Masters Of Horror series

[MacGuffin]

by far my least favorite episode.  i really disliked almost everything about it.  the editing/way it was shot, the story, the actors.  not good.  wtf tobe?

Agreed. There were some bits (like robbing the elderly for their blood, burning the bodies in the dumpster) of interest, but they were never paid off because of the film's structure and slowness.

I didn't care much for Witch House either. Felt redundant so I felt one step ahead of the story.

This Friday:


Teleplay by Steven Weber
Based on the Short Story by Bruce Jones
Directed by Dario Argento ("Suspiria," "Terror at The Opera")

Based on the short story written by Bruce Jones, Jenifer is the shocking tale of a modern-day Lolita who, through her Siren-like powers, ultimately destroys the bodies and souls of all men unfortunate enough to cross her path. After police officer Frank (Steven Weber) saves her life, he adopts her, only to learn that no good deed goes unpunished. Jenifer is a twisted and terrifying tale with a horrific twist that warns us all to be careful of what we bring into our homes.

[Pubrick]

wtf tobe?

has-beens of horror.

[Gamblour.]

I just got caught up on the first two episodes. Wow. Pretty uncreative. The first episode, funny enough, plays like Jeepers Creepers meets MacGuyver. I was rooting for the chick and I actually thought the acting was decent. But my god, the demonic maniac, mutilated bodies, car on a highway, the twist at the end.....Jesus! Are these guys writing what horror movies have become, or are they really trying to be frightening, because it's not working.

The second episode felt like an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark, and it was more fantasy than horror to me. What's with baby skeletons? Two episodes have them. This episode had boobies, so it was at least ok. The story is too here and there, tying multiverses with witches????? come on, here you can have demons and shit, but witches? lame. and i'm sure the hp lovecraft tale was much better. that necronomicron reference was so lame, although called for because lovecraft wrote all about it.

[Ghostboy]

I hadn't seen any of the prior installments, but I watched Jenifer tonight and enjoyed it; it was very predictable and not really very scary, but the 'icky' factor was waaayy up there and made it worthwhile.

[killafilm]

I think Jennifer is by far the best of the first three.  It was way icky yet totally funny at the same time.  It's the whole what would I do? And then you feel a bit sick in your stomach for even thinking about that question. 

[MacGuffin]

it was very predictable

Very. You knew the cycle was going to continue, it was just a matter of finding out what drew each man to that point, and yet I didn't think the payoff was all that interesting in living up to finding out that mystery. It was certainly a better episode, but I still think the premiere episode ("Incident...") has been the best so far.

This Friday:



Written by Mick Garris
Directed by Mick Garris ("Riding the Bullet," "The Stand")

Jamie (Henry Thomas), a newly divorced young man who creates artificial flavors for the food industry, suddenly and inexplicably starts to experience brief and random flashes from someone - and somewhere - unknown: sight, sound, smell, touch. Learning that he's experiencing life through the senses of a mysterious woman, he begins to fall in love with her - without having met her. Eventually, he discovers a horrifying secret that binds him inexorably with the perfect woman in an erotic, horrifying dance of death.

[MacGuffin]

It takes a zombie to speak out
Director Joe Dante's short film for Showtime highlights the advantages of using horror to make a political statement.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Hollywood has always been portrayed as a hotbed of liberal activism, so who would've imagined that its first full-blown anti-Iraq war movie would come not from a famous political loudmouth like Oliver Stone but from Joe Dante and Sam Hamm, a pair of horror-thriller aficionados?

Their hourlong film "Homecoming" premiered Friday as part of Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series. Adapted by Hamm (who wrote "Batman") and directed by Dante, who made "Gremlins," the film is a barbed political satire and zombie thriller: It has the creepy resonance of a version of "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in which everyone with a pod under his bed is made out to be a Bush supporter. (The film airs again at 11 p.m. Friday on Showtime.)

Set during the final weeks of a fictional presidential reelection campaign, the story kicks into gear on a TV talk show when the president's political consultant fends off the distraught mother of a dead soldier by saying he only wished her son could come back to life to remind the country of the war's importance. Voilà! Blood-encrusted soldiers killed in Iraq rise from their graves and head for the polls, voting against the president before they crumble back into dust.

