Tales from the Crypt – In the Groove (12/21/94)

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The episode was the director’s only credit.  It was co-written by a guy with only one other credit.  It starred an actress with only 4 other TV credits that did not star her boyfriend.  And it was about an occupation which never translates well to the screen — radio [1]

It never had a chance, did it?  Well, yes it actually did.  The cast was rounded out by Wendie Malick and Miguel Ferrer who have both done a lot of fine work.  Unfortunately, both are stuck in roles that they are completely unsuited for.

Zapruder shot of the spittle. That is one magic loogie.

The episode begins like every TV show set in a radio station — in the dark [1].  Gary Grover is doing his radio show which is unbelievable in every way.  He is methodically narrating himself undressing a woman.  We get a close-up profile of his lips as he describes removing her shoes, her stockings, her underwear.  We are also treated to a couple of shots of spit flying out as he talks, for no reason.

The first question is, why is it dark at 8:57 in the morning?  The second is, WTF would listen to this awful show at 8:57 in the morning?  This isn’t like Howard Stern having fun interviewing porn-stars.  This is a humorless, sexual, role-playing show airing in the drive-time slot.  Is it him doing the role-playing every day?

Gary gets mad at his guest who is 1) inexplicably in the studio rather than on the phone, and 2) is a dumpy, middle aged woman totally misrepresented in the cut-away shots from Gary’s flapping lips. [2]  We learn that the 9 am on-air personality gets ten times Gary’s radio ratings, which is understandable until you see that it is Slash from Guns N’ Roses.

Gary’s sister Rita is the station manager which makes the lurid sexual nature of his show even creepier.  She is unable to fire him, so puts him on the graveyard shift and makes him take on a co-host.  He is not interested in working with her even after seeing she is a prim, hot blonde.  His new intro is:

Welcome to Grover’s Graveyard.  The show that gets you up from six feet under.

What does that even mean?  Co-host Valerie was hired at the same time as the slot change to improve the ratings.  She gets no mention in the new intro?  OK, I guess Graveyard is a reference to the time-slot.  But “six feet under” is clearly a graveyard reference, and his show has nothing to do with horror or the macabre.

Gary lethargically begins his dreadful show the same way he has always begun his sexual exploits — both on the radio and, I imagine, off — solo.  He lifelessly croaks, “Oh, you are so hot.  Can I take your shoe off?”  Do all of his monologues begin with shoes?  I can’t adequately express how truly awful Grover’s Graveyard is.  As he begins on the leg, Valerie jumps in.  Just as Rita expected, she immediately breathes life into the show,  Who would have thought sexy-talk would be better from a hot, young blonde than from an angry middle-aged bald guy?  Even Gary is energized.

Inexplicably, the next scenes have Valerie doing nothing but feeding Gary a few lines via keyboard.  After her great sexy, on-air debut she says nothing.  The script is baffling.  Gary isn’t holding her back; he is excited about the show again and sponsors are flooding back.  But she is just typing.

We do see her importance when she stops feeding him lines; he is an imbecile.  She wants the show to talk about things over than sex.  As he struggles for a topic, she suggests asking people what makes them angry.  She leads him on by typing AUTHORITY FIGURES, then MOTHER.

Gary begins ranting about his dead mother’s will.  “Did she leave me her Chicago station?  No.  Her Minneapolis station?  No.”  He says his mother only left him half of the small Lancaster station because she “wanted to keep me under her thumb even from beyond the grave”.  Or, more likely, because she didn’t want this talentless boob to bankrupt a station in a major market.  And if she hated him so much, why is his sister working in the same station?  Gary tears his mother’s watchful portrait off the wall, which was long overdue given the sexual nature of his show.

After he rants at length about his dead mother and hopes she’s in hell, Rita — apparently management also works the midnight to 6 shift — approaches the window.  She gives the finger across the throat signal.  Mom also had it in her will that no one could defame her on the air.  Rita can’t fire Gary, but does take him off the air.  This leads to a twist in the last 2 minutes that is silly, but welcome.

This is a rare TFTC with no supernatural element and thus no reason for being.  Gary and his show are so repulsive that you hate them far more than dramatically necessary.  Wendie Malick is fine, but a TFTC episode should have used her comedic chops.  The whole episode is just dreary.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Except NewsRadio and WKRP.
  • [2] Oh, you say the sexy body in the cutaways represents the radio listeners’ imagination?  Were they also rapturously imagining Gary’s big ol’ spittle-flicking lips?
  • Title Analysis:  In the Groove would only make sense if they played music on the station; and were 60 years old.

