Monthly Archives: June 2018

Science Fiction Theatre – The Human Equation (10/15/55)

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We open on a cleaning woman cleaning, and the announcer announcing, ” . . . and a vacuum cleaner screamed its defiance at the usual quiet.”  The woman is pretty defiant also, screaming at the tenants over the noise, “I know it’s noisy!  Ain’t my fault the noise bothers you!  I can’t help it if you got sensitive ears!”  Then she just scream-screams as a man runs into frame and strangles her.  Thus far, he is the hero of tonight’s episode.

One of the neighbors recognizes the man as Dr. Finch, and the police haul him in.  He protests, “I am a man of science.  I have never inflicted pain on a single human being.”  C’mon, WWII was just ten years ago.  He claims he can’t even remember where he was that day.

Finch’s niece Nan takes his arrest pretty hard.  She and Finch’s associate Dr. Seward go to see the Governor rather then, say, an attorney.  The Gov has the facts, though.  He lists off the evidence: Finch was spotted at the crime-scene, the victim’s skin was under his fingernails, a hair on his coat came from the victim, particles of dust and carpet fibers were found on his clothes, and he was positively identified by an eye-witness.  The Governor’s case is undermined, however, by the ridiculous circular tuft of hair sticking out of the side of his head.

Seward argues that Finch’s record of service to medicine should get him a break.  Not only that, he implores the Gov to just think of the millions who will benefit from his future research.  However, Seward doesn’t offer up any new hard evidence or campaign contributions so the Gov leaves Finch on death row.

Seward assumes Finch’s position at the lab.  Nan is none too thrilled with this.  She barges into his office and says, “Why, your best couldn’t possibly equal the least of my uncle’s abilities!  You’re a fool if you think you can replace Albert Finch!”  She further accuses him of taking credit for her uncle’s research and storms out of his office.  Strangely, she was fine with it earlier that day.  You don’t often find such irrational behavior in fictional women.

Seward goes to check on their new scientist, Dr. Clements.  Seward tells him he doesn’t think they could have found a better person for the job. [1]  He also conveys Nan’s pleasure that he was carrying on her uncle’s work.  Clements seems surprised by this news.

At the end of the day, Seward offers to take Nan home.  They hear a ruckus in the lab.  Clements has gone nuts and attacked a subordinate.  When Seward intervenes, Clements threatens to kill him.  After a mild defense, Clements runs out.  Seward is baffled by this.  “What’s the meaning of this?  Resentment one minute, a cheerful greeting the next.  And now this.”  He looks at Nan and says, “What about you?”  He confronts her about her earlier hostility, but she remembers none of it.  She suggests he’s the one who been acting strangely.  Yet, the sap still drives her home.

Back at Nan’s place, her son Kenny is mad at her.  While Nan is cooking dinner for them, Seward notices a bruise on Kenny’s arm.  Nan walks in and asks, “Who did this?”  Kenny says, “You know!  You did it!  You know you did it!”

The next day, after what must have been an awkward dinner, Seward goes to see Dr. Upton, a psychiatrist.  He needs Upton’s expertise to determine the effects of a fungus they have been developing as an antibiotic.  It is supposed to be more effective than penicillin.  What is it with fungus and infections?

With just hours until Finch goes to the gas chamber, Seward decides to test the fungus on himself.  Upton ties him to a chair and injects him with it.  After an hour, his heartbeat accelerates 10 BPM, his pupils dilate, and he begins to perspire.  So either the fungus was having an effect, or he kind of digs this bondage.

An hour later, he becomes psychotic.  After another hour, he begins to have visions.  Finally after four hours, he violently thrashes about trying to escape from his restraints so he can kill Upton.

Seward and Nan visit the Governor again to explain that he had proven that Finch had acted under the influence of the fungus.  Since they have compelling new evidence and witnesses, he calls the warden to stop Finch’s execution.

The announcer assures us this was a fictional story, however . . .

