Jamie (Henry Thomas) is being interviewed by the police, and asks the detective if he knows what it's like to really be in love, complete and all encompassing love. But let's go back to the beginning, why has he ended up far from home and covered with blood? He was a lonely divorcee who worked as a chemist creating artificial flavours for food, had no friends outside of his workmate Wally (Matt Frewer), and hardly saw his young son, so although life wasn't as bad as it could be, he wasn't exactly having a great time either. But one night, he had a vivid dream and awoke with the taste of chocolate in his mouth, which was strange as with his allergies chocolate was something he usually avoided. Yet this was the first sign that a strange condition was overcoming Jamie, a condition that made him experience not only his own life, but someone else's as well...
For Masters of Horror creator Mick Garris's own episode, you might have anticipated he would have saved something extra special for himself, and that's where you'd be, erm, wrong. One of the weaker instalments, Chocolate isn't even much to do with the titular foodstuff, so no poisonings or overindulgence as the basis for any creepiness here. No, what it is is a rather wan tale of obsessional love with Jamie growing increasingly preoccupied with the woman (Lucie Laurier) whose life he is seeing and feeling in short bursts, although Garris takes his time in revealing precisely what is going on, which at least offers up a sense of mystery in the early stages.
Jamie's psychic links happen at the most inconvenient of times, from where an attractive woman attempts to chat him up at a performance of Wally's band he's attending, to where he is driving home and finds he's looking at a street scene in Canada instead of the road up ahead. The weirdest is where, yet again, his chances with the opposite sex are ruined when he is in bed with his latest conquest (Leah Graham) and starts to feel what sexual intercourse is like from the woman's point of view due to that pesky psychic link once again, although such self-consciously racy interludes don't do much to further the story. When the woman whose life he's enduring turns to murder Jamie realises it's time to act, and using what he has gleaned from the visions he tracks her down, with entirely predictable consequences. Not bothering to explain why all this is happening is one of the irritations of Chocolate, and while Thomas gives an adequate, nice guy loser performance, the episode is fairly disposable. Music by Nicholas Pike.
[Part of the Anchor Bay Masters of Horror box set of DVDs, which include a host of extras such as commentaries and documentaries to keep fans occupied.]
