Season two of Masters of Horror has a returning Tobe Hooper (season one’s shaky Dance of the Dead) working with a Matheson (the son) teleplay of an Ambrose Bierce short story rendered barely recognizable. It’s focus is a small town sheriff in Texas, played by my dude Sean Patrick Flanery (who stared in Mongolian Death Worms amongst other things of a more famous variety), going up against a malicious force that he believes may have had something to do with his loving father murdering his mother back in the early eighties. Sheriff Kevin Reddle may have been gunned down too if some invisible force hadn’t got ahold of his papa and tore him apart. Decades later and he’s definitely got some mental scars from that traumatic night which has put a strain on the relationship with his estranged wife Dina (lovely Marisa Coughlan who stole all of our hearts in the incomparable Freddy Got Fingered) and their son Mikey (who is not great at acting). He’s still got the house where the awfulness went down and just can’t seem to part with that last little piece of his family. That personal anguish is gonna take a back seat when something evil rises as the sheriff’s birthday draws near and townsfolk begin behaving erratically… not like in the calling cops on your neighbor over a minor trespass way but in the beating themselves to death with a hammer kind of way. Violence spreads and all hell breaks loose. It’s something that our lawman seems to have spent years preparing for or at the very least expecting to show up. Judging by how hard he fails, I’d say he couldn’t find his ass with both hands and two mirrors. A sleazy journalist (a memorable Andrew McIlroy) is digging into things because he knows there’s something juicy and awful going on. Brendan Fletcher is a dopey deputy who dreams of being an illustrator and Ted Raimi shows up as the local priest…. and who doesn’t love seeing his ass? There’s some splattery death and Sean Patrick Flamnery is solid at playing a very tired man but the film is let down by some lazy storytelling, awkward pacing and a threat that mostly sucks.
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