OK, Esai Morales playing Jessie is no Jack Klugman.

And Maury Chaykin playing Fats is no Jonathan Winters.

And writer George Clayton Johnson is no George Clayton Johnson.

Oh, wait, actually he is!  Johnson’s original screenplay was used for this remake.  That is very cool.  But the fact that they used Johnson’s original discarded ending just makes it even more special.  A wonderful mixture of the old with the new with the old, showing what could have been 25 years earlier.

I wasn’t even that thrilled with the original.  Maybe that’s why I am so content with the remake.  Reviews online are pretty mixed, so I guess my lowered expectations fit the bill.

It’s hardly worth writing up.  Two guys play pool and talk.  But it kept me engrossed the whole time.  A worthy remake.

Other Stuff:

• Classic TZ connection:  Duh.

Starting off with a great title like that, this is TZ’s to blow.

Psychologist Dr. Mallory Craig is arriving for his first day at Crest Ridge Sanitarium.  The narrator tells us, “There is a terror behind those cold institutional walls that nothing in his education has prepared him for.”  So maybe they have a Republican working there.

Nurse Becky is the underpaid woman at every company that actually runs things.  She shows him his office and hands him his mail.  Reviewing the files that afternoon, Dr. Craig asks her about only one patient, Sharon Miles (coincidentally the hottest patient in the joint).  She self-committed after constantly rearranging furniture and demanding to sleep in an all-white room (hey, maybe she’s the Republican!). ^[1]

She is frequently repainting her entire room whenever she sees a spot, she dresses only in solid colors, and only ventures out for meals and counseling.  Nurse Becky says she has never seen a patient so utterly terrified.  That night, Dr. Craig stops by her room.  She is sitting in a white room with one white chair and one lamp.  A non-Becky nurse brings her some fresh blankets with a pattern and she freaks out.

Why the constantly changing look?

The next day, Sharon makes a rare excursion to Dr. Craig’s office to apologize.  Before she can enter, though, he must roll up a patterned carpet and put it aside.  She explains that it wasn’t the blankets that scared her; it was the patterns.  The patterns on blankets, on walls, and on ceilings sometime form faces.  Dr. Craig explains, “That is the way the brain works; it tries to bring order out of chaos.” ^[2]  

She recalls lying in bed one Sunday watching shadows on the wall cast by the trees outside her window.  The shadows formed into a face which seemed to be pressing outwardly from the wall.  She is horrified, thinking it is looking right at her, but it disappears when the phone rings.  Great, but who was calling her at 3 AM?

Dr. Craig suggests maybe she just imagined it was looking at her.  Sharon compares it to crossing a street where a car is waiting for a light.  Even if she can’t clearly see the driver’s eyes, she can feel them on her ass; or something like that.  She dismisses Dr. Craig’s explanations and says, “It’s trying to kill me!”

They continue talking the next day.  She describes how she saw more faces and how they seemed to form in the patterns of ceilings, wallpaper, shadows and “the doodles of my 7 year old son.”  That’s why she stopped wearing patterns.  “That’s how they get through.”  She thinks they are whispering about her, looking in from somewhere else.

In a confusing edit, she is tossing and turning in bed.  The headboard and room are very simple.  Then we cut to her reading in a much more stylish bed and homey bedroom.  So I guess she is dreaming of herself at home in bed, just like the doctor does except not on all fours.  She turns off the light and sees shadows on the wall and hears muffled whispering.  As she approaches them, faces and heads begin stretching the wall like latex, their heads and faces protruding menacingly.  She runs to her son’s room.  He is OK, but the entities write on his wall:  TELL NO ONE.  She wakes up screaming in the sanitarium.

She immediately calls Dr. Craig and says she wants to tell him everything.  She thinks she knows what they want.  The next morning at the hospital, Becky tells him Sharon had another episode last night.  She was screaming, pounding on the door to get out.  I guess we didn’t see that one, we just saw the one in the flashback.

He runs to her room, but finds her in the hall.  She serenely says she realizes she was just being silly last night.  She says she was wrong to abandon her son and husband.  Wait, who?  She’s married?  Where was her husband during the flashback?  Did he go on a business trip and leave little Bobby with this maniac?

