Monthly Archives: February 2019

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Escape to Sonoita (06/26/60)

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Bill Davis (Burt Reynolds) and his father Andy are rolling through the middle of nowhere in an old truck with Max Bell Oil Co. on the side.  Around the spot where the 10,000th condo has now blighted the area, they come to a stop with the engine overheating.

While they wait for the truck to cool down, they drink from a couple of giant bags of mostly water.  This does not cool down Bill, who is belly-aching constantly but maybe the water keeps his father from committing filicide.  Bill complains about the heat, the crummy truck, and his father not even painting over the previous owner’s logo.  He also admits he has a new job beginning Monday.

Andy says, “Looks like dust back there on the road” which is not exactly a revelation on a dirt road.  A car appears through the dust and runs off the road where their truck stopped.   34 year old Harry Dean Stanton jumps out appearing pretty much like he would 19 years later in Alien — looking 53 years old.  Other similarities to future HDS: sweaty, wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a dopey hat, submissive to another man, and dumb as a rock.  His fast-talking partner Murray Hamilton (Marsh) is wearing a black suit & tie in the blazing desert, and still is the brains of the gang.

The Davises generously offer them some water while Bill checks out their car.  He sees two problems — the driveshaft is broken and there is a woman tied up in the backseat.  Andy recognizes her as Stephanie Thomas, a kidnap victim he heard about.  Now Marsh pulls out his pistol.  Andy asks why they don’t just take the $100,000 ransom and leave the girl.  They got the ransom and kept the girl?  Well, these kidnappers are just bad eggs.

As Stephanie begs for water, Lemon teases her with the bag.  Bill is disgusted by his cruelty and lunges for him.  That is when Marsh reveals that he and Lemon have only three bullets between them.  So maybe this gang has no brains.

Marsh tells Lemon to get the $100,000 out of the car and put it in the truck.  Lemon suggests they take the truck and trade it in for a car.  Yeah, you have $850k in 2018 dollars — take a stolen truck you don’t have the title to and try to trade it in.  It’s 1960, just go buy a new Thunderbird for $4k, dumbass!

The truck has cooled down enough to drive, so Marsh and Lemon (is it a joke that they both have such moist names?) take it, leaving Andy, Bill and Stephanie to die in the desert.  Andy says he lied to them, it is only 25 miles back to town.  The two guys suddenly become McGyvers as they drink the water from the radiator [3], convert a spare tire inner-tube into a water-bag, and create a signal fire by using gas from the tank to set the backseat cushions on fire.  Unlike the previous dumbbells would have done, I suspect, they remove the cushions from the car first.

The dilapidated truck is soon found by the cops.  This thing makes the truck in Duel look like the Snowman’s Kenworth.  Stephanie is taken to the hospital and the Davis boys pursue the gangstas with the cops.  Happily, they find the kidnappers have died — Lemon by a gunshot, and Marsh somehow died of thirst in about an hour.  Thus the state of California has saved millions of dollars, and Stephanie’s family will get back, ummmm — let’s take a look at these cops — about $60,000.

There is a twist and, in a completely arbitrary editorial choice, I will not spoil it. Maybe because I didn’t see it coming.  But it is refreshing.

Burt Reynolds, in his 3rd year of TV, did not seem like an inevitable movie star yet, but was perfectly fine.  James Bell had an easier role as his father and sold it well, seeming oddly familiar to me as a calm dad dealing with his hothead son.  Harry Dean Stanton was born 80 years old and mumbling.  I don’t think he was a good actor; we just needed a Harry Dean Stanton and he filled in for 60 years.  I like Murray Hamilton more every time I see him.  Before started this project, I only knew him as the mayor in Jaws, but he is always fun.

So a fine story, interesting complete lack of indoor sets, real locations, good performances and a fun twist.  It is easy to take AHP for granted, but one day it will be gone.  And if the Season 6 box set doesn’t get a lot cheaper, it will be soon. [2]

Footnotes:

  • Venetia Stevenson (Stephanie) went on to be a script reader for Burt Reynolds’ production company, presumably guiding him to such triumphs as Navajo Joe and Operation CIA. [1]  She was also Axl Rose’s mother-in-law.  Wait, what?
  • AHP Deathwatch:  Burt Reynolds died last year.  Veneta Stevenson, 22 in this episode, is still with us.
  • [1] That’s a cheap shot as those were among his first films.  Later, though, he did have a Chevy Chasian instinct for choosing the wrong movie nearly every time.
  • [2] What the hell?  Season 6 is twice the cost of the earlier seasons.  Season 7 is not even available in the US.  The Alfred Hitchcock Hour seems similarly inaccessible.  Clearly Hollywood is tired of people asking why TV can’t be this good again and are disappearing AHP from existence.
  • [3] Do not try this at home; it may kill or blind you.  Plus, you have a sink right there!

