WARNING: This post on John Carpenter’s Masters of Horror installment Cigarette Burns contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t seen it, you probably shouldn’t read it.
With the Missus out of the house doing bridal-showery things, I’ve spent most of the day playing catch-up with movies I’ve TiVo’d that she wouldn’t wanna watch. I’ve been mightily entertained (by Master of the Flying Guillotine–now I know where Dhalsim from the Street Fighter video game got his mojo!), so I guess it’s only fitting that I’d be mightily disappointed as well.
The responsible party is Cigarette Burns, the lone episode of Showtime’s well-received horror anthology series Masters of Horror I managed to successfully TiVo. (The Clive Barker-penned Haeckel’s Tale got erased to make room for more Judge Judy episodes, I believe.) Though I can’t for the life of me find them now, I know I read many a favorable review of this short film, and indeed I recall it being billed as the best of the show’s first season. My reaction upon finally seeing it? A deep-seated “eh.” There’s certainly something to be said for the movie’s general ambiance, which is like nothing so much as the initiation narratives of early Clive Barker crossed with the viral-media metaphors of The Ring, but I assure you the execution isn’t anywhere near as interesting as that comparison would indicate.
Problem number one is leading man Norman Reedus. Reedus plays Kirby, a down-on-his-luck arthouse theatre owner who’s hired by a degenerate European businessman to track down a print of an ultra-underground film called Le Fin Absolue du Monde. Conventional wisdom among cineastes has it that after its disastrous initial screening, during which the entire audience went mad and began slaughtering one another, the only existing copy of the movie was destroyed; the businessman (played exactly how you’d imagine by Udo Kier) has heard differently, and sends Kirby on his way to find this film of extreme power. Would that Reedus’s performance contained power of any kind. He’s got the right physique and face for it–the same sort of gone-to-seed late-20s sad sack presence projected by Jeremy Renner in the excellent biopic Dahmer–but his line readings are stilted and flat, sometimes almost laughably so. It’s a little like watching a performance by a guy from the high school football team who tried out for the school play because he had the hots for the drama club president.
But to be fair, more than half the blame for Reedus’s weakness has got to go to writers Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan, who stuff into Kirby’s mouth some of the most wildly implausible reactions to horrific situations you’re likely to hear in a film this year. His confrontation with the father of his suicided heroin-addict girlfriend, who is also the bankroller of Kirby’s theatre, is played like just another nasty financial dispute with a brusque John Carpenter-movie suit, and a badly thought-out one at that; I don’t care how much you don’t like this guy, but getting self-righteous about how his presence makes you see your dead girlfriend’s face (his dead daughter’s, need I remind you) is pretty much the last thing you’d do when he’s threatening to close your beloved place of business down. Then there’s the moment when another Eurotrash film freak hacks a woman’s head off in front of a bound and gagged Kirby and a rolling camera in order to make some point about the power of film. When the dude removes Kirby’s muffle, rather than scream for help or plead for his life or, y’know, vomit, he instead chooses to angrily refute the guy’s film theory. “It’s not revealing some hidden truth! It’s fucking murder!” he yells at the machete-wielding brute walking toward him, blood-covered blade in hand. Uh, fellas, are you kidding?
Sadly, the film is lousy with those kind of poor decisions. To stay with the scene I was just talking about, there’s the outrageously gratuitous nature of the violence toward the slain woman. She was Kirby’s cab driver, and the second she came on screen I thought to myself “they cast a woman as a cab driver? And it’s not even a speaking role? Gee, I wonder where this is going.” Horrific? Very, but just as amateurish.
Then there’s the big reveal, which unbelievably comes at the beginning of the film. Turns out that Bakjavic, the mysterious director of Le Fin Absolue du Monde, mutilated an actual angel for the movie’s set piece. But we find this out during Kirby’s first meeting with his European benefactor Bellinger–because Bellinger has that same mutilated angel chained up in his mansion! Now, wouldn’t having the actual supernatural being be more interesting to both Bellinger and Kirby than tracking down footage of it instead? Bellinger acts like it’s no more interesting than owning the movie’s one-sheet, while Kirby spends the rest of the episode without mentioning it at all. I suppose you could read something into this along the lines of “to a film obsessive, the film is even better than the real thing,” but this is a movie never implied what it could state outright in the most obvious way possible, and that particular idea is never brought up in any way.
So rather than peripatetically work our way toward the reveal of the angel, our journey with Kirby culminates in a screening of Le Fin. After hearing about how the movie was designed to utterly destroy anyone who sees it, how it’s the most extreme vision ever committed to film, what we get–essentially, a Sisters of Mercy video–is a letdown, to put it very mildly. (Note: my TiVo froze during this climactic screening, so I missed about fifteen seconds’ worth of the images; if there’s something there to rival the scary Shining girls or the skull-face in The Exorcist or the meathook scene in Texas Chain Saw, well then, I take it all back.) Not only does it compare unfavorably to whatever you’ve conjured up in your head–or for that matter to some of Cigarette Burns‘s earlier gore effects, which are admittedly very powerful–it fails to equal the creepiness or the beauty of the similarly cursed video footage in The Ring, and that stuff took seven days to kill you, rather than taking effect instantaneously.
I could go on, about many things (right now the thing that’s rankling with me the most is the late girlfriend’s dad, straight outta the “I’m an over-the-top dickhead all the time for no good reason” school of stock Carpenter antagonists), but I’ve got more movies to watch. Oddly, though, I’m not regretting having watched this one. As I mentioned up top, there’s something there–something in that blend of Hellraiser-esque pursuit of forbidden knowledge and mutilated angels with J-horror “to see is to be corrupted” art as disease. Maybe this horror just needs someone else to master it.