Really lackluster outing.

Cathy Moriarty and Ben Cross are practicing a ruse to bilk a widow out of $300,000.  Cross wonders to himself how he got into this mess — hiding in a closet to pretend to be a ghost.  Great, a dreaded flashback.

Two weeks earlier, lawyer Cross gets a visit from Dean Wormer.  Moriarty is there to pretend that she is a long lost cousin of Wormer’s.  Cross tells Wormer that his dead uncle Albert Peters has left them $3 million.

Wormer says, “The only man I know by that name is my mother’s brother.”  Isn’t that kind of the definition of dead uncle?  Cross tells Wormer that his uncle was not killed by a train as his mother told him — he spent 20 years in jail for a bank robbery.  $200,000 from the heist turned into $3M.

Moriarty invites Wormer to her hotel room that night.  He shows up with a bottle and a rose.  Moriarty explains that they should just buy Cross out for 10%  They start making out — so not only does Wormer not know the meaning of “uncle”, he is a little fuzzy on the concept of “cousin” as well — and are photographed by Cross from the closet.

They go to to Cross’s office and Wormer figures out that he and Moriarty are in cahoots.  They show him the photos which only make him laugh, and says his wife will never see them (a pretty good gag that will pay off later).  Moriarty goes to shoot Wormer, but he pulls a Rosalind Shays (i.e. falls down the elevator shaft). Just to be safe, they send the elevator to the bottom floor to crush him.

At they police station, the decide to try to get the cash from Wormer’s wife who they see is blind.  She wants to discuss it with her late husband via her spiritual adviser — she’s blind, not stupid. No wait, she’s blind and stupid.

Since Mrs. Wormer is blind, they tie up the “real” psychic and Moriarty imitates her. Also present is Mrs. Wormer’s chauffeur who apparently has never seen “her spiritual adviser” before.

The spirit of Wormer is summoned and a hooded figure shows up.  He throws back the hood to reveal it is Wormer.  The chauffeur says, “Mr. Wormer is looking a bit peaked.” Does he not understand why they are at the psychic?  They gave this guy a license?

Wormer reveals Cross’s head in a brief case, then rips out Moriarty’s heart like Mola Ram  in Temple of Doom.  He tells Moriarty, “You ain’t got no heart.”

I literally fell asleep about 5 times over the course of three days trying to finish this one. Not sure whether it is the actors or the direction or both, but Moriarty and Cross are two of the dullest actors I have ever seen.

Moriarty is a classic case of peaking early.  She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in her first role, then disappeared for six years.  Her IMDb bio cites a serious car accident, bad luck, and man trouble.  Maybe, but part of the problem had to be an absolute lack of screen presence.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis: A little too on-the-nose.
• Written by Harry Anderson.
• Ben Cross was just in The Concrete Mixer.  Just as lackluster as Moriarty, he finally got the role he was perfectly suited to play in 2009 — Spock’s emotionless Vulcan father Sarek.

An emcee introduces the band Exorcist to us and their inexplicably adoring fans.  The almost well-named lead singer Danny Darwin’s prodigious musical talent is matched only by his linguistic skills enabling him to work the F word in three times in three sentences.  I have to go back to Demosthones or maybe even Iggy Pop to find a wordsmith of such a skill.

Darwin, blissfully, takes a break from his godawful set to announce that his guitarist Bosch has gotten married.  The girls in the audience jeer as they would at a similar announcement from Justin Bieber; or like guys would the second he walked on stage.

Darwin drags Bosch’s fiancee Scarlett (Tia Carrera) onto the stage, much to her displeasure.  He warns Bosch not to get pussy-whipped, calls Scarlett a bitch and pushes her off stage.  So that Dale Carnegie course really paid off.

Bosch drops the guitar and walks offstage.  Stopping the show, Darwin follows, and Bosch attacks him as much as a guy with big hair, earrings, a necklace and a mesh shirt can.  He demands an apology, but Darwin says it is was just a joke, further demonstrating his grasp of the English language, and communication in  general.

Darwin goes to his dressing room where there are a couple of skanky sluts.  They say they hate Scarlett, too because she treats them like skanky sluts.  So far there is exactly one person in this episode that I don’t loathe (although her taste in men is appalling).

One of the skanks, Vendetta, starts to grow on me as she unzips her leather top.  Sadly, she has destroyed her beauty with a dreadful new tattoo of a snake curled around her breast.  She tells Darwin to look closer, and he sees a tongue slither out of the snake’s mouth.  She promises to reveal the location of this magical tattoo artist if he will sleep with her.

