Too horrible even for Showtime

There's been some chatter at tvbarn2 about the "Masters of Horror" episode that was cancelled by the network. People want some details on it.  Well, here's the gory story, straight from yesterday's session with Bob Greenblatt of Showtime:

QUESTION: In front. I wonder if you could talk about the episode of "Masters of Horror" directed by Takashi Miike that you guys have apparently withdrawn as unsuitable for even premium cable viewers.

ROBERT GREENBLATT: Sure. Yeah. I don't know if people know him as a filmmaker, but he tends to make films that are really extreme in terms of their visual depiction of torture and violence. And the episode came out just really, really strong. And there's a lot of violence and a lot of scenes of torture and things in it that I think, in the aggregate, just make it, you know, unsuitable even for a premium cable. I think it would be the equivalent of an X rating if it were going in front of the MPAA. And rather than try to figure out how to cut it and make it work for us, we decided it's probably better not to butcher Takashi's vision and, instead, not air it, and they'll put it out on DVD.

QUESTION: Was this not foreseeable?

ROBERT GREENBLATT: You know, we sort of said, "Let's see. Let's see how edgy it gets and how extreme he wants to go." And we kind of gave him the freedom to film it, and then we decided to take a look at it and evaluate it after the fact.

Now, this is why I come to TV critics' tour: A colleague, specifically Bill Goodykoontz of the Arizona Republic, has actually seen a "Masters of Horror" episode and was able to describe it in grisly detail.  The storyline seemed to involve a serial killer who enjoyed putting people's heads in drill presses and boring holes into their skulls.  While we watch. 

After a rundown of that episode, Goodykoontz and I were both left with one question: How bad can this Takashi episode be??

Comments

[Alex]

I'm amazed they showed the one where the Zombie soldiers came back to life to vote against Bush...I figured somebody would complain about that one.

[David Loehr]

From what I've heard, it's not simply the gore but the context for it, specifically involving an abortionist.

To quote from the New York Times article:

""Imprint," which has a much more polished look than most of Mr. Miike's work, plays like an infernal variation on "Memoirs of a Geisha." In mid-19th-century Japan, an American journalist (the genre stalwart Billy Drago) goes in search of the prostitute he has fallen in love with but was forced to abandon.

"The American's quest leads him to a mysterious island zoned exclusively for dimly lighted brothels, where one procurer, a syphilitic midget, introduces him to a relatively sympathetic prostitute (Youki Kudoh, who also appears in "Memoirs of a Geisha"). Hideously deformed, the right side of her face pulled into a permanent rictus, the nameless woman tells the American the terrible story of what happened to his lover, throwing in at no extra charge the story of her own hideous childhood as the daughter of impoverished outcasts.

"As the woman's story continues, her revelations, scrupulously visualized, become more and more outlandish, and her descriptions of the violence done to the missing prostitute, who was suspected of stealing a ring from the brothel's madam, become more cruelly imaginative and difficult to stomach. But the most shocking imagery is yet to come, as the nameless woman describes her collaboration in her mother's work as an abortionist."

The full article is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/arts/television/19horr.html

[Richard Gagnon]

When I saw the article headline, "Too horrible even for Showtime", I thought that Showtime was cancelling the whole series for it's lackluster quality. There have been a few gems in the series, but it has overall been a great disappointment. If these are representative of what the American horror masters can do, then it's little wonder that some of the more interesting and successful horror films are coming from Japan and elsewhere. The aforementioned soldier zombies, coming to life to vote against Bush, was too ridiculous to be either funny or scary and would have been more suitable for MAD magazine as a parody of zombie revenge movies. An even more embarrassing example was the episode with an Indian reindeer god sporting a mounted reindeer head that would have been a joke fifty years ago. It's almost funny to read that one of the episodes was too gory to air instead of not quite being embarrassingly bad enough to air.