story and at the end his body turns to typewritten paper and his floats away.

Oh my god, Mick Garris -- are you trying to kill me with your ineptitude and lameness? Or do we blame Clive Barker? Something, perhaps those previously mentioned movies, makes me think Barker isn't the problem.

Nothing here is scary. The story is poorly developed. It makes sense, but only a contrived kind of sense. The horror is boring, the script stupid, the point indiscernible. Another so-called Master reveals his failings.

.5/5

Dreams in the Witch-House, dir. Stuart Gordon (2005)

NIKKI says:
Is it wrong to be shocked that a Masters of Horror could be so good? I think what separated this from most of the bad films is the class of filmmaker -- Stuart Gordon may actually be a Master of Horror. I don't think he's had anything as pointless and stupid as this series' Chocolate on his resume. There's just a level of class to this one, from script to production value, that places it well above its contemporaries.

We continue here with Lovecraft Week, this film based on the story of the same name. A young man rents a room near his college campus (Miskatonic U, of course), and ends up going mad. It's the getting there, obviously, that provides much of the fun here. Basically, there's some evil residing in the place, and sacrifices are afoot.

Gordon builds tension well. He gives us a likable main character and some suitably bizarre background folks. He places them all in a creepy old house and lets ancient witchcraft do its thing. We get rats with human faces, dreams of naked witches, and flesh-tearing so grossly real you'll think this was a documentary.

The success of this one probably has to do with Gordon's clear reverence for Lovecraft and his stories. Gordon made Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon -- all good Lovecraft-inspired movies.

3/5

STEVE says:
This was the first of the Masters of Horror series that I'd seen, and the reason my expectations were so high for the rest. As it happens, Stuart Gordon and co-writer Dennis Paoli set me up for a fall: I would wait a long time until another episode reached the high-water mark set by Dreams.

Watching it for a second time tonight, I've decided it's some of the most disturbing work Gordon's done. Re-animator and From Beyond had a sense of humour about them, whereas Dagon was more of a straight horror piece. Dreams falls into the latter category, with very little in it to elicit the slightest chuckle (although I did find the human-faced rat-thing kind of silly).

Enough of this Masters of Horror crap. I want to see Gordon get his own show where he does all the Lovecraft stories. This one-hour format seems perfect for that sort of thing. I'd love to see his take on Pickman's Model, The Dunwich Horror or The Lurking Fear.

3.5/5

The Damned Thing, dir. Tobe Hooper (2006)

STEVE says:
Hmm, yes. Another entry from the Masters of Horror collection; this one from Tobe Hooper, written by Richard Christian Matheson and based on a story by Ambrose Bierce.

Not a bad pedigree, and one it almost lives up to. But only almost.

Starts off okay, with young Kevin witnessing his dad go from genial family man to shotgun-toting lunatic in mere seconds. "It found me," he says. "The damned thing." After killing Kevin's mom, dad chases Kevin outside, through a field, and up a tree, and just before he's able to shoot Kevin down, some unseen force tears at his chest, rips him open from nave to chops, and spins him around a bit before we -

Cut to: Present Day. Kevin (as played by Sean Patrick Flanery) is now Sheriff of Cloverdale. When townsfolk start going mad and turning on one another - and in some cases, themselves - Kevin realizes it has to do with the Damned Thing that did his dad in. He learns that the same thing happened a few towns over in 1959. Some of the townsfolk who survived - including his own father - relocated to Clovafield. Now the Thing is back, and it's found them.

There is never any explanation as to what this Damned Thing is, where it came from, or why it's after any of the survivors - and, it seems, their offspring - from the 1959 incident. No matter. Kevin figures the Damned Thing wants him and will go away if it gets him, so he sacrifices himself to save his wife and child - not realizing, I guess, that the Thing would want his child as well. Which is where it ends, Kevin's wife and kid being done in by the Thing as well.

This was very unsatisfying in the end, but I was with it up until then. It was good - not Black Cat good or Homecoming good, not by a long shot, but still not as horrendously bad as this series tends to be. I'm rating it on a special Masters of Horror curve.

3/5

NIKKI says:
It started out well. I enjoyed the opening scenes with the dad going slightly mental on his family after the black stuff dripped through the wall. And then I was reasonably interested in why the townsfolk, all those years later, started doing themselves in in mass numbers.

What annoyed me, though, was that old thing of, well, here we are however many years later, and the thing is back and it wants YOU, Sean Patrick Flanery! It was a bit Here We Go Again. But that's the nature of horror and supernatural stories -- so much ground has been tread since the Poe days that not much is going to be shocking and new.

Still, this one perhaps could have upped the ante a bit. Instead, it went exactly where one expected it to go. Flanery's kid was in peril, wife went mental, thing ate Flanery. Ho hum. Man, do I hate the Monster At The End ending. It's lazy, it bores me, it's the main reason why I broke up with Stephen King. Note to horror writers: Big mud monsters are not scary.

I do wish Flanery would get more work. And the scene where the guy kills himself with a hammer has to be seen to be believed -- these shows do not hold back horror-wise. That's a plus.

2.5/5

Pelts, dir. Dario Argento (2006)

STEVE says:
Dario, you're better than this.

Pelts didn't suck. It was no Chocolate, not by a long shot, and it was better than your first entry, Jenifer. But it wasn't great. It wasn't Homecoming great, or Black Cat great. With those, Dante and Gordon (respectively) managed to make an hour of TV feel like a cinematic experience. The Black Cat is the reason we've taken to including the Masters of Horror segments in this project. But Pelts just felt like TV.

