Monthly Archives: February 2017

Outer Limits – Tempests (03/07/97)

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Another grossly inefficient spacecraft. But the floating chair is cool.

John Virgil is in the spaceship Tempest returning from Earth.  He has picked up a serum that he is taking back to his colony.  There have been a few deaths, but his wife and son appear fine on the video they sent.

He is joined by Burt Young.  His character Captain Parker is given no first name.  I assume, like every character Burt has ever played, it is Paulie.[1]  There is also Dr. Vasquez and Governor Mudry. They are preparing to drop out of the matrix, but do so too close to the planet Leviathan and get pulled into its gravity well. They have an immediate argument over who should get to use the emergency escape pod.  Parker and Virgil are pretty selfless unlike a certain roly-poly President I could name.  They want to send the doctor with the serum.  Naturally, the Governor has a gross over-estimation of her value.

Unfortunately, no one gets out before The Tempest crashes.  Everyone is roughed up, but Parker is in the worst shape.  He has a hematoma and a concussion and his brain will soon be too large for his skull, which is never something I expected to say about Burt Young.

Virgil goes outside to check the damage, but is attacked by a giant spider.  Not shelob-giant, but a meaty little package the size of 2.5 small dogs.  Understandably freaked out, he flees into the ship.  He is not too diligent about keeping the beast out, unlike a certain Warrant Officer I could name.  He collapses, then awakens in the hospital at the colony. His wife praises him for saving the colony.  Then — bang — he wakes up back on The Tempest.

The doctor says the 12-hour hallucination is due to a spider-bite. We can judge it for ourselves as the doctor didn’t feel the need to bandage the gaping 4 inch wound on Virgil’s arm.  Another spider got into the ship and found the Governor as scrumptious as she found herself.  It doesn’t have the cocooning skills of an Alien or me on a long weekend, but has webbed itself to her neck and is controlling her autonomic functions such as heart-rate and corruption.  It is an effective shot as she begs to have it removed.

Like Billy Pilgrim’s being unstuck in time, Virgil snaps back to the hospital.  His wife and the doctor tell him about the crash, but get a few details wrong.  He goes to Parker’s room.  Parker screams at Virgil to not leave him with the spiders and Virgil snaps back to The Tempest.  He continues flipping back and forth as we learn more about the condition of the ship.

It comes to the kind of grim, disturbing conclusion that the 1980s Twilight Zone could use more of.  The only downside is that it felt a little padded out.  I wish the producers had not been forced to make every episode the perfect length for future syndication.

Good stuff.

Post-Post:

  • [1] Upon doing 30 seconds of research, I am shocked.  Burt Young only played a character named Paulie in the Rocky movies.  He sure seems like a Paulie in every movie.
  • Title Analysis:  Sure, it is the name of the ship, but I’m not sure what they were going for.  A tempest is a violent windstorm, which does not apply.  Or a violent commotion . . . maybe.  I see no connection to Shakespeare’s play.  And why is it plural?  I guess the spiders are the titular tempests, but why?
  • I initially thought Virgil was a play on Virtual.  Maybe it is — makes more sense than tempests.
  • Them pests!

The Hitchhiker – W.G.O.D. (11/26/85)

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Gary Busey.

That’s it.  Join me tomorrow for The Outer Limits.

Wait, what?  This was 3 years before riding a motorcycle without a helmet made him seem like he had played too much football without a helmet? OK, then.

Seeing the date of his skull-cracking crash, I am stunned.  I thought after his accident, he had immediately become . . . shall we say, erratic.  However, the crash was in 1988.  He still had the relatively subdued performances in Point Break, Under Siege and The Firm ahead of him.  Whatever, like Randy Quaid in Night Visions, it is just nice to see him young and healthy.

Busey plays Reverend Nolan Powers, a radio evangelist.  We join him mid-call with an adulterer who has been sneaking out for nooners at the Airport Ramada Inn.  He tells her he is going to play a song for her, but strangely nothing is done with this. The music seems to be as stock as the first DVD releases of WKRP, so I guess budgetary issues stopped them from doing anything interesting with it.

His takes a call from a shoplifter, and he then has another untrustworthy type in the studio, a network reporter from Weekend LapWatchdog.  His last call of the day is a young man, but his call is distorted with feedback as he requests What a Friend We Have in Jeebus (availabe since it entered Public Domain in the year of our Lord 1206).  After the show, reporter Eric Sato rides with Powers in his Lincoln back to the Reverend’s modest 12,000 square foot parsonage.

We’re still only 5 minutes in, but the direction and set design are already pretty impressive.  We got some nice dizzying aerial shots of the station and tower.  The building has huge letters WGOD on the roof.  Even more amazing are the 10-foot tall letters in front of the building.  If this is where the budget money went, I can listen to some generic hymns.

