Coming hot on the heels of "Chocolate", "Homecoming" was a breath of unexpected fresh air, though it has an equally lauded and awful rap, depending on who you talk to.

Detractors point out its stupidity, its obviousness, its lack of depth, and its divisive nature. Advocates appreciate its political satire, its ribbing of asshole pundits, and its thoughtful pointedness about our times. So, as you can see, opposing viewpoints, much as you are wont to see in our political culture.

The plot involves a conservative pundit's opportunistic wish that all our fallen troops from the Iraq War would return, sure to vote for his neo-con President in a tight election. His wish, of course, comes true and the troops rise from the grave to the astonishment of the establishment.

They don't know how to deal with the troops, so they handle things badly. There's camps. People are told the apocalypse is coming.

Of course, all they want to do is vote. So they're allowed to and they pass back into death. Until their votes are discounted... The rest you'll have to see.

It has analogues for Cindy Sheehan, Karl Rove, a particularly nasty jab at Ann Coulter, all the biggest, dumbest talking heads in the business. It's a fairly astute vision of politics, filtered through the pathos of our troops and the sacrifice they make for... well, roughly nothing. It lampoons the assholes that run our world blisteringly.

The one criticism I have is the very end, which is far too cartoonish and pushes well past the point, which was already made. No need to drive it home, Mr. Dante.

Joe Dante is a horror fan and has made a name for himself as a director. It is well-deserved. Sam Hamm shows that he has an excellent handle on how to tell a horror story that has a social context. It's all very well-done and I enjoyed it very much, though other people would easily write it off because of the overtly political texture. To them I say "Eat it."

Poor, silly Henry Thomas. You were okay in Suicide Kings. And, here you are now, reduced to doing this horrible episode of "Masters Of Horror".

The problem with this episode is Mick Garris. Mick, we thank you for putting together the show and being a big dork who managed to gather directors for the "Masters of Horror" dinners that got this ball rolling. You're a nerd and you got it going, so kudos to you. But you can't direct worth a shit. Look at all those horrible Stephen King movies you've done... Stephen King isn't even a decent writer, but you keep churning out crap TV-grade movies based on his hacky novels.

And Mick's writing is no favor, either. Bland and stupid stories play out before you everytime he writes something, often based on someone else's crappy writing. Every time, it's a series of bland and pointless incidents with characters talking about nothing, barely strung together coherently. The concepts are weak.

This episode is no exception. A man, the aforementioned Henry Thomas, starts seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, sensing the life of a woman he's somehow in intermittant psychic connection with.

Against the judgement of any intelligent person, he tracks the girl down, acts like a huge, crazy stalker, and generally makes a big stupid scene, of course leading to general badness but not a shred of horror, going against the theme trumpeted in the show's title.

The particular episode is not as incompetant as "Dance Of The Dead", for example, but it's a bland and pointless exercise in creating a second-rate sci-fi short film. It might as well be an episode of some syndicated anthology show, just updated for the twenty-first century.

As far as positives, Matt Frewer is in the episode briefly and shows what a real actor can do before collecting his check and escaping from the horrible affair.

If only we could all escape with you, Matt, assured in our notion that Mick Garris was done writing and directing ever again. Sadly, it's not so.

Easily the weakest MOH episode ever to see air, "Dance Of The Dead" is every horror fan's worst nightmare: a soulless, pointless teleplay worst-case-scenario. Its incompetence only underscores the sheer dullness and stupidity of the whole affair.

In this instance, our blame seems to lie upon the shoulders of Tobe Hooper, a director I've always found to be vastly overrated. (As a hater of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and having seen The Mangler and Toolbox Murders, I've yet to forgive the man for his incompetence. Sadly Massacre was his peak and it was a flash-in-the pan waste of time.) But, aside from my deep dislike for Tobe Hooper, a good part of the blame should be heaped upon Richard Christian "Chris" Matheson, son of "I Am Legend" writer Richard Matheson, pumping out a shitty adaptation of his father's obviously shitty story.

I'm not going to try to decipher the post-apocalyptic drivel that they passed off on me as a story, so I'll leave it at this: something happened and now you've got a weird retro future where young punks roam around drinking and drugging, just like now, except there's a lot fewer people. Amidst all this, you've got a club run by Robert Englund, overacting and chewing more scenery than he's ever chewed before in his life. Imagine Freddy combined with every other role he's had since and you still don't have the level of bad overacting that he provides in this storm of ass. At this club, the severly overwrought Freddy provides patrons with the opportunity to watch zombies "dance" on the stage via electrocution. Yeah, it's actually dumber than it sounds.

I'll gloss over the entire plot and the poor, foolish young actors involved. I'm not sure how much I can blame them when the rest of this retread mongoloid garbage is so stylistically fucked and lobotimized. Some people would claim that there's meaning in this episode (iMDB, I'm looking at you), but there's nothing here except a shitty titties 'n' zombies extravaganza, more inclined to let people chew scenery and deliver dialogue about nothing than actually have them doing anything that makes the slightest bit of sense or would entertain any viewer at all.

Somehow, the monstrous stupidity of this vapid horseshit manages to drive the show down to a level beneath some of the worse movies I've seen in my time... It's too bad to even be funny. It's just an irritating nightmare and you can't wait for it to reach its wretched conclusion. One would not think that such a lack of enjoyability, good taste, or substance would be manageable, but these men made it happen.

The fact that the Matheson/Hooper episode, "The Damned Thing", in the second season was so tolerable was an experience filled with shock and awe for me, as I had given up hope that either of these men could create anything watchable by a human being ever again. So I guess I have to give them that...

There are aspects to "Jenifer" to be applauded. For one, it's one of the less horrible things that schlock-meister Dario Argento has churned out in his career. I'm sure many would be angry to hear me tear down their idol, best known for his gaudy LSD-trip nightmares of color and cheap violence to women. Unfortunately, I like story, which is an area completely foreign to all Italians, instead prefering a system by which random things happen to people until everyone gets bored, turns off the cameras, and goes home.

Additionally, this episode stars and is written by Steven Weber, an actor that I've always enjoyed, from his days on "Wings" to his current work on "Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip". He is an undervalued and enjoyable actor with excellent comedic sense. Perhaps horror is not his best mileau, but I applaud his interest in more dorky areas.

While many dislike this episode and I admit the plot is somewhat nonsensical and obvious in its movements, it is an interesting idea: an almost cursed man saves a disfigured and mutated monster of a woman, first taking pity on her and then lusting after her as she viciously lashes out at everyone else. Weber does excellent work as a man torn and mentally deteriorating under the stress of balancing his desire and his need to stop this beastly but childish woman.

Really, there is little else to say about the episode, other than recapping its every moment, as it was fairly straightforward and its length is already padded out with Argento's artistic touches. By the time it reaches its obvious conclusion, you probably won't be satisfied, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to claim it as one of the worst episode of the season.

So, mediocre stuff, but kudos to Weber, who I can forgive for this less-than-stellar offering.

"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.