Twilight Zone – Cat and Mouse (03/04/89)

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The title is clever, referring to a tom-cat of a man and a mousey young woman.  Unfortunately, it sets up an expectation for an episode of suspense and thrills.  This is not that, and that is not this.  But it works out.

Narrator:  “Andrea Moffit longs for true love.  A man who is strong, handsome, and exotic.”  Maybe she should have longed for a cinematographer.  The first shots are of her dressed in white and and a man dressed in white standing in a white room.  OK, you might say she is very shy and this is symbolic of her desire to blend into the background unnoticed.  But the guy is a pharmacist — they are so extroverted they insist on standing 6 inches over you in the store.  It’s just a poor choice.

Carl asks her out, but she shyly says she is busy that night.  Her friend Elaine tells her she can’t afford to be picky and that Carl is a good catch.  But Elaine is also downing a handful of pilfered downers (and justifiably so) at the time, so she might not be the best judge.

That night as Andrea is curled up with a book, a cat comes through her window.  She gives it a bowl of water, but it prefers to check her out while she is showering.  When she comes out of the bathroom, she is startled to see a man in a short white robe.  Well, not startled — she barely registers surprise.  She should have been screaming at the sight of this intruder in her home.  Or at least howling in laughter at his goofy short robe.

She grabs the phone and he says, “Call the police.  Tell them that you’ve seen a man turn into a cat.”  Then he turns into a cat before her eyes.  And, unfortunately, back into a man.  With a smarmy French accent, he criticizes her coffee, insults the people of Turkey, touts his love-making skillz and, most egregiously, says his name is Guillaume de Marchaux.

Caught banging a sultan’s wife centuries ago, he was cursed to be a man only at night.  He says, “It is not such a curse.  I have spent centuries loving women, showing women how to love.  Women like you.”  He offers to leave but warns her she will never know the pleasures that only he can make a woman feel.  That’s all it takes, and they make the love.

Day 1 at the pharmacy, she is full of glee and probably morning-after pills.  TV Step 1 to beauty:  she has let her hair down.  She rushes home after work to make out with Guillaume.

Day 2 at the pharmacy is TV Step 2 to beauty:  she has ditched her glasses.  Elaine tells Carl that nobody changes that much unless sex is involved.  After work, she brings him a cat collar, but he hisses at her.  Later, as a man, he condescendingly explains that during his transformation into a human, the small collar world have choked him to death.

That night, he is still lounging around in that absurd robe for the third day.  Andrea shows him a negligee that she bought.  He dismisses it, and throws her coffee in the fire, calling it sewage water.  He insists that she go get some of that serious gourmet shit immediately or he will leave forever.  Stupidly ignoring this opportunity to get rid of him, she obediently heads out to Starbucks . . . to get a Frappuccino for herself; then to Dunkin Donuts for some palatable coffee.

Elaine just can’t stand the thought of Andrea being happy.  She has twice said said she wanted to be a fly on the wall to see what caused the change in Andrea.  With that Frenchman sitting around 3 days in a robe, she will not be the only one.  She goes to Andrea’s house, and Guillaume nails her in 20 minutes, beating my record by 3 months.

Andrea is furious at Guillaume for literally less than 20 seconds.  When he says it is time for him to move on, she begs him to stay.  He says he is going to Elaine, but Andrea asks him to stay one more night.  He continues to insult her until the downers she slipped into his coffee knock him out.

He awakens the next day as a cat, in a cage, in a veterinarian’s office.  Andrea asks to have him fixed.  He hisses and tries to claw her.

This works so much better than it should.  It seemed like another insipid episode with a dreadful sickeningly-sweet score.  It stars the narrator from the mediocre The Hitchhiker series.  Some performances are over the top and others are too staid.  And yet . . .

I expected the worst from Page Fletcher.  Not only is he best known from a weak series, he wasn’t even an actor in it.  However, he was amazing here.  Being from Canada, I don’t whether his natural accent is quasi-French or quasi-American, but he created a perfect archetype here of the condescending, parasitic European guy.  He not only creates a believably repulsive character, but that in turn makes Andrea’s love for him maddening for the audience.  Bravo!

Similar to yesterday’s Outer Limits, the ending here rewrites the tone of the episode.  Yes, the score is indeed awful, but there is a winking nastiness to the finale that, in retrospect, makes it all feel like parody.[1]  I wouldn’t want episodes like this every week from TZ, but this was well-done.

