Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 25, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
There’s probably no one more surprised than author Joe R. Lansdale that his stories “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” (written out of necessity, not inspiration, to fill a space in a collection) and “Bubba Ho-Tep” (which he considered unfilmable) have been adapted for the screen. And it is now abundantly clear that there’s no one more suited to the task of bringing Lansdale’s uniquely atmospheric prose to life than Don Coscarelli, who—as we learn on the DVD of his Incident adaptation for Masters of Horror—optioned both stories at the same time. Following the unexpected but deserving success of the director’s Bubba Ho-Tep feature, he was tapped to contribute to Masters and found the perfect venue for “Incident,” a brief tale which wouldn’t quite survive being stretched to feature-length but fit Masters’ approximately one-hour format just fine. The rest is TV history, as Incident was chosen to lead off this historic telehorror project.
All that background and a whole lot more is covered in the pair of commentaries that are the centerpieces of Anchor Bay’s Incident DVD. Coscarelli shares one with Lansdale and another with co-scripter Stephen Romano, and though both his track partners are writers, there’s plenty of unique territory covered in each. The director/Romano talk divides its time equally between conceptual and tech talk—ranging from the episode’s concepts of eye violence to the use of a techno crane—with numerous trivia tidbits dropped along the way. We learn, for example, that Angus Scrimm’s Buddy character was based on a role the actor had previously played in a TV movie that wound up being cut out, and that the assorted corpses strewn around the killer’s lair were originally created by KNB EFX for Michael Bay’s The Island. The duo’s writing process is also explained, and Coscarelli admits to feeling some pressure from “competing” with his fellow Masters directors.
A few production details not mentioned on that track crop up in the Coscarelli/Lansdale commentary, but for the most part this one is, not surprisingly, concerned with the story’s themes as well as Lansdale’s own history and approach. The author, who at one point makes a great comment about director Luis Buñuel, clearly appreciates what Coscarelli has wrought from his work; the two compare their respective writing approaches, and Lansdale agrees with the filmmaker that despite the producers’ desire to feature more of the villainous Moonface in a potential sequel, the backwoods murderer is “the least interesting character”! Great stuff, start to finish.
Incident’s modest but feature-quality production values receive a fine showcase in the 1.77:1 transfer, which ranges from rich, naturalistic hues in some of the flashback scenes to effectively color-drained, harsh-contrast images the rest of the time, with eerie Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. A Predators and Prey featurette allows Coscarelli to expand on the fascination with survivalists he brings up on the commentaries, but the best stuff here concerns his previous work, from his debut feature Jim: The World’s Greatest (bankrolled by his father; we even see a snatch of behind-the-scenes footage) through the Phantasm films and his disappointing experience on Beastmaster.
Title star Marc Singer has much fonder memories of that project—indeed, he positively waxes rhapsodic about it—as he and many of Coscarelli’s other collaborators sound of in the Working With a Master piece. Opening with a great reminiscence by Scrimm, it also gives face time to Phantasm co-producer Paul Pepperman (who claims that film inspired numerous phans to go to mortuary school), Incident heroine Bree Turner and others. This segment is only 20 minutes, but feels longer—in a good way—’cause there’s so much packed into it. Other supplements include a Behind the Scenes montage of video footage, documenting the filming of assorted stunt, action and horror moments; a still gallery containing some cool corpse detail shots; the script in DVD-ROM format; and a pair of on-set actor interviews. John De Santis explains his take on Moonface’s character and we see the makeup process that transformed him into the ghoul, while Ethan Embry doesn’t have much to say (and the segment ends abruptly, as if the editor realized it too).
The only conceivable bonus missing from this disc is the additional footage Coscarelli shot to beef up the original 52-minute Incident to full hour length for foreign territories; it has neither been restored to the episode nor presented on its own. Hard to say why Anchor Bay chose to exclude this material, but this package is otherwise so exhaustive that one barely misses it.