Outer Limits – What Will the Neighbors Think? (04/23/99)

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Well they roped me from the first second.  There is a jaunty little piano tune in the background and a young woman begins a voice-over.  It is so refreshing and unlike the usual Outer Limits opening that I fear the episode will not back it up.

Mona tells us she has lived in the Clarkson Arms all her life.  She admits it has seen better days, but thinks it still has charm.  Her husband Ned is pumped because he was offered his dream job managing Crazy Moe’s Electronics Superstore.  Mona refuses to move out of the Clarkson Arms, though, so he folds like Crazy Eddie’s.

Mona goes to the condo board meeting to discuss who has been buying up units as residents have been abandoning the old building.  The remaining owners are violently opposed to selling out cheap.  The cutting-off of heads is mentioned.  Uh, here’s a less radical solution:  just don’t sell.

Mona now has a cause — you know, other than crushing her husband’s dreams —  to get excited about.  She thinks maybe the mysterious buyers will not want the building if it is full of Radon, so she buys a Radon-Detection Kit.  Although, maybe she should have just bought some Radon.  While she is testing the basement, she catches her married (not to each other) neighbors Shirley and Dom banging [1] on top of the washer.  Mona backs her wheelchair into the shadows and is electrocuted.  Yeah, so I didn’t mention she was in a wheelchair.  You think that defines her?  What’s wrong with you?  Anyway, she falls out of the chair, but on the way down hears the naughty thoughts of her fornicating [2] neighbors.

She wriggles on her stomach all the way to their 3rd floor unit.  I guess she took the stairs, because how would she reach the elevator button?  Ned picks her up and carries her inside.  At the next owner’s meeting, she is able to hear everyone’s thoughts and discovers they are a bunch of neurotic, unfaithful, insecure, hateful dolts.  Concerned that their unhappiness might cause them to sell out and move out, Mona tries to help with the problems only she knows about.

Everything is easier with cash, so she asks to get in on Dom’s poker game.  The other players are resistant, but she demonstrates her knowledge of poker by reciting the winning hands in order and, after all, brought her own chair.  Heyooooo!

With her new psychic ability, she cleans the men out, but the game also exhausts the viewer.  Her reading of minds is demonstrated on-screen by filming the actors with a fish-eye lens, overlighting them, and having them speak maniacally directly to the camera.  It became tedious at the owner’s meeting, but unbearable at the poker game.  The device might have worked if used judiciously, but in some scenes the grotesque over-emoting occupies over half of the screen time.

Mona tries to set everyone’s lives on the right track.  This leads to a scene of escalating mayhem which shows signs of greatness on a Night at the Opera stateroom level.  Unfortunately, it is undermined by these repulsive characters.  Toward the end, their grotesque inner-selves are indistinguishable from their live personalities.  I just didn’t care what happened to these clowns.

That is not the end though.  There is an utterly unnecessary twist which makes no sense.

Jane Adams was perfectly cast and gives a great performance as Mona.  Every other character is so relentlessly over-the-top that they are repulsive.  The lone exception is her husband.  He is relatively normal, but I have no idea what his character is.  He appears to be unemployed, yet sits around all day in a suit.  He wants a job managing a store, but seems to be a real estate mogul.  He seems to love Mona, but has a long-existing plot to kill her.

It really is too bad the episode went off the rails.  It was fun, well-scored, and artfully directed.  It was just a chore being around these people.

Footnotes:

  • [1] Really, they named him Dom Pardo?
  • [2] I used the nice word there in honor of Outer Limits’ restraint.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard an F-bomb used in this series.  They do, however, show occasional nudity so I’m happy with the trade-off.

Science Fiction Theatre – The Long Sleep (04/13/56)

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Truman Bradley tries to teach us about hibernation by dropping a raw egg on a table versus dropping a frozen egg.  I don’t think that is a good analogy, and it irks me that he wasted an egg — that was someone’s child!  He says the principle is also true in some animals.  He shows us a cold, hibernating bear cub on the table.  Fortunately, he does not toss a conscious bear out the window to prove his point.  “This is the theme of the story you are about to see.”

