Cinema Suicide

It must be particularly difficult to be a feature film director and have only a few more than forty minutes to craft a well-rounded horror short that does what it needs to do in three short acts. This must be even harder if you’re just another schlocky remake director. Breck Eisner had the unenviable task of kicking off the NBC horror anthology, Fear Itself tonight and the result was a mixed bag.

Horror fans have a tendency to get excited about anything horror on TV and the buzza was going great guns over this series. There was a report on all your favorite horror outlets at the slightest breeze in Fear Itself’s world. It seemed as though no one learned anything from Masters of Horror which acted, more or less, as a blueprint for Fear Itself.

The series gets the ball rolling with an episode called The Sacrifice about three bickering criminals, their mortally wounded buddy and a vaguely outlined criminal act that has them riding desolate back roads to avoid the law. When their truck bottoms out and drops most of the transmission, they hoof it to a column of smoke in the distance and find shelter in a frontier outpost occupied by three strange but attractive sisters who lull the felons into a false sense of security and then feed them to their dark secret which they’ve kept for many generations. Good thing the criminals have a bag full of uzis.

The Sacrifice commits one of the worst crimes in monster movies. It never gives you a good look at the monster. There’s a lot of build up, a lot of background noise and interference. With another forty minutes of character development it probably could have been something better. Mick Garris’ script is a decent, albeit unoriginal idea. By this time, pairing up Reservoir Dogs (which, itself, wasn’t original) with a horror movie favorite has been done a few times to varying degrees of success in the Japanese zombie movie, Junk, and the slasher, Malevolence. It’s fairly predictable with a predictably oh, snap ending.

The Sacrifice survives on the novelty of a fairly explicit horror short on network TV, though. It’s a very nice thing to see and it relieves the entire series of responsibility if it sucks because you can’t judge the whole thing on any one episode unless they all suck in tandem. Even Masters of Horror had glimmers of quality and next week’s episode, a haunted house bit starring Eric Roberts, looks like it could be decent.

What these people really need to do to find success is throw out the popular themes of contemporary horror movies. Trying to tie what’s happening at the box office is going to sink your ship before the season can go to completion. They ought to be studying what made shows like The Twilight Zone and Tales From The Crypt so consistently good.