Sato would like a tour of the house, but Powers does not invite him in.  Powers hears What a Friend We Have in Jesus coming from the attic.  His mother is playing his brother Gerald’s records again.  Even though Gerald ran off, Mom still adores him, living in his old attic bedroom with the college pennants and model airplanes.  Powers rips the record-player’s [1] power cord from the wall, but it continues playing.

The next day, caller #1 is pain-killers, and that is how his callers are designated on his call screen — atheist, mid-life crisis, pain-killers.  The mysterious young man calls again, but without the feedback and distortion.  He tells Powers, “I want to save your soul, or do you want to die a sinner?”  The microphone gives a spark and the caller ominously says, “You’ll be hearing from me.”  Could this be Gerald?

Later, Powers is putting on an anti-abortion show at the local mall.  Once again, this looks great.  It is filmed in a real split-level mall, it has a banner with a logo, the many extras are dressed neatly in a nice mid-western style.  The Armani-clad reporter comes in just in time to hear Powers wonder if maybe “Jesus has already returned and was flushed down an abortionist’s toilet.”  Gotta say if that’s your philosophy, it is a pretty good question.

That night, Powers makes a phone-call and the Gerald-voice answers. He is watching a replay of the rally and his mother thinks she sees Gerald in the crowd.  Powers goes to the garage, grabs a shovel and gets in the Lincoln.  On the radio, he again hears What a Friend We Have in Jesus.  Gerald’s voice comes on the radio and taunts Powers over how he abused Gerald when they were kids, and accused him of being a mama’s boy.

Powers drives back to the station.  You pretty much know what is going to happen, but the specifics are carried out with genuine creativity and style.  It is not a one-man show, but Busey really blows everyone else off the screen.  He does what I have seen many others fail at in the course of this blog — he comes off as a believable voice on the radio. As things fall apart, I see him as a real person breaking down, not a caricature or latter-day Busey.

Great stuff.

Post-Post:

  • [1] For the kids, that is an actual player of records — mono with a jagged needle and scratchy speakers.
  • Other nice little flourishes:  The cross on the phone, in headlights, and as the hood ornament of the Lincoln; the microphone dripping blood.
  • I watched this on You Tube where it has French subtitles.  Over there, the station is D.I.E.U.  Pretty clever, but now that I think of it, why do WGOD and DIEU have periods?  They aren’t abbreviations.
  • Gary Busey will play another evangelist in The Outer Limits.  In Season 6.  God help me.
  • There actually is a WGOD in The Virgin Islands.
  • Fun Fact: I learned from this episode that old CRT computer monitors had a red incandescent bulb in them.  OK, that’s a cheap shot at a good episode, but it is weird how long they lingered on it.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Impossible Dream (04/19/59)

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A couple are is dancing and discussing what a tramp the woman is (by 1959 standards, anyway).  There are 2 gunshots which are effective shocks even though (i.e. because) they are so unrealistically staged.  They are dancing very close and shown from just below the shoulders when the shots are heard.  It is almost comical what a non-sequitur they are. Before the shots, the woman’s arms do not move, so it is as if she was holding the gun between them the whole time.  As we hear the shots, there is absolutely no recoil.

The camera pulls so far back we can see the director — no wait this has been a scene filmed for a movie.  Stage-victim Oliver Matthews picks himself up and heads for his dressing room.  He opens up a bottle of hooch and unloads on his assistant, Miss Hall.  He hates the film, hates that he has been reduced to a small role, and hates having to act beside Myra Robbins.  But he’s not just a h8ter, he does love that booze.  Miss Hall gets him to put down the bottle by offering a sedative.

Her slavish devotion is repaid by Matthews telling her, “You ought to find yourself a man.  You’re drying up,  Pretty soon you’ll have fewer choices.”  He goes on a Serling-esque harangue of self-pity about himself and mockery of Miss Hall.  This a pretty pathetic pair.  Even as Matthews is cruelly taunting Miss Hall on the way out the door to Mexico, she is obsequiously fawning over him.

We are tricked as he actually goes home, not that the director gives us any clue — this could have been a place in Mexico.  However, the wardrobe lady from the film set  who Matthews had earlier pretended not to know walks in and is all smiles.  I was expecting that his previous ass-hattery was an act and that he would be charmingly in love with the lowly wardrobe lady, Grace Dolan.  Well cheers to them for fooling me, but jeers for them subjecting me to another depressing co-dependent train-wreck of a relationship.

In this pairing, Dolan is blackmailing Matthews to keep quiet about his role in her daughter’s murder.  Ya know, most parents might take such evidence to the police.  He insists that he is broke and can’t keep paying.  She nastily demands that he write the check anyway and damn well better find a way to cover it.  As she is leaving, he asks her to stay for a drink which is not at all suspicious.