Dr. Samuel Willard is checking his artificial hibernation equipment. An important patient is being brought in with massive infections, a temperature of 107, and the worst case of hypertrichosis John has ever seen.  Hey wait, that’s Jambi the Orangutan from the local zoo!

John asks if hibernation can be used although it is not clear why.  Hibernation will cool him down, but with a little hat and bowtie, he’s already the coolest orangutan in town.  It would halt the infection, but it not cure him.  Dr. Willard says he has only ever tried the procedure on squirrels and hedgehogs.  He agrees to try, but does not expect success.

They put Jambi into a coffin-like box filled with ice which will 1) chill him down to 80 degrees, and 2) be very convenient if this doesn’t work out.  When he gets down to 81, Willard tells Ruth it is close enough for gorilla work and to stop the chilling.  But since he is buried in ice, how is she going to stop the temp . . . oh, nevermind.

Jambi had been given 12 hours to live, but 24 hours later Jambi is still alive and his body is fighting the disease.  WTH?  Truman Bradley just said infections are stopped during hibernation.  Maybe this is more like an induced coma . . . too easy. [1]

After one more day, they revive him.  Dr. Willard gives him the banana test.  He figures if Jambi eats it he will be OK.  Success!  The town rejoices and the newspaper headlines return to calling President Eisenhower a fascist imbecile.  Willard is a smart guy, though; he cautions his family it will take many more years of research, studies, tests, patents, and government funding to make this single achievement a success.

That night, Willard is shocked to get a call asking him to repeat the procedure on . . . a gorilla.  OMG!  Wait, another freakin’ monkey?  Well it does worry him that it is a step closer to man.  He gets over it quickly, and goes to his lab that night.  The caller shows up with a gorilla with the worst case of alopecia he has ever seen.  Oh, wait, it is a boy, not a gorilla.

Mr. Barton does not care about Dr. Willard’s protests that the procedure is not yet safe for a human.  Willard punches him out and calls the cops.  Barton says if Willard calls the police, his wife and son will die.  Barton has kidnapped them.

Willard puts the boy into the icy hibernation chamber.  The next morning he is alive, but with a week heartbeat.  You know, like you might get from hypothermia since humans can’t hibernate.  But he has lasted longer than his previous doctor expected, so it is all good so far.   Ruth comes in and they determine the kid has a kidney infection.  For the next 4 days, the kid is hooked up to an artificial kidney.

Blah blah blah.  There is a subplot where Barton is going to see Willard’s wife each day to deliver her insulin only as long as Willard cooperates.  Even with this extra wrinkle, the episode is just deadly dull.  Dick Foran as Willard is laughably bad in some scenes.  Some blame is due to the director, but his performance often feels like a silent movie.  A few times, the director has him speak directly to the camera in an extreme close-up.  Despite the sound, I expected a title card to pop up.

John Doucette as Barton was just loathsome.  I guess he was supposed to be.  But he should have also had a bit of humanity as he was doing this to save his son.

There are silences, deliberate line readings, sluggish dialog, just about every problem you can think of.  This is an episode that had potential — a scientific (if implausible) theory, a guy getting punched out, blackmail, a wife who could be killed at any time, an orangutan, and Ruth the smokin’ hot assistant.

After a promising start in Season 2, this is just a bomb.  Not the bomb, just a bomb.

Footnotes:

  • [1] Once again, reading this later, I don’t know what this means.  The episode was inducing a coma for me?  Was that the titular long sleep?

 

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Escape to Sonoita (06/26/60)

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Bill Davis (Burt Reynolds) and his father Andy are rolling through the middle of nowhere in an old truck with Max Bell Oil Co. on the side.  Around the spot where the 10,000th condo has now blighted the area, they come to a stop with the engine overheating.

While they wait for the truck to cool down, they drink from a couple of giant bags of mostly water.  This does not cool down Bill, who is belly-aching constantly but maybe the water keeps his father from committing filicide.  Bill complains about the heat, the crummy truck, and his father not even painting over the previous owner’s logo.  He also admits he has a new job beginning Monday.

