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Tales From the Crypt – Food for Thought (10/06/93)

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tftcfoodthought12Tales From the Crypt’s visits to the carny have not been very successful for me.  From Lower Berth to Dig that Cat, they just fall flat.  Maybe that’s because carnivals have too much natural overlap with the cruel, campy narrative that a good episode should have.  You can go over the top, but you can’t go over the big-top.

Or maybe I am uncharacteristically on the fence over the exploitation of people who are different.  Say what you will about society’s treatment of the bearded lady, she ain’t laying on a couch collecting unemployment and becoming the fat lady.  The market has spoken.

Under the opening credits, we get a great unbroken shot of a midget with a withered arm, a midget playing an accordion, a giant, a gorilla in a dress, coupla topless floozies, a clown, a strongman, a tattooed guy, more midgets, a bearded lady and finally ending up 2 minutes later on the very interesting pixie-haired noggin of Carnie Connie (Joan Chen).

tftcfoodthought04Zambini is yelling at Connie to let him into her mind for a little light reading. She can read his mind, but he wants to liven up the act.  After frying up a flaming dinner and chowing down, Zambini tells her he wants some “desert, the kind that only Connie can give.”  It is a little disconcerting that while she is hearing his lurid thought, his Gene Simmonsesque tongue is licking his plate.  More disconcerting, he is salaciously licking the china while psychically broadcasting his desires — is this a subtle un-PC joke on the Chinese Ms. Chen?  If so, I kind of have to say kudos.  Anyhoo, he gets his wish and we see that she doubles as a sword-swallower.

In the next show, she demonstrates that she is genuinely psychic.  She should be playing the bigger rooms; or at least the bigger tents.  After the show she wants to hang out with the other acts, but Zambini orders her back to his wagon.  Things get a little too melodramatic as the fire-eater stands up for her.  She sneaks out to hook up with him, but her orgasmic thoughts are broadcast back to Zambini, who hears her thoughts for the first time.

tftcfoodthought14We are treated to the Siamese Twins in the shower and see that they are joined at the breasts.  Interesting, but frankly they took the trouble to cast sisters and talked them into getting naked.  Mucking up their naughty bits with hokey make-up was not a good use of that resource; the hip would have been fine.  However it is a nice bit as one of the midgets sneaks under the door.  More kudos for the sound effect was he wipes his goggles clean (see, it really doesn’t take much to make me happy).

Connie has decided to escape with the fire-eater.  Zambini psychically hears her plan. That night, he dowses the fire-eater with gasoline and lights him up.  Connie sees the burnt body and runs back to the wagon to pack.

That night, Zambini gets boozed up and tries to psychically summon Connie back to the wagon. He hears, “I hear you, I’m coming.”  Then he hears up on the rooftop, click click click [1].  He sees movement through the skylight, then a body drops through the glass to the floor — it is the gorilla.  It is the gorilla’s inside voice saying, “this is for you, Johnny Fire-eater.”  In no time, he has the top of Zambini’s head off like Ray Liotta in Hannibal and is chowing down on brains.

tftcfoodthought19It was the gorilla’s mind that Zambini had been reading.  Johnny Fire-Eater had been nice to the gorilla, so she was jealous of Connie and fur-ious when Zambini killed him.

There is a great idea here, and the performers and sets are all pretty great.  The direction and an overly melodramatic score, however, brutally undermine the episode. Even at about 20 minutes (excluding the Cryptkeeper, as I do) it drags despite its many assets.

Post-Post:

  • [1] What exactly was making that click click click noise?  Is there an alternate ending where Herbie wants to be a tap-dancer?
  • Title Analysis: It really only makes sense in the last few seconds of the episode, and even then it would be more on-target if reversed.
  • I enjoyed seeing Kathryn Howell and Margaret Howell in the opening credits.  I’ve never heard of them, but I deduced immediately that they would play Siamese Twins.  It made me feel smart, like Sherlock Holmes.  The game is a 3rd foot, Watson!
  • Sadly unable to work in a Zamboni reference.

