“Some films are meant to be seen…”
Today I return to the Showtime anthology series that gave us Valerie On The Stairs for another episode.
Why Found-Again? I’m not sure why, but when I first delved into the Masters of Horror series, I saw that Cigarette Burns was about the search for a lost, possibly cursed old movie and immediately thought that meant a very old movie. My attention to the story never quite recovered from the fact that I’d been thinking Häxan or Nosferatu when I should’ve been thinking Rosemary’s Baby, and I wondered whether my opinion would be improved by actually, you know, knowing what it’s about this time around.
The Premise: Having a captive angel in your mansion is possibly the worst of all conceivable bad ideas. (A rich man also hires a film buff to track down an evil movie that caused its first and only audience to go mad and kill each other, but if you have to have a single takeaway, à la the end of the old He-Man cartoons, it’s up there in the first sentence.)
The chances of me ever watching The Walking Dead are nil, but even I shouted “Daryl!” when I saw that Norman Reedus plays our ill-fated protagonist, Kirby Sweetman, who is despairing over his wife’s suicide and the imminent failure of his business even before getting sent on a wild angel goose chase. Add in Udo Kier as the rich man and a small role played by Christopher “Vince from Eureka’s Café Diem” Gauthier, and things are set to get interesting.
There’s always something seductive, I think, about movies/TV that explore the power (in this case quite literally) of movies/TV; bit by bit, we are drawn with Kirby into a dark chain of mystery and the unspeakable, all centered around what watching movies can do to people. And in the world of this movie, it can do quite a lot.
The problem—I’m sure none of you saw this coming—is that this one is waaaaaaay too gory for me, even by the standards of other Masters of Horror installments and even though I’ve been around the deserted, spooky block enough times to know what “John Carpenter’s” means in front of a title.
The Verdict: This really did repay rewatching: it’s an interesting and atmospheric story that never lets up on the creeping dread except when it’s time to let the dread stop creeping and run. For people with stronger stomachs than mine, which is nearly everyone, I recommend it. (So. Much. Eyeball violence…)
Might go well with: Nothing. Definitely not popcorn. Or sausage.
Next time: The beginning of the end of Highlander, and yet another of my enduring film fascinations.
