Pick Me Up

It is funny when I look back at the series of Masters of Horror, how it came and went, horror fans excited about their favorite directors featuring little tales, dvd releases really catered to all of us who enjoy/cherish their work from the past. That said, often many reviews I read often mention how disappointed they were in the episodes of the series, how expectations, maybe a bit too outrageously high, were off-the-charts considering the talent involved. Pick Me Up is generally considered one of the better ones that came out of the first season and its dvd release was superb. The supplemental material really gives you your money's worth (especially, now considering how cheap the dvds go for...), especially if you are a fan of these directors, such as the one and only Larry Cohen.

Pick Me Up reunites Cohen with his greatest lead actor, Michael Moriarty who just knocks it out of the ballpark, but this is no surprise because when these two joined forces only magic happens. What a devious script from David Schow. He has this wicked idea and Cohen gets his actors to run with it. Moriarty is a truck driver who normally hauls meat, but his recreation is hunting humans with designs on getting to know those who hitch a ride with him before getting rid of them. When a hitchhiker (Warren Kole), wearing a cowboy hat, snakeskin boots, and a duster (the charming smile, the Texas-style manners (that are really part of the role his killer plays to gain favor with his victims), and laid-back posture, the works) starts honing on his territory, taking out victims who are along his current route. So truck driver and hitcher are engaged in a competition for a particular "stray", a young, bitter woman (Fairuza Balk, who wears a scowl and maintains a fuck-you attitude the entire time on screen) on the road to wherever, having escaped an abusive marriage. It just doesn't go well for this girl, lemme tell you.

Cohen isn't overly concerned with that much gratuitous violence (you want that, find Miike's awesome Imprint or Argento's two gorefests), although a punk girl with multiple piercings and uninhibited candor gets it real good by a rather excited (calm excitement can be just as chilling as gleeful excitement and Kole embues his psycho with a cold-blooded nonchalance that is rather effective) hitcher who has carved hunks of flesh from her naked body. Members of a broken-down passengers bus all wind up victims to Moriarty and Kole, each taken advantage of or by surprise, not expecting them to be serial killers. That's the point of Schow's script, I think, the element of surprise.

One of the characters, a highly paranoia-laden wife of an exhausted husband who is flat tired of her constant musings about the dangers of just trusting anybody, is actually right (irony), but running into the unfamiliar woods does her no favors. Kole is the kind of serial killer who takes his time, likes to show off his handiwork, and mocks his victims. Moriarty likes to gain the trust of his victims, laying on his brand of off-kilter humor (there's this unpredictable nature about him, although he has an infectious personality that wins over people which is probably why he's good at killing...) before the inner savage adds notches to his kill-belt. He wears his tropheys from victims throughout the cab of his truck...future victims see them in person, unaware that they'll probably leave behind a trinket for him once they are dispatched.

This mini-film is more of a showcase for the stars and Cohen doesn't really use a style that intrudes upon the boys and their quarry. He does have a great visual trick where we are overhead as he passes from one room of a hotel to another to another (Kole's kill room with the girl he's torturing, to Balk's, to Moriarty's; it's a neat shot, and has a purpose, in that it points out the fact that all three principles are in rooms aligned together, telling us they are all fated to meet...). There is also a chase through the woods, where Kole follows carefully and confidently after a future victim, and Cohen establishes why he would be able to catch her by making the wilderness of this area in the US (I guess it is the US...)disorienting and confusing.

Moriarty adds little details to his character that is so wonderfully typical, such as his New Yawk dialect, how he lights the edges of a cigarette, even at one point playing a piano at a gas station (oh, and he tells a joke to Kole while having Balk prisoner in his truck cab, about a blonde and a rattler). The most unusual kill would have to be the strangulation with a dead rattler (the victim ran the snake over with the bus, as to add irony to the murder, essentially dying by the very thing you yourself killed). But, ultimately, I think what sells this episode of Masters of Horror is the measuring the size of their peckers by comparing their killing methods and using antagonizing tactics to get a rise out of each other. There's an instance where Moriarty has a pack of cigarettes on the person of a victim Kole had left in a ditch that establishes the feud...it has one killer telling another that he knows his secret, issuing a challenge.

Will it work for Cohen's fans? The setting is away from the big city, the characters seem more rural, and the on-the-road feel of the whole episode isn't quite Cohen as we are accustomed to. But it does have lots of quirky touches that give off a Cohen scent, especially the interplay of two psychopaths wanting to show the other up and the little bits of odd character interraction (the inspired casting of Cohen alum, Lauren Landon, as she flirts with Moriarty, as an example) that feature throughout. I think these episodes from the first season will become curiosities years from now as horror fans re-evaluate them, knowing what they're not, maybe being a little more willing to go in with a proper mind-set...let's face it, Pick Me Up is not in the same conversation with The Stuff or God Told Me To, but I think there's enough here for you to enjoy.