Sunday

Last night's October-thon double-feature included two episodes of Showtime's spooky anthology series the Masters of Horror. In John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns,* Kirby is hired to locate the lost print of an infamous art movie, a shocking vision of the absolute end of the world. Thus he travels about the world interviewing people: a creepy European snuff filmmaker, a creepy European art dealer, and a creepy American protégé of Pauline Kael's who actually saw the film before going crazy. All these people warn Kirby off his quest, but does he listen? The title's cigarette burns refer to the image scoring used to denote reel changes in older theater projection systems--you know they will be popping-up in the visuals. Here Carpenter attempts horror without comedy with mixed success. The first half boils down to a series of conversations far more engrossing than they should be, and spots of realistic violence are more effective than the excesses in the story's climax. Last night's second feature, Lucky McKee's Sick Girl,* returns to the well-traveled mainstream of quirky horror. Poor Ida is having trouble with her girlfriends: every prospect seems to run away upon discovering she’s an entomologist. Advice from her frat boy coworker: get rid of the hundreds of exotic pet bugs at home. Ida is a wonderful, deeply strange, and rather nerdy young woman who babytalks her collection, so she can't do more than hide them in the bedroom during her next first date. To complicate matters, a nameless benefactor has mailed her an unknown specimen in a plain brown wrapper, a thorny-looking creature that immediately escapes its plastic cage and eats the landlord's dog. Things go downhill for Ida from here. Sick Girl is delightful, charming, and colored like a plastic toy. My favorite in the series so far. [Cavin]