The dude from Hogan’s Heroes and the loud chick from Laugh-In.  Is this a horror show or The Love Boat?

The segment opens in London where Ellis Travers (Bob Crane) is complaining about a house-swap that resulted in him leaving New Jersey for London.  Wait, what?

Not content with his flat, he wants to get a larger place, somewhere he can entertain. — and, being Bob Crane, room enough for his camera equipment.  He persuades his wife Iris (Jo Anne Worley) to go along by noting that some of the local homes for rent come with ghosts — a passion of hers.

He goes to see an elderly real estate agent who advises Travers to stick with a suburban ghost.  He gives a great short diatribe about their superiority over country ghosts who are up at the crack of dawn.

The agent also tells Travers that there are different types of ghosts — hallway ghosts, attic ghosts, bedroom ghosts, etc.  Upon hearing that it it has a stairwell ghost, Travers decides to rent Canby Manor, which comes with the ghost of Mr. Canby.

As soon as they arrive, Iris admires the sweeping staircase.  Travers said he had visualized her at the foot of the stairway the moment he saw the photos.  In the background, an invisible hand is using a translucent razor blade to cut through the handle of a suitcase.  When it breaks as Travers takes it upstairs, it nearly rolls over top of Iris.

Travers has a passion of his own — a blonde bird name Sherry.  She is cool with his idea of bumping off his wife to get his mitts on the princely sum of $2,000 per month.

When Iris has trouble sleeping — meaning, she is dragged out of bed by an invisible entity — Travers calls a doctor.  Or as they call them in England, a doctor.  He diagnoses Iris as having only 8 months to live.

Travers decides that he can wait a few months for his wife to go naturally, and more importantly so he doesn’t have to risk getting caught.  Canby has other plans and pushes her down the stairs.  You can’t really blame him — he was advertised as a stairwell ghost, after all.

Canby presents him with a bill for his services — a mere $2,000 per month.  In perpetuity.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Alan Napier was in Passage on the Lady Anne (also Alfred in the 1960’s version of Batman).  Bob Crane was an uncredited DJ in Static, presumably voice-only.
• I like that flat refers refers to a 1-story apartment — it is literally flat.

Wow, I have to combine these two vacuous segments to really have anything to grab onto.

Midnight Never Ends

In the first segment, Rod Serling is actually the subject of the featured painting.  His one meta-appearance in TZ was awesome, so you might think that would indicate this was something special; but consider how god-awful most of these oil slicks are.  And WTF is he holding a guitar?

The lovely Susan Strasburg is driving through a pitch-black night — and I mean that literally. The minimalist sets in this segment, including the car, are lit only in the immediate area where the actors are.  Anything outside of the car or the room they occupy is completely black.

She picks up a soldier holding a sign for Camp Pendleton.  They are perplexed that they seem to know things about each other.  It takes 20 minutes to get to an ending somewhat similar to Five Characters in Search of an Exit.

The sets are interesting, and Strasburg is good (however, the soldier is pretty bad), but the whole thing just feels like Serling phoning it in again.  And I think I saw this same premise as a sketch on a variety show many years ago.  Played more seriously, the build-up could have worked, but then the let down at the ending would have been just that  much greater (think M. Night Gallery Shyamalan’s The Village).

Even the synopsis on the DVD menu is half-assed:  “Two men can’t shake the uncanny feeling they’ve shared previous experiences.”  Yes, there are other men in the episode, but the soldier and the woman are really the main characters.

Brenda

A lot of potential in this one.  Laurie Prang plays a lonely young girl who has her moments of bitchiness — being rude, trampling over sand-castles, etc.  She encounters a monster in the woods — or is it a manifestation of her inner demons?  It is a menacing creature, but not horrific; it mostly just looks like a compost heap, not having any discernible head or limbs.

Laurie Prang is excellent in the role, and also sells her transformation when a year elapses and she ages from maybe 12 to 13.  There really is nothing wrong with this segment, and I actually enjoyed it as I watched it.  It just has kind of a meh ending; and after the first segment, I really needed something more.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Robert Karnes was in The Arrival, and Robert Hogan was in Spur of the Moment.  I saw Hogan in something a long time ago and wondered why they would have used the same name for the character in Hogan’s Heroes.  It also bugged me as a kid that there was a Sgt. Carter on both Hogan’s Heroes and Gomer Pyle.
• There is more of a connection to Star Trek, where four of the actors in the episode appeared; most notably, Glenn Corbett as Zefram Cochrane (before Farmer Hoggett got the gig).

