Incident On and Off a Mountain Road & Chocolate

Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series, based on what I've seen thus far, hasn't lived up to its potential. Hour-long, violent horror films from established low-budget genre directors should be a lot of fun, right?

I can't really speak on the 13-episode first season as a whole, because I've only seen five of the films. So far, out of the five, only Joe Dante's Homecoming (yet to arrive on DVD) was really worthwhile. Sure, it worked more as political satire than anything approaching actual horror, but at least it was entertaining and fast. The other entries have ranged from the mildly amusing (John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns) to the downright wretched (Stuart Gordon's inept Dreams in the Witch House).

I discussed those episodes, the first to appear on DVD, here. The latest two, Don Coscarelli's Incident On and Off a Mountain Road and series creator Mick Garris' Chocolate, hit shelves today.

Incident On and Off a Mountain Road



Coscarelli, best known to horror fans as the creator of the low-budget Phantasm films, adapts a grisly short story by Joe Lansdale. As in his previous film, Bubba Ho-Tep, also based on a Lansdale story, Coscarelli takes a thoroughly ridiculous, campy set-up and then plays the entire film dead serious.

Ellen (Bree Turner) darts down a stretch of, yes, mountain road and runs into a parked car. In a flash, she's set upon by a homicidal, ninja star-tossing albino (John De Santis). Fortunately, as we discover in flashbacks, Ellen learned how to evade capture in the forest from her demented survivalist husband Bruce (Vegas Vacation's very own Ethan Embry).

There are clearly too many flashbacks and Coscarelli awkwardly interrupts the main action for them at inappropriate times. The monster comes towards Ellen, she kicks him and falls over, he lunges at her while she's vulnerable...and then we cut to Bruce and Ellen sharing a tender moment on a hiking trail.

It doesn't help that the flashbacks are so ridiculous. Bruce berates Ellen for not firing her gun with deathly precision. He warns her about invisible menaces waiting in the shadows right before proposing marriage. He hands her a knife and tells her to have a go at him. The ways in which the "training scenes" fit into the albino chase are often clever, and as a new twist on this well-worn narrative, it's better than most. But a few brief flashbacks could have communicated this just as easily.

The silent killer has been nicknamed Moonface by the demented old man he keeps chained in the cellar (Phantasm vet Angus Scrimm), and he's a creepy looking but fairly conventional horror movie villain. Bald, scarred and utterly emotionless about his psychotic business, he remains an uninteresting enigma for the entire film, a device as opposed to a character. (And why would a mutant living in the woods be throwing around these circular dagger weapons? Where did he get them? Surely he didn't make them in his makeshift cabin?)

But it's just as well. With only an hour to tell the story, Coscarelli rightly spends most of his time fashioning set pieces and gore scenes. He's done a pretty decent job, above-average by "Masters of Horror" standards. I liked how Moonface's torture chamber has been made up to look like a middle school woodshop, as if, once he's done drilling out attractive teenager's eyeballs, he's going to make his mother a cutting board.

Chocolate



I can think of two things wrong with Chocolate being included in a show called "Masters of Horror." (1) Mick Garris, who has directed some mediocre made-for-TV Stephen King adaptations, is Master of Nothing and (2) this film is in no way part of the horror genre.

Garris' original screenplay very closely resembles a Stephen King short story. Even if the resemblance weren't so obvious, Garris includes a shot of the hero reading King's "Desperation" (the subject of Garris' next movie), just to make sure everyone gets that he's in on the joke. Basically, a "regular guy" going through some tough personal changes becomes involved in some mysterious supernatural phenomenon, and it all leads to a weak, disappointing conclusion.

In this case, our King-ean hero is Jamie (Elliott Henry Thomas), an artifical flavor researcher going through a painful divorce. In a tip to the hat, of sorts, to The Eyes of Laura Mars, Jamie begins having spells wherein he seems to enter the mind of a woman living somewhere far off. While his body remains in an unconscious daze, he can see, hear, touch and taste whatever this woman senses.

These scenes are unfathomably silly. I hope the scene where Jamie enters the mind of the woman mid-coitus and begins humping and gyrating the air was meant to be funny, because it's certainly not scary. Jamie begins to fall in love with the far off woman, in a tip of the hat, of sorts, to Being John Malkovich and does a little research based on his visions to try and find her. It all leads to a conclusion that fizzles out just when it begins to get interesting. Just like a Stephen King story!

There's an author who has figured out how to build up tension effectively, but who never leaves himself a way to wrap things up gracefully. Garris previously directed a miniseries of King's "The Stand," one of the most disappointing reads of my entire life. You spend literally 1,000 pages following dozens of characters around a carefully-sketched post-apocalyptic United States, only for King to resolve everything through the most half-assed, lazy device possible.

When adapting that book, I would think any director worth his salt would try to find a better way to wrap up the story. Because you already have a very promising set-up with some interesting, likable characters. At the very least, I would hope he (or she) would devise a way to express the conclusion visually that made up for King's lack of imagination. Instead, Garris just directs exactly what's written in the book, using bizarre, half-finished animation to give the audience only the vaguest sense of what's actually even happening.

A scene like that lets you know this guy is basically a hack riding the coattails of the extremely famous author whose work he clings to life the proverbial liferaft. Yes, I'll give the man some credit for creating this series, which I've enjoyed off and on for a few months now. But how embarrassing, to concoct your own anthology show and then direct one of the weakest entries!