“The discovery of a similar fungus derivative that can produce experimental psychoses for study in the laboratory is fact!  The drug, known as LSD, has enabled science to relate mental illness to the chemistry of the body for the first time.”

Wow, I wonder if this was the first mention of LSD on TV?  I see it actually was available by prescription starting in 1947.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  OK, he says man, not person.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Hitch Hike (02/21/60)

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Twenty-Three year old Suzanne Pleshette . . .

Really I could stop tight there, give the episode a 10, and move on.  Unfortunately, this great natural resource is somewhat wasted.

No-nonsense Charles Underhill has just picked his niece Anne up at the courthouse.  She was hanging out with a car thief, but got off easy because Underhill is a city council-man and the judge knows him to be a model citizen and honest public servant.  Except for using his office to get his gangsta kinfolk out of the hoosegow.  Honest except for that.

The judge lets Anne off so as not to damage the sterling reputation of the council-man.  Underhill tells her she should be grateful, and she grudgingly thanks him.  To straighten her out, he tells her he is pulling her out of college and sending her to work in an office for one of his friends.  Probably the one that needs a loading zone in front of his store.

He pulls his land yacht over and runs into a store to buy some cigarettes, so I guess the example-setting only goes so far.  While he is gone, Anne notices a cute guy hitchhiking.  She certainly has a type.  Their eyes meet, but Underhill breaks the mood by returning.  Before he can resume his lecture, the car ahead of him backs into his car.  “Look at her!  Can’t even pull out of a parking space!” he says and lays on the horn.

Unfortunately, the horn gets stuck in the F-U position and won’t stop blaring.  Anne is greatly amused at his inability to stop the horn, and his discomfort at becoming a spectacle in the downtown square.  The good towns-folk stop and stare, but the hitchhiker takes action.  He comes over and disconnects the horn.

Underhill, being a proper gentleman, thanks him.  The twitchy punk says, “A noisy horn, it bugs me.”  Underhill compliments his mechanical skillz, and he says, “Either you dig a motor or you don’t.”  Len, a hipster doofus of the type inexplicably considered cool at the time, hits Underhill up for a ride to San Francisco.  Two-time County Safety Award winner Underhill takes a dim view of hitchhikers, or it might just his presbyopia flaring up.  Len reminds him that he did help the old guy out of a jam.  After initially refusing, Underhill relents and gives him a ride.

Well, we get a lengthy exploration of the generation gap.  A new age had arrived in Hollywood, so the dialogue is written to let the cool Len score all the points against the geezer Underhill.  But, ya know, when you dig into it, Len is kinda full of shit.

  • Len is the criminal here, let’s not forget that.  Sure, Underhill is old and stodgy, but Len is actually the parasite who stole the product of another man’s work.  They might present him as cool and charismatic, but he was in jail for theft.
  • Len talks about his dream of building a car and racing it around the world.  A little out-there, but respectable, especially the part about building it himself.  But what has he done to make it happen?  Instead, he whines about “insiders” like Underhill who have worked 40 years for what they have.
  • He goes on and on about knives.  Underhill understandably gets nervous and attracts the attention of a cop.  Len then complains that he had said he was talking about his cell-mate, not himself.  Granted, he did say his cell-mate was the knife aficionado.  But it seemed to have rubbed off on him, and Underhill was correct to be concerned, especially with his impressionable, dimwitted niece in the car.
  • As part of his “insiders” vs “outsiders” rant, Len talks about poet Dylan Thomas.  He tells the geezer Underhill he could never understand a young guy like that.  Well Thomas was born only 7 years after Underhill, dumbass. [1]
  • There is a twist in which Underhill compromises his “old-fashioned” values.  It is presented as a victory for the smirking Len, but really it is just a sad, early fracture of American standards.
  • In the final shot, Len is shown tearing up paper and throwing it out the window of the moving car.  So add litterbug to his charges.

So Len is really just one of the first in a long line of sanctimonious hippie blowhards that finally took over popular culture in Easy Rider.  But in his short hair and button down shirt, he probably smelled a lot better.