The next morning, she drops Darwin off at the home of Farouche, the magical tattoo guy.  Farouche is also a tattooed douche-bag, but he has an eye-patch treats Darwin like shit, so I kind of like him.  Darwin wants a tiger, but Farouche says he will decide what to create; he “finds what is inside and brings it outside.”  Like my lunch when I think that low-lifes like these are the future of our country.

When Farouche is finished, Darwin races to a mirror — a common practice for him, I imagine — and sees that the artist has put a massive tattoo of Scarlett on his chest.  Outraged, he refuses to pay and storms out.

Back at the house, Scarlett comes in and immediately tears into Darwin for being unprofessional.  She reminds Darwin that Bosch writes and produces the songs and that a lot of labels would love to have him as a solo act.  His reasoned response is, “You’re trying to break up the band, you stupid bitch.  Can’t you see we’re the hottest band in the country?”  Which is why they share a house.

At the small club (where the hottest band in the country plays every night) he finds Vendetta and accuses her of giving Farouche a picture of Scarlett to tattoo on his chest.  She has her first reasonable suggestion and gives Darwin the name of a plastic surgeon who can remove the tattoo.  Because this is the chick whose advice is gold, baby!  The doctor does his thing, but a ghost of the Scarlett tattoo remains.

After apologizing to Bosch and telling him he wants to keep the band together, he skips the next gig.  While the band is playing, he sneaks back into his own house while Scarlett is slipping into the tub.  While Bosch is headbanging on stage, Darwin does some headbanging with Scarlett, and not the good kind.  He viciously slams her noggin repeatedly against the tile wall until she is dead.

Bosch comes into the dressing room and asks Darwin (as he is putting on his guy-liner) if he has seen Scarlett, which just baffles me.  The band was on stage during the murder.  Didn’t anyone miss the lead singer?

Darwin tells Vendetta that he killed Scarlett.  He peels the bandage off his tattoo scar and the tattoo has fully returned.  When he finally makes it onstage for the second set, something is bouncing around under his shirt .  He runs offstage, belts Vendetta, returns to the mirror and has a chest-burster scene that makes Alien look tame.

He then engages in a little self-surgery of the non-plastic variety.  As the climax is spoiled in the first shot of the episode, I don’t feel the guilt that I also haven’t felt spoiling every other episode.

A good episode with brief moments of greatness, largely ruined by too many entirely repulsive characters.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Again, no thought was put into it.  First of all, it’s not “Deadman’s Chest”, it’s “Dead Man’s Chest.”  Second, who is the titular dead man?  The only person killed is a woman.
• Danny Darwin is an awful name for this character.  If you want to keep Darwin (and there really is no reason to), name him Darwin Dedmon (I have never known anyone with the last name Deadman), then change the title to Dedmon’s Chest.  Both problems solved.
• All I can think is that Darwin is almost an anagram for drawing?
• Gregg Allman, as the club manager, was far more normal that I expected.

George Gatlin (Dylan McDermott) pulls up to the police station and opens the hatch of his car.  It does not bode well that the director makes a huge mistake by immediately showing us who the corpse is.

Directorially, though, it picks up quickly.  In a nice touch, Gatlin grabs the corpse by the Chucks — oh, come on, he was sporting Converse sneakers! — and begins dragging him to the door. Gotta think that the pavement was wearing the back of his head pretty thin; and WTH did he park so far away?  The trip up the stairs to the door gives his noggin a floggin’ also.

He drags the corpse up to the desk Sargent and has a great opening line, “I’m dead and this is the guy who killed me.”  Then we get the dreaded flashback.

Continue reading →

The camera pans across expensive old crystal, fine old silver, and a real antique putting on lipstick.  Young, handsome Howard Prince wheels in a cart with some fine food perfectly mushy for a toothless-American who also travels on wheels; also a 1966 Chateau Lafite Rothschild.

As he shares the wine with his superannuated wife, Howard smoothly pulls a contract out of his snazzy dinner jacket for the old woman to sign which enables him to buy a company.  She asks him to do something for her which, thank God, turns out to merely be reciting To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) who would go on to write The Incredible Hulk (although records are sketchy from that time).

Strangely the poem is about a suitor wishing he had eternity to worship some hot babe, body part by body part.  Who doesn’t like boobs, but “two hundred years to adore each breast.”?  Russ Myer wasn’t that obsessed.  Ironically, it is not Howard who “time’s chariot” is chasing down, but his elderly wife.  And the poison he put in the wine is really cracking the whip on those horses.

The old woman dies before he can get through the poem, even though he really gave her a sporting chance by starting in the middle and skipping several lines.  He immediately calls 9-1-1 and acts as distraught as Treat Williams is capable of.

At her graveside, he is joined by his business partner Morty who has assisted in his scheme to marry and murder several old women.  The law is closing in on them, and Morty thinks it is time to quit and flee to an island which he can’t pronounce and I can’t figure out even with subtitles.

