Masters of Horror: Screwfly Solution

A couple of years ago, I watched Joe Dante's Homecoming, an entry from Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series. It was a blistering piece of anti-Iraq war agitprop with zombies. Not scary by any means, and lacking Dante's usual smart-ass wit, but interesting viewing. Now that I'm no longer watching a foreign film a week, I thought I'd watch all of the Master of Horror episodes currently available on DVD. It's a murderer's row of genre directors: Dante, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter, Takashi Miike, John Landis.... and none of the entries longer than an hour. Sounds like fun to me. The first episode I watched was Dante's second entry in the series, The Screwfly Solution, which concerns a virus that turns men's sexual urges into homicidal urges. As with Homecoming, the episode suffers from a glaringly low budget, a heavy thematic hand, and generally pedestrian direction, but the concept pays off in unnerving ways. Mostly, watching this makes me curious to see what other horror aces do with the limitations and structures of the series.