World Premiere 2009 in London, US Theatrical Release 2011
Starring Bill Hicks, Kevin Booth, John Farneti, Lynn Hicks, Mary Hicks, Steve Hicks, Andy Huggins, David Johndrow, James Ladmirault, Dwight Slade
Directed by Matt Harlock & Paul Thomas
Expectations: High, I love Bill Hicks.
Bill Hicks is fucking awesome and if you dig stand-up comedy in any meaningful way, you should already know the name and be familiar with his work. If not, he’s one of the best there ever was. Hicks elevated stand-up to levels previously undreamt about by mainstream comics, pushing boundaries way past the bleeding edge. At his core, he was a thoughtful, logical man who threw everything he had up on that stage and American: The Bill Hicks Story seeks to let you in on how he came to be that man. Mostly it succeeds, but as much as I love Hicks and the experience of watching this movie, I can’t let my feelings override the glaring problems I had with the film at a structural level.
There’s an odd choice made by the documentarians to focus on audio-only interviews of his family and friends, instead of traditional video interviews. While they’re talking, still photographs are animated into whatever scene the interviewee is describing. It took a while for me to come around to this style, and while I eventually was OK with it, I never really liked it. It creates an odd disconnect from the person speaking and unless you’re extremely good with placing a voice to a name, you’re going to lose track of who’s who. Bill Hicks, via these animated pictures and live video footage, is always front and center and the film takes on something of a video shrine to him instead of a true documentary. Then in the final few minutes of the film, the filmmakers break character and finally show the people who’ve been narrating our experience. The only problem is that besides Hicks’ mother, I have very little idea who everyone else is, unless their current look unmistakably resembles all the photographs we were shown from the 70s and 80s. They also never flash the person’s name on the screen when they’re talking, so we literally have no help in this regard.
Despite this, the film succeeds as a document of the legacy and power of Bill Hicks’ stand-up act. It follows a very linear path from Bill’s childhood to his death, so you do get a great sense of the overall arc of his life, and some of the twists and turns it took along the way. I greatly enjoyed the film, but a lot of that enjoyment is just discovering bits and pieces of what made a guy I greatly respect who he was. Hicks was the man, and this documentary only seals that fact deeper in my mind. If you’re unfamiliar with him, I’d definitely watch a couple of his stand-up sets before hitting this doc up. I highly recommend his HBO One Night Stand set, currently available on Netflix Instant as Episode 1 of the series: Bill Hicks Live: Satirist, Social Critic, Stand-up Comedian.
Starring Toni Collette, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries, Eric Bana, Bethany Whitmore, Renée Geyer
Directed by Adam Elliot
Expectations: Moderate. Heard good things.
The past few weeks I’ve been doing my best to wipe my cinematic slate clean of everything that’s been clogging it up for the past year (or more). While this is theoretically impossible for me with my Netflix Queue maxed out at 500, another couple hundred on the Instant Queue and hundreds of other films I’d like to see not represented there, I’m doing my best to prioritize and pave the way for an upcoming year filled with new and exciting movies. What I’m getting at is that I’ve intended to watch Mary and Max for the past thirteen months. My co-worker watched the film in October or November of last year and highly recommended the film to me. She knew I was a huge fan of claymation, and she cited the character depth in the film as something that I would probably connect with. I took the film home with the distinct intention to watch it within a few weeks. Time passed and I soon found myself at the end of December, a period in our work schedule where an imposed furlough makes it so that we’re all off work for the final week or so of December. I said to myself, “Perfect. I will finally get to that Mary and Max movie during the furlough.” You can probably see where this is going, and perhaps I’m revealing too much about my procrastinating tendencies, but I never did watch the film. Instead it languished in my mind for the entirety of 2011, until I found myself once again at home on the first day of our December furlough. When I thought of Mary and Max again (as I do every few days or so) I realized just how long it had been “something I’d get to.” Lately, I’ve forced myself to schedule things like this to bring order out of the procrastination chaos, and after my realization that it had been a full year, I decided right then and there to finally watch it this week. And I did. And I loved it.
