Monthly Archives: June 2018

Science Fiction Theatre – The Unexplored (11/05/55)

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“Middleton College in New York State is a respected institution of learning.  Professor Alex Bondar, teacher and authority in parapsychology, is about to give a demonstration . . .”

Well, which is it?  Are they respected, or do they have a department of para-psychology?  It can’t be both.  Dr. Bondar is about to give a demonstration of hypnosis.  He has determined that elderly Mrs. Canby can be put under by shooting sound waves through her head at 14,000 cycles per second.

In a few seconds the old woman’s face relaxes and her eyes shut.  The overly-optimistic Bondar does not check her pulse, but rather asks, “Mrs. Canby, do you know me?”  He tells his students that not only is she not asleep, but some are her senses are more acute than when she is awake.  He drapes a handkerchief in front of her face, and has a student hold an open book behind it.  She astounds the class by being able to read the text, although she mistakes a booger for a comma.

Bondar explains this feat by saying that under hypnosis, her mind might be more sensitive to infra-red rays.  Hunh?  He says he has also seen Mrs. Canby describe things that were far out of sight where infra-red rays wouldn’t explain it.  He awakens her by counting slowly from 10 down to 1.  And I mean he takes his bloody time and doesn’t miss a digit.

It is also a countdown of a different sort as Bondar has a bombshell announcement.  A college administrator has actually pulled his head out of his ass for once and canceled the parapsychology program, judgmentally calling it “nonsense.”  Bondar is leaving the College, and not by no astral projection, either.

He gets a call from the police that his colleague Dr. Bernhardt Mannheim, driving in from Montreal for a parapsychology lecture, has been missing for 2 days.  Bondar describes him as about 70, small, frail, with white hair, and having a goatee; so indistinguishable from every other German scientist on TV.

Back at home, Julie Bondar is saddened by the loss of her husband’s cushy job.  She suggests that maybe if he had concentrated less on the para- and more on the -psychology, he might still have the gig.  He says she was never supportive and considers his work “the foolish fumblings of the family idiot!”  Sing it, sister!

That night, the Bondars go to Dean Henry Stark’s house for tea and begging.  He implores Bondar to admit that his work is just a lot of hooey.  The Dean says, “Science explains what actually happens.  You’re trying to explain what has never happened.”  Right on, brother!

While there, the police call with an update on Mannheim.  Stark mentions that he had tried to hire Mannheim for the faculty.  But wait, why would he make an offer to a parapsychologist when he was shutting down the department and considered it nonsense?  Anyhoo, Mannheim used his credit card to buy gas about 200 miles from them, but then just vanished.  Stark has a brilliant idea — are we sure this guy is the Dean? — why doesn’t Bondar use telepathy or clairvoyance to find Mannheim?

Bondar is uncomfortable having his crazy beliefs put to the test like, you know, science.  He argues that such skills can’t be turned on and off like a water tap.  The Dean, quite appropriately, accuses him of not really believing in this stuff himself.  Bondar says that psychics usually have a possession of the victim to work with, like an article of clothing.  Whew, guess we can’t test my beliefs, nosiree!  His wife helpfully reminds him that he has a letter from Mannheim, and Bondar almost does a homina homina.

Bondar agrees to haul Mrs. Canby in at 10 am the next morning to try to locate Mannheim.  Julie is suddenly on team Bondar again and doesn’t want him to go through with it.  She fears the Dean will make a fool of him, and reminds him that Mannheim warned him he was throwing his life away.  Again, wait — this is the same Mannheim who was driving down for the parapsychology lecture, right?

In the classroom, Bondar fires up the parabolic dish pointed at Mrs. Canby’s grey noggin again.  To Stark’s delight, this time the sound waves just hurt her ears; especially the good one.  Heyyyoooo!  They fall back on a method that had also worked with her — a metronome.  Honestly, this is a great piece of business because the silence broken only by the perfectly regular clacks is indeed hypnotic; so much so, I wonder why I can’t recall ever seeing it used again on TV or in movies.  The camera slowly pushes in alternately on the metronome, then Mrs. Canby’s face in a series of shots that is — dare I say — worthy of Hitchcock.  Was SFT fooling around with the antibiotic fungus from two weeks ago?

That does not work either, so Bondar tries using light as a stimulus.  Maybe they were still using the fungus, because he shines a spot in Mrs. Canby’s eye, then shines it in Julie’s for no reason I can figure.  Trying to put Mrs. Canby under, Bondar counts slowly from 1 to 29.  Think of that — on network TV, they had a scene where absolutely nothing happened except a dude counted slowly for 30 seconds.  Maybe that earlier 10 second countdown tested well.  Mrs. Canby freaks out at the pressure they put on her and is taken away.