As she is looking through his record collection, he dumps a bottle of his sedative in her glass and charmingly stirs it with his finger.  As a result of the drug or his grubby finger, Dolan passes out.  She is so disgusting that he isn’t tempted to do anything but kill her.  He loads her in the car, wraps her in chains and gives her a long shove off a short pier.

He returns home and finds Miss Hall there.  She knows what Matthews did, but will not tell the police as long as he will be her boyfriend.

This episode is a victim of its own success.  Franchot Tone is just great as Matthews.  And, by great, I mean repulsive.  Miss Hall is so needy, you go right past empathy into thinking “what’s wrong with this woman?”, and Grace Dolan is just as nasty as Matthews. There is just no one to root for or identify with.

Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.

Twilight Zone – A Matter of Minutes (01/24/86)

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tzmatterminutes1Michael Wright awakes to the sound of construction.  His lovely wife June [1] looks at the clock and it is 11:37. Michael’s watch, however, says 7:05. Realizing he has suddenly gained four hours and thirty-two minutes, he starts making out with June.  Her mind is probably on what she will do with her extra four hours and thirty minutes.  This temporal fantasizing is cut short as she hears a noise downstairs.

Michael grabs a bat and they go down to investigate.  In their living room, they see the blue man group working in their living room — men with blue featureless faces, blue skin and blue clothing.  They are rolling up carpets and moving furniture.  They are Borg-like, ignoring the Wrights until Michael swings the bat.  One of them just takes it, silently tosses it aside and continues his work.

tzmatterminutes3They decide to go to a neighbor’s house.  Outside they see more blue men scurrying around, using blue tools and driving blue vans.  Inside the neighbor’s house, the find a white dimensionless void.  They wander downtown amid many more blue workers.  They notice the clock on the bank also says 11:37.  Luckily they run into a man in a yellow suit who seems to be the supervisor.

He explains that the couple have somehow stepped backstage in time to the minute 11:37.  This is the place where the world of 11:37 is constructed.  And on it goes with the expected beats . . . you can’t leave . . . will they get back . . . when the world catches up to 11:37, will they move along with it or be stuck in 11:37?  There isn’t much of a story, no twist after the premise, and no arc to the characters. So why is it one of the best segments yet?

tzmatterminutes5It begins with a solid foundation — exploring the nature of time.  That is an immediately intriguing subject, especially to anyone who is watching The Twilight Zone.  I’m not sure even this incarnation of TZ is up to the task screwing up that subject.

They take that general topic and specifically explore the nature of reality, and how it is created one minute at a time.  It would be the worst kind of quibbling to suggest that a minute would be an eternity in this context.

tzmatterminutes6Visually this is the most startling episode of the series so far and must rank high up for TV of any era.  The faceless blue men stand out in contrast to the reality they are constructing whether it is inside the house or downtown.  Outfitting them in red would have been too flashy; the cool blue is the perfect choice for these drones going quietly about their work.

They must have also burned through a lot of the season’s budget for this episode.  In addition to the workers — and there seem to be many — their tools are also the same color blue.  And this includes everything from a wrench to a wheel-barrow to the vehicles.  It is always perfectly clear who it is that does not belong and what they are doing (even if it is actually the Wrights that don’t belong).

Lastly, the performances are consistently interesting.  Of course, the blue men are silent and stoic going about their jobs.  Adam Arkin (Michael) is always an interesting choice. Karen Austin wasn’t given much to do, but is perfectly fine.  The stand-out is Adolph Caesar as the yellow-suited supervisor.  He has most of the dialog and exposition, and pulls it off flawlessly.  Given a brief running time, he does as well as possible grounding the episode, explaining the situation, and breaking the news that the Wrights can’t go back.

OK, this isn’t like forgetting to take off your watch for a battle scene in Braveheart.  How could this guy forget a mask that turns everything blue, and how could no one else have noticed it?

I would generally not care for a segment that didn’t do more with its basic premise [2]. However, A Matter of Minutes does everything else so well, that it is a complete success.

Great stuff.

Post-Post:

  • [1] Karen Austin with a sultry sexy southern accent that I don’t remember her having on Night Court.
  • [2] Of course, being based on a story by a guy who wrote about a killer bulldozer, what did I expect?
  • With a point in time being constructed, this is the anti-Langoliers.

Twilight Zone – Monsters! (01/24/86)

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tzmonsters1Toby Michaels and his Dad are horsing around with horror masks and toy ray guns.  Toby shouts, “Die Monster Die!”  His dad responds, “American International, 1967, starring Boris Karloff, Nick Adams, based on a story by HP Lovecraft.” Does anyone talk like this?  Does anyone give a shit what studio produced a movie? [1]  In the category of useless information, this is second only to TV hosts who insist on crediting the publisher of a book.  No one cares.

