The episode begins with a prolonged close-up of a nameless smoking hot blonde (interrupted by a pan to her rack).  Blonde, sophisticated, well-dressed and well-coiffed with a mischievous wink.  Then we see her in the shitter.

But that’s OK too, as she is using the alone-time to practice her “o-sounds” for later that night.  Someone enters the restroom and cuts off the light. When the blonde complains, the stall door flies open and she is attacked with an axe.

Roger is driving home and stops to help a woman whose pickup has broken down.  Because a) it is raining, b) the buses have stopped running for the night, c) Roger owns a nearby cabin, d) his marriage is on the rocks, and e) the stranded motorist is Brooke Shields, he offers his cabin to her. But mostly “e”.

Tipping his hand a little, Roger stops off at a small store in the mountains to buy some oysters.  This doesn’t strike me as a place that would have fresh seafood, so maybe he is going for mountain oysters.  Maybe they do stock oysters, because this log cabin of a store also carries Cristal Champagne.  The clerk — the always fun Michael J. Pollard — catches Roger up on the local news — a stolen truck and a woman hacked to bits in a restaurant.

At the cabin, Brooke puts on some fancy clothes.  Downstairs, Roger says he wants to put something on her that belonged the Catherine the Great.  I was thinking a saddle, but the kinky stuff comes later.  It is a necklace.

Over dinner, he asks her why she stole the truck.  She says she stole the truck to come looking for her cheating husband and that she “took care of” the bimbo.  Seconds later, Brooke is tying Roger’s wrists to the bedposts.  Darn the luck, his wife shows up before he can do any rogering, so he hustles Brook out onto the balcony.

The ending is a nice couple of twists and backed by soaring opera that gets crazier and the story gets crazier.  It is all over-the-top good fun as TFTC should be.  There is a minor quibble with some logistics involving the door, but why dwell on that?

Michael J. Pollard really has nothing to do, but just showing up makes the episode more fun.  Perry King starts off solid and ends up great.  And Brooke Shields has always been misunderestimated — she’s just great here as the flannel-wearing thief.

This is a good one.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis:  Good episode, but another pathetic title — unless the girl practicing her orgasms in the restaurant bathroom was named Dawn.

Jeffrey Jones is teaching an Egyptology class in which Anthony Michael Hall is enrolled; sadly for Jones, this is several years after Hall’s John Hughes phase.

Today, Jones is discussing Pharaoh Ramseth aka “the mummy who wouldn’t die.”  Seems he was obsessed with a maiden named Nefra.  Sadly, he croaked before he could act on his desires so the moniker is not technically accurate.  And, being Pharaoh, what was holding him up? Couldn’t he have any maiden he wanted?  Or goat?  What happened to jus primae noctis?  He emerges from his tomb on each anniversary of this death to search for Nefra.  Rigor mortis is nature’s Viagra.

To protect themselves, each year the locals delivered to Ramseth’s tomb a human sacrifice.  When Ramseth was disappointed that each year’s offering was not Nefra, he would go berserk and kill each girl. Ya know, Nefra really could have taken one for the team and volunteered.  Bitch.

Fascinating as this story is, student Anthony Michael Hall is more interested in his football playbook.  Nerdy-girl Nina Siemaszko is also distracted — by Hall.  As Hall has been sentenced to a purgatory, doomed to play each role in The Breakfast Club forever ^[1], he is now “the jock.”  As such, he is a bonehead and seeks out Nina to tutor him.

She is thrilled at the attention and meets him in the library.  Perhaps inspired by being in a building he had never visited before, Hall comes up with an alternative to studying.  He tells Nina to ask Jones if she can visit his collection of Egyptian artifacts.  While she is distracting Jones, Hall will make a copy of the mid-term exam.  He backs her up against the card catalog and gets her decimal system all dewy, removes her glasses and asks her to go to a party.  So she is putty in his hands — silly, silly putty.

She arrives at Jones’ homes and he leads her down to the basement, which might have actually been scary if she were a young boy.  He shows off a full burial tomb.  By shows off, I mean tosses her inside and closes the door.  Turns out Hall and Jones are in cahoots. When the door is shut, Jones blows the shofar when he could have gotten away with just tipping him $5.00 for the ride. This awakens a mummy inside.

Jones didn’t mention he had ol’ Ramseth stored in his basement.  Suspiciously, he didn’t mention if there was anyone in his crawlspace either.  Nina is a smarty, though, as evidenced by her glasses.  When Ramseth tries to strangle her, she grabs a head-dress and pretends to be Nefra, his blonde, spectacled, pasty white, English-speaking Egyptian crush.