The camera pans over to Julie who has not moved an inch.  She seems to be in a trance as she walks to her husband. [1]  She is not feeling well and asks him to drive her home; and to use the Stone Mountain route so she can get some fresh air, and maybe a Pecan Log Roll.  Julie tells her husband to stop at a certain point, then tells him to go down the hill and look around.  At the bottom of a steep hill, he sees Mannheim’s car where it crashed 3 days ago.  Bondar’s paranormal beliefs are vindicated because Julie’s clairvoyant vision made her stop them at this specific place; or it might have been all the flies.

Like Tales of Tomorrow, you really have to grade this series on a curve.  Objectively, the episode is awful.  However, considering the budget, the times, and compared to the rest of the series, parts of the episode are just a masterpiece.  The metronome, the editing, the counting, the shot compositions . . . there was just a lot to like here.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] OK, it is a great idea that Julie was caught in stray light that was intended for Mrs. Canby.  But it’s not like she was right behind Canby.  Bondar really had to swing that light around to get it in Julie’s eye, and do it more than once.  It would have been so easy to just line them up so Canby caught the light on the left side of her face and Julie behind her caught it on her right side.
  • Major kudos to the director Eddie Davis.  He has a ton of credits, but nothing that indicates an auteur.  Maybe I should rewatch his earlier SFT effort, The Strange People at Pecos.
  • BTW, IMDb has his age at 115.  Maybe they need a — dare I say — Dead Man’s Switch.  At some point, ya just know you missed an email.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Madame Mystery (03/27/60)

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Not that it matters, but that is the same beach-house that was in The Last Dark Step.  I remember it from 18 months ago because it was kind of sad.  It looks like a great old California getaway, right on the water.  The sad part is that it was probably plowed under decades ago to make way for some ugly $MM condominiums.

Steven is pounding away on a typewriter when a soaking wet floozy wanders in the front door — a beach-house feature second only to the beach.  Unfortunately, the wet, liquored-up blonde — I haven’t gotten to the unfortunate part yet — is there with Jimmy Dolan.  He has promised to help her career.  Honesty, I hope her character is a better actress than the actress playing that character.

After summarily throwing the girl out of the house, Jimmy starts talking about another actress, Betsy Blake, who was killed in a speedboat accident.  Her death had sunk a $6M production at Goliath Studios.  The studio execs are too dumb to move the release date up to capitalize on the tragedy.  Since her body was discovered this morning, the story is over.  Jimmy is worried that by the time the film comes out, everyone will have forgotten Betsy.

Jimmy wants Betsy to have the biggest funeral ever, bigger than Rudolf Valentino; but doomed to be dwarfed in 3 years.  He thinks that will make him a big man in Hollywood.  His plan is to then start a rumor that Betsy Blake is still alive.  Plan B is to concoct a back-story for her — the real Betsy Blake that no one ever knew.  That’s why he needs a writer to help him.  Steven refuses to lower himself to such a spectacle; until Jimmy offers him $300.

Weeks later, Alfredo is about to leave the beach-house.  Wait, who?  He mentions tools, so he might be a plumber.  Steve’s pipes were mentioned earlier, but that might have been a metaphor; plus, months have elapsed.  He seems to know about the Blake scheme as if Steve had confided in him.  And when Jimmy enters, he calls Alfredo by name.  Alfredo glares at him.  Alfredo is just kind of a strange, superfluous character who does not need to be there.  Kind of like that floozy, but at least she was blonde; and wet.

Jimmy is just giddy at his success in promoting the dead woman as a star.  Steve has been writing articles like Love Secrets from Beyond the Grave and I was Betsy Blake’s Astrologist.  Jimmy says, “The best thing that washed-out, platinum-rinsed old pelican ever did in her life was to ram her speedboat into that jerk from Pasadena.”   Then Jimmy is shocked when Betsy walks in and says, “the next phase should be The Return of Betsy Blake!”

Betsy (aka the titular Madame Mystery) is a strange piece of work.  She has a great natural sexiness, but this is mitigated by her personality.  She shouts her lines as if she were drunk, but she does not otherwise appear to have been drinking.  True, she makes a beeline for Steve’s liquor cabinet, but there is no weaving or slurring of words.  Almost immediately, she is full-on drunk, though.

Turns out, there was a blonde on the boat she hit that had a similar build and blood alcohol level.  When the police fished her body out of the water, they just assumed it was Betsy Blake.  So Betsy took this opportunity to escape from her horrible, horrible life as a movie star.  Just as well.  She had sworn to leave the country if Nixon became president anyway.

