When Mike's grandmother dies he and his family atends the funeral to later stay in her estate. In the big house Mike's ten year old daughter Amy accidentally knocks over a painting portraying George Washington and inside of the broken frame is a secret parchment, stating that Washington was a cannibal.
Whoa! This was so bad it was hard making it through the 56 minutes it lasted for, not to mention how meaningless it feels to write about something that doesn't deserve to be written about. But what the hell, let's go: The Washingtonians is based on a short story by satirical horror author Bentley Little and while it might work very well on paper, it does not work on film. Peter Medak's, whose merits include The Changeling, adaptation is pretty much a mess from beginning to end and even though these films are kinda short, it was really hard making it all the way through. This episode is not as much horror as it is comedy, or that is black comedy, but the kind that does not really work. Suggesting that George Washington was a cannibal who loved to eat little children might sound horrific and fun, but watch this episode and you'll see that it's pretty much anything but that.
When Mike's grandmother dies, he and his wife and daughter travels to the old lady's house and stays there to atend the funeral etc. His daughter Amy runs around and is afraid of pretty much everything you could think of. One day she heads down to the basement to mess around and be obnoxious, and knocks down a painting of George Washington. Inside the broken painting, Mike finds a parchment that was written by Washington himself, saying how the man liked to eat tasty little children. He later finds out that the parchment is authentic and it doesn't take long before all hell breaks loose and a group called the Washingtonians starts threaten him and his family.
 
If you wanna see a lot of creepy old people that are just as disgusting as they are weird then at least The Washingtonians has that to offer. It's not all extremely bad and it of course has a few things that could've been decent, problem though is that the whole story doesn't play out too well on screen. At times, the whole story and the acting is just so over-the-top it's not funny anymore, and talking about being fun, this is definitely a bad choise if you wanna have a laugh. The only person that I liked in this film was Venus Terzo who plays Mike's wife, thing is that she didn't do anything special really, but at the same time didn't come off as an idiot, something that pretty much everyone else did. The gore is there but it felt like watching a really bad zombie movie (with a decent budget though) and the cannibalistic side of things was not scary nor funny, it just ended up feeling quite stupid.
I'm pretty sure this was the worst episode in the series so far and I wouldn't sit through it again even if I got paid. Next week it's time for Norio Tsuruta so hopefully that'll be a helluva lot better.. well, it can't be any worse, that's for sure.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: The Washingtonians
MOVIE YEAR: 2007
DIRECTOR: Peter Medak
WRITING CREDITS: Richard Chizmar, Johnathon Schaech
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Johnathon Schaech, Saul Rubinek, Venus Terzo
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 56 min
RATING: 1/10
Masters of Horror (S02E12): The Washingtonians Website/IMDB Click here
Masters of Horror (S02E12): The Washingtonians Trailer Click here
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