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Win tickets to The Devil's Xmas Party click links to win! VOICE in the News Michael Musto will be interviewed on Friday Dec 2 at 10pm, on AMC's "Movi es that Shook the World", about the movie Philadelphia.
Dead man voting: Homecoming Masters of Horror/Showtime TURIN, ITALY "This is a horror story because most of the characters are R epublicans," director Joe Dante announced before the November 13 world p remiere of his latest movie, Homecoming, at the Turin Film Festival. Rep ublicans, as it happens, will be the ones who find Homecoming's agitprop premise scariest: In an election year, dead veterans of the current con flict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting bo oths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold o n "horseshit and elbow grease." The dizzying high point of Showtime's new Masters of Horror series, the h our-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the mo st important political films of the Bush II era. With its only slightly caricatured right-wingers, the film nails the casual fraudulence and con tortionist rhetoric that are the signatures of the Bush-Cheney administr ation. Its dutiful hero, presidential consultant David Murch (Jon Tenney ), reports to a Karl Rovelike guru named Kurt Rand (Robert Picardo) and engages in kinky power fucks with attack-bitch pundit Jane Cleaver (Thea Gill), a blonde, leggy Ann Coulter proxy with a "No Sex for All" tank t op and "BSH BABE" license plates. Murch's glib, duplicitous condescensio n is apparently what triggers the zombie uprising: Confronting an angry mother of a dead soldier on a news talk show, he tells this Cindy Sheeha n figure, "If I had one wish . I would wish for your son to come bac k," so he could assure the country of the importance of the war. The boy does return, along with legions of fallen combatants, and they all beg to differ. How fitting that the most pungent artistic response to a regime famed for its crass fear-mongering would be a cheap horror movie. Jaw-dropping in its sheer directness, Homecoming is a righteous blast of liberal-left f ury (it was greeted with a five-minute ovation in Turin, the most vocal appreciation seeming to come from the American filmmakers and writers in attendance). At once galvanic and cathartic, Dante's film uncorks the rage that despon dent progressives promptly suppressed after last year's election and tha t has only recently been allowed to color mainstream coverage of preside ntial untruths and debacles. For all its broad, bludgeoning satire, Home coming is deadly accurate in skewering the callousness and hypocrisy of the Bush White House and the spin industry in its orbit. Zombie flicks, with their built-in return-of-the-repressed theme, have al ways served as allegories of their sociopolitical moments (as demonstrat ed mere months ago by George A Romero's prescient pre-Katrina class-war nightmare, Land of the Dead). Dante, the Roger Corman protg who went on to direct Innerspace and both Gremlins movies, has been known to embe d wayward subversions in Hollywood genre pieces (he also previously atte mpted an all-out political satire in the 1997 HBO movie The Second Civil War, just out on DVD). But Homecoming, very much a movie on a mission, casts aside metaphorit derives its power from its disconcerting literaln ess. The zombies do not representbut arethe unseen costs of this futile war. Implicit in the film's unapologetic bluntness is a sickened urgency , an insistence that this is no time for subtlety. "If you're going to code the message, which is the way horror movies have always done it, that's fine, but it's not going to reach an audience li ke a movie that's overt, and this is not exactly subtle," says Dante. "S omebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. But everybody's afraidit's uncommercial, people are going to be upset. Every minute, somebody' s dying in this war, and for nothing. Dante and writer Sam Hamm ( Batman) adapted Homecoming from Dale Bailey's "Death and Suffrage," a 2002 short story that puts a morbidly literal s pin on the idea of the dead being used to pad the Chicago voting roll. As if in defiance of the P entagon's policy to ban photographs of dead soldiers' coffins, Dante's f ilm shows not just the flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base but t heir irate occupants bursting out of them. "There's a lot of powerful im agery in this movie that has nothing to do with me," Dante says. "When y ou see those coffins, which is a sight that's generally been withheld fr om us, there's a gravity to it. Even though there's comedy in the movie, there's something basically so serious and depressing about the subject that it never gets overwhelmed by satire." In any case, as Homecoming suggests, there are ways in which the current administration is essentially beyond satire. The nuttiest attitudes the film ascribes to its ruthless Republicans are scarcely more extreme than anything Dick Cheney or Karl Rove has been credited with.
Dante says the lead roles were initially offered to better-known actors, who all turned them down, but Masters of Horror "happened to be a situat ion where nobody had any veto power over the material." Devised by produ cer Mick Garris, the series has resulted in refreshingly uninhibited wor k from some old prosJohn Landis's Deer Woman, a goofball update of a Nat ive American myth, and John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, a Ring-like thr iller about movie madness, also premiered in Turin and will both air on Showtime in Decemberthough no other "master of horror" has embraced the gift of creative freedom with Dante's gusto. To his surprise, Showtime executives didn't flinch when they received the script. "I can't conceive of any other venue where we would have been a ble to tell this story: You can't do theatrical political movies; You can't do them on television, because you've got s ponsors," he says. "Michael Moore's last picture made a lot of money, bu t he was vilified for it so much he's practically in hiding." Dante hopes Homecoming functions as a wake-up callnot so much for politic ians but for filmmakers. "If this spurs other people into making more an d better versions, it will have done its job. "Nobody is doing anything about what's going on nowcompar ed to the '70s, when they were making movies about the issues of the day . This elephant in the room, this Iraq war story, is not being dramatize d" "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we're in," he continues. "It's been happening steadily for the past four year s, and nobody said peep. The New York Times and all these people that ab etted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this warnow th at they see the guy is a little weak, they're kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn't bite back. This pitiful zombie m ovie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody's done about this issue that's killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? While gratified by the warm reception to Homecoming in Tur in, Dante says he's eager for the right-wing punditocracy back home to s ee it: "I hope this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with ita nd that it makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are."
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