Cody Hamman looks at the fifth entry in the Masters of Horror anthology series, Mick Garris's Chocolate.
In 2005, Mick Garris created the anthology series Masters of Horror, which offered us the chance to watch an hour-long movie from a different iconic genre filmmaker every week on Showtime. Of course, being a writer/director, Garris also reserved one of the first season’s thirteen episodes for himself – but this wasn’t just some random name being dropped into the midst of masters. Genre fans were already familiar with Garris’s work on several horror projects, most of which were collaborations with author Stephen King.
Garris made his feature directorial debut with the sci-fi horror comedy sequel Critters 2, and some of the work he did between that film and the creation of Masters of Horror included Psycho IV: The Beginning, the Stephen King movie Sleepwalkers, the King mini-series The Stand and The Shining, and the anthology movie Quicksilver Highway, which consisted of a King adaptation and a Clive Barker adaptation. I’m a fan of Critters 2 and Psycho IV, and that mini-series version of The Stand was one of the most impactful pieces of entertainment I’ve ever witnessed in my life, so I would certainly never argue that Garris didn’t deserve to be ranked as one of the “masters of horror.” (Never mind that he created the show, and organized “masters of horror” dinners before the show, so he could do whatever he wanted to anyway.)
What’s surprising here is that Garris didn’t choose to make his Masters of Horror contribution an adaptation of another writer’s work. Instead, his Chocolate is an adaptation of his own short story (although I couldn’t tell you where that short story was published, if it ever was). He brought back his Psycho IV star Henry Thomas for this one, casting him in the role of Jamie, who uses his heightened senses of smell and taste to create artificial flavors for the food industry at Cougar Culinary Labs in Chicago. Jamie’s life hasn’t been a smooth ride lately. He’s recently divorce, paying his ex alimony, paying child support for their young son, and living in an empty apartment by himself. On the bright side, he did just trim down a bit (he’s described as being “newly fit and fabulous”), but the bummer is that he has to eat nothing but health food, otherwise he’ll put the weight back on quickly.
Things take an interesting turn when Jamie starts experiencing what someone else is sensing. The first time, he’s lying in bed when he tastes and smells chocolate. Then, his co-worker Wally (Matt Frewer from The Stand) invites him to a gig his punk rock band is playing, and in the middle of the gig, Jamie’s hearing drops out and he starts hearing what someone else is hearing somewhere else. The sensory overload continues when he sees through someone else’s eyes while he’s driving Wally home, nearly resulting in an accident.
Soon enough, Jamie is being thrilled by these sensory experiences, especially when he realizes the person on the other end of these experiences is a woman. He feels it when she has sex with her boyfriend. He sees and feels it when she masturbates in the bathtub. These thrills make him realize how empty his life has been, and he comes to love them, even though they disrupt his interactions with his ex and son and cause trouble when he hooks up with a woman he meets in the grocery store. When he gets a glimpse of the woman in a mirror while seeing through her eyes, he becomes even more obsessed, because she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.
Jamie pieces together clues to figure out that the woman is a Canadian artist named Catherine (Lucie Laurier). But this is a horror show, so we know that this situation is going anywhere good. Sure enough, violence has entered the picture – but even before that, we know that things are going to go terribly wrong, because Chocolate starts with a bloody Jamie being interviewed by police about this woman he claims to have loved more than any man has ever loved a woman. Garris probably could have just let the story build up to Jamie being interviewed rather than basically spoiling the ending right up front and it might have been more intriguing... but woulda coulda shoulda. As it is, and as it has been for twenty years, Chocolate gives away Catherine’s fate at the beginning and we have to wait fifty-some minutes to find out how that fate came about.
Chocolate is light on horror, but it’s interesting, well-made, well-acted, and a worthy addition to the line-up.
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