Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 21, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
“I think the picture speaks for itself,” says director Joe Dante on the Anchor Bay DVD of his Masters of Horror entry Homecoming, explaining why he doesn’t talk about its politics therein. And he’s right, in spades; the episode (see original review here) leaves no doubt as to what side of the political fence its creators are on, rendering any potential explanatory discussion redundant. Yet despite being “extremely biased and extremely unsubtle,” as the director puts it, Homecoming overwhelmingly succeeds as a horrific statement on current events, and even if there were no extras on the DVD, it would be worth owning just for the show itself.
But of course, in the tradition of past Masters discs, there’s a surfeit of supplements here, almost to the point of overkill. Dante decided to sit out a commentary track, but scripter Sam Hamm speaks over Anchor Bay’s typically fine 1.77:1 transfer (whose colors never run). Though there are gaps in his talk, he touches on everything from the adaptation of Dale Bailey’s original short story “Death and Suffrage” (in which the theme was gun violence) to Homecoming’s antecedents (like “an Alan Clark movie called Deathdream”—oops) to amusing bits that got left out. The most surprising revelation here is that Dante felt the image of a soldier corpse rising from beneath its American-flag shroud—perhaps the most striking image—was so pointed it might be too much, and considered cutting it.
The director gets to say his piece in a featurette called The Dead Come Marching, in which he notes that zombies have long served as political metaphors, and his original mentor Roger Corman opines that the same has been true of Dante’s work from early on. (Recall that his 1978 Piranha used the Vietnam War as a narrative jumping-off point.) Dante additionally draws more practical parallels between his initial features and the tightly budgeted/scheduled Masters (“You click back into your New World phase”), and admits he went broke after The Howling before Steven Spielberg came calling with Twilight Zone: The Movie and Gremlins. This thorough and most interesting survey of his career even includes a poster for his aborted Jaws 3, People 0!
Adding more color to this portrait of the artist is the Working With a Master segment, which rounds up everyone from frequent collaborators Robert Picardo and Kevin McCarthy to Howling star Dee Wallace, with a number of neat tidbits on the groundbreaking lycanthropicture (Stone played her side of the big transformation scene with no werewolf present, and the popular “I’m gonna give you piece of my mind” was only added in postproduction). Homecoming stars Jon Tenney and Thea Gill give Dante due praise here, and they and Picardo offer observations on their Masters roles in separate interview segments as well. The best of these is Picardo’s, in which he reveals how he came up with bits of actorly business to allow Dante’s camera to track with him in one scene, and—despite being outed as a Republican in Hamm’s commentary—refutes any criticism of Homecoming as disrespectful to our servicemen.
Somewhat less intriguing are the DVD’s making-of featurettes. Behind the Scenes, an assortment of on-set video backed by music (including an anti-war song), doesn’t show us quite enough; Script to Screen, which tracks a collection of scenes through reproduced screenplay pages, and copious footage of those portions being filmed, and the final result, shows too much to consistently hold interest. The real gem among the extras is a vintage Fantasy Film Festival LA cable program hosted by young Masters-creator-to-be Mick Garris, in which Piranha is discussed by not only Dante but genre-fave actors Paul Bartel and Barbara Steele as well, sharing fun stories about that film and their histories with Corman. The stop-motion “homunculus” and a rubber piranha even make appearances! Rounded out by a good still gallery and an informative Dante biography by Richard Harland Smith, Homecoming is yet another Masters DVD well worth saluting.