Dante has made sci-fi fantasies and thrillers for years, going back to his early horror films, "Piranha" and "The Howling." But with "Homecoming" he emerges as an indignant satirist, as caustic as Dennis Miller or Aaron McGruder. At a campaign strategy meeting after the dead soldiers begin lurching around the country, one consultant jokes, "Why don't we just ignore them, like regular vets."

Although the film is ostensibly set in the future, the campaign slogans — "Four more years" and "Mission accomplished" — make the satire's target clear. The film's key characters include an Ann Coulter-type leggy blond pundit (who has a torrid affair with the political consultant) and a ruthless Karl Rove-type presidential advisor. Both die the kind of grisly deaths that occur in sci-fi films when an arrogant scientist defies all warnings not to tinker with frozen aliens or unstable atomic isotopes.

When I asked Dante if he was worried that he'd crossed the line into poor taste with the film's more gruesome moments, he was about as apologetic as Bill O'Reilly was after he practically invited Al Qaeda to attack San Francisco when the city banned on-campus military recruiting. "Of course this movie is in awful taste," Dante says. "However, when our actors are killed, they get to go home at the end of the day's shooting. In real life, when our soldiers in Iraq get shot, they're dead forever."

If you look back in film history, it's hardly surprising that the first bona fide anti-Iraq-war film arrives dressed up as a zombie thriller. "Horror movies are naturally subversive," says Dante. "If you want to know what's going on in any country at any specific period of time, look at their horror films. Everything you see in horror films after World War II, starting with 'Godzilla,' is a metaphor for fears about the bomb and radiation. Science fiction has always been about social issues. Watch 'The Day the Earth Stood Still.' Its message is very clear — it's a ban-the-bomb movie."

Horror movies are perfect vehicles for messages because, unlike the prestige films of any era, they fly under the radar, attracting little attention from squeamish studio chieftains. They also are given a wide berth because of their minuscule budgets. As innumerable filmmakers have discovered, the less money you spend, the less studio interference you get.

"The genre is the beard," says Hamm. "The fact that we're working in a low, disreputable genre like horror allows us to say what we want between the margins. There's a long tradition of films using coding to provide a radical political critique." In fact, horror is such a disreputable genre that "Homecoming," which would have been prime op-ed page material if it had been made by a more fashionable filmmaker, has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media.

In the years after World War I, German horror melodramas like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Dr. Mabuse the Gambler" offered hypnotic portents of the Nazi traumas to come. Fritz Lang, who made "Dr. Mabuse," fled Germany only after Joseph Goebbels, impressed by his films' subliminal power, tried to hire him to make Nazi propaganda. During the 1950s, at the height of the fears of a communist takeover, America's low-budget sci-fi films were crammed with flying saucer invasions, the bug-eyed aliens serving as stand-ins for grim Soviet commissars.

When Rod Serling — a polemicist at heart — wanted to escape the oppressive censorship of TV sponsors in the late 1950s (he once had to cut a shot of the Chrysler Building because his show was financed by Ford), he turned from straight dramas like "Requiem for a Heavyweight" to "The Twilight Zone," which allowed him to shield his messages with the cozy blanket of the eerie supernatural. He once explained that by cloaking controversial subjects in a veil of fantasy, "I found that it was all right to have Martians say things Democrats and Republicans could never say."

Two of the most influential horror films of the late 1960s and early '70s, George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" and Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," are now viewed by horror faithful as being Vietnam War allegories.

The danger of disguising your message is that sometimes the audience doesn't react the way the artist expects it to, as when Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." was embraced as an endorsement, not a critique, of Reagan-era patriotism. Steven Spielberg's recent remake of "War of the Worlds," which came adorned with dialogue such as "all occupations are doomed to fail," was viewed by some as a sly commentary on our invasion of Iraq, but it has also been praised by conservatives for its portrayal of American fortitude and ingenuity.

As Hamm says of the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," "It's metaphorically acceptable as an indictment of the horrors of communism or the horrors of '50s conformity."

