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Masters of Horror - Cigarette Burns
episode 1.8
USA 2005
produced by Stephen R. Brown (executive), Morris Berger (executive), John W.Hyde (executive), Mick Garris (executive), Keith Addis (executive), Andrew Deane (executive) for IDT Entertainment, Nice Guy Productions, Industry Entertainment/Showtime
directed by John Carpenter
starring Norman Reedus, Udo Kier, Gary Hetherington, Christopher Britton, Zara Taylor, Chris Gauthier, Douglas Arthurs, Colin Foo, Gwynyth Walsh, Christopher Redman, Julius Chapple, Taras Kostyuk, Brad Kelly, Lynn Wahl, Brahm Taylor, Rikki Gagne, Crystal Mudry
written by Drew McWeeny, Scott Swan, music by Cody Carpenter
TV-series Masters of Horror
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
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Rich businessman Bellinger (Udo Kier) hires theatre owner and film
collector Kirby (Norman Reedus) to find for him the legendary film Le
Fin Absolue du Monde, a film that was screened only once and that
turned the entire audience into homicidal maniacs and the auditiorium into
a slaughterhouse ... if just to see what the film is all about. Searching
for the film, Kirby is first confronted with a wall of silence, which he
only very gradually anages to break through, but the closer he gets to the
film, the more he is plagued by strange visions that seem to have to do
with the suicide of his heroin-addicted girlfriend Annie (Zara Taylor) and
the guilt he feels since.
Finally, Kirby makes it to the widow of the film's director, who really
deems him worthy of the film (probably because of his many strange
visions) and hands it over just like that.
Kirby hands over the film to Bellinger, collects the reward money and
thinks that's it ... but while still watching the film, Bellinger calls
Kirby back to his house, and when Kirby arrives there, he finds
Bellinger's butler (Colin Foo) gone completely mental, who kills himself
before his very eyes, and Bellinger, who is jsut about to insert his guts
into the film projector ... ouch.
Then the father of Kirby's dead girlfriend appears on the scene and
tries to kill him, but Kirby kills him in self defense. Ultimately Kirby
realizes that the power of Le Fin Absolue du Monde doesn't lie so
much in the film as such but in the grief and guilt in the audience it
draws upon. Then Kirby takes the gun Annie's dad wanted to kill him with
and shoots himself. The end.
In part, this film is a retelling of John Carpenter's rather
disappointing In the Mouth of Madness from ten years earlier, in
part it's a humourless version of the Monty Python sketch The
World's Funniest Joke, in part it's unelegant neo-noir, in part it's
just really bad soap opera, and in part it's a poor man's psychodrama, all
of this packed into an hour's worth of horrorfilm. The result is pretty
much as bad as all of this sounds, a horor story that is built around the
setpiece towards the end and desperately tries to waste some time until
it's time for the climax, but features a story that seems to go nowhere in
particular.
Another disappointment by John Carpenter, who has made a few great
films in his career (Dark Star, Assault
on Precinct 13, Halloween), but at least as many films (Starman,
Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Village of the Damned) that
weren't even worth the price of admission ...
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