The first installment of the much-anticipated series "Masters of Horror" certainly wasn't a disappointment, although the script hardly looks like the work of a "master". Any second-rate horror scriptwriter during the 1980's could have come up with this plot, but of course that doesn't mean "Incident on and off a Mountain Road" is any less entertaining. Director Don Coscarelli deserved his place in the horror hall of fame thanks to his on-going "Phantasm"-series, which has a lot of fans including myself, and the more recent hit "Bubba Ho Tep"; starring genre favorite Bruce Campbell. None of Coscarelli's previous movies were ever exaggeratedly gore, but this 60 minutes episode is pretty blood-soaked and contains several brutal images of torture and dismemberment. The story is simple and handles about a young woman involved in a banal car accident on a remote mountain road who then gets violently chased by a mythical-type monster that stabs out his victims' eyes and subsequently crucifies them. Ellen tries to outsmart the creep by using tricks and booby-traps she learned from her obsessive commando trooper ex-husband (whom we get to know through brief flashbacks). The monster, Moonface, is quite an engaging one man freak show and he somewhat looks like a crossover between Lurch, the Addams Family butler, and The Creeper from "Jeepers Creeper". The dungeon where Moonface brings his victims is stuffed with gruesome torture devices and an impressive collection of severely decomposing human body parts. Beautiful Bree Turner is very good as the hunted prey and there's a truly cool supportive role for Agnus "The Tall Man" Scrimm as the fool who survives in the monster's cellar. "Incident on and off a Mountain Road" by no means is a memorable or innovating horror spectacle, but if the rest of the series will be equally entertaining as this first episode, I'll be more than satisfied.