Author Archives: don

Tales from the Crypt – People Who Live in Brass Hearses (10/13/93)

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tftcpeoplewho01How the hell is this thing rated as the 10th best episode of the series on IMDb?

In retrospect, I jumped the gun.  The episode did get off to an abysmal start. First, there is the presence of the worst actor ever to make a good living at it, Bill Paxton. He is about as obnoxious as usual without the redeeming qualities that occasionally make him interesting.  Add in a wife-beater, a mullet and some god-awful tattoos and he nearly crashes the episode on take-off.  Luckily, Brad Dourif is on hand to take the controls and add some gravitas to the acting.

However, the episode quickly establishes itself as being exactly what TFTC does best, and should do more often.  It had laughs, gore, surprises, and some over-the-top scenes. The only minor non-Paxtoncentric criticism — nay, observation — is that they have featured Siamese twins in two, dare I say, back-to-back episodes.

Paxton — and does it really matter what his character is named? — has just gotten out of jail.  He lives with his brother Virgil who is clearly meant to be “slow.”  However, Virgil is at least reading a comic book (Jesse James vs. Predator), while Paxton is pacing like an animal, slapping the staticky TV, and snacking on a stick of butter.  Kudos on the butter thing, though — that was the first sign of life that turned this episode around for me.

tftcpeoplewho02Paxton reviews their plan for the great ice cream warehouse heist.  He blows up at Virgil who forgets that he must disengage the fire alarm before unlocking the door.  To be fair, though, fire doesn’t generally care whether a door is locked or not.  Maybe disengaging the burglar alarm would be more productive.

Paxton and Virgil take their Impala out to meet the local ice cream truck.  Paxton is upset that the driver Mr. Byrd ratted him out from stealing money from his own ice cream truck route, and cost him 2 years in prison.  I’m not sure what this scene accomplishes other than introducing Mr. Byrd, and giving Paxton a chance to attempt to order butternut, butter brickle, and buttermilk before settling on butterscotch.  For some reason, this butter humor is killing me.

Paxton goes to the ice cream warehouse where Virgil works.  There is some wheel-spinning while we meet the manager, and hear Mr. Byrd trying to get his truck resupplied.  It is worth the wait, though, to see how Virgil screws up his assignment.  When you’re in a gang with Bill Paxton and you aren’t the brains of the operation, that is a bad sign.

tftcpeoplewho03The episode is only about 20 minutes once you skip the odious Cryptkeeper.  They were wise not to pad it out, as there is surprise after surprise from here on out.   Sometimes it is a dead body, sometimes it is a grappling hook, sometimes a gunshot.  It just goes down like butter.

This is too rich to spoil — I rate it 3 scoops.

Post-Post:

  • Title Analysis:  Pathetic — no brass and and no hearses are to be seen in the episode.  C’mon, with a story built around an I-scream truck, you couldn’t come up with anything?
  • “Impala is a kind of horse, right Billy?”

Tales of Tomorrow – Sneak Attack (12/07/51)

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totsneakattack01The first thing that registered as I wrote down the title was, Hey this aired 10 years to the day after Pearl Harbor!  Amazingly, for a medium that managed to show 5 seasons of Gomer Pyle without mentioning Viet Nam, the episode actually starts with, “Can Pearl Harbor happen again?  Tonight we present Sneak Attack.”  But then, people back then weren’t complete pussies.

The action begins “in 1960, in a hospital room somewhere on foreign soil.”  Major Ray Clinton is the patient, having just had 5 slugs removed from his legs — the lead kind, not the mushy kind.  His doctor seems to think that Clinton is actually a plant sent by their own government to spy on them.

That night, the doctor comes back to his room to try and figure out who he is.  She believes that if he were really an American, the military would have killed him rather than bring him to a hospital.  And she is suspicious that he survived a close-range machine gun blast with only 2 superficial leg wounds.  Clearly this is before movies where sustained machine gun blasts at close range generally result in zero wounds for the hero.  He tells him that he, in fact, is able to walk.

totsneakattack04Clinton gets dressed.  She tells him there is a secret weapon being designed in this very hospital for a sneak attack on the USA.  He is baffled why she would tell him this.  When another doctor enters the room, she takes his temperature with her tongue (orally, I hasten to add).  So apparently getting caught talking to a spy is bad; swapping spit with him is dandy.

