The scariest thing about most episodes of Masters of Horror so far has been the fact that professional filmmakers were behind them, but the Joe Dante segments have been refreshing change-ups from the general incompetence on display. Which is ironic, since Dante’s film career has been, as the French might say, merde for the last couple of decades.
But maybe the Showtime anthology has done something, shook something loose deep inside his brain, and Joe Dante could be on the verge of a comeback. At the very least he’s working on a movie that I’m interested in seeing – a first for him since I graduated high school. The movie, according to the Time Out Movie Blog, is called The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes, a riff on a John Lennon lyric, and it’s about the making of The Trip – a Roger Corman movie from 1967 that was written by Jack Nicholson. Corman apparently dropped acid to research the film, which is about Peter Fonda as an uptight businessman doing some LSD he buys from Dennis Hopper (holy shit would I not be interested in scoring from him).
Time Out Movie Blog says the film should shoot later this year, and it will have cameos from Martin Scorsese, John Sayles and Jonathan Demme – all people who had their start with Corman. This sounds like a fantastic, fun concept, and I’m dying to see who Dante gets to play Corman.
I have seen The Trip once, and only once. During my LSD heyday we rented the film from the local videostore, dropped a couple of tabs and commenced viewing. The tape was fucked up – the top half of the screen was distorted and pulled to the left. I think we all believed we had just gotten some extraordinarily good acid.