Footnotes:

  • [1] You’re not supposed to think about this:  What is Andrea really doing?  She is the one who made most of the bad choices here.  Guillaume is the one who has been cursed for centuries.  He inarguably changed her life for the better.  And she is cutting his balls off.

Tales from the Crypt – Staired in Horror (12/14/94)

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Clyde, like all guys named Clyde, is a criminal.  Being chased by guys with dogs, he runs to the door of an old gothic mansion deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans. Although, to be fair, he started in Louisiana, so that part is no big deal.

An old woman lets him in.  He says the sheriff is after him for fooling around with his young daughter.  In no time, the sheriff is at the door with a different story.  He says Clyde “is a killer.  He preys on old people like yourself!”  Strange things were afoot at the Circle-K and a man died after a fight with Clyde.

This one hinges completely on the twist, so I hate to give it away.  The gothic setting is entirely irrelevant — the episode could have taken place anywhere.  I’m no judge of accents, but Rachel Ticotin seem to pull it off much better than D.B. Sweeney.  There really is no plot, but more of a device.  And it is a good one, but a little obscured by the trappings.

A few minutes into the episode, it seemed obvious where it was going.  I was baffled why Teller (of Penn & Teller) would have been involved in such a mundane story.  But it became perfectly clear as the episode went on.  There is a trick, a gag, a prop — there is probably a magic term for it — a McGuffin?  used that sits right in the middle of those titular stairs.  It put an unexpected twist on what seemed to be an old story.  That is Penn & Teller in a nutshell.  Then that narrative is completely subverted by a surprise ending.

Sadly, although Rachel Ticotin and R. Lee Ermey in a cameo are very good, the setting and accents just didn’t land for me.  Also, making Clyde a killer was pointless.  The off-screen murder was not emphasized enough to make me want to see Clyde killed for it.  The ending didn’t have the irony that would have existed if he was just fooling around with the sheriff’s young daughter.  But maybe death would have been too harsh a comeuppance for that crime.  Depends on how young, I guess.

However, the twist employed is so interesting that I am still thinking about it.  Rachel’s explanation of it accompanied by illustrations along the stairway in oil and other viscous liquids is also clever.  It’s too bad the opening TFTC Magazine cover gives away part of the surprise.

Footnotes:

  • Rachel Ticotin had the funniest line in Total Recall.  The original, not the remake which was ruined, like every movie with Colin Farrell’s presence, by Colin Farrell’s presence.

 

Outer Limits – Blank Slate (04/02/99)

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A guy is running down an alley, being chased by two guys in trench coats.  In a great visual, he hides out among a bunch of mannequins like ____(actor)____ in ______(TV Show)______ .

Sorry for the Mad Libs.  I wish I knew a reference to insert there, but TV has become unwatchable for just that reason.  Does every f***’in’ guy on TV have to be uniformly perfect mannequin?  They are indistinguishable with their perfect salon haircuts, 3 days perfect stubble, blinding teeth, perfectly flat stomach, 3% body fat, still somehow too-small jackets, and wooden personalities.  I have bailed on the last few series I attempted because the guys are indistinguishable.  Arrow: just creepy.  Hey Manifest, I tried; I could not keep the male characters straight even when they were literally different races.  Designated Survivor, ditto. [2]  Timeless, you’re trying my patience (although that guy does seem to have talent beyond his looks).

But I digress.  It is a fun shot of him hiding behind the bin of mannequins, with their smooth white limbs pointing in all directions.  Kudos to Lou Diamond Phillips who directed this episode.

Tom Cooper stumbles into a homeless shelter.  He is carrying a box that he says contains all his memories.  His credibility on that point is pretty iffy as he immediately has a flashback about escaping from a facility.  He opens the box and takes out a fabulously-designed injector.  He plunges it in into his neck which either leaves a scar or gives him impetigo; it’s a nasty mark.

Memories come flooding back to him, mostly from his childhood.  Social worker Hope Wilson drives him to his childhood home.  When gets there, the house is gone and there is a sign announcing 6 luxury condos being built, so that must have been some house.

Cooper forgets to zip up after taking a whiz, so he injects another vial of memory juice.  The first one hurt, but this one inflicts immense pain.  He screams in agony and Hope freaks out that she can’t help.  This is another great scene which, unfortunately, highlights how blah the rest of the episode is.  Two more guys in trench coats show up, so Cooper and Hope beat it back to her place and have the sex.

