Palate Cleanser – Bunheads
Reply
Monthly Archives: October 2014
Night Gallery – Whispers (S3E13)
According to Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour, “Whisper” is among the best scripts Night Gallery ever produced.
Then who is to blame for the piece of shit as it aired? Serling had long ago had his power in the series usurped. Director Jeannot Szwarc? Certainly not, he went on to direct Jaws 2, and Somewhere in Time. Maybe the answer is on one of the pages hidden by Google Books.
Sally Field allows spirits to enter her body.
Dean Stockwell has a ridiculous afro.
There is a lot of talking directly to the camera.
I watched this episode twice, so I feel like I’ve done my part. Really an awful experience.
Post-Post:
- Twilight Zone Legacy: Dean Stockwell was in A Quality of Mercy where he played a Japanese Soldier.
- This 3rd season episode oddly appears in the 1st season collection, but it is almost bad enough to put me off marching 4th into the 2nd season.
Needle (2010)
After the credits, an old an old man is assaulted by an unseen attacker who leaves a hole in his chest like he was shot by a cannon.
This unpleasantness passes quickly, then we cut to a college campus where it is quickly demonstrated that Australia’s production of Elle Macpherson was no fluke. Just to further drive home the point, one of the girls is in a lesbian relationship with a French Exchange Student. This is just the kind of craftsmanship that is sadly lacking in American movies today.
Ben is visited at his room by Mr. Joshua, a representative from his father’s estate. He has brought Ben a box found in a storage unit. Ben is ready to ready to eBay it, but understandably uses it first to entice some girls back to his room.
One of the group fatefully records their image with some sort of picture-taking device that does not have a phone in it, and actually is able to produce said image on paper — how retro!
Ben’s ne’er-do-well brother Marcus shows up at the room. Somehow this drifter has secured a gig with the police as a crime scene photographer. He is generally a good guy throughout the film, but is immediately set up as unlikeable, and pulls that off perfectly. I think it is the haircut.
Ben discovers the box has been stolen. An unseen person begins cutting up the aforementioned photo, and inserts one of the gang’s headshot into the machine. After adding some liquids, the machine produces a waxy doll that can be used for voodoo-like effects. It also seems to wreak havoc on electrical systems. The mystery person uses the doll to inflict numerous fatal cuts on the victim.
The gang is pretty quick to draw a connection between the missing box and their dead friend. Another of the gang has their picture inserted, and the box again works its magic. It is more grizzly this time as not only is the victim sliced by an invisible knife, he has limbs lacked off.
The mystery figure is revealed, the motive is disclosed, and there is a proper comeuppance.
Overall, a nice little film with mostly likeable characters, a few shocks, and good pacing.
Post-Post:
- Mr. Joshua is a pretty unusual name not to be a callback to Gary Busey in the first Lethal Weapon, but there seems to be no connection.
- Ben’s professor was Jane Badler from V. The good one.
Tales from the Crypt – Korman’s Kalamity (S2E13)
Tales from the Crypt goes meta with a story about a TFTC artist. I’m sure the Crypt-keeper had another layer of meta to add, but it is my policy not to watch that waste of latex.
Harry Anderson is the artist, suffering a case of artist’s block. His shrewish wife shows up and the office and accuses him of working Saturday to meet a bimbo at the office.
She also accuses him of not taking the potency pills he needs to get her pregnant. He says the non-FDA approved pills make his brain hurt, kickstarting the episode.
That night he sees a cutie at the laundromat. After he leaves, the lights go off and a thug begins to attack her. Turns out she is a cop, and she flips him to the floor. A monster crawls out of the washer and grabs him, biting his head off.
The cutie recognizes the monster 
as similar to the work of Anderson. She tracks him down, and tells him her theory that his drawings are coming to life. She tells him to draw a monster as a test.
This is a little irresponsible as a monster does materialize in a warehouse where some kids are playing.
His wife busts him making a date with the cutie and he begins sketching her as a monster. Monster wife kills shrew wife and Anderson goes off with the cutie.
Sipping wine at restaurant, the cutie says, “Are you married?” and Anderson says “Not any more.” Wow, that dialogue is crackling, I tells ya!
The episode is far, far less than the sum of its parts. Mostly a waste of some fun actors.
Post-Post:
- Colleen Camp (the wife) was one of those sexy 1980’s chicks like Deborah Foreman — a welcome addition to any crappy movie. Maybe best remembered as the maid in Clue.
- Richard Schiff went on to be Toby in The West Wing.
Torment (2013)
The movie opens with a prologue of a family at dinner time. Mom and the daughter seem nice. For no reason, the filmmakers opted to make Dad an asshole.
What is the obsession this genre has with making the victims assholes? OK, it’s fun to see bad guys get what they deserve, but this guy is offed after we know him for 30 seconds. Maybe he had a bad day. Maybe he found out this morning he had cancer, maybe his family are the awful ones and we just happened to catch them in a civil moment. Yeah, he is a jerk, but did he really deserve to be murdered? You have to make a case in order for that to be cathartic, and it isn’t going to be made in 30 seconds for a character who isn’t even around long enough to have a name.
On the other hand, you can make someone likable and sympathetic pretty quickly. Then kill them.
So, his put-upon wife is murdered, he is murdered, and the killers are approaching the teenage daughter when we cut away. This prologue tells us that the killers are not making moral judgments, they just kill for no purpose. Well, that’s not exactly true, but that sets up a twist at the end.
We flash-forward to a much happier family driving to their cabin in the woods. Well, the young son is kind of jerky, but his father has just remarried after the death of his mother, so there is a solid pre-fab back-story for his jerky attitude. However, I’m kind of a jerk because I have to point how how bad this kid’s performance is.
They arrive at the cabin which turns out to a huge house. It all seems great until they see evidence that there have been squatters there — messy beds, dirty dishes. Hey, maybe I have squatters at my place, too.
The killers have taken the heads off of the kid’s stuffed animals and made masks of them. The masks and lack of motive have lead many people to make comparisons to The Strangers and You’re Next. These are pretty superficial points, and apply to a lot of movies. Yeah, there are some similarities, but Tormented is its own movie.
Really no major complaints. There is not much story to latch onto, or recap, or mock, or criticize. It is mostly an exercise in style, and moving the pieces around the board. It worked well enough for me. I like the callback for the motivation. The other twist just didn’t do much for me. More of a reveal, really, and there really was no substance set-up for it to knock down.
The kid was not very good, and Katherine Isabelle was only OK. She seems to have more presence when she has something to work with like lycanthropy or being a psycho medical student. As a Mom, she was kind of blah, and became irritating because half her dialogue seemed to be yelling for her husband, “Coryyyy!” This would still make a better drinking game than “Wallllllt!” on Lost, though, because you really need to already be drunk to sit through that.