Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on December 8, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It was at about this time last season, in the course of Masters of Horror, that Joe Dante’s Homecoming arrived to take viewers’ breath away with its combination of undead thrills, pointed political satire and just plain terrific screen storytelling and characterizations. Right now, the series could use just such a boost after the disappointing (or worse, depending on who you ask) John Carpenter and Dario Argento segments, and while The Screwfly Solution, which reteams Dante with Homecoming scripter Sam Hamm, isn’t quite up to the level of their zombie-soldiers opus, it delivers a similarly stinging mix of sociopolitical commentary and traditional horror mayhem.
This time, the war being examined is the one between the sexes, taken to the nth degree. To wit, men are starting to turn homicidally on women, first in isolated incidents and then in cancer-like “clusters” across America and in other countries. A murderous worldwide apocalypse is at hand, but Dante and Hamm play the focus tight, centering on a family who are not only directly affected by the plague of violence but are in assorted positions to do something about it: father-and-son scientists Barney (Elliott Gould) and Alan (Jason Priestley), and the latter’s wife Anne (Kerry Norton), who works at a women’s shelter (which becomes a shelter for all women as the mania spreads and the female half of the population has to be quarantined for their own safety). And there’s a wonderful reversal of assumptions when Barney’s wife, who at first seems to be nothing more than a feminist scold, is revealed as a high-ranking government agent who gets called in to deal with the problem.
Dante and Hamm don’t put much more stock here in our country’s powers-that-be than they did in Homecoming, but they’ve got other satiric fish to fry in this episode. Even though it’s evident right from the documentary-style title sequence, which recounts how an insect pest was exterminated by scientific alteration of the bugs’ ability to mate, that an outside agent is at work, Solution draws a straight and pointed line between religious fervor and dangerous misogyny. The murderers claim to have heard the word of God as they carried out their slayings, and an early moment plays on viewer awareness of the repressive/deadly aspects of Muslim fundamentalism (and in doing so, makes for a bit of an ironic counterpoint to Homecoming’s anti-Iraq War stance).
Still, if religion can’t be turned to, science doesn’t prove much help either. Alan, Barney and others in that community are powerless to stop the spread of this new disease; all they can do is conduct a series of experiments that test the male subjects’ reactions to video sex and violence. This occasions what I believe is Masters’ first in-reference to itself, and it’s a witty bit, one of a scattering of dark-humored moments that pop up throughout Solution. But this is overall a more deadly serious exercise than Homecoming, or just about anything else Dante has done before, and the story ultimately becomes a survival quest as Anne and her daughter Amy (Brenna O’Brien) flee through a world overrun by a deadly strain of sexual harassment.
The more Norton and O’Brien’s sympathetic performances are center stage, the better, as it turns out, since Solution could have used a more compelling leading man than Priestley. Convincing in conveying Alan’s loving-family-man side, he’s less so when called on to adopt a take-charge mode. On the other hand, where Homecoming threw out twists and revelations right up through the final scenes, Solution settles into familiar territory in the third act, leading to a rather puzzling final revelation and an ending some might see as effectively bleak and others may find unsatisfying. Nonetheless, the first two-thirds are as good as anything Masters has offered in either season, and this is one of the few episodes in the latest batch that doesn’t carry the sense of a half-hour tale stretched to double that length. (That’s a notable achievement, since Solution, like many of its second-season brethren, was based on a short story. Author James Tiptree Jr., who originally published it under the pseudonym “Raccoona Sheldon,” is billed under his real name here.)
In fact, Solution suggests that it could have easily worked as a feature of 90 minutes or so, with an even more in-depth exploration of its provocative ideas. If that were the case, Dante might have to tone down the graphic lovemaking and bloodletting that are staples of Masters, and which he eschewed in Homecoming but embraces here. They don’t come off as gratuitous, though, because the combination of sex and violence is at the heart of Solution’s themes, and not just a titillating ingredient. The episode stands as that rarity in the genre: a story that’s truly about violence against women, rather than a simple presentation of it.