There's no mistaking the message of "Homecoming." Both Dante and Hamm were upset over the way the Iraq war was sold to the American public with little criticism from Democrats or the news media. "Only now have we gotten to the point where the media is finally fact-checking the president's speeches," says Hamm. When they were searching for a story for "Masters of Horror," Hamm discovered a Dale Bailey short story in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. Its plot involved a Democratic political operative who, after hearing of the shooting death of a young girl, promises to melt down every handgun, prompting the victims to rise from the dead and vote for his candidate.

Hamm transformed the zombies from handgun victims to dead soldiers. Dante shot the film earlier this year in Vancouver, in 10 days. The story was so in sync with current events that Cindy Sheehan began her vigil outside President Bush's ranch while Dante was filming the scenes with a grieving mother. As the director put it: "You can never exaggerate too much with satire. Have you seen 'Network' lately? It's all happened."

Like the other directors involved with "Masters of Horror," who include Hooper, John Landis and John Carpenter, Dante was afforded total creative freedom by the show's producers. The irony is not lost on Dante that his last movie, "Looney Tunes: Back in Action," which cost $100 million to make, was butchered by constant meddling, but when he made a $1.8-million TV horror movie — even one with a prickly antiwar message — he was left to work without interference.

While its critics will no doubt dismiss the film as a product of Hollywood anti-Bush bias, Dante begs to differ. "I know from experience — Hollywood is a bastion of making money, not liberalism. When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone's feathers people in the movie business are today."

For me, this little film proves that the politics of Hollywood is far more complicated than its critics are willing to admit. Conservatives always point out that no one in Hollywood would release Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," which went on to be a huge hit. But the first studio to pass was Rupert Murdoch's 20th Century Fox, where Gibson had his deal. It's hard to make the case that studios are hotbeds of left-wing activism when they've been so conspicuously silent on a huge issue like the war in Iraq, aside from documentaries and the FX series "Over There." The two films in theaters now that deal directly with today's political issues, "Syriana" and "Paradise Now," were made only after the filmmakers found independent financing.

Whether you see "Homecoming" as an irritant or an inspiration, it packs a punch. At a time when the Pentagon has banned photographs of dead soldiers' coffins, it's quite a jolt to finally see the haunting scene in a horror film, with this war's scarred warriors stumbling out of their flag-draped resting places. It makes you think that whoever coined the phrase "horror movie" knew what he was talking about.



Teleplay by Sam Hamm
Based on the short story "Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey
Directed by Joe Dante ("The Howling," "Gremlins")

Terror and scandal grip the nation when the media discovers that the living dead have swayed the Presidential election. This adaptation of Dale Bailey's award-winning short story "Death & Suffrage" blends zombie horror and contemporary political satire with chilling results.

[abuck1220]

"Of course this movie is in awful taste,"

he's right about that. i couldn't believe what i was seeing during that thing.

[MacGuffin]

Major 'Masters of Horror: Season 2' Announcement!!
Source: Bloody-Disgusting

Here it is, the news you've all been waiting for, the official director line-up for Showtime's Masters of Horror: Season 2! Read on for the official press release with tons more details and the storys for each episode!!!


ACCLAIMED LINEUP OF DIRECTORS ANNOUNCED FOR SECOND SEASON OF IDT ENTERTAINMENT'S
MASTERS OF HORROR
Brad Anderson, Ernest Dickerson, Tom Holland Join Returning Directors Dario Argento, John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Mick Garris, Stuart Gordon, Tobe Hooper, and John Landis For Season Two

Los Angeles, CA:– A stellar lineup of directors has been confirmed for the second season of Masters of Horror, the anthology series produced by IDT Entertainment in association with Industry Entertainment and Nice Guy Productions. Thirteen new one-hour films will debut this fall on Showtime. In addition, DVDs from the first season of the critically lauded series are being distributed by IDT Entertainment's Anchor Bay Entertainment. Stars have also been announced for several episodes.

"Our creative environment supports and nurtures directorial talent," says IDT Entertainment COO John W. Hyde. "We're thrilled that A-list talent continues to be attracted to the Masters of Horror."

