Monthly Archives: March 2015

Tales From the Crypt – Yellow (S3E14)

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Image 007When 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.

Image 019The 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.

Image 012Lt. 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.

Image 027Only 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.

Outer Limits – Paradise (S2E17)

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Image 007This could have been an early draft of Cocoon; or a final draft of Cocoon III.

Deputy Middleton is having a beer and watching the game at the local bar.  In walks a pretty hookery looking blonde who starts hitting on him.  Within seconds, they are back at his place, rolling around on the floor nekkid.

He gives her a pretty good ride, but she tearfully says, “It didn’t work.”  Not what a guy wants to hear.  Then she ages 50 years in just a few seconds.

Dr. Christina Markham is talking to her husband, the sheriff.  She is envious of her sister who has just made partner, bought a new house and is going to have a baby.  As a doctor, a hottie  and being married to the sheriff, she seems to be doing OK, though. But she really wants kids.

Image 008She examines the deputy’s babe, who is now a dried up corpse showing signs of several advanced diseases.  Christina goes to see her mother in a nursing home.  She is being taken care of by her late husband’s brother.  She has a touch of Alzheimer’s, but is still lucid enough to ask why her daughter has no children.  Moms.

The sheriff finds another dried up old body.  The doctor finds that both of the dead women have the same abnormality, a third ovary.

The deputy is at home during the day eating a sandwich — doesn’t this guy ever work?   He is surprised when a hot twenty-something walks into his house.  Even more surprised when he realizes it is his mother.  When he has a visitor at the door, his mother leaves and crawls in the sack with the first guy she sees who is not her son.  After doing the deed, she returns to her son’s house.  For the second time, he hears a woman say, “It didn’t work” and sees her age 50 years in a few seconds.

Image 016The doctor’s mother drags her brother in law out of bed in the middle of the night and leads him to a field.  She clears some weeds away from a rock.  Golden sparkles begin swirling around them and they are magically made 50 years younger.

Since she is young again and her husband is long dead, she wastes no time in taking her brother in law to her daughter’s bedroom to have the sex.

Indicating that this was not sex as usual, she is 9 months pregnant in just a few minutes — again, not what a guy wants to hear. Then her daughter the doctor delivers her 75 year old mother’s baby.  That Back to the Future controversy is starting to look pretty tame now.

Her mother describes how 50 years ago, she and and the other three dead women went on a picnic at the old Anderson Farm.  They encountered a naked golden alien — the last of her race — who impregnated each of them, or at  least supplied them with an egg that took 50 years to mature.  The alien then left a rock in the middle of the field which would make them young and fertile again 50 years in the future.  Luckily Anderson decided not to plow that field or build condos on it for 50 years.

Her mother ages again, but the alien has left her a gift — eliminating the Alzheimer’s that she had suffered.  So she will be able to watch the baby grow up as her daughter raises it as her own.

Yeah, that alien was really a sport — killing three women just because they couldn’t fertilize the one egg she gave them.  Then still making the the one survivor age back to be an old woman again.

Post-Post:

  • Title on Canadian DVD:  Le Paradis.
  • This is the first episode where I noticed “Please stand by” at the end of the opening credits narration.  There are also choppy act breaks.  It’s like they suddenly started showing commercials.  I know the show moved from Showtime to Sci-Fi at some point, but episode 17 is a strange place to do it.
  • Title Analysis: Bears no relation to the episode.

Ray Bradbury Theater – Zero Hour (S5E2)

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bradbury02Memory: Read as a kid and remember being disappointed at the unsatisfying conclusion.

It is morning in a sunny cul-de-sac dotted with McMansions and a poorly placed park where the kids play, but is impossible to get to without crossing a street.

Pinked-hatted ten (?) year old Mink (Katharine Isabelle (Torment, American Mary, and the almost homonymic Ginger Snaps)), is elated when she finds what the kids have been searching for.