Tales of Tomorrow – Test Flight (10/26/52)

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tottestflight01After a brief diversion to CARE last week, we are back to being sponsored by wrist-band king Jacques Kreisler.  Featured this week, the men’s Monte Cristo which is packaged in the barrel of a gun, perfect for air travel (and fabulous served with red currant jelly).  For the ladies, they feature the Flirtation — styled “from the times of Madame Pompadour” so you too can look like an 18th century French whore.

CEO Wayne Crowder is arguing with company controller Davis about his expensive plan to build a spaceship.  He shows this detailed map of his route to Davis and displays a Sharptonesque grasp of the written word, “what we’ll do on the first test flight, break out of the . . . the . . . this . . . into the stratosphere.”  Really, he couldn’t have just guessed either “troh-po” or “trop-po”?  Or showed up sober for rehearsal?

tottestflight11Eager to show off how how much better his SAT math score was than his verbal, he pulls out another chart that maps his planned Velocity per Second versus Light Years.  The trip to Mars is is about 34,000,000 miles, and one light year is 36,000,000,000,000 miles.  I’m no Norman Einstein, but I’m not sure why he has scaled the chart to 11 Light Years.  And how that would only take 7 seconds.

His chief engineer tells him the initial costs for the rocket will be over $500 million.  And this is in 1952 when $500 million meant something. We get stock footage of production, scrap metal being salvaged, trains running.  Crowder places an ad in the paper:  “$100,000 for man to fly me into space.”

tottestflight02After $20M is spent and he still doesn’t have an engine for his rocket, Davis tells him that he should think what will happen to the smaller stockholders.  Crowder gives his detailed plan of how he will pull off this amazing feat of engineering: “I’ve never failed and I won’t start now.”  This guy should be running for president.

The engineer then brings in Mr. Wilkins, a man who can design the engine for his rocket.  Wilkins has brought no blueprints or designs.  He says his concept will use magnets.  Opposite poles attract, similar poles repel.  The Roarkian designer is less interested in being paid than being able to build the spaceship.  He does however insist on a few things.  There will be no questioning of his design, and he gets to be on the flight.

As Crowder builds his rocket, the press labels it Crowder’s Folly and his company’s board tries to stop the project.  When Wilkins tells Crowder that he will need $100M of Mercurium to fuel the ship, Crowder vows to get it.

Eventually, the ship is completed.  On the day it is to lift off, the newspaper headline is WALL STREET LABELS ROCKET “CROWDER’S FOLLY” which is exactly the same headline it had months before.  Or maybe the paper has just been laying around for a few months.  Crowder admits that to fund his folly he fraudulently “over-subscribed the stock” and stupidly paid with a credit card so the subscription automatically renewed.

tottestflight10Wilkins and Crowder board the ship and strap into chairs in the absurdly cavernous cockpit — the engineer in Alien had a tighter capsule.  Once they are in the stratosphere (having passed that other sphere) Wilkins gives the OK to unfasten the safety belts and move freely about the cavern.  This was, after all, only the titular test flight.  Crowder proclaims it a success and tells Wilkins to head back to Earth so he can start work on another $500M ship capable of reaching Mars even though he has committed stock fraud, and pissed away more of other people’s investments than the Clinton Foundation.  Wilkins informs him that this ship is going to Mars.

Crowder overpowers Wilkins and tries to change course.  Wilkins has frozen the controls and says that he is “going home to Mars.”  Crowder wanted to build an empire on Mars, Wilkins just wanted to go home.  As Crowder watches, Wilkins transforms into an alien.  Well, technically he was an alien the entire time; now he no longer species-identifies as a human.

A little disappointing as the world was not destroyed as it was in the first 2 episodes.  Still, for all the hammy acting, live TV mishaps, cheap sets, and cheesy organ music it is very enjoyable.

Test Flight is a success.

Post-Post:

  • Lee J. Cobb was #3 of the titular 12 Angry Men.  I’d like to see a sequel called 1 Happy as Shit Man starring the clearly guilty psychopath that Henry Fonda is responsible for setting free to terrorize his neighborhood and those who testified against him.  Snitches get stitches, bitches.
  • I’m not sure if Mercurium is a real thing.  The only other reference is in Star Trek Voyager, also as a spaceship fuel.