And what I mean by all this complaining is that it is a great episode.  John McIntire is great as the stodgy, old-school geezer.  He was so good that I’m not sure he was acting.  Robert Morse can frequently be cloying and/or obnoxious as he hams it up.  His persona worked in this episode, though, as the counter-point to the older man’s rigidity.  Really both were caricatures as they somewhat have to be in a 30 minute show.  Sadly, Suzanne Pleshette is given little to do; but she is very cute doing it.

No, I’m not 80.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Granted, their current ages are quite different.  But that is because the poet Len admires as the pinnacle of humanity drank himself to death at age 39 leaving behind a wife and children.
  • Title Analysis:  Why Hitch Hike rather than Hitchhike?  Why Hitch Hike rather than Hitchhiker?  The Hitchcock/Hitch Hike similarity doesn’t make sense.  I’m baffled.
  • The titular similarity to the dreadful Hitchhiker series also somewhat tainted the experience.
  • My general crotchetiness possibly due to being stuck in traffic today beside two motorcycles.  OK, you’re already riding a 100 decibel boom box.  Do you really need to blast a stereo that you can hear above that?  Plus they were fat guys with no shirts.
  • No, I’m really not 80.

Twilight Zone – Our Selena Is Dying (11/12/88)

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Dramatis Personae

Martha  Brockman

Selena  Brockman

Diane  Brockman

Debra Brockman

Kent  Brockman

What a mess!  Maybe there’s a reason this original story from Rod Serling never got produced.  At least in Number Twelve Looks Just Like You we didn’t have to meet all twelve; and they were hot!

Why would they start out with this shot of a girl in a B&W photo?  We don’t know who she is, and won’t know the significance until 2/3rds into the episode.  It sets us up for nothing.  Did any viewers really recognize the bandage on her arm that appears to be a sleeve?  Benedict Cumberbatch wouldn’t have noticed it.  I mean, Sherlock Holmes would have.  I just assume Cumberbatch is an average Joe (with occasional superhero tendancies) like me and probably would not have.

Young Doctor Burrell is making a house-call to check on elderly Selena Brockman, which might be the single most fantastic premise in this entire series.  But such personal care is why he went into medicine.  He quickly regresses to the medical mean by giving the old woman a fistful of pills.  Her niece Diane Brockman uses the opportunity to hit on the doctor.  No, wait, that’s why he went into medicine.

Another niece, Debra Brockman, has received a phone call asking her to come see Selena whom she has never met.  Diane greets her and introduces her to Orville the Handyman.  Diane calls him the village idiot but says it is OK because he is deaf and she had her head turned.  Debra sees another woman staring catatonically out the window.  Diane says that is her mother which I guess makes her Martha Brockman.

Diane takes Debra upstairs to meet Selena.  Debra tells the old woman she will be helping to take care of her.  Selena takes her hand so firmly it hurts.  It leaves a mark which the doctor later tells Debra is a liverspot, but he might have just been flirting.  When the doctor next visits Selena, he is surprised she is dressed and sitting up alert in bed.

That night, however, the doctor gets a call from Debra who asks him to come to the house.  When he arrives, she is sitting in the dark.  He takes her to the hospital, but they can find no reason for her apparent premature aging. You know what I can find no reason for?  Not showing her aged face.  At the house, her face is kept in the shadows.  She is not shown at the hospital at all.  This is the point where her older self should have been revealed.  We know what is happening, and Debra thought it was severe enough to call the doctor.  Instead, we see her a few minutes later, after we have gotten used to the idea.  And she is not hideous enough to warrant any suspense that might have built up.

Back at the house again, the doctor is taking Diane’s blood pressure.  She says she is fine and her mother Martha is fine also.  He notices a nasty burn scar, which she says is from an accident when she was a child.  Selena rolls her wheelchair in and says they are both fine.  Dr. Burrell notes the irony that Debra is aging as Selena is getting younger.  She tells him his services are no longer needed.

