I am – Hercules!!

I don’t think the “Cigarette Burns” episode of “Masters of Horror” is set to be colorcast on Showtime for another month or two, but longtime Coaxial News spy “Gaspode” (whom I’d always suspected had it in for Moriarty) got a look at it before even the Mighty Herc!!

Oh, god, I can’t look:

Masters of Horror: ‘Cigarette Burns’
Written by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan
Directed by John Carpenter

While Showtime was debuting their Masters of Horrors series with ‘Incident on and off a Mountain Road,’ a small group of diehard fans at New Jersey’s Chiller Theatre convention. The folks at Anchor Bay screened a copy of John Carpenter’s ‘Cigarette Burns,’ apparently the first time the finished episode had been seen anywhere. Whether or not this is true I have no idea, but my curiosity had already been piqued by the fact that I don’t get Showtime and would probably have to wait months to see it on DVD; and AICN’s own Moriarty had already reported on the making of ‘Cigarette Burns’ a couple of months ago, so I was interested to see what he had been fussing about.

Before I go any further, I have to make a couple of admissions here. Number one, even though I know this is Mori’s baby, I really wasn’t hadn’t seen any of the work he’d done with Scott Swan in the past. So I honestly couldn’t care less if the episode was any good or not. In fact, if ‘Cigarette Burns’ sucked big-time, I would have happily cut it to pieces and dared AICN to print the review. After all, the name of this series was MASTERS of Horror and if Mori/Drew couldn’t run with the big dogs, he really should have known better than to try.

Secondly, although I’m a long-time John Carpenter fan, I haven’t been all that impressed by his work in recent years, such as Ghosts of Mars, Vampires or Escape from LA. Was his latest effort going to be just as underwhelming?

I needn’t have worried. ‘Cigarette Burns’ is a stunning piece of television, Carpenter’s best work in years. The direction is slick and atmospheric, the music is moody but never intrusive, and the script is well-paced, always moving towards a chilling conclusion. There are lots of genre references scattered throughout the episode, but never in a beat-you-over-the-head, aren’t-we-cleverer-than-all-of you self-referential way. The structure is so nicely laid out that ‘Cigarette Burns’ could easily have worked as a full length feature, albeit with a few extra character beats and maybe an extended first act.

For those who aren’t familiar with the episode yet, Kirby Sweetman (Norman Reedus) is the kind of guy who can track down even the most difficult-to-find films for collectors. He runs an aging revival house theater, but he’s in hock up to his eyeballs, and his father-in law, a nasty son-of bitch is waiting for the $200,000 he’s still owed and would happily tear the place down given the chance. You see, Kirby’s wife Annie committed suicide in the bathtub under circumstances that we’re not told, but there’s obviously bad blood between the two men.

Enter Ballinger (Udo Kier) an obsessive film collector, who hires Kirby to track down the holy grail of avant garde cinema, La Fin Absolue Du Monde (translation: The Absolute End of the World). Only shown once at a festival 30 years earlier, the film sparked an orgy of death and destruction in the theater where it aired. The projectionist, now a film archivist acquaintance of Kirby, barely survived, but his left hand is now a fused lump of flesh. Virtually everybody who worked on the film is now dead, as is just about everybody who’s tried to track down the single existing print.

Are all of these stories merely some kind of cinematic urban legend? Not according to Ballinger, whose mansion houses the biggest collection of La Fin Absolue Du Monde memorabilia in the world, including an emaciated angel that he keeps chained in the study (the pitiful creature’s wings have been chopped off and are proudly displayed on the wall behind Ballinger’s desk). And when the collector offers Kirby- wait for it- two hundred grand to find the print and bring it back, the offer is too good to turn down.

But as Kirby begins to discover, there’s a reason that La Fin Absolue Du Monde has remained in hiding all these years. Nasty things have happened to all who come in contact with the film. The only critic at that original screening has spent the past three decades trying to write the perfect review. A French filmmaker influenced by the film hogties Kirby and decapitates an unfortunate female cab driver in front of his eyes, all in the name of art. The director’s widow, who watched her husband go insane, unsuccessfully cutting her throat and his own successfully, is glad to hand the print over to Kirby, who’s been experiencing some nasty hallucinations of his own. And when Kirby finally hands the film over to an anxious Ballinger, La Fin Absolue Du Monde is finally screened again, with quite literally gut-wrenching results.

As an episode, ‘Cigarette Burns’ references everything from classic noir, to Argento, to the new wave of Japanese horror. Reedus does a great job of playing the hapless Kirby, who appears to start out with the best of intentions, but finds himself getting caught up in Ballinger’s obsession. Udo Kier is as creepy as I’ve ever seen him, with those watery eyes that remind you of a latter-day Peter Lorre as much as anyone else. And I’m afraid I didn’t catch the name of the actor who plays the fallen angel (listed in the credits as a ‘willowy being’) but every moment he’s on screen is mesmerizing, particularly his final line to Kirby at the end.

Finally, I have to mention the work on KNB, who contributed the makeup FX for the episode. The series is called Masters of Horror, and KNB’s work is certainly that. I don’t want to give too much away, but gore-hounds won’t be disappointed by the graphic decapitations, gouging, gashing and assorted nastiness, all accompanied by appropriately squelchy sound effects. My personal favorite is a scene in which Kirby confronts Ballinger after the collector has just screened the film for himself. Half-hidden behind a projection booth, it’s obvious by the horrible sounds that something fairly disgusting has happened to the collector but we still can’t see what it is. The scene goes on and on, with Carpenter ratcheting up the suspense, and when he finally pays it off, it’s a gruesome shot to the guts.

In the end, ‘Cigarette Burns’ is an amazing achievement. If the episode had aired first in the Masters of Horror line-up, I suspect it would have set the bar awfully high for installments to follow. As it is, Carpenter fans have something to look forward to in a few month’s time, because the director has more than lived up to the show’s title.

Oh, and on Saturday, Anchor Bay is hosting a panel at Chiller with Masters of Horror directors John Landis, Stuart Gordon and Lucky McKee, screening Gordon’s episode ‘Dreams in the Witch House.’ Should be interesting to see what he comes up with.

Submitted with plant-like enthusiasm by
Gaspode

Just for the record, “Gaspode’s” plant-cred is not the plantiest. Stick his name in the AICN Search box below Coaxial and discover that he was one of our regular “Farscape” reviewers back in the day.

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