What the hell is going on here? Did all the directors from season one meet up in a room and decide that they would turn up the heat this time around? Because season two of “Masters of Horror” has been one big punch in the gut, and I’m surprised. Dante, who came at us with my favorite episode “Homecoming,” repeats his one-two punch with “Screwfly Solution” an utterly violent and original picture of the apocalypse. I have a soft spot for films or television that paints the apocalypse or post-apocalypse, and “Screwfly Solution” is a fascinating story about the line between sexual aggression and aggression thinning into a gory result. How does this happen?
Well, the first twenty minutes give it away considerably with an obvious clue, but beyond that we view what is a rather violent end of the world. The end of the world is depicted yet again as mankind turning on one another, except this time its man turning on woman. All over the world women are being murder viciously by men, and no one can explain why. At the start of the story, a man is watering the concrete of his driveway, and upon inspection, we learn that he’s brutally murdered his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law. But that’s just the start. All over the world men are murdering women, and there’s even a river flooded with the bodies of hundreds of women, and as the story unfolds, we learn it’s now become an epidemic.
Dante doesn’t stop there, though, showing an utterly shocking murder at a strip club which features its male customers brutally stabbing two strippers to death. Alan and his friend Barney have decided to crack down and solve this mystery and learn it’s an airborne virus possibly started by a cult named the Sons of Adam who have spread a germ that creates aggression in males that make them murderous through women, which will in effect extinguish reproduction and the human race. Dante inserts a startling sense of misogynism that only adds to the demented attitude of “Screwfly Solution” which we see so many men murdering these women, which then escalates into full on hysteria and Armageddon.
In one utterly shocking sequence a woman refuses to board a plane because of the number of men on it, and when she gets hysterical, she’s murdered rather quickly and no one seems to mind. With the women being viewed as infestation, the men involuntarily become incredibly murderous to them, and Alan is trying to stop it before he joins the crowd and goes after his wife and daughter. Dante’s installment has a brutal sense of urgency and sheer carnage as the violence becomes much more mean spirited, and we ultimately learn the entire ironic purpose of this sequence of events. Dante’s second outing in the “Masters of Horror” series is a pure dose of shock entertainment with a great story, and an otherwise original pictures of the apocalypse thanks to a mysterious chain of events.