"Masters Of Horror" tried to start out strong, raising the bar for their show early and, subsequently, disappointed the audience with the following episodes, a series of half-baked and idiotic hack-jobs, most glimmers of hope and promise not returning for another five episodes.
Don Coscarelli was a fair enough choice to start out the proceedings, though it could be pointed out that he's hardly a "Master" of anything, having only managed to crank out the Phantasm films, Bubba Ho-Tep, and The Beastmaster, easily his best work. Others might defend Phantasm, an impossible feat given that it's a festival of retardation revolving around exploits at a funeral home where corpses are turned into undead dwarves and transported to another planet (with higher gravity, hence the need for dwarves) by The Tall Man as a cheap form of labor. Fine stuff, right? Bubba Ho-Tep isn't much better, though the fans will watch any retarded shit as long as it stars Bruce Campbell, a cool enough guy that's given far too much credit in exceptionally mediocre films idolized by fucktards.
Given these drawbacks, Coscarelli does a good job, doing yet another Joe Lansdale adaptation, this tale involving a girl stopping on the side of the road, only to be chased by a pale mute giant with a knife, intent on having her as a fleshy toy with which to test his drill press. The straightforward and bloody plot is interspersed with the development of the girl's relationship with her husband, from first date to his neo-fascist survival obsession, where he trains and abuses her, toughening her up along the way.
Bree Turner does a good enough job as the damsel du jour, though the real marks go to Ethan Embry as her ever-more-unstable husband and Angus Scrimm (far from his Tall Man days) as Buddy, the lunatic captive of killer Moonface, there to voice mad concern for Miss Turner as she frantically plots her escape. Scrimm is the best thing about the episode and, along with Embry and the beautifully filtered and filmed darkness and gore, is all that's worthy of merit, but it was an above-par beginning to a series that promised a new revolution in horror... If only it had delivered as well as the limited abilities of Mr. Coscarelli, then I would have no complaints at all.
