I love horror movies as much as anyone with a strong appetite for cinematic blood, guts, and gore, but there are horror movie sub-genres I don’t touch unless I absolutely have to. These are supernatural movies and Asian horror flicks with ghosts and shit. To me, these movies take the fun away from horror because I get genuinely scared. My vivid imagination doesn’t make it any easier; I remember the most frightening movie scenes the moment I start nodding off to sleep. To recover from a supernatural horror movie, I have to go to bed with the lights on for a week.
To celebrate Halloween, I invited the Hohobags over for candy, alcohol, and horror movies last night. I thought we’d never get to the movie part of the night, but we eventually stopped talking and got around to watching Paranormal Activity, which was followed shortly by Clueless so we could fall asleep to pretty thoughts of pink fur and plaid. (Am I the only one here who’s weirded out by Clueless‘ incestuous plot twist? How come I didn’t spot this when I was in fifth grade? Whatever happened to Alicia Silverstone anyway? And why does my boyfriend withhold his affection every time young Jeremy Sisto comes on screen?) Without looking at the synopsis, I knew I’d probably have trouble sleeping for the next couple of days.
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A couple of weeks ago, I complained about the serious lack of censorship-free horror movie viewing in this country, but little did I know that Phil Dy was awesome enough to show Antichrist all week at Mogwai. Thank God for (free) independent film theaters! I have been waiting to see this movie since I read an article about how its disturbing imagery made people at walk out of it at Cannes. But now that I’ve actually seen the film, I’m not entirely sure what to think.
Let me begin by saying that Antichrist the kind of movie that invites pretentious readings. If you really want to take it apart and talk to your friends about it, you’re going to end up sounding like a douchey, know-it-all critic. Antichrist is very heavy on the imagery, and there’s no other way to talk about the movie without the risk of reading too much into it. The film opens with a couple deep in the throes of lovemaking, completely oblivious to their young son who was slowly crawling his way out their apartment window. (The opening sequence actually had a shot of penis-vagina penetration, woot!) After their son dies, the wife experiences severe depression, which her therapist husband tries to help her recover from. He suggests that they retreat into a cabin deep in the woods so she could overcome the fears and anxieties triggered by their son’s death.
From this point onwards, it’s hard to say what happens next without revealing important (and complicated) details, and without inserting your own interpretation of the events. Let’s just say that after a while, the wife goes batshit insane and some very graphic genital mutilation occurs.
THE CUT CONTAINS SPOILERS GALORE!
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I finally finished watching the first season of Masters of Horror last night! I know it’s only thirteen episodes and I’ve had it for a couple of weeks, but it takes me two to three hours to watch a one-hour episode because I end up multitasking somewhere in between. I meant to do a review of each episode but I’m too lazy for that now. So I’ll just talk in detail about the ones I liked and lump everything else into the next paragraph.
To be perfectly honest, Masters of Horror doesn’t live up to the hype that the opening credits bring. At least not for me. Save for two or three episodes, the whole series is basically Are You Afraid of the Dark? for adults. And by “adults” I mean that almost every episode has raunchy sex scenes and a woman’s perky breasts. Most of the first season is incredibly disappointing. The plot devices were lame and cliched beyond belief, the gore is so-so (and sometimes non-existent), and the endings are prosaic and unimaginative. Their rendition of H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch-House was truly horrifying only because it was so bad. I really wanted to like the fourth episode, Dance of the Dead, because Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins composed the musical score. But even that was rather awful and the “music”–if you can even call it that–sounded a whole lot like buzz buzz BUZZZZZ to my ears.
That being said, I have two recommendations. If you want hot women and mediocre horror that functions as nothing more than an excuse to show lots of tits and ass, watch these episodes:
Episode 4, Jenifer
Episode 7, Deer Woman
Episode 12, Haeckel’s Tale
If you are looking for something that will satisfy your bloodlust, I suggest that you save your bandwidth and watch these:
Episode 1: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road
I enjoyed this episode very much and naturally, I expected the next 12 ones to be just as satisfying. Little did I know that I would be sorely disappointed. Incident On and Off a Mountain Road feels and moves like a quality slasher flick. It starts with a girl driving late at night on a lonely mountain road, and you can tell she’s going to be so screwed because any girl alone in a dark place might as well be wearing a huge sign that says “Kill me now plz!” Soon enough, she encounters a serial killer who bears a striking resemblance to Hellraiser. A lot of running away from him happens, then some flashbacks of her having raunchy sex with her boyfriend just because, and then a very interesting twist kept my eyes completely glued to the screen.
This episode inspired me to teach myself some self-defense, mostly in the form of waving around a hunting knife and trying to look bad-ass while doing it. You never know when you need to escape from the clutches of a psycho.
Rating: 4/5
Episode 8: Cigarette Burns
Cigarette Burns revolves around a man’s search for a very rare film called La Fin Absolue du Monde (The Absolute End of the World)–a movie so violent and foul that it incited a murderous riot among audience members during the first and last time it was shown to the public. The narrative is clear and well-told; your curiosity will get so piqued that you’ll be sitting on the edge of your seat, waiting for the mystery to unfold. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the quirky characters were rather endearing. My favorite one is the French snuff filmmaker. I can’t explain why but there’s something about him that’s just so…lovable. I shall blame that on my penchant for finding the freakiest guys really attractive.
Towards the end of the episode, you do get to see snippets of La Fin Absolue du Monde but it didn’t live up to the hype and mystery surrounding the film. For that, I will give this episode a 4 out of 5. Expect a lot of blood, gore, violence, and fun times.
Episode 13: Imprint
This is the only episode Showtime refused to air because it was too shocking and graphic for the average person to stomach. I’m actually not very familiar with Takashi Miike’s work, except that I’ve heard that he’s made other films that are even more disturbing than this one. I’m currently downloading Ichi the Killer and I’m a little bit nervous about watching it alone because it’s supposed to be one of the wrongest films ever.
There are no words for how insanely fucking awesome Imprint is. It was gruesome, it crawled under my skin and stayed there festering like a rotten wound, it disturbed me to no end. It’s everything I love about in a horror flick and more. Fancy adjectives can’t do justice to how awesome it is, so this is all I have to say: . I’ll burn you a copy if I have to! It’s that fucking amazing. Admittedly the plot twists were a little hard to swallow, but at that point I was seriously freaked out that I couldn’t afford to be nitpicky about things like the internal cohesion of the story.
Rating: 5/5
I love Imprint so much that I’m willing to forget that most of the first season of Masters of Horror was utter crap. I’ll give the show another shot and start watching the second season tomorrow. Let’s hope this one won’t let me down.
