Ray Bradbury Theater – Zero Hour (S5E2)

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bradbury02Memory: Read as a kid and remember being disappointed at the unsatisfying conclusion.

It is morning in a sunny cul-de-sac dotted with McMansions and a poorly placed park where the kids play, but is impossible to get to without crossing a street.

Pinked-hatted ten (?) year old Mink (Katharine Isabelle (Torment, American Mary, and the almost homonymic Ginger Snaps)), is elated when she finds what the kids have been searching for.

Inside, Mink’s mother Mary Morris is having a work-at-home Saturday.  She gets a call on her futuristic (in 1992) 27-inch picture-phone from her husband — a great technology allowing people on opposite sides of the earth to communicate visually in real-time.  He is calling her from the kitchen, though, so not really a great use of the tech.  He too has to work, and goes to his office.

rbtzerohour17The kids huddle around a spot in the park.  All at once, they scatter to their homes and begin collecting a seemingly random pile of items — spoons, colanders, camera tripods, cheese graters, pliers, etc.  Mink’s mom asks what kind of game these items are for and Mink says, “Invasion!” as she runs out.

The kids reassemble in the park and Mink takes the lead in putting the parts together.  A couple of older boys, maybe 13, start to be dicks in the way only 13 year old boys can be.  And 13 year old girls.  Also older boys and girls.  And most grown-ups too, for that matter.  Mink tells them they are too big to understand and they should beat it.

MInk’s mother has the TV on and the big news is that no country now has possession of any nuclear weapons.  They are all being held by an organization called Earth Mutual Defense.  Meanwhile her daughter is outside telepathically receiving instructions, words and formulas that she doesn’t comprehend.

rbtzerohour14Mink is called in for lunch.  She runs in, grabs a hexagonal cookie cutter, and runs out again.  She says it is for her new friend Drill.  Her mother is impressed at all the big words Drill seems to know.  Mink, not exactly tight-lipped tells her mother that Drill has a plan to use kids to invade earth because adults are too busy to notice.

Mary gets another call on the picture phone, from her sister on the other coast.  Her little boy is also looking for a hexagon and mentions his friend Drill.  Mary hears a scream and goes outside to check on the kids.  Apparently one of the girls has gotten to old for the game during lunch, and starts crying as she realizes what is happening.

Mink starts a gyroscope spinning on her hand, and in a few seconds, it just disappears. After seeing that, Mary starts to worry and runs back inside.  When her husband gets home, she frantically drags him up to the attic and locks the door.  He naturally thinks his wife is crazy — and not just from the insane hair-do she has had the whole episode — until he hears a lot of footsteps downstairs.

Footsteps.  A little humming sound.  The attic lock melted.  The door opened.  Mink peered inside, tall blue shadows behind her.  “Peekaboo,” said Mink.

rbtzerohour33That is the end of the short story which underwhelmed me long ago.

It worked much better for me this time around as I absorbed the entire story and not just the last three words.  The episode follows the short story almost exactly, a rarity with no padding and nothing significant left out.  One of RBT’s best.

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  • First published in Planet Stories, Fall 1947.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Deadly (S3E11)

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ahpdeadly01This takes place back in the old days when all women were housewives.   And they go to the train station to pick up their hat-wearing husbands after their train commute from the city.

On the way home, Margot tells her husband they have a leak in the water heater in the basement.  He says he will take a look at it.  It was back when men did that too, rather than just calling a plumber.

Margot is cooking dinner when her husband comes up from the basement.  She asks if he got it fixed, and he says, “No, it’s too dark down there to see what’s wrong.  I guess you’ll have to call a plumber.”  So what he really needs isn’t a plumber, it’s an electrician. Or a flashlight.  I take it back — this guy is not the handiest of men.

He also tells her to get an estimate, “and if it’s more that $10, he can forget it.”  I got nothin’.  That’s just mind-boggling.

The next morning, the doorbell rings.  Just like June Cleaver, she already has her pearls on by 9:30 am.  She looks out the window and sees the truck for Mike Staley Plumbing & Heating.  She opens the door and somehow seems surprised that her visitor is the plumber . . . who she called . . . and whose truck she just saw.

ahpdeadly13He makes way too much small talk with Margot, all smiles and charm. He is a little too familiar, guessing her husband’s salary and calling a neighbor by her first name.  After a few minutes in the basement, he tells Margot that he has to go upstairs to shut off the water in the bathroom to equalize the pressure, “that’s the trouble with the Stetson Valve, otherwise, they’re very good.”  I have a feeling he might just as well said he needed to get a Langstrom 7″ Gangly Wrench and Margot and I would both have been just as clueless.

She finds him admiring some artwork in the bedroom over the bed.  He compliments her taste on furniture, bedspreads, everything.  She is creeped out by this guy.  He picks up her nightie off a chair and compliments that too.