A stentorian voice-over tells us that in New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and 20 other cities, the skies were darkened by planes bearing America markings.  The pilot-less planes landed for reasons unknown.  While the politicians are yakking in the White House, the plane in Denver blows up and destroys the entire city.  This is more like it!  After destroying the earth in the first 2 episodes, Tales of Tomorrow had gotten a little squishy.

We get some shot of the carnage which I assume is from the war, ended only 6 years earlier.  We are told there are 46,000 dead in Denver.

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I appreciate the little runway model, but this airport design is just a recipe for disaster.

Now that we’re in the mood, we cut back to Clinton and his doctor.  The other doctor who caught them doesn’t care that they were kissing. As he leaves the room, he even turns off the light.  That must have been fairly scandalous in 1951.

When Clinton learns about the sneak attack, he demands to be given his clothes; especially his right shoe.  His doctor retreives it and Clinton is able to send a message to the White House telling them he can stop the bombs.

He has his doctor pretend to take him  to the bombs at gunpoint.  When they reach the guards, he wrestles with one, leaving his female doctor to wrestle with the other. Somehow, and I have absolutely no idea how, this results in the control room blowing up.

When the deadline passes without the country being destroyed, the sanctimonious president says that the enemy just can’t understand that we’ve had “a taste of Liberty” — a mere 184 year sip at that point — and “prefer death to life on our knees.  When will they realize that we want only peace and freedom.”

Well, OK but they better bomb the shit out of that other country if they expect to get re-elected.

Post-Post:

  • Sponsored again by Jacques Kreisler Watchbands.  My favorite feature is that they demonstrate how the women’s band easily slides up the arm so she can do the dishes.
  • Added bonus:  the announcer clearing his throat during the credits.

Ray Bradbury Theater – Fee Fie Foe Fum (10/28/92)

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rbtfeefifofum03Fee fi fo fum / I smell the blood of an Englishman / Be he live or be he dead / I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

This always pissed me off.

If you’re going to make up nonsense words, why wouldn’t you make one up that actually rhymes with Englishman?  Or, as part of the evil conservative War on Women, you could smell the blood of an Englishmum.  I don’t guess I can blame Ray Bradbury for this since that little ditty is 500 years old.

A man pulls up to Edith Bunker‘s house.  It isn’t clear who he is, but he comes in and gives the much-younger Lucy Lawless — holy crap, Lucy Lawless! — a kiss on the lips. [UPDATE — he is revealed to be her husband, Tom].

He seems very excited that he has brought Lucy and grandma Edith a Mr. Muncher garbage disposal, Mr. Fusion having not yet been invented.  Whoever he is, he’s a better man than me — he is able to install a garbage disposal; and bag Lucy Lawless.  He gets an inordinate amount of joy feeding bones into his prized unit — the disposal, not Lucy.  Edith however, even all the way upstairs locked in her room, is terrified by the machine.

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Hmmm, how can we here at RBT best feature Lucy’s beautiful blue eyes? Let’s use a blue filter so they blend into the background!

The next morning after after bread-winner Lucy leaves for work to support them and Tom leaves to goof off — this guy is quickly becoming my hero.  Edith goes downstairs to inspect this new monster Tom has installed.  Hearing it gurgle, she finds a feather in the drain, and her pet bird is missing from its cage.  She suspects Tom will next feed her bones into the Mr. Muncher next and steal her money.

Edith thinks she hears Tom chopping up her cat and dog and feeding them into the disposal. After he leaves the house, she finds the disposal gurgling again and finds cat fur in the drain.

That night, Edith sneaks down to the kitchen and talks to the disposal.  Then she goes out to the garage where she has hidden her animals.  So the old woman is framing her son-in-law which doesn’t explain why she was so aghast when she thought he had pulverized her pets.

rbtfeefifofum08The next day, she gives Lucy & Tom $500 to go on a vacation.  Tom returns early, having forgotten his fishing lures.  Edith corners him with a hatchet and . . . and  . . . I don’t know what the hell happened.  At first I thought she was going to chop him up the old fashioned way and feed him into the disposal like the bones that brought him such pleasure.  Then there were hellish flashing lights and pictures of the disposal’s grinding teeth, so I thought he was going to somehow be dragged into it whole.