Jones pours Hall a snifter of brandy having no more regard for 21 year old age limits than for 18 year old age limits.  Hall decides to change the terms of their deal, but wisely, Jones had drugged his snifter.  In the basement, he stuffs Hall into a sarcophagus.  As he mops his brow, he hears the tomb’s door open, and we get the classic Jeffrey Jones / Ed Rooney “oh shit” stare which is always hilarious, unless it is through a camera viewfinder.

He enters the tomb and sees Ramseth standing erect, heh heh. Possibly because Nina has donned a suit similar to Princess Leia’s golden slave bikini.  Ramseth gets jealous of Jones and begins choking him, then pulls his brains out through his nose.

The ending is a complete botch. Nina is arrested for her class project which involves the mummified Jones and Hall.  First, this is a smart chick, why would she implicate herself in the murders?  Second, the two stiffs are unrecognizable despite being unwrapped, due to their contorted faces, but who else would they be?  Neither one appears to have a mustache as Jones had.

And a little sign says that Stella got an A+.  Well, she was the nerdy-girl, an A+ is probably routine for her.  But since Jones is dead, who assigned the grade?

Jones is always a hoot, and I’m a sucker for a good mummy story (which, ironically, the original The Mummy was not).  I was also entranced by Nina Siemaszko.  She played a great nerdy girl and consistently lit up the screen.  I’m not usually a fan of the cleft chin, and have really learned to hate them after watching Henry Rollins.  But she made it work.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] Tragically, I am not familiar enough with Mr. Hall’s oeuvre to know if this is true, but I liked the idea.
• Title Analysis:  Junk.  OK, there is a college course involved, but what the hell is “creep course”?  That is not a common phrase or even close to any I can think of.
• Jeffrey Jones and Anthony Michael Hall were both in Edward Scissorhands.  If Winona Ryder were here, they would have a hat-trick.  But I’d keep an eye on the hat.
• The only directing credit by Jeffrey Boam.  Sadly, he only lived to be 53 but in a five year span, he managed to write 2 Lethal Weapons, an Indiana Jones, the Witches of Eastwick, The Lost Boys, Funny Farm, and Innerspace.
• A few years earlier, he wrote the screenplay for The Dead Zone.  Hall would later star in a series based on the same book.

Billy Zane is a magician doing something and his hat catches fire.

If I seem less than thrilled, you are indeed perceptive — maybe it is external influences. There actually are several things to like here. Maybe I’ll just dwell on these rather than unfairly criticizing the episode.

Billy Zane is actually pretty good as the incompetent magician Miles Federman.

His assistant Maryam d’Abo is absolutely beautiful although given too little to do and saddled with a terrible accent — oops sorry, trying to stay positive here.  Her twin blonde replacements are pretty snappy numbers also.

The real episode-maker, though, is Martin Sheen playing a role unlike any I’ve ever seen him portray (i.e. not indistinguishable from actor Martin Sheen).  Sheen is unrecognizable as Kraygen — literally, as I did not recognize him (although I finally placed the voice).

The sets are interesting, and the score is fine.  I really don’t know why I was so uninvolved in the episode.

Post-Post:

• Title Analysis: Not quite as pathetic as People Who Live in Brass Hearses.  At least half of this one makes sense.
• Andrew Kevin Walker went on to write Se7en.  So, I’m not about to fault him for my ennui.

I don’t really get the whole fraternity concept.  But then I’m not much of a joiner; also not much of a being-asked-to-joiner.  The episode starts off with almost-naked Wesley Crusher in just his tightie-whities scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush.

For anyone thinking of doing their own blog, let me offer this advice:  If you are viewing this episode at Panera Bread, sit with your screen facing a wall ^[1].  I also have to think Subway would be a little sensitive to this scene also after recent events.

We open at the frat house, populated as always on-screen by drunk bullies reading naughty magazines.  Kevin Dillon enters swinging a pledge-paddle — another tradition I don’t get.  Wesley, kneeling, addresses him as “Grand and Glorious Pledge-Master Wilton, Sir.”  Dillon helpfully points out the dog poop that he has just tracked in.  Before Wesley can get to work, Dillon tells him to kiss the bottom of his shoe.  The last pledge who refused was hazed to the point of having a nervous breakdown.

Polynesian Night?  What the hell kind of cultural appropriation is that?  Trigger warning!