Toby’s best friend has moved away, but his father tells him someone is moving into the old house today.  Toby walks down the street.  Showing the brain-power that explains why you never see guys over 20 named Toby, he decides the best vantage point to check things out is from under the moving van. [2]

After a nice bit of cat and mouse, Toby is face to face with an old man.  He introduces himself as Emile Francis Bendictson.  Noticing Toby’s monster magazine, he confides that tzmonsters2he is a monster, specifically a Vampire-American.  Toby protests that that can’t be true or he would be burning up in the sunlight.  So clearly Toby was lying earlier when he bragged about reading Dracula twice.  There is then a bit where a big deal is made over a vampire picture in Toby’s magazine.  It is not clear whether we are supposed to think the drawing is of Bendictson.

The next day, apparently agoraphobic Toby crawls into the space under Bendictson’s porch which he has been using as a clubhouse.  He drapes a wad of garlic around his neck, and pulls out a small cross.  He is spying on the old man washing his car, which is never going to be a Carl’s Jr. commercial.  Bendictson senses this and astounds Toby by lifting the car with one hand.  Bendictson busts him again.  Toby accuses him of “having the strength of the undead.”  Hey, you’re the one wearing the garlic necktie, pal!  The old man assures him there is nothing to worry about.

In fact, he says everything Toby knows about vampires is rubbish.  The cross has no effect on him.  He even grabs the garlic with no ill effects.  To prove the point, he takes young Toby out for garlic pizza . . . this is getting a little uncomfortable.  Just a few weeks ago, we had Peter tzmonsters3Riegert wrestling with a young boy in One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty. Now we have this geezer taking Toby out to a lovely outdoor bistro without the knowledge of his parents. Shockingly, they are both eating al fresco, but he is not listed in the credits.

The next day Toby sneaks into Bendictson’s house.  He discovers a refrigerator full of blood bags, but doesn’t seem to think it is worth mentioning to anyone.  Instead we cut to Toby some indeterminate time later sick in bed. [3] It should be noted that there have been a few sneezes by Toby and others when they were near Bendictson.  Toby’s father also had a sore shoulder, and others in the neighborhood have flu-like symptoms.

Bendictson opens Toby’s window and says, “C’mon, walk with me into the night, you and I . . . step out into the night . . . step out and I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.”  [REDACTED]  Bendictson and young PJ-clad Toby take a moonlight stroll to the local cemetery.  He points to a tombstone for the grave of “Emile Francis Bendictson 1828 – 1839.”  The epitaph says, “God save the child” which is exactly what I’ve been thinking for some time.

tzmonsters4He explains to Toby that a vampire must stay on the move.  If he stays in one place too long, the real monsters come out.  The sneezes are just a symptom of a recessive human survival trait.  When they are near vampires, they turn into monsters and kill the vampire in their midst.  Later that night, Bendictson leaves his door open and allows himself to be taken.

The next morning, the neighbors gawk as Bendictson’s corpse is put into a hearse. Toby takes his dad to the cemetery and it somehow has become night in just a few minutes. Rather than show his dad Bendictson’s tombstone –the first one — which might be a nice conversation-starter, Toby shows him some fireflies which I’m sure are significant to someone smarter than me.  Then Toby’s dad sneezes, which seems to alarm Toby.  Maybe this also makes sense to someone smarter than me.

OK, we know the sneeze is a human reaction to vampires.  This tells us that Toby’s father is a human.  But does it mean Toby has become a vampire?  There was absolutely no indication that might be the case.  I hate to even imagine the old guy nibbling on Toby’s neck.  To be fair, Bendictson says that isn’t the only way to “turn” someone, but I saw no other options.  This ending feels right, but doesn’t make much sense.

Bruce Solomon (Toby’s father) had a great sense of how to play this material.  It wasn’t pure comedy, but there was a lightness and a fun vibe between him and Toby.  Ralph Bellamy (Bendictson) had the easy charm of his 150 years in show business.  Sadly, Toby and his mother were pretty poorly portrayed.  Kathleen Lloyd went on to a nice career, so maybe she just wasn’t given enough to do here.  Oliver Robins had a short career, but he can always say he was in one of the all-time great movies — Poltergeist. [3]

Overall, a pretty good segment.

Post-Post:

  • [1] Much less the 14 companies that flash their logos before every movie.  It’s OK, your mother knows you’re in show business.  No one else cares.
  • [2] To be fair, it was a moving van, but the van wasn’t moving.
  • [3] Toby’s father’s diagnosis:  “The flu.  It’s one of those Asian things.  Payback for Viet Nam.”  Yeah, I’ll look for that line in the inevitable next TZ reboot.
  • [4] He might be less forthcoming about being in Poltergeist 2.  On the other hand he and I both share the honor of not being in the dreadful remake.