But in the next scene, Tom and Lucy are loading up the car to move away.  Lucy seems OK, but Tom is pretty twitchy.  Edith is now a big fan of the machine and even invites the mailman in to see it.  In a good show, she would have fed him into the Muncher.  Or something.  Anything.

rbtfeefifofum01Post-Post:

  • Finally a New Zealand episode that makes use of the country’s fabulous natural resources, namely Lucy Lawless.
  • Only 2 more episodes to go.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Listen, Listen! (05/11/58)

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ahplistenlisten02Things get off to a pretty fishy start as old man Jasper P. Smith walks into a police station; fishy because there is no Jasper P. Smith in the credits.  Mr.  Smith has come to explain to the police how their investigation of The Stocking Murders has gone awry.  This will go well because if there is anything the police love more than people who know their rights, it is people telling them how to do their jobs [1].

He believes the 3rd so-called Stocking Murder is merely a copycat.  Which is a sound theory — I would expect the Stocking Murderer to stop at a pair; or at least a multiple of two.  So maybe there is an odd number of murders to come.  The detective assures him that “it just so happens that the Stocking Murders are sewn up tight.”  Ha!  Good one!

But even more importantly to the detective, the 3rd murder took place in a different precinct.  He sends the alleged Jasper to see Lt. King at the 51st precinct.  Smith goes to the 51st and introduces himself as Cyrus Morgan — I knew it!  Morgan tells Lt. King his take on the case.

ahplistenlisten04“Three girls, all very young, all living in walk-up apartments.”  And all three were super-models (although that is an assumption on my part).  “Three weeks ago, the first girl was found by the cleaning woman in her pajamas.” Although how she got in the cleaning woman’s pajamas, he doesn’t know. She was strangled with the titular stockings and had an “A” scrawled on her forehead with lipstick.  As was the 2nd girl, as was the third.

Smith/Morgan suggests that once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and three times is enemy action.  [2]  After seeing the pattern of the first two murders, a killer would count on the police to assume the third was the same killer.  The lieutenant repeatedly tells the old man not to waste his time as he is 30 and will be retiring with a lifetime pension shortly.

ahplistenlisten06After being ejected from the police station, Smith / Morgan goes to the newspaper.  He is informed that there are no reporters in the building.  They are all off-duty and hanging at Ace’s Bar & Grill; this still being the era when journalists wrapped their lips around a bottle of hooch rather than a politician’s ass.

He finds Mr. Beekman of The Chronicle.  Smith/Morgan introduces himself as Ralph Reid, being the first person in history to change their to Ralph. Beekman introduces a dame at the bar who gives her name as Slats.  Smith / Morgan / Reid gets flustered at the woman (and the 2 sherries in his tea-totaling system) and bails from the bar.

He next tries a church, which apparently investigated murders in the 1950’s (child abuse, not so much).  He gives his name this time as Herbert Johnson.  He tells his theory to the priest.  The priest also dismisses him; he is an old man, after all.

ahplistenlisten01

A jarringly cinematic shot in a visually blah episode. Not least of which, because the scene is set at night.

Smith / Morgan / Reid / Johnson goes home to his wife.  There is a twist, but not the one I had been dreading for the previous 20 minutes; that’s the good news. The bad news is that the twist used is inadequate in two ways.  First, while it is certainly unexpected, it has absolutely zero foreshadowing.  Second, it is not even clear what happened.

Mrs. Johnson washes her hands and reaches for a towel.  The actual washing goes on a couple of beats too long, and is dwelt upon like it should have some significance. She then goes to get the towel with hands that are deliberately held as gnarled or arthritic even though she had no trouble lathering up.  She opens a drawer and removes a towel revealing lipstick and stockings hidden beneath.

Herbert says he can’t go back and tell the truth now, “no one would believe that a mother could do such a thing.”  Well, maybe if he had mentioned the mother angle to anyone.  The camera pans up to Mrs. Johnson sporting a big smile.

So, Johnson is right that the 3rd murder was a copycat.  But was it done by the girl’s mother or by the grinning Mrs. Johnson?  There is always the possibility that I am dumb as a post (or this post), but I really had to work through this to figure out what happened. Ultimately, it was a good twist, just maybe needed to be set up a little better.

UPDATE: I rewatched the episode in 2018, and reread this post.  Holy crap was I totally wrong on some things.  For the real story, as always, go to barebones ezine.

Post-Post:

  • [1] Actually, this blog is pro-police.  This is just an example of how easy it is to take cheap shots.
  • [2] Actually, looking at this 3 years later, he suggested no such thing.
  • AHP Deathwatch: Jackie Loughery and James Westmoreland are still with us.
  • Jackie Loughery (the awesomely-named Slats) was not only Miss USA in 1952, she was married to Jack Webb.
  • Hulu sucks.