There is no mention of the other girl’s family.  Since no other body was found, her parents must be worried sick about their vanished daughter.  Do they even know she was out on a boat?  Was there an air-pocket in the sunken boat where she waited desperately to be rescued?  Did some privileged a**hole leave her to die?  Maybe it’s appropriate that Jimmy planned a Kennedyesqe funeral for Betsy.  And let’s not forget that Betsy is pretty chipper, and the two dudes are pretty forgiving considering she killed two people.

Jimmy and Betsy argue and insult each other.  He is upset that her reappearance will ruin his good fortune.  She berates him for being successful only by exploiting her.  There is a twist that might have been shocking in 1960, but mostly it left me thinking it was a total non-sequitur.

Far be it from me to criticize such a great show, but this one did not quite live up to its potential.  Audrey Totter could have been great as Betsy had she dialed her performance down to 10.  I know she had to be obnoxious to have the conflict with Jimmy, but she is frequently just too grating.  Harp McGuire was a stiff as Steven.  Only Joby Baker as Jimmy seemed well-cast.  He has the perfect face for the era.  It is hard to imagine him 10 years before or after with his mug.  And that twist — nice, just too out-of-nowhere, man.

Other Stuff:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  Jimmy is still with us.  Sadly, Steve died six years later at only 44.  Even more sadder, Lois, the floozy in the first scene, died at 36.
  • Audrey Totter was last seen in Spider, Inc.
  • As always, more info on the production and source material can be found at bare*bonez ezine.

Twilight Zone – Acts of Terror (12/03/88)

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“Well,” as the commenters say, “there’s nothing funny about this.”

Louise Simonson, after years of physical and psychological abuse by her husband, gets the ability to conjure attack dogs for protection.

That’s about it.  The episode really destroyed my desire to think any more about it, which, I guess, means it was effective.  The thought of the prison Louise was in and the excuses she made for her bruises continued long after the brief enjoyment of seeing her idiot husband gets his due (actually getting off way too easy).

Melanie Mayron and Kenneth Walsh were amazing in their roles.  If I have any criticism, it is that maybe it was a little too real for this often-silly edition of The Twilight Zone.

Next . . .

Tales of Tomorrow – Past Tense (04/03/53)

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Dr. Henry Marco (Boris Karloff) is in a bed at State Hospital dead of pneumonia; or maybe just sleeping — it’s hard to tell with Karloff.  Wait, he’s breathing, barely hanging on.  The doctor says he has had no visitors and no one knows where he came from.  Karloff claimed he was from the future, but no one believed him.  In his stupor, he mumbles for penicillin, but the doctors in 1910 have never heard of it.

We flash back, and by back I mean forward, to 1953 where Marco’s wife is nagging him to unlock the basement door where he is working on his experiments.  He opens the door so Jane can berate him about their money problems and “this fantastic, stupid comic book idea of yours!”  She motions toward a seat surrounded by chrome and metal disks.  He asks her what she would say if he told her he could go back to any time in the past.  Jane threatens to smash the time machine and runs back upstairs.

Dr. Marco sees the time machine as the answer to all his problems.  He is tired of being poor, and he is tired of merely treating headaches and colds.  He might also want to visit the young Henry Marco back around the Civil War and tell him to steer clear of that Jane chick.

He takes off his lab jacket, and puts on a proper suit jacket.  He grabs a few items < 3.4 ounces from the fridge and sits in the time machine.  As he goes back in time, we see stock footage of catastrophes such as Hiroshima (1945), Pearl Harbor (1941), and FDR’s inauguration (1933).  He finally sees some good news about Charles Lindbergh making it (1927) and plops down in 1923.

He tries to introduce modern medicines to the 1923 medical community, but they are understandably skeptical.  He finally gets in to see Dr. Giles and Dr. Laskey without an appointment. [1]   They are hesitant to try his miracle drug without proper testing. Also because he wants $250,000 in bonds which will mature in 1953.  Marco asks for a test subject on the verge of death from meningitis, pneumonia, or the boogie-woogie flu.  He will revive the poor sap with his so-called “penicillin.”

Dr. Giles is a smart dude and leaves.  Dr. Laskey is interested, though.  He tells Marco there is a great candidate in the children’s ward — a little girl hours from death.  Karloff is giddy with excitement.  He injects the girl with 300,000 units.  Her temperature continues to go up.  He gives her another 300,000.  Then she gets better.  No, wait, she dies an agonizing death with a 105 degree temperature.

