There once was a time when premium cable was considered exactly that—premium, first class, the best. In short, it was superior to the network television that commoners watched when they couldn’t splurge for the topnotch stuff.
But Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” series, which is inexplicably back for a second season with 13 new one-hour episodes, falls below par. Perhaps the horror genre just doesn’t translate well to the small screen, but to assert that the series doesn’t do anything close to horrify—as its name would imply—almost seems beside the point.
The episode titled “Family” aims for the eerie suburbia captured by The Stepford Wives and the deluded fantasy of Psycho, but it is outright laughable—as in, I found myself thinking that the series might be an intentional joke. The spookiest element of this installment is that George Wendt, who played Norm on “Cheers,” plays a Norman Bates-like character—frea-kay!
It’s hard to believe that “The Damned Thing” is directed by Tobe Hooper of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This one is a cross between The Shining and Swamp Thing. With choice scenes—like when one dude’s insides become outsides or when a cop accidentally rips a chick in half—this episode is absolutely incoherent.
Likewise is “The V Word,” which has the dubious honor of crossbreeding the vampire and the zombie for, I believe, the very first time. With embarrassingly funny dialogue—like when a white guy reminds his black friend that he’s been called a “white geek dipped in chocolate” or when the black friend tells the white guy that he’s “got some pussy leaking out” of him—the greatest accomplishment of “The V Word” is to break down regrettable zombie stereotypes: Did you know that in addition to all the flesh-eating maniacal zombies out there, there’s also the scholarly zombie, the devout zombie and the anorexic zombie?
Perhaps it is only fair for the cable bigwigs to recede into the shadows now that TV has finally grown a brain. With successful shows courtesy of ABC and Fox, it’s hard to understand how Showtime has managed to combine attributes from the worst of network TV underlings. “Masters of Horror” is the type of unfortunate programming that still gives credence to the term “idiot box.”