Joining the roster of directors this season are Brad Anderson (Session Nine, The Machinist), Ernest Dickerson (Bones, Demon Knight), and Tom Holland (Fright Night, Child's Play). Returning for a second outing are directors Dario Argento (Suspira, Terror at the Opera), John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing), Joe Dante (The Howling, Gremlins), Mick Garris (Riding the Bullet, The Stand), Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator), Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Poltergeist) and John Landis (American Werewolf in London).

Stars include Sean Patrick Flanery (The Boondock Saints, The Dead Zone), Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Meat Loaf (Fight Club), Michael Ironside (Scanners, Total Recall), Marisa Coughlan (Boston Legal, Teaching Mrs. Tingle), George Wendt (Cheers), John Saxon (From Dusk till Dawn, A Nightmare on Elm Street), Ted Raimi (Spider-Man), Caitlin Wachs (Commander in Chief), Meredith Monroe (Dawson's Creek) and Matthew Keeslar (Waiting for Guffman, Art School Confidential).

"We're all excited that this incredible array of creative talent has joined the 'Masters' line-up," says Andrew Deane, a partner at Industry Entertainment and an executive producer of the series. "These directors have unique points of view and we're certain that they will utilize the series' promise of artistic freedom to produce frightening results."


The following episodes have been confirmed:

Family, directed by John Landis and written by Brent Hanley, tells the story of a young married couple (Meredith Monroe and Matt Keeslar) that moves into a new home in a new city and finds out that their neighbor (George Wendt) is not what he seems.

Pelts, directed by Dario Argento, written by Matt Venne, adapted from F. Paul Wilson's short-story, is an erotic tale about stolen raccoon pelts that violently turn against those that covet them in this Giallo-style adaptation of F. Paul Wilson's short story. Meatloaf and John Saxon star.

The Damned Thing, directed by Tobe Hooper, inspired by Ambrose Bierce's classic short-story and written by Richard Christian Matheson, is the apocalyptic tale of a monstrous force that devastates Sheriff Kevin Reddle's family and his small Texas town. Sean Patrick Flanery, Marisa Coughlan and Ted Raimi star.

Pro-Life, directed by John Carpenter, written by Drew McWeeny & Scott Swan, tells the story of a young girl trapped inside a clinic, that discovers the only thing more dangerous than her pursuers is the demonic secret that she carries within her. Ron Perlman, and Caitlin Wachs star.

The V Word, a vampire film directed by Ernest Dickerson and written by Mick Garris, reveals the punishment visited upon two teenage boys who make the very poor decision to break into a mortuary. Michael Ironside stars.

Sounds Like, directed and written by Brad Anderson, adapted from a short-story by Mike O'Driscoll, tells the story of Larry Pearce - an ordinary man blessed with a gift of extraordinary supernatural hearing that drives him to the brink of insanity and forces him to take violent action to silence the horrific cacophony in his head.

The Screwfly Solution, directed by Joe Dante, written by Sam Hamm and adapted from the Raccoona Sheldon short-story, is about a nightmare virus infecting our nation, transforming men into psychotic killers who attack every woman that crosses their paths.

Valerie On The Stairs, directed and written by Mick Garris from a Clive Barker original screen story, tells the tale of a novelist who discovers there are fates worse than literary anonymity in this sexually-charged tale of terror.

We Scream For Ice Cream, directed by Tom Holland from David J. Schow's adaptation of John Farris' short-story, depicts a local ice cream man who, in this case, is turning sweet-toothed children against their parents.

The Black Cat, directed by Stuart Gordon and written by Gordon & Dennis Paoli, has the great Poe, out of ideas and short on cash, tormented by a black cat that will either destroy his life or inspire him to write one of his most famous stories

The executive producers of Masters of Horror are IDT Entertainment's Morris Berger, Steve Brown, and John W. Hyde; Industry Entertainment's Keith Addis and Andrew Deane, and Nice Guy Productions' Mick Garris. Reunion Pictures' Lisa Richardson and Tom Rowe are producers. Industry's Adam Goldworm and Ben Browning are co-producers and will continue to serve as production executives on the series. IDT Entertainment Sales provides worldwide distribution of the series and Anchor Bay Entertainment, IDT Entertainment's home entertainment company, handles DVD and video releases.

