The Damned Thing – Masters Of Horror Season Two

http://www.sho.com/site/mastersofhorror/home.do
http://www.sho.com/site/mastersofhorror/movie.do?content=damned_thing


Director: Tobe Hooper
Writer: Richard Christian Matheson, from a story by Ambrose Bierce
Guest Star: Alexandra Carter, Ted Friend, Ocean Hellman, Eileen Barrett,
Tracy Waterhouse, Brendan Fletcher, Clint Carleton , Sean Patrick Flanery,
Marisa Coughlan , Ted Raimi

 

Review by Douglas Waltz

I will start off with a confession. I have not seen a single episode of the first season of Masters Of Horror. When the people at Showtime gave me an opportunity to view three of the episodes before they aired, I jumped at the chance. All I knew going in was the gossip of Season One. Some of the episodes were uneven at best if not downright bad. The best one, by Takashi Miike wasn’t allowed airtime. And Dario Argento took a really good story from Creepy Magazine and screwed it up.

Not a good way to go in, but I kept an open mind.

This story had some pretty good pedigree going in. The story by Richard Christian Matheson, son of Richard Matheson was adapted by a short story by Ambrose Bierce. This is a good thing. Tobe Hooper is directing and say what you want about Hooper, but he’s given us some of my favorite movies. Hell, leaving out the one with the chainsaw there is still Lifeforce and the Salem’s Lot miniseries. I love both of those productions. And Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 has to be one of the darkest comedies to ever come out of the 80’s. So, at this point I was feeling pretty good going in.

The story starts twenty years ago when our main character was just a boy. On his father’s birthday the man snaps, kills his wife in a gory shotgun explosion and heads after out hero who has run out of the house. The boy manages to escape as his father is torn apart by a bloody, unseen explosion of force. (Kudos to KNB guys Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger on the well executed gore).

Now, up to speed and present day where our hero is the sheriff of the same small town that he grew up in. He and his wife have separated and they have a young son. To make matters worse, the force that came for his father those many years ago has come back and it’s driving the entire town into a murderous rage as it seeks him out to destroy him.

Okay, this is still a pretty new episode in that it aired on October 27th on Showtime so I’m not going to go much farther than this. But, I have so many problems with this episode.

Why in God’s name would you stay in the same town, the same house where you watched your father murder your mother? What could possess you to become the sheriff? Some misguided sense of trying to keep the town safe? The main character fails in this horribly so, that can’t be a very effective line of reasoning. When the force comes a calling for you why not run away? Why go to your house? And, unfortunately, this is one of those things where the ending of the episode is actually a non ending. We get zero resolution to what has been laid out for us in the previous hour. That is lazy storytelling and lazy direction. Someone had to have looked at this and said;

‘Um, Tobe where in the Hell is the ending to this thing?”

If they didn’t they should be fired. Hooper isn’t the most consistent film maker in the world and some of his stuff actually stinks on ice. Spontaneous Combustion would be a good example of that. Along with trying to remake the classic sci-fi epic, Invaders From Mars. Just because of those two things someone needed to go to the people responsible for this episode, smack them in the head and say,

“Knock it off and finish The Damned Thing!”

Hey, that must be where they got the title from. Guess I’m a genius.

I’ll be back later to tell you about two other episodes; The V Word and Family. Man, they better be better than this stinker.