Orville catches Burrell outside and shows him a diary.  There is the photo inside of the girl wearing wearing a bandage in the same spot as Diane’s scar, and it is dated 1940.   But the entry says it is her mother Martha in the picture.  The camera pans away from them in a textbook camera move guaranteed to create suspense — who is around the corner . . . did they overhear the doctor . . . is Orville in danger for ratting the Brockwomen out?  But no . . . yawn . . . the pan stops on a statue.  Hunh?  There’s actually a good gag to be had there, but I don’t think they realized it.  Also, it was aleady sorta used on the original TZ’s A Penny for your Thoughts.

Back at the hospital, we finally get our first look at the prematurely aged Debra.  That night, Burrell sneaks back to the house.  He rolls up the catatonic Martha’s sleeve and sees no scar.  He says, “You’re Diane!  You’re the daughter!”  Diane walks in and Burrell accuses her, pointing out that Martha has no scar.  Also that she had green eyes like Diane did.  “How old are you really, Martha?”

He busts into Selena’s bedroom and shouts, “It’s not right!  Give Debra back her years!”  His pleas fall on deaf ears.  Literally.  Heh heh.

Selena says, “What do you know about it doctor?  The game is longevity.  You play at it with your medicine and your stethoscopes, but we’ve won.  There’s one rule doctor.  It has nothing to do with morality or love.  When illness approaches, the trade takes place.”

Diane tries to brain him with a fireplace poker, but they get into a struggle.  While they wrestle, Martha enters with a oil lamp and cries, “Mommy”  Diane backs away from her saying, “Get away from me!”  the lamp falls and breaks and the wild fire spreads like . . . er, wildfire.  Only Burrell gets out alive.  Maybe.

The police say that neighbors saw one woman escape, clothes on fire.  Debra returns to the house looking young and cute again.  Meanwhile at the hospital, an old indigent woman with massive burns has been admitted.  A nurse notes that Jane Doe’s left arm seems to be healing quickly.  Another nurse in the hall shows a friend a burn mark on her left arm that she doesn’t remember getting.  Well gee, it couldn’t have been from Jane Doe — her hands are shown completely bandaged over.

The old greedily leaching youth from the young is nothing original, but that’s OK.  It’s one of those tropes that are too good to leave alone; especially as I get older.  This production, however, just seems a little busy.  I think dropping one of the Brockmans would have tightened the story up nicely.

Maybe it would have made this crazy family less dysfunctional.  Debra has never met her aunt Selena or her aunt Martha?  OK, I guess families move away or split up.  Why is Martha being abused by her mother as the walking fountain of youth?  It is demonstrated at the end that it need not be a blood relative.  For that matter, why did they recruit cousin Debra at all?  Couldn’t they just have placed an ad for “Hot nurse wanted.  Must provide uniform” like I do?

Other Stuff:

  • Sweet Jeebus, I haven’t watched a TZ episode in weeks.  Was the new guy’s narration this insipid before, or is he going a new way?  Why do they try to make this show so . . . what, normal?  Melodramatic?  This is the MFing TZ, bitches!  Where is the edge, where is the menace?

Pigeon Blood – Paul Cain (1933)

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The woman was bent far forward . . .

Now that’s how you start a story!

It regresses to the mean quickly as she is only leaning over the steering wheel with squinty eyes looking at the road ahead and checking the mirrors for the car following her.  Her eyes get the opposite of squinty as they begin firing on her.  One shot blows out a tire, and a parting shot thuds into the back of the seat beside the woman.

The brave drive-by missers speed away, leaving the woman fortuitously stranded by a gas station.  She gives the mechanic her card and cabs her way back to Manhattan.  They see from her card that she is Mrs. Dale Hanan [1] of the Park Avenue Dale Hanans.  The mechanic recognizes her his the name.  “She’s Hanan’s wife — the millionaire.  Made his dough in oil” which is why his bread is so yummy.  His partner says, “That’s swell.  We can soak him plenty.”

