MASTERS OF HORROR: VOLUME 1 (2006)

Question – What happens when you give some of the worlds foremost horror writers/directors one hours worth of movie time to fill in anyway they feel fit? Answer - You get a rather special collection of short films that are collectively called Masters of Horror. Fortunately for us, they also decided to slap these down on to DVD so that some bloke could watch and review the first two in the series to be released. That bloke is me, and the first two are pieces by John Carpenter (Halloween, The Fog, The Thing) and Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, Dagon, Fortress) respectively.

The Thing is one of my favourite films and I was very excited to see that the first film that I was going to watch was one of Carpenters. 'Cigarette Burns’ is a story about a movie buff called Kirby (Norman Reedus) who, along with owning and running a movie theatre that shows obscure films, also finds rare movies for collectors – for the right price of course. Enter Bellinger (Udo Kier), a collector or rare films, who hires Kirby to find the Holy Grail of films – ‘Le Fin Absolute du Monde’. This legendary work isn’t meant to exist as it was supposed to have been destroyed after it’s first and only showing where it was rumoured that the audience went into a homicidal frenzy after watching it. But Bellinger believes that there is still a copy somewhere and hires Kirkby to find it. So starts a journey, following a paper trail of clues across the globe. As Kirkby gets closer to the truth behind the film and closer to where he hopes the remaining copy is, he starts having disturbing hallucinations and witnesses some horrific acts of violence.
This is not a film full of fluffy bunnies and ambling lambs. It is a disturbing, nasty film that is shot brilliantly. It never pulls any punches and leaves you feeling rather grotty afterwards. It does what a horror is meant to do: it disturbs, and then leaves that feeling with you after you have finished watching it. I know this is going to sound rather girly but I had a very colourful dream the night after I had watched it. It genuinely had affected me. It was great. I’m not going to give any major plot points away here but the film is on a far more realistic level than the second in the series. It is dealing with real people (mostly) doing real things to other real people. There are no monsters running down dark corridors, lurking around corners for the hapless blond in the tight tee-shirt to stumble into. There are human beings doing nasty things to other human beings, with no remorse, no show of emotion. That, to me at least, is the worst monster that you can create.

And so on to our second presentation, ‘Dreams in the Witch House’ which is an H.P Lovecraft adaptation. Here a physics student moves into a rundown house with a fat landlord, a woman with a baby next door and a strange old man who lives downstairs. Being a student it was all that he could afford, but he soon wishes that he’d saved his rent and stayed at home with his mum. Walter (Ezra Godden) starts to have nightmares about a rat with a human face. Not normal. He also thinks that a doorway to another dimension is behind the wall in his bedroom. Also not normal. Things start to go really strange though when he dreams that he’s being seduced by a she-demon. He’d better lay off those recreational drugs. As I said in the first half of the review, this was far the poorer of the presentations. After the ‘true’ horrors of the first film, this one seemed quite tame and watered down. I also thought that the story was weaker, but that’s not to say that it was a pile of garbage, it’s just that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I was hoping after the visual feast of the first one.
If I had to score the films individually then I would have scored the first a good couple of points higher than the second, but as that isn’t the way we do things here at the TFA offices, I have averaged them out. But remember, the Carpenter film should be watched by all horror fans, especially if you like his work. This is how a short horror film should be made. Roll on the next MOH DVD box set!

Both of the disks in the set are packed to the rafters with extras. I won’t go into all of them here, but both have a couple of audio commentaries; a piece called ‘Working with a Master’ which is a number of interviews with cast and crew of films that the particular director has been involved with; an interview with the Master himself; an on-set interview with one of the cast. The list goes on. I admit that I didn’t watch all of them, but I did sit down and watch the ‘Working with..’ featurette on both disks. They were both really good and gave an insight into the life and past works of the Master in question. I don’t remember ever seeing a list of extras on a DVD this extensive that didn’t come on 2 disks. All in all a very good package.