Masters Of Horror - "Chocolate"

chocolaterating-2.0Poor, 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.

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