a review of 香烟烙印

HOOPTOBER 4.0 NIGHT ONE: Discovered that the Masters of Horror series was on Tubi and figured I'd give it a spin for the first of two Carpenters that I've picked out for my "Spring Training" Hooptober run. Along with Carpenter, I've also been a fan of Drew McWeeny since his days writing as "Moriarty" on the old Ain't It Cool News, where he stood out as a genuinely literate critic and commentator on what in retrospect we can fairly say was a deeply amateurish/shambolic pop culture site. I haven't dug too deeply into McWeeny's screenwriting credits (he is credited here along with writing partner Rebecca Swan), but it seems the pitch for this one was built around his AICN notoriety, with Norman Reedus as kind of an idealized self-insert for that emerging archetype of the hard-boiled renegade film bro, with cinematic knowledge unavailable to the more lumpen proles of the multiplexes. There's a whole lot of interesting ideas crammed into this one, starting with the concept of the "film maudit"/cursed movie and extending all the way to how media can both directly or indirectly shape its own audience, but I'm not sure it comes together in a wholly compelling way. There's at least three or four episodic encounters between Reedus and other characters in this movie that would have made a great shock ending or Twilight Zone-style twist, and we end up getting them all in a way that ultimately feels like diminishing returns. Perhaps a longer movie could have sustained it all, but at this one's short one-hour runtime it's maybe a little bit too much happening with too little runway.