Chris Smith (RockPortReview) "Sick Girl" is a 60 minute episode of the Showtime series "Masters of Horror" and like "May" was also directed by Lucky Mckee. "Sick Girl" is a bizarrely funny romantic comedy surrounded by bugs and small doses of horror that make it really fun.Starring Angela Bettis, as Ida Teeter, an entomologist who is looking for a woman who's not disgusted by her obsession with the creepy crawly things she keeps all over her apartment. As a character Ida seems to have been transported from the 1940s. She has the period hairdo and talks in a sort of way that is hard to describe. Erin Brown AKA Misty Mundae plays Ida's love interest Misty Falls, yeah sounds kind of confusing. Misty spends her time drawing fairies and pixies in the lobby of where Ida works. Ida works up the courage to ask Misty out and their whirlwind romance begins.The episode opens with a guy capturing a big exotic bug and mailing it to Ida, who is excited about the mysterious and very aggressive specimen. This bug eventually does escape and makes a home for itself inside Ida's pillow. Talk about your bedbugs. Misty is bitten by the nasty thing that starts a gradual transformation in her. The whole episode is B-movie-ish and campy but is also fun and horrific. Like in "May" Ida is a lonely soul who surrounds her self with surrogate friends in the bugs. She is anxious and nervous of what people think of her, afraid of rejection. She finally finds a kindred spirit in Misty, who accept her for who she is, but Ida's bug obsession comes back to literally and fugitively bite her back.Their relationship is put to the test as the bug starts to take over Misty and culminates in a pretty insane ending. Ida and Misty do end up together but under some pretty strange circumstances. "Sick Girl" is available as a stand alone DVD packed with special features and is pretty cheap.

RainDogJr When I began watching the MASTERS OF HORROR episodes years ago (back in 2007-2008 to be exact), I was kind of an elitist, only getting on DVD the ones made by directors I already knew and admired (like John Carpenter, Dario Argento and Takashi Miike). Out of the thirteen episodes from the first season only five had directors I didn't know at the time; so I didn't pay much attention to this ones: "Chocolate" (Mick Garris), "Fair Haired Child" (William Malone), "Pick Me Up" (Larry Cohen, who now I know thanks to a couple of films -BONE and HELL UP IN HARLEM- that I haven't' seen yet but that are on my DVD shelf), "Haeckel's Tale" (John McNaughton) and "Sick Girl" (Lucky McKee). Recently I got the second Blu-Ray of season one; it contains two familiar ones (Argento's "Jennifer" and John Landis' "Deer Woman") and only one that I had yet to see; this one, of course. Filmmaker Lucky McKee has only two directing credits prior to his contribution to MASTERS OF HORROR, but he did a very nice, classic kind of thing, with "Sick Girl"; and after this I'll try to watch his 2002 film MAY, by the way. McKee's episode has a really strange tone thanks to its main character Ida (played by Angela Bettis). She's like the ultimate shy and weird young woman. And this is a love story, actually. It's the classic one in which we all are hoping that our main character can do it just fine when she, after a failed romance, goes out on a new first date - I must add that Ida isn't into guys, at all… so yes, "Sick Girl" has some of that irresistible-for-dudes lesbian material. Much of the reason why I gave to this a very high rating is its ending. The whole trip is enjoyable but that final scene is the thing that really makes it pure and great horror. *Watched it today

fedor8 I was going to start off by saying that Angela Bettis looks like a cross between that "May"/"Toolbox Murders" actress and the shpeech-impendimended Holly Hunter. However, it turns out that Angela IS the former, and isn't nearly unattractive enough to deserve to be insulted by a comparison with the latter. Misty Mundae (if that's her real name) is the real attraction in this slow-moving, rather mediocre episode about a couple of lesbians getting impregnated by a Brazilian creepy-crawly. Almost nothing happens in the first half, and not a great deal more occurs in the second. The humour is predictable and lame - as in 99% of all horror comedies - and the final twist not nearly exciting enough to justify sitting on my derrière for an hour waiting for it.True to the "Masters Of Horror" tradition, evil wins yet again, which is becoming a bit predictable and stale too...The author of the site's plot synopsis muses over the episode being "a commentary on the dangers of moving into a relationship too quickly". Some people have their heads so far up their trusted rears that they'll over-analyze a f**t, let alone a dumb little horror story. Those are probably the same people who find meaning in a Picasso scribble or a Rothko "carpet".

MARIO GAUCI This is surely one of the oddest, yet most entertaining, entries in the "Masters Of Horror" series – despite a rather lame title. It's very much a black comedy with unexpected lesbian overtones: the latter, however, comes as no surprise when realizing that one of the two leads – appearing under her real name of Erin Brown – is really softcore exponent Misty Mundae (the character is actually called Misty)! The other actress, then, is Angela Bettis who had starred in director McKee's cultish low-budget horror MAY (2002); incidentally, this episode was reportedly intended for Roger Corman but I wonder what he would have made of the inherent sensuality (though it is not particularly explicit by contemporary standards). Anyway, entomologist Bettis is prodded by her leering male colleague to approach the teenage artist who likes to hang out at their workplace; when the two girls finally meet, it transpires that Brown had been infatuated with Bettis for a long time – but the latter keeps her obsession with insects hidden from the former…until Brown reveals to Bettis that she is the daughter of a renowned former teacher of hers, who has actually just sent the scientist a most unusual specimen. The comedy element involves Bettis' troubled relationship with the elderly and conservative landlady (whose grand-daughter actually idolizes the young woman!) – which grows even worse with the arrival of the uninhibited and confrontational Brown. The horror themes come into play only gradually: Brown – pricked by the very insect Dad mailed to Bettis, as it turns out, to harm her so as to 'cure' his own daughter's 'unnatural' instincts – finds herself pregnant and eventually turns into a full-scale creepy-crawly!; the 'happy' ending, then, is quite amusing. As I said, the film proves a likeably oddball entry in the series which works mainly due to Mundae's beguiling doe-eyed features, supplying just the right mix of genuine charm and giddy naughtiness.