Her cab stops at  63rd and Park Avenue.  Hey, there’s the Regency — I’ve stayed there!  She calls her husband and tells him what happened.  An hour later, he is paying a visit to Mr. Druse.  Hanan tells Druse that Jeffrey Crandall just tried to kill his wife.  Hanan says his ex-wife Catherine has gone through about $115k of her inheritance gambling.  She has further run up a debt of $68k.

Hanan says his wife still has a set of rubies named “Pigeon Blood” by the worst marketing department on earth.  The plan was for Crandall to steal the rubies, Catherine to collect the insurance to pay him back, and Crandall to give her back the rubies.  Which sounds great, although, I’m not sure why Crandall needed to be involved at all.  Anyhoo, Crandall gave her back some phonies, doubling his take.  She threatened to rat him out to the insurance company even if she had to go to jail.  That’s when his boyz started shooting at her.  Druse agrees to help out for the low, low sum of $35k.  What the hell, that’s $650k in 2018 dollars!

Druse goes to her place and finds her drunk, with a dead man in her apartment.  The dude tried to sneak up the fire escape so she brained him with a niblick.  They leave the apartment.  Druse asks how long she and Hanan have been divorced.  Like every woman I talk to, she takes about 3 seconds to tell him she is married.

They go to Druse’s luxurious penthouse apartment.  It is as fabulous as you would expect from a guy who takes $650k cases.  It lacks an infinity pool, but has an infinity carpet — the living room is open to the dark city skyline outside, without even a railing.

Druse leaves Catherine and uses a phone downstairs to call Hanan.  He tells Hanan his wife Catherine is dead — what a scamp!  Then he goes to see Crandall and gives him the same story.  Crandall turns out to be pretty honest as gangsters go.  The rubies had already been switched out when he stole them.

Druse regroups with the Hanans back at his crib.  Druse lays out the whole story and someone inevitably goes over the edge of that open-air living room.  The story is pretty standard, but the image of that death is staying with me.  That would be worth the price of admission in a movie.

And by “price of admission” I mean a month’s Netflix fee because God knows they haven’t earned their $7.99 in months.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I refuse to watch The Handmaid’s Tale because of the producers’ hysteria that it could become reality any day.  On the other hand, the old convention of sticking Mrs. In front of the husband’s full name is about as close to Offred as you can get.
  • Druse has a Filipino boy working for him at his pad.  We know this because the phrase “Filipino boy” appears 13 times in 3 pages.
  • Paul Cain was last heard from in One, Two, Three in this same collection.  So either he is a great writer, or he has a lot of stuff in the public domain.
  • First published in the November 1933 issue of Black Mask.
  • Also that month:  Duck Soup released.

Tales of Tomorrow – The Fury of the Cocoon (03/06/53)

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Borden and his guide Brenegan come staggering out of the dense jungle into a slightly less dense area of the jungle.  They are showing up 15 days late and without the porters slaves and supplies they were supposed to bring.  Borden blames Brenegan for their associates slaves abandoning them.  He was “vicious, inhuman toward them.”  Like some kind of partner-master.

They walk a little more, calling out for the group they were supposed to meet.  They quickly arrive at a cabin which just baffles me.  If it was this close by, why didn’t they just rendezvous here?  The cabin is stocked with food, so Borden says they will stay the night.  On the table, they notice a large titular cocoon.

They hear a scream and run outside.  Their last porter has found the bodies of his co-workers fellow slaves.  Borden says, “Some giant leach of an animal drained them of every drop of blood.”  They hear noise in the brush and Brenegan raises his weapon.  A woman staggers out and babbles incoherently about “hundreds of them” before fainting.  Borden carries her back to the cabin.

While Borden tends to Susan, who I think is his daughter or niece, Brenegan reads from the notes of the late Dr. Blankford:

August 3 . . .  The creature died this night.  Conclusion: it could not have been of earthly origin.  By some miracle, the meteorite brought it here.  A sample of life from beyond our universe in the form of a monstrous, invisible insect.”