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Handler (10/27/92)

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Ibradbury02‘m in the final stretch of RBT and I feel like Quint waiting in the water to board the rescue ship.  Viewing the series has often been torturous (but never tortuous; also, no tortoises); having the end in sight should be a relief but is causing some anxiety — like I’ll get to the last episode and someone will discover another season of lost episodes in their attic.

This episode does, at least, get off to a promising start as we see the always amusing but criminally under-used Michael J. Pollard.  He is the soul-proprietor [1] of a mortuary and small graveyard.  He is ringing the chapel-bell [2] and turns it up to 13 only to be busted by a kid outside who also has too much time on his hands.

Later that day, he shakes hands with a yokel who says he has a cold hand, must have just embalmed a frigid woman.  So he imagines the man dead.  A clerk in a store hassles him to speak up, so he imagines her dead.  Six minutes in, I’m imagining me dead.

rbthandler02Back at work, he puts on Toccata and Fugue in D Minor and starts talking to his clients. Pollard enjoys punking them before they are buried.  He bakes a gluttonous fat woman into a cake.  He injects black ink into the body of a racist.  He removes the head from a muscular man so he can have his head sewn onto it someday.  It’s not clear if that is intended to be a joke.

One of the stiffs turns out to have been merely pining for the fjords.  Because he heard Pollards confessions, he is killed.  That night — which is dark, as nights are wont to be, and stormy — shadowy figures come for Pollard.

The next morning, one of the yokels discovers blood on a tombstone and asks, “What kind of storm was that last night?”  Spoken without any humor or irony, it is just another example of why Bradbury should have outsourced the screenplays.  Pollard’s name is also scrawled on all of the tombstones in his cemetery.  One of the yokels makes the profoundly stupid statement, “He couldn’t possibly be buried under all these tombstones.”

rbthandler04“Couldn’t he?” says the kid.

I get that Bradbury was great stylist of the prose in a short story, but the man had a George Lucasian grasp of dialogue.  I keep telling myself that he was born in a different time, and wondering if maybe the small town America he grew up in was really accurately reflected in his stories.

 

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Death Sentence (04/27/58)

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Norman and Paula Frayne are in bed — or rather, they are in separate twin beds as all couples were in the 50’s (hence the title Death Sentence).  Paula is noticeably 10 years older than Norman. Apparently Hitch didn’t get the Hollywood memo that when a woman is at least 5 years older, she is to play the man’s mother.

ahpdeathsentence02Norman is worried about a contract he lost at his real estate office.  As the contract was won by a realtor named Kennedy, he should just be thankful he’s still alive.  But I’m a little baffled how he works at Frayne Real Estate which his wife’s father owned.  He is pretty wimpy — did he take his wife’s name when they married?  I suppose the correct answer is that he inherited the firm and renamed it after himself, but that seems an unlikely move for his wimpy character.

Touchy-Feely!

The next morning at the office, he is surprised by a visit from an old pal. Norman had committed a robbery with Al Revnel, but only Al had been caught.  He did not rat out Norman who spent 12 years in the can as he was charged with murdering the night watchman. You never hear about day watch-men being killed — that seems like the better career move.  Al figures $50,000 should make things even between them, and keep him from implicating Norman.  As that would be $413,000 today, that would shut me up too.

Well, he did keep Norman out of prison.  And the vermicelli-spined (and not even al dente) Norman would have made first season Beecher look like sixth season Beecher.

Touchy-Feely!

Al is one of those bullies who likes to touch his victim’s face and get very handsy with them.  He tells Norman to call Paula and tell them he is coming to live with them.  He also calls Norman “buddy-boy” about 400 times in 25 minutes. The first month, he milks Norman for $800 of advances.  He also likes to drop in to have lunch with Paula every day while Norman is at work.

