HOMECOMING

Just a reminder that this Friday Night the Showtime cable channel is going to repeat Joe Dante and Sam Hamm's Masters of Horror episdode Homecoming. It just got written up in today's L.A. Times for its direct anti-Iraq war theme: "The Big Picture: It Takes a Zombie to Speak Out" by Patrick Goldstein, 12/06/05. A modest horror film for cable is the first Hollywood production to take that position, proof that, as Mr. Dante says, the entertainment industry is not a hive of left-wing conspiracies.

The Times article offers the observation that horror and science fiction movies have always expressed political undercurrents considered too extreme for direct statement, a theory often advanced here at DVD Savant. In The Homecoming a President proudly counters the tearful mother of a soldier killed in a foreign war by saying he wishes her son was alive so he could let everyone know the true meaning of his sacrifice. His wish is granted by a wholesale zombie crusade.

It's a wickedly appropriate twist on an old theme. Frenchman Abel Gance made a political-pacifist horror film called J'Accuse right after WW1, and then re-made it in the late 1930s when war in Europe seemed inevitable. Bob Clark's obscure but potent Deathdream was an eerie 'chickens come home to roost' horror film about Vietnam. The Homecoming would seem to be a smarter film - and a potentially more influential one - than either of them.

Savant missed the show's first cablecast. I will definitely be seeking out Showtime this coming Friday night! Glenn Erickson