Anyway, this session was made up of two films he had directed for television plus his segment of TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE, which is what we started with...
IT'S A GOOD LIFE
I love the original Twilight Zone and 'It's a Good Life' was one of my favourite episodes. I've also read the short story it was based on and seen the (not as terrible as you'd think) sequel that was made in 2002 for the new series. However I had never seen Joe Dante's take on it and it was great that he was able to genuinely surprise me. In the original Anthony has godlike powers which he uses to control the world, and all the adults in his life, with threats to 'send them to the cornfield'. In Dante's version he still has the same powers but is obsessed with cartoons and thus the world around him starts to resemble one. When someone crosses him he instead sends them to 'cartoonland'.
Okay, so some of this was pretty hokey (particularly cartoonland) but the puppets used for some of the live-action cartoon characters held up really well with the giant rabbit genuinely being quite horrifying. Dante spoke about how he really had a lot of creative control over this and it gave him the wrong impression of what working for a studio would be like. The real reason he was left alone to do what he wanted was due to 'the accident,' as he called it more than once. When he said 'because of the accident, we got quite lucky,' I felt really uneasy knowing he was referring to the deaths of two children and stunt man Vic Morrow on John Landis segment of the film. After that, no producer really wanted anything to do with the film...
Still, a terrific piece that really set the tone for the entire day.
LIGHTNING
This was made for a TV show called Picture Windows where directors would take a painting and make a film around it. Dante said that he'd always wanted to do a western and this was his only chance. It tells the story of a prospector who strikes gold and the (rather intelligent) new mule he's bought to help him collect it all.
It was a bit slow and a bit strange to see straight after the previous segment but it gets a lot of leeway from me because it gave me an idea as to how to fix a screenplay I had been stuck on. So your own personal experience will probably be quite different. I'll always remember it as a great source of inspirado, but a fairly straight-forward tale with a mean-spirited ending.
HOMECOMING
I keep meaning to get around to watching Showtime's Masters of Horror series despite my friend's complaint that only the Takeshi Miike one is worth watching (IMPRINT) and that the others he had seen were "B grade sci-fi channel stuff" (which obviously sounds awesome to me!). Joe Dante's contribution from the first season was HOMECOMING, a delicious political satire about zombie soldiers rising from their coffins to vote out the President who had gotten them killed. A different sort of 'horror' that got big laughs from the audience. Highly entertaining.
Creative control was another big factor here with Masters of Horror's limited budget effectively let directors do whatever they wanted. After seeing this, I really want to get my hands on all the other episodes including Dante's second contribution THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION.