She congratulates Dr. Craig for this therapeutic breakthrough.  She even plans on checking out that day.  He admits being shocked, although maybe that was just the part about her having a husband.  She is even wearing a nice pleated skirt and a colorful scarf.  He suggests a session just to wrap things up, but she curtly cuts him off and says they’re done.

He stops by her room to help her pack.  In her room, he hears strange noises.  Sharon claims to hear nothing.  After he leaves, she looks at a water stain on the ceiling.  She hears voices and sees a face straining to get through.  It says, “She’s one of them!  That’s not me!”  She smiles.

This should have been a chilling resolution.  To be fair, Deborah Raffin’s (Sharon) smile at the end is perfect, and she is great throughout.  As usual, though, the score is blah and the second the narration begins, any suspense is killed.

Damir Andrei (Dr. Craig) had an interesting style.  It sometimes seemed like they were trying to light Nurse Becky as evil.  If so, it was ineffective and unnecessary.

Even with the flaws, I like that it still has me thinking after the episode is over.  Who are those people?  What will happen to Sharon in the wall?  What shenanigans will fake Sharon get into?  Will her son notice?

Other Stuff:

• [1] It’s so easy.  No wonder everyone on TV does it.
• [2] He is talking about pareidolia, which well-worth googling.
• I kept calling him Dr. Craig because I was going to mock his first name.  Unless you wrote Le Morte D’Arthur, Mallory is a girl’s name.
• Sadly, I was unable to work in this classic:

It’s no fun kicking around a family down on their luck.  So, simply stated, Steve Cranston is an unemployed construction worker.  He is currently residing in a shelter with his wife Elaine and daughter Lisa.  The bad luck continues as he learns the shelter is about to be foreclosed on.

It is, however, fun to kick around the narrator.  Like last week, he trots out his best twee NPR voice to tell us “Steve Cranston, is a man living what Thoreau called ‘a life of quiet desperation’.”  Nope, still not fun.  Steve’s wife is supportive and his daughter clearly loves him even as they cuddle on a cot in a shelter.  Frustrated that he can’t provide for them, he blows up at his wife, and goes out for a walk.

Seriously, is this supposed to be something other than a shadow?

A police car passes him, shining a light in his face.  As the car passes, there is a shadow of the car from a streetlight.  I’m not sure they didn’t enhance it to last a little longer and be blacker.  There is even a musical stinger.  But ultimately it was a rectangular shadow that did nothing a normal shadow would not do.  Was this the titular shadow?  Or was it like the mist in the previous episode which cruelly got our hopes up for something . . . anything to happen.  Then disappeared. ^[1]

Steve finds himself on the sidewalk at the front gate of the mansion of local rich guy Frederick Perry.  His butler and a tech from Sleepwell Security are having an unsecure conversation about the security system.  The repairman needs a part, so the system will be inactive that night.  The butler and the man go their separate ways, leaving the security fence open, so neither of these guys is too bright.  As Steve watches, the fence begins to automatically close.  Wait, I thought it was inactive. ^[2]

Fortuitously having missed a few meals, Steve is able to squeeze inside before it closes.  He is so desperate for cash that he slides open a patio door and enters.  I guess it is the alarm system that is inactive tonight, although it seems to have deactivated the mechanical locks too.

In a possible sign of Steve’s real problem, surrounded by rich guy stuff, Steve first steals a swig of Mr. Perry’s booze.  On the way in, he has also knocked over a plant, left the door slightly open, and left a trail of muddy footprints.  Maybe this guy’s problem is not the economy — he’s just not very smart.

As Steve cases the room, we get a close-up of hands pulling a pistol from a drawer and nervously fumbling with the magazine.  The scene is so ineptly edited, though, that we don’t know which man has the gun.  Both men have reason to be scared.  Steve is reluctantly committing a crime to help his family, and a gun would just get him in deeper.  Perry knows that if he shoots a burglar in his own freakin’ house, he will be put on trial; worse, all his rich, liberal friends will know he owns a gun!

OK, it is Perry that has the gun.  He catches Steve just as he finds a wallet full of cash.  Steve tries to talk him into not calling the cops.  Perry is determined to make the call.  As the noted sociologist Billy Ray Valentine said, “You can’t be soft on people like that.”  Steve backs up until he hits the liquor cabinet  . . . funny how his hands always seem to find the hooch.  He slings the heavy decanter at Perry’s noggin just as Perry shoots him.  Both men go down like Frazier.

