Monthly Archives: March 2015

Tales from the Crypt – None But the Lonely Heart (S4E1)

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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.

tftcnonelonly10The 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!

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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.

tftcnonelonly23He 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.

Outer Limits – The Light Brigade (S2E18)

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ollightbrigade03The spacecraft Light Brigade has just made a jump into enemy space where, according to the captain, they are going to unleash the “most powerful weapon ever built by man, a sub-atomic warhead.”  Sub-Atomic doesn’t really sound like the “ultimate weapon” as it is, by definition, sub.

To be fair, the label seems to have acquired a different meaning in the future.  It is a bomb which breaks down the forces holding together individual atoms.  It just seems like they could have used this opportunity to come up with a cool, new. less confusing name.

Six hundred humans on nine ships are taking this doomsday device to the enemy’s homeworld.  Just as the captain is about to read the crew the poem the ship was named for, they are attacked.  And what a coincidence, the poem is about the valor of 600 soldiers.

ollightbrigade04By their radiation badges they can see that they’ve taken a lethal dose of radiation during the attack.  This just continues the unlucky streak of Major Skokes as he had been captured by the aliens in the excellent Quality of Mercy.  It is strange that the previous episode is barely referenced and there are no clips from it.

On the other hand, Skokes did escape with the help of one of his Light Brigade crewmates, and he got a swell new mechanical Terminatoresque hand; ironic, as he is played by T-1000 Robert Patrick.

A small band of doomed survivors makes their way through radiated chambers and a long series of access tubes to get to the the bridge to activate the bomb.

There are a couple of twists and turns, and it is a pretty good episode.  Robert Patrick and Graham Greene are both excellent in their portrayals.  Sadly, Wil Wheaton just doesn’t pull off his character.  I was never a Wesley Crusher hater, but he was just miscast here, or maybe just has too much TNG baggage for another space opera. Michael Dorn managed to make the leap and make a good performance in an earlier Outer Limits episode, but he had the benefit of having a completely different face than in TNG.

Post-Post:

  • Canadian DVD title:  La Brigade Stellaire
  • Naturally, the US can’t be identified as heroes, so the mission is run by the United Nations.  Although the way it turns out sounds like a UN mission after all.

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Jar (S5E3)

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rbtjar07Tom Carmody pays a visit to the slutty Thedy while her husband is at the carnival.

Her husband Charlie is walking around the exhibits at the carnival and spots a strange item through a slightly parted tent flap.  He enters and finds a jar with, well, something in it.  Is it a head?  A deformed baby?  It looks a little like the bottled alien that lunged at Paul Reiser in Aliens.

A carnie joins him and says he’d be willing to part with this thing for $40.  Charlie takes it and shows it off to the local yokels, then home to his wife.  He watches as she rides off with Carmody.

Yada yada . . . .

Post-Post:

Really, this covers this episode better than anything I could write:

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Miss Paisley’s Cat (S3E12)

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ahppaisley03After last week’s misleadingly titled murder-free outing  The Deadly, we get back to basics.  Here we get three deaths, although all are off-screen and one is not human (although he thinks he’s people, yes he does).  Shut up — cats are bad-ass.  Crazy cat ladies have given them a bad rep.

Speaking of crazy cat ladies, Miss Paisley fits the profile.  Even though she does not start off with a cat, she has crazy to spare.  For one thing, she talks to herself . . . a lot.  One night as she is chattering away, a cat crawls in her window and she decides to keep it.

As she is leaving the next morning, she meets Jenkins the building super on the stairs. He asks if the cat is hers.  With an honesty that will cause her trouble later, she admits that it is.  Jenkins tells her to be careful because he saw the cat coming out the window of her downstairs neighbor, a bookie.

ahppaisley04To keep the cat from straying, she feeds it raw meat and puts a collar on it with her name and address.  It doesn’t seem to work as one morning she sees her neighbor kick the cat out his door.

As the cat does the trot-of-shame up the stairs, she confronts the man, but he makes it clear that “if I catch him in here again, you won’t have no cat!”