Mona from Delta Omega Alpha drops by offering her new chapter to be a sister to the frat; although a sister you could totally do it with. She invites them over for dinner just to assure them it isn’t a “doghouse.”  That night, Wesley and 2 other pledges are blindfolded and taken to a haunted house.

Then some stuff happens, and the episode ends.  Its all perfectly fine and perfectly predictable.  The fake haunted house is really haunted.  Well, not exactly haunted, but there will be blood. The ending is a non-sequitur, not the ironic twist you hope for in a good TFTC.

The high point is Kevin Dillon who is excellent, really getting into the campy spirit of the series.  The rest of the cast covers the talent spectrum, but there are some brutal line-readings here.

I rate it a 1.5 out of π.

Post-Post:

• ^[1] More Panera advice: try the Mediterranean Egg-White Breakfast Sandwich.  Holy crap!
• Title Analysis:  I give it a pass assuming they were going for a “frat house of horror” reference.  But no great shakes.
• Seems like a campy show like TFTC would have done more with the selection of the frat’s Greek letters.
• But then, it took me a week to get Delta Omega Alpha’s acronym, so maybe I’m missing it.
• There actually is a Gamma Delta Omega fraternity.
• Based on 30 seconds of thinking back many years, it seems like some Greek letters are heavily favored over others.  I can understand not wanting to be identified as an Iota, but where are all the Mus, Rhos, Upsilons and Omicrons? Everybody can’t be an Alpha.  Just me, baby.
• OK, Mu might be just asking for trouble for a sorority.

Beautiful trophy wife Traci Lords is picking at her food — good thing, too: broccoli, potatoes and rice — the carbs, my God, the carbs!  She is bored to death listening to her much older husband talking about some business affairs.  I think we can all agree, we’d rather hear Traci talk about her old business affairs.

Finally, Traci tells her husband Andy that she is leaving him; not only that, she was having an affair.  He does not take it well, and after a struggle Andy stabs her. A neighbor calls the police after hearing screams from their condo — unusual because her husband is at home this time.  One of the cops hanging around the station after his shift ended volunteers to respond.

He shows up as Andy is stuffing Traci in a trunk.  There is a great scene as the officer searches the condo.  Traci is dead in the tub, covered by water and Mr. Bubble, but her face is exposed through a gap in the suds.  Andy block’s the officer’s view and brushes more bubbles over her face.  Suspenseful and visually interesting.  Kudos.

After getting rid of the cop, Andy begins hacking Traci into more manageable pieces.  We see him pulling bloody arms and legs out of the tub.  Finally he pulls out a severed Traci-head with her mouth agape.  Actually, she could probably sell a latex model online and make some serious coin.

He loads up a suitcase and takes her to the train station.  He tells the baggage clerk he wants to check the bag through to Chicago.  Inexplicably, the clerk hands him a baggage tag marked CRP — Corpus Christi.  I’d really like to think this was a sly corpus joke.  However, in my heart, I suspect it was just a mistake.

As luck would have it, the officer is at the train station about to leave on vacation.  Andy can’t just dump the bag with a phony name and go home.  He must get on the train — again, as luck would have it, in a seat right across from the officer.

Andy tries to get away by going to the dining car.  The officer follows him and says that he is working on a case that will require every bag on the train to be searched.  Andy goes to the luggage car, switches tags with another bag and tosses Traci’s Samsonite coffin off the train.

Naturally the officer was lying about investigating a case, and suspected Andy of murder the whole time. Once things begin to unfold, the episode really stunned me.  There were some fun switches, and the score — iffy up to this point — really kicked in and heightened the suspense.

Sadly, Traci Lords is killed off very early in the episode — I think the Cryptkeeper got more airtime.  It wasn’t a likable role, but I always enjoy seeing her. David Paymer and Vincent Spano were also great as Andy and the cop.  The episode’s tone was a little spotty in the beginning, but then it just soared, easily redeeming the whole thing.  The ending does fall apart if you think about it for 2 seconds, but it doesn’t even matter.

I give it 1.8 for the show.

Post-Post:

• Traci Lords is always awesome; I saw her at a show in Dallas, and she was awesome off the screen too.  She doesn’t seem to work much — I don’t know if it is by choice or if Hollywood is really that stupid.
• Title Analysis: 2nd consecutive episode to have a pathetic title.  I would create a “pathetic” tag, but I already have one called Ray Bradbury Theater.  I am baffled by “Two for the Show.”  I get the reference, but what two?  What show?  I would have even settled for the not-entirely-accurate homage, “Stranglers on a Train.”