Masters of Horror

2005

Seasons & Episodes

  • 2
  • 1
  • 0

7.4| 0h30m| TV-MA| en
Synopsis

An anthology series written and directed by the most famous names in horror.

Cast

Director

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Industry Entertainment

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Reviews

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets
Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.
Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.
Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.
avaunlocked There are some real gems in the first season. Specifically, "Jenifer," "Imprint," and "Sick Girl." These three female-oriented horrors that were the perfect amount of disturbing. It was a pleasure to watch a young Norman Reedus in "Cigarette Burns." Just a joy-I highly recommend. "Pick Me Up" was delightfully witty and fun. Unfortunately, each and every zombie story misses the target. They were so bad that they made me rethink whether I even like the subgenre any more. But that's okay. Over 75% if these are winners, and that's a great batting average, especially for horror.
Navaros Masters of Horror has a few great episodes, but far more often, the episodes are terrible. It has a huge array of very bad episodes, many of which are not even horror.The following episodes of Masters of Horror are great, and 10/10:"Incident On and Off a Mountain Road"; "H.P. Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch-House"; "The Fair-Haired Child"; "Pick Me Up"; "Cigarette Burns"; "Family"; "Right to Die"; "The Black Cat"All the episodes listed above have amazing acting, writing, directing, and a great horror story behind them. But that is only 8 episodes out of a 26 episode series. The other 18 episodes are either mediocre, or terrible. Not a good track record. Not a good series, overall. Some of the episodes, like "Homecoming", are nothing more than anti-G.W. Bush administration political propaganda. I am not defending the G.W. Bush administration and it certainly deserves some criticism --- but in *appropriate* mediums. Not in what is *supposed* to be a horror series! The episode "Homecoming" is not *horror* at all, therefore it has no place being in a horror series. There is an episode called "Chocolate" which is the biggest pile of crap *ever* put on film. No exaggeration. It too, is not horror. It's not really anything. Just an abysmally boring, pointless hour worth of banal, asinine drivel. One of the reasons "Chocolate" is so unbelievably bad is because it was written and directed by the series creator, Mick Garris. Mick has publicly admitted in interviews that he isn't very good at making movies or TV episodes; that his strength is being a nice guy and brokering deals with really talented people to make good work for him with his producing company. Despite knowing he is no good at it, Mick Garris still went right on ahead and made "Chocolate" and a bunch of other episodes in the series which are little better. Right there is a waste of several potential episode slots that *good* episodes made by real "Masters of Horror" (instead of Mick Garris) might have filled. Best way to watch Masters of Horror is to cherrypick the 8 good episodes listed above and watch them only, and skip all the rest. Or simply not watch it at all.Tales from the Crypt is another horror anthology series. It was far better, with the vast majority of the Tales from the Crypt episodes being great (barring Season 7 only, which was terrible). It is advisable to pick up Tales from the Crypt for a much better overall horror experience than Masters of Horror can provide.
liquidcelluloid-1 Network: Showtime; Genre: Horror, Drama, Sci-Fi; Content Rating: TV-MA (for protracted sequences of graphic violence and gore, profanity, simulated sex, nudity); Available: individual DVDs.Seasons Reviewed: 2 seasons Showtime's "Masters of Horror" is an anthology series unlike anything else on TV. It is actually best viewed not as a series, but as a film festival. A collection of one-hour movies with different writers, the star of which is that week's director putting their trademark stamp on their chosen story. "Masters of Horror" is a show made by and for horror movie fans. It is also completely unreviewable as a whole.Yet one thing does bind all the short films together: a pornographic taste for blood. Entrails are spilled, limbs are severed, anything and everything is eaten and a character can't simply cough up blood without it shown in lusty-eyed slow-motion. Nothing is off limits. Even for premium cable, this is as graphic as mainstream American entertainment comes. Gorehounds do not need to read further.With such variety and experimentation going on all in one place, the end results swing wildly from good, efficient story telling to long, dragging absolute waste-your-time dreck. I hate to say, but it more often than not is the latter. Hell, most of it is direct-to-video schlock. These guys calling themselves "masters" of the genre is the height of presumptuousness. Yet the purpose and spirit of the overall show - a playground for pure creative freedom – has an addicting promise.Don Coscarelli's "Incident on and off a Mountain" kicks the series off on a deceptively good note. Of all the entries of the first 2 seasons this is one of the few that truly feels like a short film. Thrilling and satisfying it stars Bree Turner as a young woman who finds the survival lessons taught by an abusive and paranoid boyfriend (Ethan Embry) coming in handy when a car accident on a deserted backwoods road (this show is full of them) puts her face-to-face with a mutilating monster.Of this group John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper may be the only directors you could call masters. Despite years of questionable output, you can't deny the power of "Halloween". But the kind of creepy, atmospheric, chills that movie delivered are not what "Masters" trades in. Carpenter falls into the hack hole just as easily as the rest. Season 1's "Cigarette Burns" wraps us effectively in the mystery of a man who seeks out an infamous movie, a movie made as an act of terrorism to drive anyone who sees it insane. Carpenter sets it all up brilliantly, then just pays it off with a bloodbath. Season 2's "Pro-Life" (in which the right-wing father, Ron Pearlman, of a girl raped by the devil turns an abortion clinic into a battlefield) is even stranger. If there is a pro-choice message in this thing, it is unrecognizably muddled before Carpenter is through with it. For his part, Hooper's entries are so far forgettable. The most talked about entry is Joe Dante's "Homecoming" - a superficially clever, pseudo-satirical Iraq war protest in which war veteran zombies come out of the ground not to eat brains but to vote the Bush administration out of office. Dante (of "Gremlins" but then "Small Soldiers") uses such a transparently heavy hand that it robs the piece of any potential edge. But season 2 entry "The Screwfly Solution" is almost offensive in the way he takes what could have been an interesting premise and reduces it to a Lifetime movie.Series creator Mike Garris' ("Desperation" and "The Shining) "Chocolate" and Brad Anderson's "Sounds Like" play with the senses and annoyingly overstay their welcome. John McNoughton's "Haeckel's Tale" (from a Clive Barker short story) is a long draining yarn of love and necrophilia. In "Deer Woman" John Landis tries to inject some humor into the festival and falls flat for it. Dario Argento's "Jenifer" perfect typifies many of the movies in the way it starts out rock solid and at some point takes a strange left turn into a meandering last act that goes either nowhere or exactly where you think it will. Then there is Argento's "Pelts" which is nothing short of a vomitorium.Among my favorites: Landis recovers and knocks it out of the park in season 2 with the smashing "Family". The less known about this cleverly told story the better, but George Wendt is perfect and the ending is a killer. Larry Cohen's "Pick Me Up" in which the "backwoods psycho" story is given a rollicking twist: two backwoods psychos. Lucky McKee's "Sick Girl" is a wild concoction mixing disgusting bugs and an unlikely lesbian love affair that slowly boils into creepiness. "We All Scream for Ice Cream" actually provides some chills under the eye of Tom Holland. The Stephen King-like story of a childhood prank that goes horribly wrong and creates a demonic ice cream truck driver… OK, it is better than it sounds.If you hunger for variety as much as I do "Masters" does not disappoint in that arena even if the episodes do. In addition to the usual dismemberment we get period pieces such as "Black Cat" where Stuart Gordon does a little history twisting with Edgar Allan Poe's classic and "Dream Cruise" in which Norio Tsuruta brings authentic Japanese horror and it's done-to-death themes of infidelity and supernatural revenge to the small screen.In closing, if there is one film of the two seasons I would call a must-see, the jury prize would go to Peter Medack's loopy "The Washingtonians". A "DaVinci Code" from hell, this movie exposes the sinister truth that could tear this nation apart: that George Washington was, in fact, a baby-eating cannibal. A secret that a secret society of cannibals in powdered wigs would kill to keep. Now that's what I call some good, gory (completely original) entertainment.
mike_panikhouse Some of the filmmakers who are participating in this series have made some really great films but they sure as heck are not showing much skill with this series. Particularly the writing. OK, the first season was somewhat better but these new episodes they are creating just stink. I'm a huge fan of horror and in my opinion the vast majority of these episodes are total garbage. Nothing new or genuinely interesting. Few of them are visually creative. It's just typical fabricated Hollywood crap, uninteresting, childish, poorly conceived and in some cases, flat out laughable. Much like Tales from the Crypt the only good thing this series has been offering is great nudity! Other then that this series blows hard. I get the impression sometimes that they hired a bunch of eighth-graders to write the episodes. Maybe they did.