Masters of Horror, episode 1: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (Don Coscarelli, 2005)
I’ve just started watching the Masters of Horror TV series. Episode one is Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, by Don Coscarelli, creator of the Phantasm and Beastmaster movies, as well as Bubba Ho-Tep. Like with Bubba Ho-Tep, Joe R. Lansdale had a hand in writing this episode.
It’s fairly straightforward slasher fare, really, with an above-average resourceful female protagonist. The serial killer is called “Moonface” (can we get a moratorium on -face serial killer names, please), and is big and ugly and mean and whatnot. He has a leatherface style cabin in the woods, surrounded by rotting corpses on stakes, and is quite unpleasant. The twist here is the female protagonist, who not only proves to be quite a match for Moonface, but also has some secrets of her own, revealed in flashbacks.
It’s not bad, but it’s not terribly exciting either. It’s competent enough, but I felt like I’d seen most of it before. And, like most slasher movies, at least to me, it’s not scary at all. There’s maybe a jump or two, but jumps don’t equal scares. The series introduction is actually scarier and moodier than the episode itself, which is not really a good sign.
The acting’s uneven, the protagonist is good enough, and Moonface is fine for what he is, but the protagonist’s wacko survivalist husband is not too great, and an old guy who’s trapped in Moonface’s cabin with our protagonist, well, he gets very annoying after two sentences, and he won’t shut up.
It also suffers from the curse of format. Everything has a format, if you want to make a feature film, it’s one and a half to two and a half hours, sometimes more. If you want to make a Masters of Horror episode, it’s one hour, and so on. This idea isn’t really complex enough for one hour, it’d be better as an half-hour movie. But, of course, there’s absolutely no market for half-hour short movies.
I’m hoping the later installments in the series will be better, it’s a promising start, after all. I hear good things about the Dario Argento (DARIO ARGENTO!) and Tobe Hooper episodes, so I’m looking forward to those. The John Carpenter one sounds interesting too.