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Watched the Masters of Horror episode 'Homecoming' yesterday, directed by one of my favs, Joe Dante, based on the short story 'Death & Suffrage' by Dale Bailey. It rocked! Satirical, biting, dark, sad, funny... and it has a great "oh shit!" moment towards the end.
The basic story is that soldiers from the Iraq war start returning to life in order to vote out the government that sent them to die needlessly. The story is mostly told from the POV of the Bush government as they try to deal with the problem.
Masters of Horror I'm finding very interesting. All the episodes to date have been based on short stories, no original teleplays. I like this approach for two reasons. One is that there's a tonne of available material out there, the other is you can pick your stories and, so long as the adaptation to tv is handled well, know that it's going to be good.
Like any anthology series, the quality is variable. Highpoint episodes for me have been 'Incident On and Off A Mountain Road', 'Jennifer' and 'Homecoming'. I pick these because the quality of story-telling, for me, complimented the subject matter. Incident and Jennifer are certainly more horrific than Homecoming, but Homecoming shouldn't have been overly horrific in the first place. We're meant to empathise with the zombie soldiers, and we do. Incident (dierected by Don Coscarelli) is nasty horror done well. Jennifer (Directed by Dario Argento) is, I suppose, mildly erotic horror.
A few more good episodes and I'll be adding this to my Must own the boxed set list.
The basic story is that soldiers from the Iraq war start returning to life in order to vote out the government that sent them to die needlessly. The story is mostly told from the POV of the Bush government as they try to deal with the problem.
Masters of Horror I'm finding very interesting. All the episodes to date have been based on short stories, no original teleplays. I like this approach for two reasons. One is that there's a tonne of available material out there, the other is you can pick your stories and, so long as the adaptation to tv is handled well, know that it's going to be good.
Like any anthology series, the quality is variable. Highpoint episodes for me have been 'Incident On and Off A Mountain Road', 'Jennifer' and 'Homecoming'. I pick these because the quality of story-telling, for me, complimented the subject matter. Incident and Jennifer are certainly more horrific than Homecoming, but Homecoming shouldn't have been overly horrific in the first place. We're meant to empathise with the zombie soldiers, and we do. Incident (dierected by Don Coscarelli) is nasty horror done well. Jennifer (Directed by Dario Argento) is, I suppose, mildly erotic horror.
A few more good episodes and I'll be adding this to my Must own the boxed set list.
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Jenifer creeped me out for days.
Seen the Tobe Hooper directed ep yet?
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Jenifer is in many ways the nastiest of the bunch. I like the fact that they didn't avoid the gruesome aspects.
Yeah been downloading and watching them in order. Dance of the Dead I think is a good short story (http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/matheson/matheson1.html), especially for when it was written, but the screen translation becomes painfully predictable. Then again, it's not something that would translate well without the change, being more a slice of life piece more than a story.
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I spent a couple of nights mildly concerned that I was going to be eaten by cannibalistic succibi after Jenifer. Fortunately I can function on nosleep.
Thanks for the link, I love Matheson's works.
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