IDT Entertainment is a vertically integrated entertainment company that develops, produces, and distributes proprietary and licensed entertainment content. IDT Entertainment is a subsidiary of IDT Corporation, an international telecom, entertainment, and technology company.

Industry Entertainment Partners, a leading talent management and production company, has produced award-winning films including sex, lies and videotape, Drugstore Cowboy, The Player, Requiem for a Dream, and Quills. 

[hedwig]

Mick Garris

excuse me while i vomit. repeatedly.

[MacGuffin]

Don Coscarelli for directing Incident on and off a Mountain Road
By Daniel Robert Epstein

What makes Don Coscarelli unique amongst the masters of horror is that the majority of his films are good. With four kickass Phantasms and one excellent Bubba Ho-tep making up the majority of his films, it's obvious to see why. Now he can add Incident on and off a Mountain Road, which was the premiere episode of the anthology series, to that list. Directed and co-written by Don Coscarelli and based on a story by Joe R. Lansdale, Incident is about young woman [Bree Turner] who gets into an accident on a lonely back road. Then she is stalked by killer and must use the skills taught to her by her survivalist husband [Ethan Embry] to remain alive. Incident has just come out from Anchor Bay Entertainment and it packed with extras such as commentary by Don Coscarelli and co-writer Stephen Romano, a making of featurette and working with a master featurette.

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you doing today?

Don Coscarelli: Let's see, today I got a bunch of housekeeping to do in terms of a couple of these different projects that I'm trying to get going. It's an ongoing struggle to track down financing for these movies.

DRE:Anything you can talk about?

Don:I'm definitely still trying to get the Bubba Ho-tep sequel going. We got a lot of interest and just trying to get it crystallized. I've finally gotten started working on the script on it and it's coming along real nice. I think it's could be a lot of fun and Bruce [Campbell] really is excited to put on the old sequined jumpsuit again.

DRE:Joe R. Lansdale never wrote a sequel, did he?

Don:No, I hope to involve Joe but he's a pretty busy guy these days. It is funny how Bubba Ho-tep really increased his profile, which is great. There's a lot of activity around some of his projects.

DRE:Do you have something else that you are trying to get off the ground?

Don:Nothing I can really say. The Bubba sequel is really what I'm focusing on right now.

DRE:I know that guys like you get financing from foreign and sometimes old rich guys too. What's the hold up on something like this?

Don:I think I was busy working on that Masters of Horror thing, which slowed things down so it's not like there's been any delay. One of the problems was we were going to go right ahead and make it over at MGM. But they were bought by Sony so that didn't work out. Now there's a lot of interest from a number of different companies so it's going to happen in one form or another.

DRE:Is it going to be like a real sequel or a prequel?

Don:I don't want to ruin the surprise but Bruce really wants to feature more of Elvis at age 39. So there'll be a little more of that in this film. Nothing is cast in stone yet so we're talking about a lot of different things.

DRE:I heard a rumor that you might not have been super happy with either the budget of the Masters of Horror episode or maybe the way it came out. Am I wrong?

Don:Completely wrong but I've heard that before. I knew what I was getting into when I signed on. The budgets were very tight but I certainly understand that financially they needed to crank out 13 of these things so they needed to create a bit of a factory. All of us were certainly wanted to make movies as best we could so I put a tremendous amount of effort into my episode. They only provided us with ten days of shooting per episode. So the only way to counteract that is to be overly prepared, which is what I did. They asked me to come back for the second season but I didn't want to participate because I thought, "I probably put in as much effort into this thing as I would a movie so I really should go back to making movies."

