Dream Cruise, the second-to-last Masters of Horror episode to hit DVD (leaving only The V Word), is an odd fit in the history of the show. It has the least impressive pedigree both behind-the-scenes and in front of the camera of any of the episodes and it kind of brings the whole concept of the show – shouldn’t each filmmaker be a well-known ‘master’? – in question. No offense to fans of Norio Tsuruta, but even his biggest supporters would question putting him next to John Carpenter, Takashi Miike, Dario Argento, and Joe Dante on the horror history shelf. It feels like Mick Garris and the brain trust behind Masters of Horror knew they needed to make a ‘J-horror’ entry eventually and simply found whomever was available. Once again, it’s not so much that Tsuruta is a bad director – he’s not – but he’s not a master just because he directed an installment in the Ringu franchise. Isn’t this a series that was supposed to reserved for the recognized masters of the form? The definition of that word seemed spread pretty thin by the time the second season (and, from all appearances, last) aired on Showtime.

Once you get over that pretty big hump, Dream Cruise actually isn’t that bad. It’s certainly not the worst of either season, ending up one of those entries more in the middle third if you were to divide all MOH episodes into good, so-so, and bad. Dream Cruise stars Daniel Gillies as an American attorney in Japan with a very bad childhood experience that has left him terrified of the ocean (what is it with J-horror and water?) Gillies begins an affair with the wife of a wealthy client, who decides to take his attorney on a sunset boat trip. What starts as a Hitchockian love triangle quickly turns into something more familiar to fans of movies like Ju-On or Ringu – lots of dark hair, water, and pale faces. Based on a short story by Koji Suzuki (creator of the Dark Water and Ringu series – and the closest thing to a master involved with Dream Cruise), this episode of Masters of Horror plays with a few too many clichés of the J-horror genre, but there’s a reason those movies use so many of the same images – they can be pretty powerful.

We long ago gave up on the second season DVDs coming anywhere near the amazing quality of the first season, but we once again have to express our disappointment that this series has gone this far downhill. Every release for the first season of Masters of Horror came with an extensive collection of features that covered their ‘master’ and his latest work from top to bottom. Early in the DVD releases for the second season, Starz abandoned that model and now do less than a lot of straight-to-DVD releases. One commentary, one behind-the-scenes featurette, and the photo gallery. That’s all you get from your copy of Dream Cruise and the technical transfer doesn’t even love up to the standard of the first season. It’s not definitely a DVD dreams are made of and that’s exactly what this series used to be.

Dream Cruise might have been a good episode of another anthology series, but this was Masters of Horror – where the greats came to play and got the appropriate treatment on DVD. We still love so much about Masters of Horror and there were great episodes in season two (The Black Cat, Pelts), but Dream Cruise shows you how far the series fell before the end. This one’s for MOH completists only.