Cigarette Burns & Dreams in the Witch House

These are the first two episodes of Showtime's anthology series "Masters of Horror" to make it to DVD. The show tasked 13 well-known genre directors, from Takashi Miike to Dario Argento to Joe Dante, to make low-budget hour-long horror films.

I managed to see Joe Dante's terrific Homecoming during a free preview weekend. By keeping the actual gore and mayhem to a minimum, and focusing on a pretty smart, on-target satirical story about the Bush administration, Dante really made the TV format work for him rather than limit his vision.

Unfortunately, neither John Carpenter nor Stuart Gordon, the first directors to debut their work on DVD, rise to the task in similar fashion. Carpenter's Cigarette Burns at least features a clever, reference-laden script (co-written by Ain't It Cool News mainstay Moriarty!), though it's a far cry from the sardonic genius of the director's best work. I can't think of anything to recommend about Gordon's miserable pseudo-Lovecraft adaptation, Dreams in the Witch House. Anchor Bay's choice to release Gordon's film as the DVD audience's first impression of the series is surprising. Could any of the other entries possibly be more amateurish and lame?



As I said, I found the actual scripting of Cigarette Burns to be fairly clever. Sure, it's little more than a reinterpretation of the Roman Polanski bomb The Ninth Gate, replacing a rare book with a rare film...but this doesn't have to be The Exorcist or anything. It's just a TV show.

Screenwriters Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan have created, however, a fun little mythology here, concerning a mysterious film known as La Fin Absolue Du Monde. The film, according to legend, played only once in front of an audience, causing them to rip one another limb from limb in an orgy of outrageous violence. Now, a dying cineaste (Udo Keir) hires an expert at tracking down old films (Boondock Saints veteran Norman Reedus) to find a print of the movie for a private screening.

More than anything else, Cigarette Burns demonstrates a deep and nuanced understanding of the psychology of hardcore film nerds. The thrill of discovery, the knowledge that few others have taken in a particularly bizarre or visceral experience, is half of the fun of seeing disgusting, unexpected horror movies. The Holy Grail experience for the true genre fan would be watching something so insane, so horrifying, that no other audience had previously managed to take in the experience.

McWeeny, Swan and Carpenter do make a few crucial mistakes along the way. Mainly, they give away the "shocking" contents of La Fin Absolue Du Monde in the first 10 minutes of Cigarette Burns - we can guess, based on Keir's collection of memorabilia from the movie, what the shocking crime at the center of its madness will be, which kind of robs the movie of its climactic surprise.

One of the themes running through this entire series, based on what I've seen thus far, is a willingness to push the envelope in terms of gore but not in terms of the visuals or the storytelling. I understand that there are budget constraints when working in television, but Carpenter doesn't really do much to make the film his own. His son Cody provides a familiar, tinkly piano soundtrack and there are a few crazy zoom shots reminiscent of his work in, say, Halloween, but the direction on Cigarette Burns is pretty much completely anonymous, which kind of takes away the whole point of an anthology series featuring famous horror directors.

Even the clips we get of La Fin Absolue Du Monde are generic and expected. It looks...like a bad experimental student film. You could interchange shots from similar sequences in Videodrome, The Ring, even May, and no one would really notice.

That being said, at least Cigarette Burns has some funny, creative moments and some nice KNB gory make-up effects. That's more than I can say for Stuart Gordon's pedestrian entry.



Adapating stories by the King of vague, metaphysical horror, H.P. Lovecraft, would be a challenge for even an exceptionally talented filmmaker with a sizable budget. His stories tend to concern unseen horrors from alternate dimensions, terrors so unthinkably mysterious and ancient that they are impossible to even describe, let alone realize through special effects and camera trickery. Stuart Gordon, armed with a couple of thou, just isn't up to the task. At all. Not even close.

Not to be oudone by Cigarette Burns giving away its final twist in the first ten minutes, Dreams of the Witch House gives away its entire story in the title. A grad student (Ezra Godden, of the director's also-bad-but-not-this-bad Dagon) moves into a creepy haunted house occupied by an old, kill-crazy witch. See, he's a student of String Theory (oh sweet lord no!) and he comes to believe that the witch uses the intersection of various dimensional membranes, in his bedroom, to sneak around and give him nightmares.

Oh, yeah, and the witch has an associate, a rat with a human face. For real. The final effect, in terms of scariness, ranks just below a full-grown man in a Chuck E. Cheese suit with the head removed, taking a smoke break.

Gordon's just got nothin', nothin' at all. The sets are clunky and uninspired, failing to even capture the concept of "seedy slum" effectively. The actors are either dull or over-the-top. And though it seems for a few moments as if Gordon's script will connect the astrophysics theme along with some sort of Lovecraftian alternate-dimension theology, this notion is left behind almost immediately in favor of a really lame human sacrifice sub-plot.

Dreams of the Witch House is a glorified fan film, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on iFilm after 20 mnutes of Flash commercials for the iPod Ultra-Ultra-Mini or something. I'm actually surprised it was deemed significant enough to air late night on Showtime.