Twilight Zone S4 – The Thirty-Fathom Grave (01/10/63)

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South Pacific Ocean, 1963.  The number on the Destroyer’s bow is 944, but a life preserver shows the number 946.  Guess if you’re drowning it wouldn’t make much difference to you.

30fathomgrave02

The bridge crew is kind of an all-star cast depending on how you define star — The Incredible Hulk (not him . . . no, the other guy . . . no, the other other guy . . . no, before him), Kolchak‘s editor, Panicky Pete from The Corbomite Maneuver and Gomer Pyle’s commanding officer.

Captain Beecham goes below to have a chat with the Chief Bos’n’s Mate about the missing letters in his title.  If I ever had a opportunity to use the word fo’c’sle, this would be it.  But I got nothing.

Beacham is sympathetic toward the CBM, which is surprising as Simon Oakland usually portrays hotheads.  Chief Bell is distracted for reasons tied to a mysterious object that the ship’s sonar has located the titular 30 fathoms below.  Even more strange, is a metallic clanging that seems to be coming from the object.  Even more stranger, it is audible to other crew-members who are not listening to the sonar.  This is too much for Chief Bell who passes out on the deck.

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Bell is not the only one affected. The rapping causes the other sailors to gaze lovingly into their crew-mates’ eyes.

Beacham orders diver McClure to go down to investigate.  McClure is lowered over the side in a suit that looks like Captain Nemo would have used it (I don’t know, maybe it was state of the art in 1963).  While on the ocean floor, McClure hears the rapping which sounds like a retired New York City cop banging on the inside of the hull near the propeller shaft.

McClure reports back that he bets his life there is someone inside that sub.  He says the sub seems to be — tee hee — stuck in deep, but not tight.  In some blatant padding that the hour-long Thriller seemed not to resort to, Beacham orders McClure to dive again.  McClure sees a 714 on the hull and the Captain finds it registered as a sub which sank in the area 20 years earlier.

30fathomgrave06This is the most offensive rapping Bell has heard from a vehicle without spinning rims.  At first it just causes a restlessness in him, and later he is actually seeing ghostly images of crewmates who died when he was the sole survivor of a sinking ship. They seem to be beckoning him to join them.

Beacham still thinks there might be someone in the sub.  He proposes “kicking the door in” apparent forgetting that it is under water, under great pressure, and metal.  One of his officers reminds him of these facts and he opts to radio the fleet for a rescue vehicle instead.  This is really a bonehead comment by the otherwise intelligent Captain.  I suspect it was more padding to get this episode up to an hour.

Still running short, Serling — I mean, Beacham — sends McClure down for a third time to investigate the rapping.  If only there were some sort of code that could be used to communicate through the sounds.  McClure surfaces and shows the captain a set of dogtags that he found below — with Chief Bell’s name on them.

30fathomgrave09Beacham confronts Bell with the tags.  Bell says he lost them 20 years ago when his sub sank — the one now below them.  He made a mistake with a light filter and the Japs sank the sub, leaving only Bell as the survivor. Now the crew is calling him to join them.  Wracked with guilt, he escapes the sick bay and dives into the ocean.

Rather than anyone diving in after him, or even tossing out the mis-numbered life preserver, the ship seems to scramble everyone in the crew and at a glacier’s pace lowers a boat full of men to pursue him . . . very sloooowly lowers them.

McClure takes a forth trip down and actually enters the sub.  There was a loose piece of equipment that could have made the clanging.  Or maybe it was the sailor who died with a hammer in his hand.

This was a fine episode that would have made a great 30-minute Twilight Zone.  Or, dare I say it, the variable Night Gallery length would have served it well.  It looks great, being filmed on an actually ship instead of the cardboard sets we sometimes get.  The performances are uniformly — ha! — great, especially from the surprisingly compassionate Captain and the tortured Chief.

Despite the bloat, I give it 25 fathoms.

Post-Post:

  • This one reminds me of one of the all-time great concepts for a movie.  In Goliath Awaits, a ship sinks and somehow the passengers manage to seal out the water, manufacture oxygen and survive under the sea for years.  I’ve admired this plot for decades, but somehow never got around to watching the movie.  There’s no way it could live up to my expectations.  Oh crap, all 3 hours of it are on YouTube.
  • I saw the credit for Lee Helmsman and thought it was the character’s name, or maybe a reversal of e.g. Helmsman Sulu; or like Minnie Driver.  But apparently it is a thing.
  • Coincidence that the Chief’s name is Bell, and the rescue equipment would be a bell.  There is no real point, so it is just an unnecessary distraction.