Andy says, “Looks like dust back there on the road” which is not exactly a revelation on a dirt road.  A car appears through the dust and runs off the road where their truck stopped.   34 year old Harry Dean Stanton jumps out appearing pretty much like he would 19 years later in Alien — looking 53 years old.  Other similarities to future HDS: sweaty, wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a dopey hat, submissive to another man, and dumb as a rock.  His fast-talking partner Murray Hamilton (Marsh) is wearing a black suit & tie in the blazing desert, and still is the brains of the gang.

The Davises generously offer them some water while Bill checks out their car.  He sees two problems — the driveshaft is broken and there is a woman tied up in the backseat.  Andy recognizes her as Stephanie Thomas, a kidnap victim he heard about.  Now Marsh pulls out his pistol.  Andy asks why they don’t just take the $100,000 ransom and leave the girl.  They got the ransom and kept the girl?  Well, these kidnappers are just bad eggs.

As Stephanie begs for water, Lemon teases her with the bag.  Bill is disgusted by his cruelty and lunges for him.  That is when Marsh reveals that he and Lemon have only three bullets between them.  So maybe this gang has no brains.

Marsh tells Lemon to get the $100,000 out of the car and put it in the truck.  Lemon suggests they take the truck and trade it in for a car.  Yeah, you have $850k in 2018 dollars — take a stolen truck you don’t have the title to and try to trade it in.  It’s 1960, just go buy a new Thunderbird for $4k, dumbass!

The truck has cooled down enough to drive, so Marsh and Lemon (is it a joke that they both have such moist names?) take it, leaving Andy, Bill and Stephanie to die in the desert.  Andy says he lied to them, it is only 25 miles back to town.  The two guys suddenly become McGyvers as they drink the water from the radiator [3], convert a spare tire inner-tube into a water-bag, and create a signal fire by using gas from the tank to set the backseat cushions on fire.  Unlike the previous dumbbells would have done, I suspect, they remove the cushions from the car first.

The dilapidated truck is soon found by the cops.  This thing makes the truck in Duel look like the Snowman’s Kenworth.  Stephanie is taken to the hospital and the Davis boys pursue the gangstas with the cops.  Happily, they find the kidnappers have died — Lemon by a gunshot, and Marsh somehow died of thirst in about an hour.  Thus the state of California has saved millions of dollars, and Stephanie’s family will get back, ummmm — let’s take a look at these cops — about $60,000.

There is a twist and, in a completely arbitrary editorial choice, I will not spoil it. Maybe because I didn’t see it coming.  But it is refreshing.

Burt Reynolds, in his 3rd year of TV, did not seem like an inevitable movie star yet, but was perfectly fine.  James Bell had an easier role as his father and sold it well, seeming oddly familiar to me as a calm dad dealing with his hothead son.  Harry Dean Stanton was born 80 years old and mumbling.  I don’t think he was a good actor; we just needed a Harry Dean Stanton and he filled in for 60 years.  I like Murray Hamilton more every time I see him.  Before started this project, I only knew him as the mayor in Jaws, but he is always fun.

So a fine story, interesting complete lack of indoor sets, real locations, good performances and a fun twist.  It is easy to take AHP for granted, but one day it will be gone.  And if the Season 6 box set doesn’t get a lot cheaper, it will be soon. [2]

Footnotes:

  • Venetia Stevenson (Stephanie) went on to be a script reader for Burt Reynolds’ production company, presumably guiding him to such triumphs as Navajo Joe and Operation CIA. [1]  She was also Axl Rose’s mother-in-law.  Wait, what?
  • AHP Deathwatch:  Burt Reynolds died last year.  Veneta Stevenson, 22 in this episode, is still with us.
  • [1] That’s a cheap shot as those were among his first films.  Later, though, he did have a Chevy Chasian instinct for choosing the wrong movie nearly every time.
  • [2] What the hell?  Season 6 is twice the cost of the earlier seasons.  Season 7 is not even available in the US.  The Alfred Hitchcock Hour seems similarly inaccessible.  Clearly Hollywood is tired of people asking why TV can’t be this good again and are disappearing AHP from existence.
  • [3] Do not try this at home; it may kill or blind you.  Plus, you have a sink right there!

Twilight Zone – Cat and Mouse (03/04/89)

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The title is clever, referring to a tom-cat of a man and a mousey young woman.  Unfortunately, it sets up an expectation for an episode of suspense and thrills.  This is not that, and that is not this.  But it works out.