Starring Caitlin Wachs, Ron Perlman, Mark Feuerstein, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Bill Dow, Chad Krowchuk, Graeme McComb, Benjamin Rogers
Directed by John Carpenter
Expectations: Moderate. Carpenter’s other Masters of Horror episode was pretty fun.
If Cigarette Burns was a good Carpenter attempt at episodic TV, then Pro-Life is an excellent one. It’s quite possible you won’t agree with me, but I found this to be easily one of the most enjoyable and exciting episodes of Masters of Horror yet. If you feel very strongly one way or the other on abortion this episode might bother you, but in the name of good horror fun, I say divorce yourself from the issue and allow the episode to run its course. The entire film revolves around a pregnant teen and an abortion clinic though, so it’s fairly hard not to think about it during the movie!
As the film opens it seems like it might be a simple horror take on the abortion issue, and in a way it is, but as the movie progresses it continues to grow darker and more other-worldly. For me personally, this was exactly the right move to take with this one and my enjoyment just grew and grew as the film went on. The ending is something of a WTF moment, but it works, and I can’t complain too much after being as entertained as I was throughout the film.
John Carpenter’s son Cody once again provides music, and this time it’s not so reminiscent of his father’s scores, but I mean that in a good way. Sure, it has the signature synths and piano that Carpenter is known for, but the melodies never reminded me of Carpenter’s fantastic scores of the past. This is a curse and a blessing as the music sometimes has a very generic horror feeling, but when it’s good, it’s fantastic. As the episode moves along, the tension rises and the percussion-driven synth score rattles on, rarely letting up its incessant rhythm. It works so well in heightening the mood and the tension, and coupled with his father’s eye for editing, it’s brilliant.
While the film is contained within one building, Carpenter splits up the players into groups and then cuts between their stories. They all begin the film together, but as it moves along, certain events force them apart. This leads to some of the best cross-cutting I’ve seen in a while, with each scene bursting with tension, leading into another equally exciting scene. They stack on top of one another as the thrills and the horror builds with them, all scored with the incessant synth percussion.
I’ve kept the plot of this one fairly vague because it’s just too much fun to spoil. The acting has a shit-ton of faults and some of the writing is equally groan-inducing, but the skill of John Carpenter and some killer FX from KNB help make this one of the best episodes of the series. It ventures into fantastically fun 80s camp territories that I haven’t seen outside of an 80s film in a while, and at the same time Carpenter shows incredible restraint in certain moments, keeping the film from being the bullshit torture porn a lesser director might make it. For these facts alone, it is worthy of my seal of approval, but don’t just take it from me. Give it a shot!
Starring Norman Reedus, Udo Kier, Gary Hetherington, Chris Britton, Zara Taylor, Chris Gauthier, Douglas Arthurs, Colin Foo, Gwynyth Walsh, Christopher Redman, Julius Chapple
Directed by John Carpenter
Expectations: Moderate. I’ll admit it, I am excited to see this. John Carpenter and me go way back.
John Carpenter is a special director to me. During my film snob period, John Carpenter was one of the few genre filmmakers able to cut through my bullshit. His confidence and grasp on storytelling was powerful enough to impress despite the issues a teenage film snob might have. Films like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, They Live, Big Trouble in Little China. Christ, the man knows how to get the job done and make it fun as hell. So going into this episode of Masters of Horror, I hoped that Carpenter would coming out firing on all cylinders.