Norman actually shows about 25% of a gonad and forces a confron-tation; although with Paula, not Al.  She says their rondevouzes [1] are very innocent. Apparently Al is feeling Norman up more than he is Paula.  She says she is going to go on a trip to Detroit with a gal-pal.  As this is 1958, she stands a pretty good chance of coming back.  Norman thinks she might be sneaking off with Al so he buys  some dynamite and wires up his car.

Touchy-Feely!

Paula hears an explosion, and the twist is that it wasn’t Al who was in the explosion — Norman killed himself.  Kind of anti-climactic.  Al goes back to jail for life for violat-ing his parole by leaving the state. Twelve years for murdering an innocent man, but make the state look bad, and it’s LIFE buddy-boy!

Post-Post:

  • [1] The plural of rondezvous is also rendezvous, but you pronounce the “s”.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  James Best made it until this year.  Probably best known as Rosco P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard.  He also starred in Jess-Belle.
  • I was watching The Walking Dead on a second screen at the same time as AHP — Does the Dos Equis slogan make any sense at all?  Isn’t “Stay Thirsty” telling people to not drink their beer?  Their “Most Interesting Man in the World” is about as interesting as a Rothko painting.
  • Hulu sucks.

Touchy-Feely!

Twilight Zone S4 – In His Image (01/03/63)

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tzinhisimage02At 4:30 am, Alan Talbot strolls out of his hotel.  It is a great location because he walks to the subway, goes down to the platform, and it is still 4:30.  He starts feeling woozy and hears electrical sounds.  The only other person in the station — a crazy cat lady with no cats — starts preaching to him, so he throws her in the path of the oncoming train.  It must be the Express, because it ain’t stopping.

His gal-pal Jessica is in her apartment when Alan comes to the door.  After a little goofy repartee about being a Junior Woodchuck, she invites him in.  He is astounded to learn he is 45 minutes late.  He was supposed to be there at 5:00 a.m. to take Jessica to meet his Aunt Mildred for the first time.  After a lengthy 4-day courtship, they are going to get married.

tzinhisimage03They arrive in Alan’s hometown of Coeurville and he begins pointing out the landmarks to Jessica.  He has only been away from home for a week, but his memory is a little spotty.  He doesn’t recognize some buildings, remembers a restaurant where there never has been one, goes to the wrong house expecting his aunt, and points out an empty field where he remembers his office being.

He goes to find his parents . . . at the cemetery.  In their plots he discovers a tombstone for Walter and Mary Ryder.  On the way back of town, Alan jumps out of the car and sends Jessica away for her own protection as the electronic noises overwhelm his brain.  Having second thoughts, he runs out into the road where he is hit by another car. The accident leaves a gash on his arm, exposing electronic circuitry.

tzinhisimage06Looking through a phonebook (a very thick object made of dead trees and containing phone numbers), he finds the name and address of Walter Ryder Jr.  At the Ryder house — as in every show I’ve posted about — Alan feels free to let himself in and explore the house.  He is surprised by Ryder who turns on the lights.  He is surprised again as Ryder looks exactly like him.  Ryder tells him, “You’re a machine, Alan!” — words he longed to hear from Jessica.

Ryder tells Alan how he dreamed as a kid of “building the perfect artificial man, not a robot, a duplicate human being.  Why he chose himself as the template rather than Marilyn Monroe or some other 60’s babe is a topic for discussion.  Sadly, Alan blew a gasket, attacked Ryder with a pair of scissors and fled the house a week ago.

tzinhisimage05Ryder takes him downstairs to his “birthplace” in the basement.  He shows Alan a couple of other spare Alans that were factory rejects.

Ryder is kind of a loser, but he does come up with a pretty good plan.  Someone with Alan’s face shows up at Jessica’s apartment.

There is a sly humor to the episode which is a sure sign Serling didn’t write it.  Some of it is slightly absurdist as when Alan points out the empty field where he works.  George Grizzard is quite good at delivering scenes like that, although he doesn’t get a lot of support from Gail Kobe as Jessica.  She comes off as a little desperate, and I don’t mean her character.