She later sees the cat in the bookie’s window, and leans in through the window to retrieve him.  For a bookie that the super describes as handling thousands of dollars, he’s pretty cavalier about security, living on the first floor and leaving the window open.

When she comes home that night, the cat is missing, so she peeks in the bookie’s window again.  She doesn’t see the cat, but does see his collar in a trash can.  She reports this to the super and he reluctantly shows her the dead cat in a garbage can in the alley.

ahppaisley09Back in her apartment she again talks at length to herself.  Eventually, she bores herself to sleep. When she awakens, she no longer has her coat on and the lights are off.  A neighbor tells her that Jenkins has been arrested for the killing of the bookie.

She somehow concludes that she must have blacked out and that she killed the bookie, not Jenkins.  For every reason the police give her that Jenkins is guilty, she has an alternate theory that incriminates herself.  For every reason they say she couldn’t have done it, she further insists that she is guilty.  She is the Anti-OJ.

The detective humors her, but still believes that Jenkins is the murderer.  The cops figure their work is done here — he tells her the brain can play all kinds of tricks and goes to get some donuts.

Six months and three days later, Miss Paisley still misses the cat.  When she finds the cat’s collar behind a chair cushion, all her memories come flooding back to her of how she did indeed murder the bookie and dispose of the evidence; along with six months of crumbs and loose change.

She cheerfully puts on her coat to go to the police station.  Then says: ahppaisley11Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  A couple of 90 year olds left.
  • Under 6 months from the murder to Old Sparky — gotta love AHP justice.  Oh, Jenkins was probably guilty of something.
  • I’m not sure what to make of this constantly cheerful old woman.  Is she crazy from loneliness?  Does she have dementia?
  • The detective was played by Jed Clampett’s banker, Mr. Drysdale.

Night Gallery – I’ll Never Leave You Ever (S2E20)

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ngillnever12Moira (Lois Nettleton) and Ianto (John Saxon) are spending the night in a manger just like Mary and Joseph.  Except there is no Baby Jesus and the man she’s f***ing is not her husband.  Almost identical scenario, really.  Well, they are making out in the hay surrounded by animals, anyway.

When Moira goes back into the house, her husband sickly Owen asks where she has been.  She blames the storm.  He sees that her hair has been tousled despite the fact she was not the one getting blown, so he asks to brush it for her.  Even that effort is too much for him.  After being with the studly Ianto, she is repulsed by her weak husband’s kiss.

Moira goes to see the local witchy woman.  For the price of two lambs, the old woman carves a likeness of Owen.  Although, I hope Moira negotiated that she could keep the lambs’ intestines to use with Ianto, eh what?

ngillnever05When she gets home, the doll moves its head when she is not looking.  When she sees the head has changed position, she panics and stuffs it in a sack which causes Owen to also be plunged into darkness.  When she takes it out of the bag, Owen regains his sight.

Not quite understanding the concept of cause and effect, she then throws the doll into a roaring fire and freaks out when Owen starts screaming in agony as if being burned alive.  Well, WTH did she expect?  She doesn’t remove the doll, but it leaps out of the fire on its own.

She grabs it and runs through the moors, then tosses it in the quarry.  She returns to the house and cautiously enters the bedroom.  All that is left is a charred, smoking pile of Owen.

ngillnever20The next morning, Ianto finds her passed out.  He is not happy that she murdered her husband.  He says he must go get the doll and completely destroy it.  Moira follows him and ends up falling into the quarry.

Owen, is lying in the bottom of the quarry and says, “I’ll never leave you — ever.”  This doesn’t make much sense as it was only the doll that was cast into the quarry; the smoking pile of Owen is still spread out on the bedroom floor of their house.

Plus, if the fall killed her, his threat is pointless.  If the fall did not kill her, she has more opportunities to cut this guy up into little pieces.  And what happened to Ianto?

Never-the-less, it is still a good atmospheric ride.

ngillnever09

Miss Chicago, 1948

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  Lois Nettleton was in The Midnight Sun looking both literally and figuratively very hot.
  • Moira (per IMDb) is spelled Moragh in the closed captions. But Ianto, they get right?
  • Skipped Segment: There Aren’t Any More MacBanes.