Just as yesterday’s Love-Potion-Gone-Bad story is a staple for a show like Tales from the Crypt, a Spend-the-Night-in-a-Haunted- House episode is to be expected from a horror series.

Fritz Weaver, a famous skeptic, agreed to such a challenge and is relating the story to his pals at the club.  He came out a believer and has the white hair — gained overnight — to prove it.

Now it is an eye-patched Leslie Neilsen who is skeptical.  As he clears the pool table, he says he does not believe in ghosts and thinks that Weaver is just a coward.  Naturally, Weaver bets him $10,000 that he can’t spend “one whole night in that house without being frightened to death.”

Weaver drives Nielsen to the house and drops him off at sunset.  Inside, he finds it run-down and covered in spider-webs, and spiders.  He hears voices and sees apparitions. Displaying the same sophisticated strategic acumen as Lt. Worf, he pulls a gun on the apparition.

He continues through the house followed by apparitions, hearing ghostly laughing, finding drops of blood, slimy trails, bricks where windows should be.  He breaks from his exploration of the house to get some coffee from his thermos and have a smoke.  He is interrupted by someone banging on the piano.

He finds a man in uniform slamming his hands on the keys.  The man’s hands burst into flames, but Nielsen notices a cable running to the man’s boot — a robot.  Convinced that this whole night is a sham, he goes upstairs to the bedroom.  He finds it clean of cob-webs and even has a nice fire going.  He checks under the bed and finds another cable which he cuts.

He lays in bed and is shocked as restraints pin him to the bed and a sharp pendulum begins swinging at his throat.

The  alarm clock goes off and he happily goes downstairs.  He goes into the kitchen and Weaver appears on a TV screen — with his hair its original color.  He tells Nielsen to go ahead and eat while they talk.

Weaver tells him of his father, a soldier in Mussolini’s army.  He protested that all he wanted to do was get back to his civilian job as a concert pianist.  Insisting he had valuable info, Nielsen set his hands on fire.

Weaver drugged the coffee in the thermos and injected Nielsen with a serum while he was asleep.  Weaver offers a proof he is not bluffing, his colleague who is in the basement, and received the same injection.  He is now a slug-like wad of skin and no bones like Eugene Levy in Skeleton.

Nielsen does actually panic as he understands now the significance of the slimy trails he has seen in the house.

The ending could have gone two ways, and I think I would have rather seen it take the other slimy path.  However, the performances are strong, there is some cheesy creepiness in the house, and it is a fun ride.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy: Fritz Weaver was in 2 good episodes.
• This was the same house used in Psycho.
• Skipped Segment: The Devil is Not Mocked.  Another well-worn tale — Nazis take over a castle that turns out to be occupied by vampires.  Told many times in the 60s-70s and with far more cleavage.
• Also, don’t make the head vamp literally be the Dracula — that’s just hokey.

Like the unwatchable Whispers last season, this segment is hard-core 1970s.

At a new-age (well, new in 1970) high-priced sanitarium, Dr. Winter is holding a session outdoors around a large tree which has several colored platforms built around it.  I don’t know how beneficial it is for therapy, but as set design, it is awesome.

Another 1970s relic, David Carradine is strumming a repetitious tune on his guitar. When one of the other patients takes offense, he goes all Pete Townsend and smashes it.  When another patient asks him a simple question, he responds in the third person, “Gideon takes the fifth.”  A more welcome response would have been “Gideon takes a bath.”

He complains to the doctor that his parents are paying $39,000 a year to keep him locked up there.  That’s $228,000 in 2014 dollars; what a rebel.

The sheriff shows up with a note found at the scene of the death of one of Winters’ patients.  Carradine wrote the note which was an introduction to a mysterious Mildred. Carradine claims he and all of the group are in love with her despite never having seen her.  He says that Mildred is a “super-groove”  who lives in a farmhouse in the woods with a picket fence and old-fashioned well.

The dead patient had gone in search of Mildred and ended up torn to shreds.  Winter retraces his path and ends op at the farmhouse despite the fact that the sheriff had said it did not exist; that there were only ruins there.  There is a young blonde woman there dressed in white who offers him a drink from the well.