Karloff’s excuse is that she was a little too close to death for the penicillin to be effective.  Besides, one case is not enough to evaluate his cure.  He asks for another test subject, but is refused.  To make amends to Dr. Laskey whose career he killed along with the girl, he gives them a bottle of penicillin for free.

Marco goes back home to 1953 for no reason that I can see.  While there, he invites Jane to go back to 1923 with him, also for no reason  I can see.  She declines, so he offers to bring her back a souvenir, “an autographed picture of President Taft” even though Harding or Coolidge was the president in 1923.  Jane isn’t scared, she just thinks he is tampering with things beyond his understanding.  He says, “Some people look to the future for their success.  I get mine out of the past.”  He explains, “I wanted to bring them the benefits of penicillin,” but leaves out the part about the $250k. [3]

Marco decides to try again.  He will go the the same company, but in 1910!  Dammit, Giles is running things then too.  He held on to that job like Justice Ginsberg.  Even in 1910, he is experienced enough to not use untested drugs.  He has Marco hauled away for impersonating a physician, and just generally being a lunatic.

It is not clear what happens to bring us back to the opening scene.  It is six months later, still 1910, so Marco somehow got pneumonia the same year he arrived.  He dies, and Laskey holds the penicillin bottle in his hand.  “If only there were such a drug!”  Wait, was he carrying that bottle around for six months?

So Dr. Marco failed at saving millions of lives by inventing penicillin 18 years early.  Did he at least drop Charles Lindbergh a note telling him to keep an eye on his kid? [2]

Footnotes:

  • [1] As he is introduced, we learn that the time travel has apparently changed his name to Harry.  Or the other actor screwed up.
  • [2] Although, to be fair, Lindbergh was only 8 at the time, so it probably wouldn’t have helped.
  • [3] I’m sure he had that earmarked for Alexander Fleming and family after denying him the discovery.

Outer Limits – Promised Land (08/21/98)

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A hideous alien, or as he is known on that planet, some guy, is educating his son Ma’al to never eat food from the outside.  Hmmmm . . . thin ice already.

After the lesson, he dons a snappy hoodie with matching ensemble and runs out of the barn.  He is stopped by his brother T’sha.  Cut!

OK, enough with the apostrophes in science fiction!  It is just a really lazy way to convey otherness (although probably moreso in 1998).  Aliens don’t speak English.  We can spell their names any way we want.  Why would we arbitrarily stick in an apostrophe?  No one can agree on how to spell Moammar Khadafy’s name, but no one is sticking an apostrophe in it. [1]  A minor point, maybe, but it’s kept me from reading Dune.

Anyway, T’sha warns Ma’al not to go to the ruins of the old city again.  T’sha reminds him (i.e. us) that “the woods are filled with the beings.  Big smelly ones.  With razor teeth and claws like hooks.”  Ma’al says their grandfather told him the beings all died in camps years ago.  What the hell, Ma’al passes a US Interstate sign.  The city of ruins is Seattle.

In Seattle, we see a ragged group of humans.  They don’t have “razor teeth and claws like hooks” but I think the smelly part is accurate.  A woman says now that they have escaped the camps, they will reclaim their birth names.  She was 98801, but is now Rebecca.  Birth names are also reclaimed by David, Isaac, Ruth, Caleb, and Joshua.  Fine names, but I think the writers forgot their Big Book o’ Character Names that day and just picked up a Bible. [2]

Rebecca asks a teenage girl what name she would like.  We don’t get an answer (teenagers!), but a flashback informs us that this is a sequel to the fine episode The Camp and that the girl is 98843’s daughter.

Raggedy Alex whines about them being hungry.  Rebecca makes good arguments about not eating the low-hanging fruit they see all around them because it might be poison.  Alex ignores her and eats like a king; well, the king of Appletown anyway.  Others follow his lead but they all get sick.  Serves ’em right.  You’d think David, Isaac, Ruth, Caleb, and Joshua would know better than to eat an apple they were warned about.

They catch Ma’al snooping and chase him back to the farm where he lives.  Once there, they break into the grow-room where the aliens grow food for their family.  They grab some groceries and flee.  Unfortunately, Caleb is killed by a security device (the good kind — it doesn’t dial the police, but it does send a dozen steel blades through the intruder’s body).

The four humans go war with the alien family.  We see the aliens are actually pretty good eggs, and we see what humans will do when they’re hungry.  It is not worth going through point by point, but it is good stuff.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] OK, a couple of spellings do.
  • [2] Just joshing.  Where would they find a Bible in Hollywood?