Borden grabs the notebook and reads of Blankford’s discovery of a giant cocoon.  An invisible creature the size of a large dog crawled out of it.  Blankford and his assistant caught the creature and covered it with plaster to create a visible statue of it.  Borden continues reading:

July 23 . . . the plaster model is finished.  It is the most dreadful insect I have ever seen.  Note to self, order another case of model glue.

I hope it was worth the wait since the journal entry dates suggest the plaster took 11 months to dry.

July 28 . . . I discovered what the creature feeds on.  Its exclusive nutriment is . . . human blood!”

Exclusive?  No wonder it was so pissed off.  It must have gotten pretty hungry back on its homeworld with no humans.  They look around and find the plaster model Blankford made.  It is indeed hideous, a modern art masterpiece.  Susan wakes up groggily saying, “Run away, hide!  There are hundreds of them!”

When she is fully awake, she tells of the attack of the invisible creatures.  She says, “Mr. Bordon, please don’t leave me.” [1]  Brenegan gets the idea that the insects could be inside the cabin already and grabs his gun.  That night they are awakened by scratching noises and one of the beasts really does make it into the cabin.

The invisible critter attacks Brenegan, and Borden inexplicably saves the maniacal paranoid whiner.  He is able to pry the insect off and tie it up.  We see the “empty” coil of ropes moving about as it struggles.  Then Susan is attacked; wait, no, she just fainted.

That night, Brenegan finally gets full cabin fever.  He takes down the boxes stacked in front of the door and makes a run for it.  In seconds he is screaming off-screen as the insects attack him.  His death was not for nothing though.  First, it raises the caliber of the acting about 50%.  Second, he knocked over a box of insecticide canisters and that seems to have killed the insect they captured.  Hmmmmm, insecticide is fatal to insects — who knew?

Borden and Susan load up with canisters of the bug spray and make their escape.  They make it safely to the river.  Back at the cabin, we see hints that one of the insects has gotten into the cabin.  It goes to the statute of its fallen comrade and pulls it over with a black string visible even in this lousy transfer.

This episode is frustrating in its perfect illustration of the limitations of the time.  It was created by the team of Don Medford and Frank De Fellita, who have been responsible for the best episodes of the series.  It has all the elements for a classic episode, but is frequently undermined by technology.

As always, the transfer is just awful.  But it is just a kinescope of the original live broadcast.  Whaddya gonna do?  Have ya seen that Apollo 11 film lately?  The best argument against a moon-landing hoax is that hoaxsters would have had better footage.

Some of the acting is just over-the-top hammy.  I’m sure in 1953 that actors had figured out they didn’t still have to play to the last row of a live audience, or wildly over-emote like they did before talkies.  However, I think this genre still brought these traits out in them.  Borden was OK, but Susan was a little hysterical.  Brenegan was just a maniacal, cackling wild man.

The music was fine.  There were even bits that are pretty close to music in some classic movies.  There is a bit from The Shining [2] and a sequence that sounds a lot like the shark attack theme from Jaws.

In looking for that Jaws clip, I realized that the episode needs no excuses.  For what they had to work with in technology and budget, they did a fine job.  The set-up and key plot-points could have provided Halloween-level suspense — maybe in 1953, it did.  Zooming through undistracted by note-taking, I was struck by the interesting camera-work . . . the zooms in on Brenegan’s eyes (or the insect’s eyes), the focus on Susan as the men fought the insect, the effect of the tied-up invisible insect, the overwrought music (used effectively for a change).  If you have the imagination to look past the superficial problems, and appreciate what they were going for in 1953, this is another winner for Medford and De Felitta.  Relative winner.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] But I thought they were related.  When the two men were searching for their companions, he called out, “Bordon!”  But his name is Bordon, so I assumed the other person was his brother (as his father would have been far too old for such shenanigans; the 20 year old dame I mean, not the safari).  Pffft, I have no idea who these people are.
  • [2] Bartok, I see from You Tube comments.
  • Nancy Coleman (Susan) previously acted in Dangerously They Live (1941), The Gay Sisters (1942), and Her Sister’s Secret (1946) which are the last three clips I watched on Pornhub.