I've been in the position to pretty much control how the money's spent so consequently the one thing I learned early on is that time equals better movies. When I made the Phantasm movies we would spend every dollar to extend the length of shooting time. The first Phantasm we shot over a year and even the second Phantasm I think I had ten weeks to shoot it and that was sort of a normal schedule. Beastmaster was shot on a really low budget and I didn't have total control but the one thing was from the get go they had a 12 week schedule to shoot all that stuff that was important. Even though Bubba Ho-tep was a very simple movie with mainly a couple guys talking in rooms, we had about 30 to 35 to shoot. So you're coming in with ten days to shoot what's supposed to be a 60 minute episode. I'll tell you what one day was like. The day we shot that scene at the shooting range between Bree [Turner] and Ethan [Embry], so Ethan is shooting the gun which is a little tricky and they've got a bunch of dialogue. Then we move up to another grassy area and we shoot the scene where he catches her, tackles her and then proposes to her. Then it becomes night time and we shot all the stuff on that crucifix. We had to get like five different crane shots and her running up. Then we had to have her exit at the end of the movie. We had to put the Ethan's character on the crucifix. Then after that, we have to go into the forest with Moonface and shoot a whole bunch of running through the forest at night. So it's these four gigantic different scenes, different emotions and do it all in 12 hours. It's just not the way I like to work at all, but that's the way they do it in television.

DRE:None of the directors seem to like their picture on the cover of the DVD.

Don:It's probably the only time in my life I'll have any picture of myself on a DVD, so I think it looks great. But I certainly would make some changes. I think I'm looking a little cross-eyed and a little Asian, which is interesting. But the whole thing was a hoot. The whole thing was worth doing because when they sent me a copy of it and I opened it up and it was like a baseball trading card set of horror directors. That's pretty neat.

DRE:The Masters DVDs are so packed, what do you think of yours?

Don:It really is packed. I had a lot of creative involvement in the Bubba Ho-tep DVD release in terms of extras and the Masters DVD just showed up on the door one day. They did the interview with me but they did that thing where they interviewed a bunch of people I'd worked with before. I didn't know anything about and it surprised me because it is pretty flattering. There was only one little flaw. They have what's advertised as our screenplay in the thing, but it's not. It is more like somebody did a transcript of the movie. But other than that, it's a really nice presentation of the thing.

DRE:Did they interview people who weren't in the Masters episode?

Don:Yeah, they even interviewed Marc Singer from The Beastmaster. I haven't talked to Marc for years. He said all these really fatherly things. It was almost an out of body experience watching the thing because it was like it was an obituary or something. It was really strange, but really nice.

DRE:Besides the nice compliments, did anyone say anything that surprised you?

Don:Absolutely, making movies isn't easy. Frankly sometimes it's hard to be civil on the set because it's a disaster and things are crashing around you. I try as hard as I can to be helpful and supportive to the actors but I might say things that irritate them and antagonize them. So it is nice to know they still think highly of me.

DRE:I've seen all the [Masters of Horror] episodes including the Takashi Miike one.

Don:Oh how is that? I never did see it.

DRE:It's really crazy.

Don:Is it as bad as Audition? If you tell me its worse I might not be able to watch it.

DRE:No, it's not worse than Audition but it's got like a 20 minute torture scene.

Don:Great. [laughs]

DRE:How do you think your episode fits into the series?

Don:We were fortunate enough to shoot early. We were like the third episode and I was fighting with them to keep a lot of the action in there because it's a lot easier to shoot dialogue. I think after my episode, they started forcing people to get more dialogue and less action because it just takes a long time and it messes with the business part.

DRE:I got to speak to Stuart Gordon when his DVD came out. Guys like you and Stuart are often limited by your budgets but someone like Miike works on such a low budget for his movies simply so he can have all that control. What's your impression of his work?

Don:He knows how to do it. I think it's wonderful and I think that early on I used to hear snippets of conversation around the office that they were basically giving him the money to let him spend however he wants. I also heard at one time that Robert Rodriguez was going to do an episode but only on the basis that they send him a check and he'd do it down in Austin and turn over the tape. These guys have made a lot of movies and they have a comfort zone so they know how to do it. I also heard that Stuart had said "give me the money, I know how to use this money and get 20 days out of it." I'm sure he does because he knows how to marshal his money. But they had a deadline to meet so consequently everybody got the ten days. I was interested to see what it would be like because I had never worked like that. So I wanted to see if I could do it and I wanted to see if I could make something decent in the context of that. That was a challenge that I was actually looking forward to trying.

