I started combing through the old Masters of Horror series for interesting plots. I thought of watching the whole thing through but it's a LOT and the first two were mediocre. But then I decided to pick and choose and came across John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns...and loved it.
In Cigarette Burns pre-Darryl Norman Reedus is a movie theater owner who's in debt and has a painful past that he's still coping with. He gets an offer of a huge amount of money to find a lost film which was supposed to have been destroyed after it's only screening drove a theater audience mad. What follows is Norman Reedus' character, Kirby, following a trail of clues that lead him to a combination of forboding conversations and disturbing visions/dreams while he tries to find the film.
It plays like a combination of that Johnny Depp flick the Ninth Gate and In the Mouth of Madness. The good is that it nails down the "are you sure you want to keep looking" and "you don't know what you're getting into" forboding while mixing in some pretty nasty sequences. The bad is that the short run time means they kinda fly through the events of the plot whereas I actually think a good chunk of it could have used a bit more room to breath and build up. Still, the characters and the lore behind the film end up being pretty well realized and the conclusion is an interesting (albeit a bit anti-climatic) close out. Also, the cast is really good.
Anyway, I'm curious if yall have any suggestions for the Masters of Horror series. The first two I watched were the first two of the series. One's a woman fleeing a freakish killer which plays out sorta like a slasher. The second one was about a guy who keeps dreaming about a witch and a rat with a human face. Neither of those two were very good, but not awful either...I get the Hulu Into the Dark vibes where the series has some good, some bad and a lot of "eh...it's alright"