Cigarette Burns is a film about films, one of the hardest types of films to pull off successfully. This is because as a self-aware film, it brings itself into our world and out of the realm of fantasy. Our touchstones are their touchstones. Carpenter is quick to establish that this is still fantasy though, when he reveals a pale-skinned, inhuman freak chained to a wall in the house of a billionaire. The rich man wants our hero (Norman Reedus) to hunt down a print of a rare film only ever shown once. When screened for the festival audience, the people went into a murderous frenzy, creating a cinematic myth for the ages. The man chained to the wall isn’t as key as you might think, but the early revelation about him changes the experience of watching Cigarette Burns and, at least for me, separates the film from our world. A parallel universe, perhaps.
Starring Henry Thomas, Matt Frewer, Stacy Grant, Jake D. Smith, Michael Curtola, Katharine Horsman, Paul Wu, Leah Graham, Lucie Laurier
Directed by Mick Garris
Expectations: Low. I’m not expecting anything from this series unless it’s a director I highly respect and I haven’t seen enough of Mick Garris’s films to really respect him.
Respectable and well made, Chocolate is a great entry into the Masters of Horror series. Director Mick Garris proves that he’s worth checking out, showing a great sense of suspense and careful plotting. Of his other films, I’ve only seen Sleepwalkers: a fun, if forgettable, early 90s horror romp. Garris loves Stephen King and has directed numerous adaptations of his work so I was surprised he didn’t go down the King path here as well. Chocolate is based on Garris’s original short story, adapted by Garris himself, making for one of the best written and filmed episodes of the series yet.
Starring Henry Thomas (Elliott from E.T.) as an artificial flavor chemist, the film follows him as he begins to have strange sensory losses. It all starts with the taste of bittersweet chocolate in his mouth as he wakes from sleep. As with any mysterious story, the unraveling is the fun, so I’ll leave the synopsis at this. The story does progress is ways you wouldn’t expect, culminating in a fitting finale. My only beef is that the ending itself is somewhat weak, garnering a “That’s it?” and a shrug. It’s not a big concern, as what happens after the fade to black is obvious, but it is a bit jarring. I respect Garris for not completely hand-holding the audience though, and allowing their intelligence to fill in the final blanks.
One of my big issues with the Masters of Horror series may seem strange upon initial reading. Whenever a woman appears in one of these films, it’s nearly a forgone conclusion that at some point during the film, she’ll be nude on-screen. For instance, in this episode there are four women with speaking parts and two of them have extensive nude scenes. One of the others takes her shirt off to reveal a bra, and the other is wearing something close to lingerie in her only scene. See what I’m talking about? While the reckless adolescent side of my brain enjoys this facet of the series, having every female sexualized to this degree is utterly ridiculous and demeaning. I’d love to see what a female director would do with this series, but in addition to female directors being scarce, female horror directors are in even more short supply. I know that horror is something of an adolescent genre aimed at males, and that these paid cable shows like to push whatever envelope they can simply because they can, but I’d like to see gore and nudity used in service of the story, not to drive ratings. I will say that the gore in this episode was excellent and absolutely in service of the story.
Chocolate isn’t a traditional horror picture, instead it’s more psychological as Henry Thomas slowly loses grip on his senses. The story is interesting and engaging, but still feels somewhat padded to make the one-hour mark. A little tightening would have done some good, but given the general quality of this series, I’ll take what I can get. I really enjoyed Chocolate and it gives me hope that Mick Garris’s other films will be as well made.
Will Silver, on January 30, 2012, 5:20 am
World Premiere 2009 in London, US Theatrical Release 2011
Starring Caitlin Wachs, Ron Perlman, Mark Feuerstein, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Bill Dow, Chad Krowchuk, Graeme McComb, Benjamin Rogers
Starring Norman Reedus, Udo Kier, Gary Hetherington, Chris Britton, Zara Taylor, Chris Gauthier, Douglas Arthurs, Colin Foo, Gwynyth Walsh, Christopher Redman, Julius Chapple
Starring Henry Thomas, Matt Frewer, Stacy Grant, Jake D. Smith, Michael Curtola, Katharine Horsman, Paul Wu, Leah Graham, Lucie Laurier
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