A somber note before we get started: I tried to keep most of this out of my personal blog output while there was still any hope, but about ten days ago someone I loved passed away. It wasn't entirely unexpected, but it was someone with whom I'd hoped to spend a lot of my future. The place where we both worked was nice enough to let me have a week off on their tab, and I am just now getting back to work. Which reminds me of him, but then so does everything, down to air molecules. The week I'd hoped would allow me to develop coping strategies mostly allowed me to spend time with others who mourn him as much as I did, and basically to sleep whenever I got too upset: not a good strategy for the workplace.
I also decided to go on with the horror movies, however, as I need the distraction and as this is really not a bad time for me to watch those. Even the guy getting his spine ripped out in Valerie on the Stairs (spoiler!) is watchable when your empathy levels have reached negative 9000. And so...
Masters of Horror: Cigarette Burns/Dreams in the Witch House
I'd kept hearing about all the nice extras on the Showtime Masters of Horror DVDs on various review sites, and it's a pity that none of those vague bastards mentioned that there are two varieties. The twofers, like my video store's copy of Cigarette Burns/Dreams..., are unencumbered by special features.
Cigarette Burns is the story of a down-on-his-luck cinephile who is hired by an eccentric collector to find the only existing print of a film that drives people to homicidal madness.* In the world we know, eccentric collectors might have a stash of Marilyn Monroe's underwear: this guy has a mutilated angel, a creature bound to the film in question, whom he keeps on a rotating platform and pelts with ice cubes. Because...yeah. No idea. The cinephile takes the job, though: he needs the money to pay off his dead junkie girlfriend's father, who lent him the money to buy an indie movie house. Those indie movie-house guys, always with the smack and the...yeah. No idea there, either.
The job takes our antihero down a long road of rumors and perils as he confronts a frustrated film critic, a homicidal disciple of the movie's director, and finally the director's wife, who narrowly survived her husband's attempted murder/suicide. He then delivers the goods to the collector, with terrifying results for people who don't like to see intestines in film projectors.
Despite my ragging on it, Cigarette Burns is visually striking, has an interesting plot and makes some interesting points about the nature of art and its power over us. For some reason I'd expected the film-within-a-film to be a silent-movie artifact (damn you, Shadow of the Vampire!), which threw me a bit, but it was a solid if surreal piece of horror. And I say this in spite of the eyeball violence.
The companion piece on the DVD is an adaptation of a Lovecraft story I never particularly liked, The Dreams In The Witch-House. I'd love to give a complete review, but unfortunately I fell asleep halfway through, not entirely due to being in a fragile mental state. The plot follows Lovecraft tolerably well: impoverished student moves into ancient Boston boarding-house and falls victim to visions of a witch and her human-faced-rat familiar, who discovered the secret of manipulating time through geometry. The sex scene was not in the original, but then, neither was the "Miskatonic University" T-shirt on the student, which was the high point for me; human-faced rats just aren't very sinister.
*Except the film critic character, which could either be a statement about how critics don't Fully Grasp The Significance Of Art, or could be the practical need to keep the exposition guy somewhat sane.
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