Inside, Mink’s mother Mary Morris is having a work-at-home Saturday.  She gets a call on her futuristic (in 1992) 27-inch picture-phone from her husband — a great technology allowing people on opposite sides of the earth to communicate visually in real-time.  He is calling her from the kitchen, though, so not really a great use of the tech.  He too has to work, and goes to his office.

rbtzerohour17The kids huddle around a spot in the park.  All at once, they scatter to their homes and begin collecting a seemingly random pile of items — spoons, colanders, camera tripods, cheese graters, pliers, etc.  Mink’s mom asks what kind of game these items are for and Mink says, “Invasion!” as she runs out.

The kids reassemble in the park and Mink takes the lead in putting the parts together.  A couple of older boys, maybe 13, start to be dicks in the way only 13 year old boys can be.  And 13 year old girls.  Also older boys and girls.  And most grown-ups too, for that matter.  Mink tells them they are too big to understand and they should beat it.

MInk’s mother has the TV on and the big news is that no country now has possession of any nuclear weapons.  They are all being held by an organization called Earth Mutual Defense.  Meanwhile her daughter is outside telepathically receiving instructions, words and formulas that she doesn’t comprehend.

rbtzerohour14Mink is called in for lunch.  She runs in, grabs a hexagonal cookie cutter, and runs out again.  She says it is for her new friend Drill.  Her mother is impressed at all the big words Drill seems to know.  Mink, not exactly tight-lipped tells her mother that Drill has a plan to use kids to invade earth because adults are too busy to notice.

Mary gets another call on the picture phone, from her sister on the other coast.  Her little boy is also looking for a hexagon and mentions his friend Drill.  Mary hears a scream and goes outside to check on the kids.  Apparently one of the girls has gotten to old for the game during lunch, and starts crying as she realizes what is happening.

Mink starts a gyroscope spinning on her hand, and in a few seconds, it just disappears. After seeing that, Mary starts to worry and runs back inside.  When her husband gets home, she frantically drags him up to the attic and locks the door.  He naturally thinks his wife is crazy — and not just from the insane hair-do she has had the whole episode — until he hears a lot of footsteps downstairs.

Footsteps.  A little humming sound.  The attic lock melted.  The door opened.  Mink peered inside, tall blue shadows behind her.  “Peekaboo,” said Mink.

rbtzerohour33That is the end of the short story which underwhelmed me long ago.

It worked much better for me this time around as I absorbed the entire story and not just the last three words.  The episode follows the short story almost exactly, a rarity with no padding and nothing significant left out.  One of RBT’s best.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Planet Stories, Fall 1947.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Deadly (S3E11)

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ahpdeadly01This takes place back in the old days when all women were housewives.   And they go to the train station to pick up their hat-wearing husbands after their train commute from the city.

On the way home, Margot tells her husband they have a leak in the water heater in the basement.  He says he will take a look at it.  It was back when men did that too, rather than just calling a plumber.

Margot is cooking dinner when her husband comes up from the basement.  She asks if he got it fixed, and he says, “No, it’s too dark down there to see what’s wrong.  I guess you’ll have to call a plumber.”  So what he really needs isn’t a plumber, it’s an electrician. Or a flashlight.  I take it back — this guy is not the handiest of men.

He also tells her to get an estimate, “and if it’s more that $10, he can forget it.”  I got nothin’.  That’s just mind-boggling.

The next morning, the doorbell rings.  Just like June Cleaver, she already has her pearls on by 9:30 am.  She looks out the window and sees the truck for Mike Staley Plumbing & Heating.  She opens the door and somehow seems surprised that her visitor is the plumber . . . who she called . . . and whose truck she just saw.

ahpdeadly13He makes way too much small talk with Margot, all smiles and charm. He is a little too familiar, guessing her husband’s salary and calling a neighbor by her first name.  After a few minutes in the basement, he tells Margot that he has to go upstairs to shut off the water in the bathroom to equalize the pressure, “that’s the trouble with the Stetson Valve, otherwise, they’re very good.”  I have a feeling he might just as well said he needed to get a Langstrom 7″ Gangly Wrench and Margot and I would both have been just as clueless.