Howard wants one more victim to really retire in style.  He fast forwards through a video-tape dating service until he comes across Effie Gluckman (Ma Clavin) who is just seeking a companion.  She rejects him as being too young and possibly a gold-digger until he claims that he can’t date women his own age because they have “certain needs and I am unable to fulfill.”  By feigning impotence, he makes his interest in her plausible, and has an excuse not to have the sex with her.  Birds: 2, Stone: 1, Bees: 0.  Brilliant!

Demonstrating the gamut of his acting range from A to B, this is exactly the same reaction he had to Wendy Jo Sperber in 1941.

He doesn’t foresee the fact that her late husband was also impotent so she had gotten quite horny. She throws him on a table and . . .

Well, I don’t really want to imagine what follows, but she brings him breakfast in bed where he nervously claims that he had not been able to perform like that since college.  She also gives him a letter that says “Another one? Stop before it is too late.”

Howard assumes it is from Morty, so pays him a visit at his office.  He shoves Morty’s tie into one of those TV paper shredders that don’t have a plug or an OFF button, and are more industrial strength than the one used on Hillary Clinton’s emails.  OK, her current batch of data is digital, but you know in the old days, she had a diesel cross-cutting shredder with a built-in incinerator.

The next morning Effie and Howard get married at city hall.  She has wasted no time in changing her bank accounts to both their names.  She goes upstairs to start the Jacuzzi, and Howard gets another note, “Another one!  What you’re doing to these women is criminal!”

Obviously with Morty dead, the list of suspects has narrowed.  So he goes to the video dating service and kills the owner.  Effie’s butler has suspicions, so he has to go too.

He tries the old poison wine trick on Effie, and soon she is dead.  That doesn’t quite take, so he throws her down the stairs.  When leaving for the airport,he finds another note asking him to go to the mausoleum.

Note to self, after you’ve unjustly killed a bunch of people, don’t go to the graveyard.

A pretty good episode.

Post-Post:

• One of two writing IMDb credits for Donald Longtooth, both on TFTC.  That was the very apropos name of the titular character in The Reluctant Vampire.  I smell a nom de plume.  Also oranges.
• WTF?  Treat Williams was in The Empire Strikes Back?
• Title Analysis:  Meh.  Song by Tchaikovsky and movie starring Cary Grant, neither containing anything similar to the themes here.

When I noticed that this episode was the longest episode yet at 39 minutes, I was not thrilled.  But directed by Bob Zemeckis and starring the amazingly still-alive Kirk Douglas, it was surprisingly great.  Guess you get what you pay for.

And they must have had some budget for this episode as the extended opening battle depicting WWI in 1918 France is excellent. Sergeant Lance (not to be confuse with Lance Sergeant) Henriksen is climbing over dead and handless bodies looking for the lieutenant who is holed up in a bunker with a flask.

The lieutenant orders a retreat, but the Sargent refuses citing the General’s orders to take the hill.  Lt.  Kalthrob orders the retreat anyway. Henriksen reports this to General Kalthrob, the lieutenant’s father.

In a flagrant example of nepotism, the Lieutenant is played by Kirk Douglas’s real life son.  It works though, as the younger Douglas does a decent job and has similar a voice and mannerisms to Kirk.

Lt. Kalthrob wants a discharge from the army, but the most his father will do is transfer him behind the lines — if he carries out a dangerous mission.  He manages to botch this one, too.  He freezes when he should have warned his squad of advancing German troops.  The squad is mowed down with a grenade blasting Henriksen through the air on top of the lieutenant, looking worse than he did at the end of Aliens.

Lt. Kalthrob runs back to the bunker and tells the General that he did all he could to save his men.  But Henriksen manages to stagger back to the bunker and tells the truth about the lieutenant — he’s the titular yellow.  The General examines his son’s weapon and determines that it has never been fired.  He orders the court martial of his son in one hour.  After finding his son guilty, he calls for a firing squad at 6 am.

That night he secretly visits his son’s cell and tells him that there will be blanks in the firing squad’s rifles.  He is to pretend to fall back dead and escape when the unit departs.  The general asks only that he pretend to die like a man.

The next morning, he is pretty cool.  He refuses a cigarette, but takes a drink from his flask.  He refuses the blindfold.  And then he is shot with live rounds and falls dead into a pit.

Only a couple of minor criticisms here.  Lt. Kalthrob survives the firing squad and the fall into the pit at least briefly, making the audience question what just happened.  And Dan Aykroyd was really miscast.

Otherwise, great piece of work despite being out of character for the series.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  No wordplay; just short and to the point.
• Kirk Douglas is now 98.  Eric Douglas died of an overdose at 46.