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'And I say to myself, it's wonderful, wonderful... oh, so wonderful my love.'
Title: Home
Season: Four (1996)
Duration: 44m
Written by: Glen Morgan and James Wong
Directed by: Kim Manners
Rating: ****
One of the biggest flaws in The X-Files was its stereotyping of race and peoples. In particular, a drive down south would always seem to find Mulder and Scully embroiled in a religious community that was typified by the phrase 'close knit, small minded'. And for an incestuous, baby-killing family then it doesn't come any closer or more small-minded.
Home is an episode so outrageously OTT in its depiction that it makes Deliverance look like a love letter to South Americans. In many ways this riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre should be deeply offensive, and it kind of is... yet it has style. Rarely repeated in the US, this tale of a deformed man who impregnates his mutilated, paraplegic mother and lives with his two sons/half-brothers somehow managed to scrape a 15 certificate in the UK, making season two's The Calusari the only X-Files episode to get the full eighteen certificate over here.
Beautifully directed by Kim Manners, this is The X-Files as pure horror... tasteless at times, but always with a sense of panache. What cements its place as a minor classic is the juxtaposition at the climax... the sheer lunatic sickness of a son driving away his deformed mother to impregnate her once more, set to Kenny James's approximation of the Johnny Mathis hit Wonderful! Wonderful! Rarely has bad taste seemed so stylish.
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