MASTERS OF HORROR SEASON ONE, EPISODE SIX: HOMECOMING

MASTERS OF HORROR SEASON ONE, EPISODE SIX: HOMECOMING

Thea Gill as Jane Cleaver (Image not from episode)

Jon Tenney as David Murch

Directed by Joe Dante

Screenplay by Sam Hamm

Based on the short story ‘Death and Suffrage’ by Dale Bailey

This episode gave me such a fucking headache and I will tell you why with all honesty. I am by far the most non-political person I know. I have no interest in politics or what’s going on in Washington, D.C. or what have you. I don’t care nor do I understand who has who’s hand up whose ass or who the master and who the puppets are. I’m just not interested. When I watched this episode of Masters of Horror the only thing I could do was view it as a typical zombie movie. The only thing about that is that it was nowhere near being a typical zombie movie. Typical zombies rise from the dead, eat the living, make more zombies and die when you kill the brain, therefore killing the ghoul. They do not rise from the dead, vote and drop dead again. What the hell were they trying to say with this one? That the dead have a right to vote? I’m sorry, but no they don’t! They are dead, deceased, taking dirt naps, the Long Goodbye and all that. More than anything, this episode did nothing but bore the hell out of me and makes my head ache.

The political undertones (overtones?) aside, what the hell happened to the Joe Dante that directed the greatest werewolf movie of all time? There are none of the trademarks of Dante’s earlier films in Homecoming. There’s Robert Picardo (The Howling and Innerspace), but that’s more of a wise casting choice than it is a directorial trademark. Where was Dick Miller? Where was the reference to the Warner Bros. cartoons? Did I miss them? Damn, my headache’s getting worse. Bottom line, this episode blew monkey balls.

Now where the hell did I put that Ibuprofen?

TRIVIA

At the end, when the zombie soldiers are coming out of their graves, the tombstones have the names of veterans of the horror and zombie genre, easy to read are Jacques Tourneur, G.A. Romero ( George A. Romero), Jean Yarbrough, and Delbert Tenney ( ‘Del Tenney (I)’). Harder to read are Lucio Fulci, Victor Halperin, and Gordon Douglas. The (readable) graves have this order: Romero and Tenney in the first line, behind them Fulci and Halperin, and in the last line behind Fulci is Tourneur, who is in the middle of Douglas and Yarbrough.

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