As if I wasn’t let down enough when Starz decided to totally misuse Mike Nelson’s talents and ditch the late-season Crow and Tom voice actors in favour of some cheesy ‘here’s a star from the movie let’s mock interview before the show’ thing….

So, Showtime has this Masters of Horror thing…and supposedly, they’ve got all these great directors or whatever the fuck their job is doing all these special movies….

The first one I saw was this godawful ‘women should listen to their insaneo survivalist husbands’ moral tale about a serial-killing monster who traps girls and drills out their eyes. Or something. It’s intercut with flashbacks to this woman and her husband and their slowly decomposing marriage. It ends predictably enough with her being able to do what her husband told her to do, with a strangely predictable twist of her husband’s body being in the trunk of her car.

The second one I managed to catch had something to do with a freakishly deformed [in the face] female who eats cats and other people while furiously mating with whatever male she’s decided to latch onto. There’s a bad twilight zone twist to it all, but it mostly kinda sucked.

The one I’ve been waiting for was the one I just watched. I don’t know which ‘master of horror’ did it, but, god, they totally butchered Dreams in the Witch House.

Time out, there’s a website….

The first one was Incident on and off A Mountain Road. The second was probably Jennifer. It turns out I knew who directed both of these when I was watching them….

What I didn’t know was that the same guy did Re-Animator and Dagon. Which is weird, because there was at least a teensy bit of good in Re-Animator, y’know? A little less fuckery and a little more ‘at least the story is there’?

Dagon…I had issues with Dagon. The title of one story, half the plot from The Shadow over Innsmouth, and strange elements from who the fuck knows where….

And the same thing happened in this one. Sorta. Elements of the story were there, but there were all these other things that were just…rewritten. The guy who rented the room sought it out in the story, not just ‘it’s cheap’, but ‘it’s important to what I’m doing’. That whole baby thing was new, and the guy’s unwillingness in the process was also new. He sought the witch out in the story.

And, gahd, that fuckin’ Necronomicon! What the fuck was up with that? “First, we’re going to beat you in the face with it. Then we’re going to close it and beat you in the face with it AGAIN! AND THEN! We’re going to have this strange lady who’s dressed entirely out-of-period [hey, where’d that laptop come from, and that cellphone, anyway…?] for the apparent time setting who flips out about how ‘nobody’s authorised to see the NECRONOMICON!’ ”

I was almost fine with it until the closing, actually. And then the face was there, and it was just ‘okay, no more.’

I was also almost okay with Brown Jenkin — the rat with the human face. That might be a hard effect to pull off on a limited budget…especially with all those strange size difference between a rat’s face and a human one. It was a little strange, but okay, I guess.

Too bad they couldn’t get the story right.

I wonder what the rest are going to be like. Some of the people on the list don’t suck, y’know?

Oh, I don’t remember if I linked to the site. Here is the list.