He comes back downstairs and after admiring the kitchen and house, he gives her an estimate of $500.  Extrapolating from the estimated $10 plumber’s bill, that would be $12 million in today’s dollars.  He explains that the exorbitant estimate is for him to keep his trap shut.  If people heard him talking about her bedroom, the artwork over the bed, the fancy bedspread, the pink negligee, they might get the wrong idea.

He also points out that his truck has been outside her house for two hours just to give an estimate for a leaky valve — what must the neighbors think?  That he’s getting paid by the hour, for one thing.

When he returns for the money, Margot has assembled all the housewives of whatever county this is.  He has blackmailed all of them and now they want their revenge.  He has spent all their money, so they start lining up jobs he can do to work off the debt, or they will call the police.  He whines, “but that’s blackm . . . .”.

Luckily for him, he is a pretty good looking guy, so some of these dames might ask him to lay some pipe.  Another corpse-less episode, but a fun story with good performances.

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  • AHP Deathwatch:  Coupla live ones.
  • Title Analysis:  The Deadly?  Hunh?  There are no deaths or even any threats of violence.

Night Gallery – Deliveries in the Rear (S2E19)

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ngdeliveries06On a very foggy night, we see a horse-drawn wagon go to the medical college with a delivery, where they take it in the rear.

Inside, Dr. Fletcher is teaching a surgical class using a cadaver.   He spots his student Mr. Tuttle getting a little pale looking at the cadaver.  Fletcher points out that the cadaver has been cut open and sewn back together many times here to save lives.  This additional information does nothing to settle Tuttle, who faints.  This reaction to routine surgical procedures is where urologists come from.

He gets a message that there is a new delivery in the titular rear.  He can tell that the body has been dead three weeks and not passed through a mortician’s hands.  He tells the men to go back and bury it where they found it.  The next corpse is much fresher — just a couple of hours dead.  He is not so uppity about the provenance on this piece of meat, so he gives them $50.

At his fiance Barbara’s house, her father questions where Fletcher is getting his cadavers.  Fletcher responds with a Clintonian dodge that he needs these bodies to teach young surgeons who will save many lives in their career.  He draws a pretty fine line between the grave-robbers and actually robbing the graves himself.  Besides, he claims, the bodies are always bums.  Fletcher says he puts them to work and give them a purpose.  They are a net benefit to society for the first time in their . . . er, life.

Going into the college the next day, he is accosted by an old woman who says he has her husband Charlie in there.  His day gets no  better when he sees the headmaster Dr. Shockman.  He asks for some assurance that Fletcher is not using grave-robbers.

Fletcher dodges the question, saying that he doesn’t ask questions.  The old lady talked to Shockman also, and the headmaster says the police will be called if Charlie’s body is found in the college.

ngdeliveries12Fletcher places a special order for a dead female from his procurers to be sure Shockman can find no male cadavers on the premises.  It is too cold to dig,so his thugs kill a woman to fill the order.  Hmmmm, special order, short notice, must be female, cold weather . . . $100 for this one; which Fletch forks over.

He lectures the class that the questioning of where the cadavers come from is misplaced.  No individual life is of consequence if it contributes to the saving of many lives.

He changes his tune; more of a scream than a tune, really, as he uncloaks today’s specimen and it is his fiance.

ngdeliveries15A nice piece, well cast and directed.  I just felt like there was something missing to link his fiance to the grave-robbers.  Maybe if she had just mentioned talking a walk in a dangerous part of town when Fletcher was visiting.  As it is, we are left to wonder, did these thugs just break into her house and snatch her?  And why her specifically?

 

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  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  Marjorie Bennett (3), Peter Brocco (2,) Ian Wolfe (1), Walter Burke (1).

The Corpse on the Grating – Hugh B. Cave

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pulpgrating01Last story of the Pulp Fiction Megapack.  Number XXV of XXV.

Dale and the mysterious M.S. have been summoned to the home of Professor Daimler.  He tells them of his efforts and failure at bringing a dead body back to life.

I assume Daimler will return because that scene was a big fat nothing.  Returning from the Professor’s home, they pass a large dark warehouse, made more frightening by the corpse clinging to the iron door.  He appears to have died of horror.  M.S. fancies himself a reader of dead minds.  He divines that there is something terrible about Room 4167 in the warehouse.  When Dale scoffs, M.S. offers him £100 if he will spend the night in that room — a trope we’ve seen before.

That night, Dale enters the building with M.S.’s assistance and climbs the stairs in search of room 4167.  Once in the dark 4167, he fortuitously finds a flashlight.  He does end up seeing something that horrifies him, and M.S. has an explanation.

Really, though, it is so uninteresting that it deserves to be at the ass-end of a $.99 anthology of 25 stories.

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  • First published in Astounding Stories of Super-Science, February 1930.  Entire issue available here, but why would ya?
  • Also that month: Pluto discovered.