Zachary FenellJohn Carpenter's Cigarette Burns
January 19th 2009 18:01
John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, 2005
I felt a little bad after my Saturday Boner review because I would hate for anyone to think that the entire Masters of Horror series was bad. In fact, there are many beautiful little horrific gems in this run, and today's movie was the inspiration for me to continue exploring the series, good or bad.
Cigarette Burns has nothing to do with smoking, per se. As the film explains, a cigarette burn is a hole punched in film at the end of the reel to signal the projectionist when to switch over to another projector (the second half of the film) so that a whole movie is seen seamlessly. There are a lot of superstitions about it in the movie industry, it seems, and people who like to collect cigarette burns from old films.
Our story centers around Kirby (played by Norman Reedus, who you should recognize as Murphy from the Boondock Saints) who is hired for a ridiculous amount of money to track down a mythical movie alleged to have driven all who saw it murderously insane. It was said to have only been viewed by a full audience once, and all of those people are either dead or jibbering away in some institution.
That's the background. Here's the scoop: Avoid this movie if you are even a little squeamish. The violence is original, the concept is fresh (though addressed previously in a few other stories), and the story is compelling. We get a kind of twisted excitement from watching Kirby's frustration as well as from his unfolding emotional turmoil, but mostly we just really want to know what's in this movie that so many people are trying to keep him from or else steal from him.
John Carpenter has had his ups and downs. Doing a bite-sized flick like this (with the normal Masters of Horror 1-hour run-time) seemed to refresh him pretty well.
Four stars for this little ditty. I'd have liked to see a little more depth and sympathy in the characters, but then again, you can't like everybody...
4 Stars
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