The Movie:

Tobe Hooper's second season entry for Showtime's Masters Of Horror series begins with a boy named Kevin sitting down to dinner with his mother and father deep in the heart of rural Texas to celebrate the father's birthday. Dinner is interrupted when dad goes nuts and shoots his wife dead with his double barrel, Kevin running out into the woods nearby just barely escaping with his life. His father was torn apart right in front of his eyes by an unseen force.

Fast forward twenty-four years to the presented day and Kevin (Sean Patrick Flannery) is now the Sheriff of Cloverdale. He's separated from his wife, Dina (Marisa Coughlin), and his son, Mikey as Dina is put off by Kevin's penchant for home security. He lives in the family home where his father went off years back alone, watching the outside world through his security cameras. When some strange electrical occurrences start happening and a couple of townsfolk wind up dead under some very unusual circumstances (one unlucky man bashes his own face in with a hammer) Kevin and his deputy (Brendan Fletcher) decide to investigate. Unfortunately, it looks like the same unseen force that killed Kevin's father and many before him has come back and that it won't rest until it's destroyed everyone in town, even the local preacher, Father Tulli (Ted Raimi).

Adapted from the short story of the same name by Ambrose Bierce, Richard Christian Matheson's screenplay provides ample opportunity for nasty gore set pieces and a decent build up to a very ambiguous ending. While the manifestation of the titular force is a huge disappointment (think bad CGI) getting there is a lot of fun thanks to a surprisingly strong performance from Flannery and the supporting cast. Hooper's direction is sold and he paces the film very well, hitting us fast and hard with a brutal opening scene and punctuating the film throughout its running time with some equally disturbing murders. Who knew the guy who made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have such a knack for adapting the work of an nineteenth century poet and writer!

Flannery shines as Kevin, bringing a genuine sense of sadness to the part that makes him a likeable character despite his obvious shortcomings and his taste for liquor. He's quite believable as a man who really does mean well and a couple of the scenes between he and Maris Coughlin actually succeed at tugging on the audience's heart strings. At the same time, he's also able to really bring a sense of menace to the character towards the end of the film in much the same way that Jack Nicholson did in The Shining without going that far over the top. Ted Raimi is also quite interesting as the preacher and while he doesn't have a huge role in the movie, he does have more screen presence here than you'd probably expect to see given some of his goofier, more slapstick performances in the past. On top of all that is the cinematography and the effects work - the gore looks real and pulls no punches and the film is lit in such a way that even if the colors are a little earthy, it's for the best. All in all, The Damned Thing is a solid entry in the series - well paced, well acted, suspenseful and bloody - all things a good horror movie should be.

Video:

Tobe Hooper's The Damned Thing is, like every episode in the series so far, presented in an anamorphic 1.78.1 widescreen transfer. Overall this is a strong transfer as color reproduction is good, and detail levels are strong. Black levels are strong though if you look you're definitely going to notice some mpeg compression artifacts in a few of the darker scenes. A little bit of edge enhancement and some aliasing is present, but thankfully it's minor and doesn't detract much from the picture.