DRE:Angus Scrimm said that you and Stephen Romano were working on something else.

Don:Steven's a friend and we've got a couple of different projects that we're cooking up. We had one script we were really excited and I'm not going to name names but another movie came out with a similar idea and it just shot all our work to hell. So we're regrouping and working on some other stuff.

DRE:Anything going on with the Phantasm remake?

Don:No progress on that. It could still happen and there's a lot of interest but no progress. I'm still committed to do something with the original cast. We're cooking up some things but we haven't quite got it formulated yet, but one way or another we'll get something else out in the Phantasm world.

DRE:How often do people expect you to be a crazy wild man instead of the normal guy that you are?

Don:All the time. People think I should be some freak. But it's all mental. [laughs] Not necessarily physical. The genre is pretty cool and I'm really fortunate to be working in it. Fans of horror fantasy and sci-fi are some of the smartest people because they're interested in projects and stories and movies that give them something to think about. A lot of times their interpretations, certainly on my movies, are so intelligent and interesting and amplify on what I do.

[w/o horse]

Imprint came out today.  It never aired.  I was thinking of picking it up but after reading through this thread maybe not.

[modage]

yeah i downloaded it a long time ago after it aired overseas.  but the rest of the episodes blew so badly i could never get up the enthusiasm to watch it. 

[last days of gerry the elephant]

Imprint came out today.  It never aired.  I was thinking of picking it up but after reading through this thread maybe not.

I've been waiting for it so long now, I will buy it and hopefully force myself to enjoy it.

[MacGuffin]

Masters of Horror: Takashi Miike
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Bottom line: An outstanding evocation of classic Japanese horror films, with excellent supplementary featurettes, including an informative interview with Miike.

So, you've got this anthology cable show called "Masters of Horror, " and it broadcasts hour-long programs that are full of nudity and drenched in blood and gore, so what could possibly be the story about the one episode that was rejected for broadcast, Takashi Miike's "Imprint"?

Well, now that it has been released by Anchor Bay Entertainment (retail $16.98), you can find out for yourself what the one last cable no-no apparently is -- fetuses. But let's not be rude. The film is an outstanding evocation of classic Japanese horror films.

Set in a brothel in pre-technological Japan, a prostitute spending the night with an American tells him her life story and also explains how the woman he is searching for was horribly tortured and killed, all of which is seen as a flashback. She then proceeds, over the course of the show's 63-minute running time, to revise and re-tell the story several more times, each iteration more horrifying than the last.

At one point the heroine is carrying a dead fetus to the river for disposal when some boys tease her and she drops her basket. The dead body rolls right out onto the rocks and that was, most likely, when the cable company put their foot down, although there are several more fetuses bounced about after that, and the tortures that the other girl undergoes, having pins stuck up her fingernails and into her mouth, might have been a deal killer as well. Unlike some of the other episodes in the series, the look of the film is outstanding. The images are richly imagined and elegantly delivered, and the amazingly grotesque show knocks you over with a what-did-you-expect? hammer of psychic pain and grotesque horror.

The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.78:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The color transfer delivers the film's transfixing images with a smooth clarity. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound has an effective dimensionality. As is explained in the supplement, the film is performed in English, and in fact its weakest component is the at times trite dialog, which is recited by some of the performers phonetically. It is a shame someone can't go back and dub it in Japanese. There are optional French and Spanish subtitles, but no English captioning.

The supplementary featurettes are excellent. There is a 48-minute piece about the entire shoot, a 23-minute piece about the makeup effects, and a thorough and highly informative 41-minute interview with Miike, about the film and about his filmmaking philosophies. Included as well is a text profile of Miike, and a collection of promotional stills. On DVD-ROM, the script is available in PDF format.

Film enthusiasts Wyatt Doyle and Chris D. supply a commentary track, and they appreciate the program, sharing their knowledge of Miike's work and its context, but they tend to be a bit too critical of the show's flaws and inconsistencies, not really stepping back and recognizing how well Miike's effort makes use of the hour limitation to gag the viewer with beautiful but upsetting images and thoughts.