And you're no stranger to TV. We've seen Do You Like Hitchcock? and quite liked it - actually liked it a lot more than your cinematic offerings of late. So what went wrong? There were bits that looked like Argento - the kid with the trap, for example, and the woman sewing her face up - but they felt like they were done by someone else entirely. Like you didn't have your game face on.

What's the story, Dario? Do you need the money? Was this just a paycheck to you?

Don't get me wrong, I'll still be there for La Terza Madre - finishing off your Three Mothers trilogy after nearly 30 years, how could I not be? - but a little part of me wonders if it'll be worth it...

2/5

NIKKI says:
All together now... "meh".

I think we both said it when this ended. Not a horrible entry in the series, but nothing to rave about. The film was graphic and gross as far as the effects, but just not as gripping and hair-tearing-out tense as Dario often is. Still, even at his shittiest, Dario is a cut above most horror directors, which is probably why this didn't wholly suck.

And, imagine, a Masters of Horror episode by an actual Master of Horror. It had to happen eventually.

Meat Loaf is a guy who collects and sells "pelts" -- I'd never heard that word before, and prior to finding out thought this was a film about heavy rain. Meat then sells the pelts for good money. The better the pelt, the more cash he gets. So, when crazy John Saxon interrupts Meat mid-lapdance to offer him the best pelts ever, Meat is intrigued. He goes to get them and finds Saxon and his protege dead. Not just dead, really dead -- Saxon with his head beaten crudgy via baseball bat, and the kid with his head chopped in half longways in a bear trap (watch this movie for that scene -- it's foul).

So, we learn the pelts are from a mysterious raccoon tribe and their spirits are making those who come in contact with the soft fur do horrible things to themselves.

What Meat ends up doing has to be seen to be believed. Now, that's horror.

Didn't hate it, didn't love it. Didn't ever need to see Meat getting rubbed up by strippers.

2/5

The Screwfly Solution, dir. Joe Dante (2006)

NIKKI says:
The Masters of Horror series has been hit and miss in terms of its quality. Some of the films have been good (The Black Cat), some great (Homecoming), and others have been utter crud (Chocolate). In any case, we anticipate them all in the same way: will we love this film or hate ourselves... it's fun to see which way the dice will fall.

Screwfly wasn't too bad. It was one of those that falls into the "good" category. And this could be because so many of them are so bad, that even if they're remotely decent, they look better than they really are. This one was a Dante entry, and his have been good in the past, so it's no surprise this works. It's about a virus the drives the male population to kill the women (a strange confusion of arousal and aggression), forcing a mother and daughter to seek refuge. Jason Priestley and Elliott Gould play the scientists struggling to find the answers and save the day.

It was enjoyable enough. Though in the past three days, I've seen Priestley getting ridden by a naked babe in bed, and I've seen Luke Perry full-frontal, exiting the shower in Oz. Didn't I dream this at some point back in 1992?

2.5/5

STEVE says:
First, a disclaimer: Although Masters of Horror is a TV show, we've decided to consider the episodes as movies in their own right. With Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe and The Cowboy and the Frenchman (also part of a TV series, "How I See the French", incidentally), we've already allowed short films into this project, and with feature film directors at the helm of each Masters of Horror episode, we reckon they at least fall into the short film category.

Second, The Screwfly Solution was okay, but not great. I loved the idea of religious mania destroying the world, but this didn't quite have a Joe Dante feel to it. And even if it hadn't been Dante, if someone else had directed it and my expectations had been different, I'm not sure it would rate any higher. The story was good, but the ending felt rushed and a bit derivative - of Maximum Overdrive, of all things.

Now that that's out of the way - where do some of these people get off calling themselves Masters?

Okay, you got Carpenter. No argument there. Argento, fine. Stuart Gordon, yes. Hooper... you're getting into shaky territory here (Eaten Alive, The Funhouse and The Toolbox Murders being some of the worst "horror" I've had to endure), but still, he did give us The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so for that alone I hold my tongue. Larry Cohen - again, fine - cheesy, but fine. But Don Coscarelli? Yes, he gave us the Phantasm series, but that's about it, as far as horror goes. I mean, just because you've made some horror movies, doesn't make you a master, you dig? John McNaughton made Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer back in 1986 - this makes him a Master of Horror?

The list also includes Joe Dante and John Landis - both of whom I'm a fan, but "masters" of horror? I'll give Dante points for The Howling and Landis for American Werewolf, but apart from that... What, Gremlins? It's a dark comedy, nothing especially horrific about it.

And who the fuck is Lucky McKee to be among the names Carpenter, Hooper and Argento? Director of May and The Woods? Sorry, pal - not impressed. Same goes for you, Mr. William Malone. Your remake of The House on Haunted Hill was beyond the pale. And Feardotcom? Now you're just fucking with me.

The only thing Mick Garris appears to be a Master of is middle-of-the-road TV adaptations of Stephen King stories. His contribution to the first series, Chocolate, is perhaps the worst because it suffers not only from his direction, but from his screenwriting and being based on his own short story. This guy knows nothing about storytelling - how he continues (indeed, how he even started) getting jobs is beyond me.

There were 13 episodes in the first season. Of the 10 that I saw, there were three good ones: Dante's Homecoming, Landis' Deer Woman, and Gordon's Dreams in the Witch House. The other seven were either incomprehensible or just went straight for the gross-out. Horror never entered into it.

Why I expected anything more from the second season - with "masters" such as Ernest R. Dickerson (Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight), Peter Medak (Species II), and Rob Schmidt (Wrong Turn) - I don't know.

2.5/5