HOMECOMING

The corpses of American soldiers killed in Iraq come back to life after a party leader, during a television broadcast, expresses the desire to bring back all the war dead to know their thoughts on the war. But this time, the zombies' goal is not to kill people but to vote Democratic! « Masters of Horror » is a singular project born from the mind of Mick Garris, a director known in the horror realm, especially for the adaptations of Stephen King's novels. Garris had the idea to gather the most representative horror film directors in a project destined for cable TV Showtime and home video, the result is « Masters of Horror », a series of 13 half-hour films, each one directed by a great name in the genre; each episode has a budget of 1.8 million dollars, the location set in the Canadian city of Vancouver, and total creative freedom was given to each director. The names involved in the project are: Don Coscarelli, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Lucky McKee, Stuart Gordon, Joe Dante, John McNaughton, Larry Cohen, Takashi Miike, John Carpenter, William Malone, John Landis, and Mick Garris himself. Episode directed by Joe Dante (director of cult films like « Gremlins » and « The Howling ») for the first season of the television series « Masters of horror ». « Homecoming », clumsily titled « Candidato maledetto » in Italy, contains a lot of social criticism, entirely explicit, directed against the current Bush presidency and, more specifically, against his war in Iraq. This short film manages to show us zombies in a new way: they are no longer the « bad guys » of old, the anthropophagous ones like those in Romero's films; now they are no longer the negative figures to be fought, but the enemy is another, and they are just poor victims, sacrificed to human stupidity, capable, in some scenes, of softening the heart of the viewer. Before this film, on another occasion, zombies were shown to us in a slightly different way, as in Bob Clark's film « Deathdream » (where, as here, the zombie was a war veteran) which, however, contained a social criticism that was somewhat subtle and leaned more clearly towards the horror side, not betting everything on « how to make us see zombies differently ». « Homecoming » is therefore one of the best episodes of this first season of the TV series « Masters of horror » and, although there is not much splatter (a common characteristic of many zombie movies), there is still a lot of suggested violence; in short, Dante « delivers » a truly flawless film, probably the absolute masterpiece of the first season of « Masters of horror »! I recommend watching this episode to everyone because films like this are very few and far between these days; Joe Dante is a very courageous director, and this film is proof of that. Rating rounded down.