Back at the sanitarium, Carradine has pulled together several books of lycanthropy, werewolves.  He believes that is what killed the other patient. The sanitarium’s inexplicably beret-wearing French caretaker also believes that werewolves have killed some of their sheep.

Winter goes back to the farmhouse to see Mildred.  Then returns to the sanitarium where he learns another patient has been torn to shreds.

Then returns to the farmhouse.  Then back to the sanitarium.  Honestly, this story could have used some tightening up.

The next day, before sunrise, he returns to the farmhouse.  Mildred had asked that he read a funeral service over three unmarked graves.  He collapses in mid-psalm and is later found by the caretaker.  Where the farmhouse had stood a few moments earlier, there are only ruins.

So he goes back to the sanitarium . . .  presumably still as the doctor.

Sadly, less than the sum of its parts.  The actors are great — Carradine is the typical sanctimonious hippie, but he is perfect in the role.  Mildred was not very well cast, but the others were fine.  It just went on for too long with not much of a payoff.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy: None really, but Bill Quinn was in the TZ Movie.
• Skipped Segment: Silent Snow Secret Snow.  This is segment is based on the Conrad Aiken story that everyone used to have to read in school.  Oddly, Aiken’s daughter Joan wrote the Marmalade segment of the previous episode.
• How can lycanthropy not be in spell-check?
• Kudos on the subtle indication that Mildred is a werewolf:

Introducing the segment in the gallery, Serling cites “a word we coined just for the occasion — arachnidphobia . . . a special distaste for those crawly little beasties with the multi-legged hairy bodies.  In other words, a fear of spiders.”  That’s swell Rod, but we already have the suspiciously similar word arachnophobia meaning the same thing.

The ascotted Justus Walters is typing away on the world’s gayest typewriter.  He reads back his words:

We like the curtains tossed back with a rose,

The sole bonne femme in the room.

So the rose was the only woman in the room?  Maybe I was right about that typewriter.

His neighbor Elizabeth calls and he chews her out for disturbing his work.  Not taking a hint, she then knocks on her door and he rudely shouts at her to go away.  When she doesn’t, he opens the door and really has a hissy fit.

Hearing his faucet dripping, he goes to the kitchen and sees a small spider in the sink. He practically yells eek and jumps up on the counter.   He washes the itsy bitsy spider down the drain.  A few minutes later he sees a much larger spider.  That also gets a sink flush.

The building super comes in the work on the thermostat and Walters complains about the spiders.  The super says, “Any guy who makes a living writing about pishy-poshy food and interior decorating . . . ”  Well the rest doesn’t even matter.  For some reason, they are really stacking the dick here for no good reason story-wise that I can see.

After the super leaves, Walters hears a squeaking.  Peeking in his bedroom, he sees a spider the size of a dog.  Now he really needs someone and goes to Elizabeth’s door. After a couple of brandies, he asks for Elizabeth to escort him back to his apartment in case the big bad spider is still there.

He gallantly allows Elizabeth to enter first to see if the coast is clear.  He then asks her to check the bedroom.  The room seems to be relatively giant spider free, so Walters goes in.  Elizabeth then closes the door and locks him in.

She repeats his insults back to him as he begins crying to be let out.  We hear the squeaking again and know that the giant spider is is bearing down on him.

There is not a lot of story here, but I enjoyed the dialogue and the way Walters’ insults were played back to him in the end.  There is also a good sense of suspense and dread with the giant spider.

It was just a bizarre choice to inject a Nightmare on Elm Street 2 level of gayness into the episode for no reason.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I give it 6 out of 8 legs.

Post-Post:

• Twilight Zone Legacy:  Patrick O’Neal (A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain).
• Directed by Gomez Addams.
• Originally assigned to Steven Spielberg to direct.
• Elizabeth played Pancho Barnes in The Right Stuff.  Read the book, see the movie.
• Skipped Segment #1:  Junior — Very short sketch with Wally Cox (TZ’s From Ages with Love).
• Skipped Segment #2:  Marmalade Wine — A longer piece with very stark sets which might have been shocking 40 years ago.
• Skipped Segment #3:  The Academy — Pat Boone scouts out a military school for his bad seed son.