In 2005, Mick Garris and Showtime gave fans of the horror genre a wonderful gift. That gift was an anthology series called Masters of Horror, which offered us the chance to watch an hour-long movie from a different iconic genre filmmaker every week. I was extremely hyped for Masters of Horror in the build-up to its premiere... which was, of course, right before Halloween, on October 28th. (Although it would have made more sense to have it premiere earlier so episodes would have been airing throughout the month of October.) The episode count was perfect for a horror show, 13 a season, and the contributors included Stuart Gordon, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, Larry Cohen, and Joe Dante, among others. George A. Romero was going to direct an episode, but he got caught up working on Land of the Dead and had to hand it over to another director. He still gets a credit on that episode.
I wasn't let down when Masters of Horror started airing. I was a big fan of this show - and as years have gone by, I've come to appreciate it even more. We've lost several of the "masters" since the series went off the air, which makes it more obvious just how special the show was. It was under-appreciated in its time, though. I enjoyed nearly every installment, but when I'd check horror message boards I'd see a slew of complaints about them. I've since come to realize this is just how horror fans react to anthology shows. The episodes never seem to live up to their standards.
Masters of Horror kicked off with one of its most popular episodes/movies, Incident On and Off a Mountain Road. Directed by Phantasm franchise mastermind Don Coscarelli from a script he wrote with Stephen Romano (who had written a Phantasm sequel that never went into production), based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale - the author who had also written the story Coscarelli turned into the incredible film Bubba Ho-Tep.
Incident stars Bree Turner as a young woman named Ellen, who gets into a car accident on a dark mountain road right after we're introduced to her, smashing her vehicle into another car that was parked on a curve. The driver of the other vehicle isn't anywhere in sight, and Ellen is still figuring out how to handle this situation when she's attacked by a huge, knife-wielding, metal-toothed man we'll come to know as Moonface, played by 6'9" John DeSantis. A big reason why this movie is so popular is because it's, for the most part, a simple stalk and slash story, and horror fans love a good, simple slasher.
Lansdale's story was very short, only around 20 pages, and was all about Moonface pursuing Ellen through the mountain forest as she uses some self-defense tricks she learned from her survivalist husband. Coscarelli and Romano had to flesh out the story quite a bit to make it reach an hour in length, and they do that by adding flashbacks to Ellen's relationship with her husband Bruce throughout. Bruce is played by Ethan Embry in what was a major career shift for him at the time. Back then he was known as the kid from Dutch, or the goofy guy from movies like Vegas Vacation and That Thing You Do! He has gone on to play similar characters in things like The Guest and an episode of the Creepshow series, but in 2005 we had never seen anything like this from Embry before. Bruce is bulkier than Embry had been prior. He has a shaved head. He talks tough, handles Ellen roughly. He's waiting for the collapse of society, ranting about certain types of people - it's difficult to see why Ellen fell for him in the first place, but she did. She fell for him, she married him. And quickly came to regret it.
In the present section of the story, Coscarelli does great work shooting a slasher chase sequence with Moonface and Ellen in the woods... and when Ellen reaches the killer's shack, which is populated by the corpses of other people he has captured and killed on the mountain road, we get another enhancement to the story. Coscarelli wanted to include his old friend Angus Scrimm, the Tall Man from Phantasm himself, in this movie, so he and Romano created a character named Buddy. Buddy is locked up in Moonface's lair, but he doesn't seem to mind it too much. Scrimm is a lot of fun in this role, and the addition of Buddy also allows the delivery of some exposition so Ellen and the viewer can get a deeper understanding of what Moonface is doing out here in the woods.
They also added some extra victims and violence, because viewers would be expecting that sort of thing.
We get a good chase, some bloodshed, the cast turns in strong (and in the case of Embry, surprising) performances, DeSantis makes for an intimidating killer, there's even a twist. This was an awesome entry in not only the Masters of Horror series, but in Coscarelli's filmography. It's made all the more impressive by the fact that it had a shooting schedule of just ten days.
Incident On and Off a Mountain Road was apparently so well-received there was even some behind-the-scenes talk of sequelizing it in some way. Which makes sense to me, because it introduces a memorable slasher who has clearly been slashing for a while by the time this story begins. It would have been easy to tell another Moonface story - but the movie's creative team wasn't interested in that. Coscarelli and Lansdale didn't see the appeal in saying anything more about Moonface, so they were relieved when the sequel chatter didn't lead anywhere.
I loved Incident On and Off a Mountain Road when I watched it on the night of October 28, 2005. I have revisited it many times in the years since then, and I have loved watching it every time. This was really the perfect way to get Masters of Horror started.
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