Homecoming... I had decided not to track down the 'Masters of Horror' series for a couple of reasons. Mostly I just figured I'd be underwhelmed. I love most of the people involved in this series and have watched their work in film religiously (the original Night of the Living Dead is the one movie I've seen more than any other) and yet I wasn't excited to hear that the likes of Romero and Carpenter had been brought on board a new anthology television series. I never really got over the original 'Twilight Zone' and 'Outer Limits' episodes and have had very little truck with shows in a similar vein over the years since. What I do love about more regular television programming is when they touch upon horror themes and imagery in an unexpected way. 'Twin Peaks' was not a horror show, but had some real horror jump out at you amidst all the other head fuckery going on in there. Frank Silva's Bob is still ridiculously scary and the onscreen murder of Laura's cousin, Madeleine (again played by Sheryl Lee), is just gruesome and still hard to watch. 'The X Files' had it's moments in the first couple of seasons and closer to home 'Jam' of all things was simply terrifying because of some of the visuals that escaped from the mind of Chris Morris. Remember the mother with the dead baby who calls in the plumber to fix a Gilliamesque series of pipes to reanimate the tiny corpse in its crib? You don't actually see that much, but it's always stayed with me... So the idea of an actual horror themed TV show was never that exciting to me plus I figured it was always going to watered down Argento as opposed to the full on crimson spectacular that I can watch anytime by loading up a DVD. Then a day or so ago I saw this post over on Boing Boing about the sixth episode of 'Masters of Horror' - a Joe Dante directed political zombie story. I'm queer for the undead so I forgot all the above and torrented it. Now I'll probably go back and catch up with the other five. Not that Homecoming was fantastic horror TV or anything - it sagged in places, had a hokey postscript and was never ever remotely scary - but it was (it seems to me, stuck on a little island well away from Washington) beautifully political. Enough so for Reuters to pick up on it too. I loved the Ann Coulter clone blasting away on the edge of the road and would have thought her right-wing shrew a little overdone if I hadn't seen way too much footage of the real life bitter blonde that the character was based on. I enjoyed the political spin that the Republicans tried to put on the left wing dead before sending them off to internment camps. All that stuff was VERY broad satire but done well enough to raise a smile. What really got me though were two scenes. One is captured in the screengrab over on Boing Boing showing one of the few vocal dead soldiers decrying the lies that cost him his life. The other scene was earlier when the first batch of corpses come back to life. It's set inside the kind of hangar we've all now seen inside but were never meant to - flag draped coffins fill the screen. Now it wasn't too long ago that these very images were being kept from us and now they're being used as set dressing (and in a much better way than say the Abu Ghraib inspired images that have popped up on satirical comedy shows). As the first coffin bursts apart (and I took their flimsy nature to be yet another comment on the fact that these troops were given inadequate supplies while at war and continued to be given makeshift equipment in death) the first returning soldier is hidden from view by the flag that rested over his coffin. A dead American soldier shrouded in the American flag was a ballsy shot and made the whole show for me. I also liked the little touch of the coerced undead detainee putting on his glasses to reveal a bullet hole through the left lense to match the wounded eye socket. So now I'm interested to see if the previous directors can take the limitation of 60 minute TV and come up with something as interesting... On a slightly related note I got an early Christmas gift today in the shape of a DVD boxset from Jess' cousin out in NYC. We spoke a little about TV while she was here and in particular some of the American staples that never made it to these shores. Carol now reinforces how much she rocks by sending me 32 episodes of classic comedies, detective shows and westerns from the 1950s. Once the other stuff I have to watch is out the way I can sit down and relax with the likes of Andy Griffith, Bob Cummings, Jack Benny, 'The Lone Wolf', 'Man with a Camera', 'Death Valley Days' and 'Bat Masterson' for the very first time. That's not mentioning the stuff on here that I am familiar with like 'Dragnet' and 'The Beverly Hillbillies'... Jess tells me it just started snowing in Gothenburg. Doesn't get much better than that. Tomorrow I'll be mad busy in the day followed by the Londonist Christmas meal so it may be a while before I get back to emails etc... [Music: Throwing Muses]