Steve wakes up in Perry’s bed.  Even stranger, the butler recognizes him as Frederick Perry. ^[3]  He tries to call his wife at the shelter but is told she went to the hospital with her husband who has been shot.

He goes to the hospital.  Looking like the man who shot Steve Cranston, that goes about as badly as you would expect.  As long as he is stuck in the body of multi-millionaire, he decides to do something good.

Soon, for no apparent reason, the two men later swap bodies again.  Frederick Perry abides by Steve’s good deed (i.e. the deed to the shelter).  Steve even gets a job out of the deal.  Whether Perry understands what happened is never addressed.  They all live happily ever after.  God bless us every one.

Except anyone who tuned in looking for an episode of The Twilight Zone.

To be fair, it was fine.  I’m just tired of the get-the-girl, save-the-family-farm, move-out-of-the-shelter endings.  I still get shivers thinking of the ending of On Thursday We Leave for Home which I saw 2 years ago.  I will forget this episode before breakfast.

Other Stuff:

• [1] Upon multiple viewings, it appears they CGI’d some eyes into the shadow.  If so, it is still so detached from the “event” as to be pointless.
• [2] Perry’s Rolls Royce is parked just inside the gate.  Why is it down by the gate?  Wouldn’t it be under the porte-cochère at the house, or in the garage, or in front of the local nudie bar?  I guess that is to inform us Perry is rich just in case the security perimeter and butler don’t clue us in.
• [3] No big deal, but the boom mike is visible a couple of times here.
• Title Analysis:  What street?  What shadow?  That thing?

Did I forget what the original Twilight Zone was like?  Are my memories of loneliness, terror, cruel irony and remorseless cosmic comeuppance just romanticizing an old TV show?  Because this series is becoming more predictably lame than the dark days of Ray Bradbury Theater.  I thought it was impossible for the narrator to be more miscast than Charles Aidman.  This new guy, though, has the edgy menace of an NPR host.

I like them french fried potaters.

The insufferably twee narrator introduces us to young Danny who lives in a trailer with his mother.  There is a glimmer of hope as Danny puts a toy boat in a stream “and follows a trail just to see where it goes.  But today that trail will lead Danny through a private reserve which lies just inside the borders of the twilight zone.”

Unfortunately, the narrator foreshadows the utter banality to come by speaking in the chirpy tones usually reserved for giddily introducing yet another goddamn segment on cowboy poets.

They even jerk us off — sorry, this has taken an ugly turn — by having the toy boat go through a strange white mist.  Is anything done with this?  Of course not.

Danny encounters a man walking though the woods dressed like Sling Blade.  The immaculate long pants and fully buttoned shirt should be a little disconcerting.  However, the man’s gentleness and the insipid score ensure no suspense is created.

After a sad conversation about Danny and his mother, Danny invites the man to dinner.  We get an idea what the man — named Scout — is up to when he mesmerizes a deer and makes it disappear.  They have a nice dinner where the scariest thing is a spilled glass of water.  Danny has a new friend, Mom is starting to take a liking to this new fella, and all is right with the world.

I’m not sure if this happiness was to set up the next scene, or if I’m just getting tired.  It is pretty creepy, though.  The next day, Scout meets Danny at the trailer.  Scout invites Danny to go exploring.  Danny says his mother told him to stay there until she got home.  Scout says, “I talked to your mother” and Danny skeptically says “You did?”  Scout says they’re all going to have dinner at his house, and they walk off onto the woods.  In fact, it is so chillingly creepy that I’m not sure that was their intention.

Dull story short, Scout is an alien (and based on that last scene, should be on To Catch a Predator) collecting specimens of earth life.  He is going to take Danny, but the thought of his own family makes him change his mind.

After a brief detour last week where TZ knocked off a teenage girl, it is back to the sappy vibe that sank this run of the series.  It’s like if Henry Bemis remembered the spare glasses in his coat pocket.

Despite the episode being a stain on the TZ franchise, I must say the performances were all very good.  There was nothing wrong with the script that a different script couldn’t fix.^[1]  Just the tone was entirely wrong.

Pfft:

[1] The script was fine for what it wanted to do; I just mean, a different story.