She finds him admiring some artwork in the bedroom over the bed.  He compliments her taste on furniture, bedspreads, everything.  She is creeped out by this guy.  He picks up her nightie off a chair and compliments that too.

He comes back downstairs and after admiring the kitchen and house, he gives her an estimate of $500.  Extrapolating from the estimated $10 plumber’s bill, that would be $12 million in today’s dollars.  He explains that the exorbitant estimate is for him to keep his trap shut.  If people heard him talking about her bedroom, the artwork over the bed, the fancy bedspread, the pink negligee, they might get the wrong idea.

He also points out that his truck has been outside her house for two hours just to give an estimate for a leaky valve — what must the neighbors think?  That he’s getting paid by the hour, for one thing.

When he returns for the money, Margot has assembled all the housewives of whatever county this is.  He has blackmailed all of them and now they want their revenge.  He has spent all their money, so they start lining up jobs he can do to work off the debt, or they will call the police.  He whines, “but that’s blackm . . . .”.

Luckily for him, he is a pretty good looking guy, so some of these dames might ask him to lay some pipe.  Another corpse-less episode, but a fun story with good performances.

Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  Coupla live ones.
  • Title Analysis:  The Deadly?  Hunh?  There are no deaths or even any threats of violence.

Night Gallery – Deliveries in the Rear (S2E19)

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ngdeliveries06On a very foggy night, we see a horse-drawn wagon go to the medical college with a delivery, where they take it in the rear.

Inside, Dr. Fletcher is teaching a surgical class using a cadaver.   He spots his student Mr. Tuttle getting a little pale looking at the cadaver.  Fletcher points out that the cadaver has been cut open and sewn back together many times here to save lives.  This additional information does nothing to settle Tuttle, who faints.  This reaction to routine surgical procedures is where urologists come from.

He gets a message that there is a new delivery in the titular rear.  He can tell that the body has been dead three weeks and not passed through a mortician’s hands.  He tells the men to go back and bury it where they found it.  The next corpse is much fresher — just a couple of hours dead.  He is not so uppity about the provenance on this piece of meat, so he gives them $50.

At his fiance Barbara’s house, her father questions where Fletcher is getting his cadavers.  Fletcher responds with a Clintonian dodge that he needs these bodies to teach young surgeons who will save many lives in their career.  He draws a pretty fine line between the grave-robbers and actually robbing the graves himself.  Besides, he claims, the bodies are always bums.  Fletcher says he puts them to work and give them a purpose.  They are a net benefit to society for the first time in their . . . er, life.

Going into the college the next day, he is accosted by an old woman who says he has her husband Charlie in there.  His day gets no  better when he sees the headmaster Dr. Shockman.  He asks for some assurance that Fletcher is not using grave-robbers.

Fletcher dodges the question, saying that he doesn’t ask questions.  The old lady talked to Shockman also, and the headmaster says the police will be called if Charlie’s body is found in the college.

ngdeliveries12Fletcher places a special order for a dead female from his procurers to be sure Shockman can find no male cadavers on the premises.  It is too cold to dig,so his thugs kill a woman to fill the order.  Hmmmm, special order, short notice, must be female, cold weather . . . $100 for this one; which Fletch forks over.

He lectures the class that the questioning of where the cadavers come from is misplaced.  No individual life is of consequence if it contributes to the saving of many lives.

He changes his tune; more of a scream than a tune, really, as he uncloaks today’s specimen and it is his fiance.

ngdeliveries15A nice piece, well cast and directed.  I just felt like there was something missing to link his fiance to the grave-robbers.  Maybe if she had just mentioned talking a walk in a dangerous part of town when Fletcher was visiting.  As it is, we are left to wonder, did these thugs just break into her house and snatch her?  And why her specifically?

 

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  Marjorie Bennett (3), Peter Brocco (2,) Ian Wolfe (1), Walter Burke (1).