Narrator:  “Andrea Moffit longs for true love.  A man who is strong, handsome, and exotic.”  Maybe she should have longed for a cinematographer.  The first shots are of her dressed in white and and a man dressed in white standing in a white room.  OK, you might say she is very shy and this is symbolic of her desire to blend into the background unnoticed.  But the guy is a pharmacist — they are so extroverted they insist on standing 6 inches over you in the store.  It’s just a poor choice.

Carl asks her out, but she shyly says she is busy that night.  Her friend Elaine tells her she can’t afford to be picky and that Carl is a good catch.  But Elaine is also downing a handful of pilfered downers (and justifiably so) at the time, so she might not be the best judge.

That night as Andrea is curled up with a book, a cat comes through her window.  She gives it a bowl of water, but it prefers to check her out while she is showering.  When she comes out of the bathroom, she is startled to see a man in a short white robe.  Well, not startled — she barely registers surprise.  She should have been screaming at the sight of this intruder in her home.  Or at least howling in laughter at his goofy short robe.

She grabs the phone and he says, “Call the police.  Tell them that you’ve seen a man turn into a cat.”  Then he turns into a cat before her eyes.  And, unfortunately, back into a man.  With a smarmy French accent, he criticizes her coffee, insults the people of Turkey, touts his love-making skillz and, most egregiously, says his name is Guillaume de Marchaux.

Caught banging a sultan’s wife centuries ago, he was cursed to be a man only at night.  He says, “It is not such a curse.  I have spent centuries loving women, showing women how to love.  Women like you.”  He offers to leave but warns her she will never know the pleasures that only he can make a woman feel.  That’s all it takes, and they make the love.

Day 1 at the pharmacy, she is full of glee and probably morning-after pills.  TV Step 1 to beauty:  she has let her hair down.  She rushes home after work to make out with Guillaume.

Day 2 at the pharmacy is TV Step 2 to beauty:  she has ditched her glasses.  Elaine tells Carl that nobody changes that much unless sex is involved.  After work, she brings him a cat collar, but he hisses at her.  Later, as a man, he condescendingly explains that during his transformation into a human, the small collar world have choked him to death.

That night, he is still lounging around in that absurd robe for the third day.  Andrea shows him a negligee that she bought.  He dismisses it, and throws her coffee in the fire, calling it sewage water.  He insists that she go get some of that serious gourmet shit immediately or he will leave forever.  Stupidly ignoring this opportunity to get rid of him, she obediently heads out to Starbucks . . . to get a Frappuccino for herself; then to Dunkin Donuts for some palatable coffee.

Elaine just can’t stand the thought of Andrea being happy.  She has twice said said she wanted to be a fly on the wall to see what caused the change in Andrea.  With that Frenchman sitting around 3 days in a robe, she will not be the only one.  She goes to Andrea’s house, and Guillaume nails her in 20 minutes, beating my record by 3 months.

Andrea is furious at Guillaume for literally less than 20 seconds.  When he says it is time for him to move on, she begs him to stay.  He says he is going to Elaine, but Andrea asks him to stay one more night.  He continues to insult her until the downers she slipped into his coffee knock him out.

He awakens the next day as a cat, in a cage, in a veterinarian’s office.  Andrea asks to have him fixed.  He hisses and tries to claw her.

This works so much better than it should.  It seemed like another insipid episode with a dreadful sickeningly-sweet score.  It stars the narrator from the mediocre The Hitchhiker series.  Some performances are over the top and others are too staid.  And yet . . .

I expected the worst from Page Fletcher.  Not only is he best known from a weak series, he wasn’t even an actor in it.  However, he was amazing here.  Being from Canada, I don’t whether his natural accent is quasi-French or quasi-American, but he created a perfect archetype here of the condescending, parasitic European guy.  He not only creates a believably repulsive character, but that in turn makes Andrea’s love for him maddening for the audience.  Bravo!

Similar to yesterday’s Outer Limits, the ending here rewrites the tone of the episode.  Yes, the score is indeed awful, but there is a winking nastiness to the finale that, in retrospect, makes it all feel like parody.[1]  I wouldn’t want episodes like this every week from TZ, but this was well-done.

Footnotes:

  • [1] You’re not supposed to think about this:  What is Andrea really doing?  She is the one who made most of the bad choices here.  Guillaume is the one who has been cursed for centuries.  He inarguably changed her life for the better.  And she is cutting his balls off.