Episode 6: Pelts
An erotic love story about raccoon pelts!
Meat Loaf! John Saxon!
Short story by F. Paul fucking Wilson, man. One of my favorite authors.
Directing: Dario Argento.
Okay. I step into this with faith and hope. And it's got Wilson all over it. The obsession with the weird and unexplained, supernatural horror, don't piss off the ancient indian city gods. And this episode gets an automatic star right out of the gate for insane Meat Loaf trying to rape the naked black lap dancer (who is naked throughout the episode). There's another automatic star for drunken John Saxon scraping away the gore from his raccoon pelts and yee-hawing in an excellent rendition of a yokel. With two other automatic stars for Wilson and Argento, you really don't have to bother paying attention to the episode.
But... let's do so anyway. It's great! God, I can't believe it's a part of the MoH series. It really is what masters of horror can do... Everything else in this series has felt forced, or thrown away, but this one has all of Argento's love poured into it. Dreamy music, quiet nature scenes, gore splattered walls, and the general ease that most of his films exhibit. Wilson's power as a horror/fantasy writer comes in the way he so smoothly wraps the supernatural around everyday existence. The general foibles of men are victim of (or simply channel) the otherworldly powers constantly straining to escape their forgotten graves. Having followed Wilson's career for 15 years, I now realize that he's scared of the woods and old women.
Why the hell was Miiki dropped last season when Argento seems to have been given a no-holds-barred license to just go crazy? This is Argento at his absolute goriest. It's actually uncomfortable and stomach churning at times. We get an up close sewing shut of a woman's nose, eyes and mouth without the camera turning away. Stitch by stitch. Another guy cuts himself open groin to neck and pulls out his intestines. And then there's the finale...god. This is old school gore. The real stuff. The stuff that the word gore brings to mind, not this pansy machete through the neck shit.
Nacho's Sunday night tea and biscuits rating: It keeps those four stars. We get hot lesbians, lots of tits, gore that doesn't belong on your TV, and angry raccoons.