After the 3rd injection in the episode, 4th if you count the sex, Cooper remembers he is a doctor — Chist, there’ll be no living with him now.  And is, oh yeah, married.  The shelter calls [1] and tells Hope the trench coat guys came by and said Cooper was psychotic.  They trace the call and go to her house.

After a 4th injection, Hope and Cooper go to the facility he escaped from.  He realizes that he invented the memory-wiping procedure.  It started honorably enough as he was looking for a way to forget the rape and murder of his wife.  Then they started testing it on homeless people.

Cooper destroys the final vial so that he will not return in full to the asshole he was before all this.  Accepting himself at only 80% restored so that he will be a better man is pretty clever; however, the episode doesn’t end there.  It is arguable whether the final scene is necessary.  In mulling over which ending was better, I decided that adding the final twist gave the episode a darker, more ironic feel.  Not including it would have resulted in a 1980s Twilight Zone feel-good ending.  So that settled, as they say, that.

An OK episode elevated by great performances, fine direction and those very cool injectors.

Footnotes:

  • [1] Technically, a guy from the shelter. It is the same dude who showed Mulder the bleeping dead alien.
  • [2] Except Keifer Sutherland.  But even he insists on wearing a suit a size too small to show off his zero-fat bod.  He comes off looking more like Tobias when dressed in Maebe’s suit.
  • Robbie Chong (Hope) is Rae Dawn Chong’s sister.  Why didn’t Outer Limits just cast Rae again?  That’s not a criticism of Robbie, who was very good here. I would also say to anyone who cast Meryl Streep in the 80s: “Hey you should have gotten Rae Dawn Chong!”
  • Hope’s cute answering machine greeting:  “If you’re looking for Hope, you’re not alone.”

Science Fiction Theatre – Signals from the Heart (04/06/56)

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What the?  I have stumbled unwittingly into the second season.  For budgetary reasons, they switched to black & white.  Ya know, it’s easy to make funny jokes at this show’s expense even if there is no evidence of that here.  I bought a book about the series and now have more sympathy for what they were trying to do and the limitations they worked under.

“This is an electrocardiogram,” the narrator tells us while fortuitously showing a picture of an electrocardiogram.  Mechanic Warren Stark is working on a Volkswagen — no wait, he’s a doctor working on a big fat guy lying on his back.  Dr. Stark tells the the patient, Tom Horton, that his EKG looks fine, but that he might want to keep an eye on those brake pads.  And WTF decided the abbreviation for electrocardiogram should be EKG?

Dr. Stark warns Horton that his EKG might look fine, but that is while lying down in a comfortable office.  On his job as a cop, pounding a beat, it might be different.  Then his hatchet-faced wife chimes in, nagging him about retiring.  Although being at home with this shrew is not the Rx for a long life either — his or hers.

The next day there is a massive train derailment.  The District Attorney and head of the State Insurance Company visit Dr. Stark.  They tell Dr. Stark that the engineer was a patient of his.  The man died of a heart attack and caused the massive crash.  The autopsy showed the engineer had a bad heart, yet just a week before Dr. Stark and given him a clean bill of health.

Stark again uses the “in the office” excuse.  He says the engineer’s EKG looked fine in the office but could not possibly reproduce the stressful environment on a train.  After all, the strain of having a union job, a bottomless pension, generous healthcare, and the responsibility of guiding a beast which rides on unmovable steel rails to an inevitable destination simply cannot be duplicated in an office.

Stark gets a call from his wife.  Journalists are saying the train crash was his fault after finding no possible way to blame it on 10 year old Donald Trump.  They say “he passed the engineer without giving him a thorough examination.”  The two men tell Stark that a coroner’s jury will determine his guilt in the deaths of 24 passengers.  He could be charged with “malpractice, criminal negligence or even manslaughter.”  The jury finds him not guilty, but his reputation is shot.

That night, while he is checking the want-ads, his son asks for help with his homework about the weather.  Junior wants to know, “How do they make the forecasts so accurate,” so he is no brainiac either.  Dr. Stark describes how a system of high altitude weather balloons, telemetry, historical data, complex models, and high school graduate celebrities are able predict a blizzard everywhere Al Gore goes to lecture, and 20 out of the last 3 hurricanes.  That gives Dr. Stark an idea.

He wonders if such telemetry could be broadcast from the heart.  He works all night on his idea and presents it to Dr. Tubor [1] in the morning.  It would be a radio-EKG broadcasting the titular signals from the heart to a central database.  Stark says they would “have a continual picture of his heart action at all times.  When he’s playing or working or arguing with his wife.  EVERYTHING!”  I don’t know about his patients, but I can hear Mark Zuckerberg’s heart palpitating from here.

The two men work for days to create the transmitters that could broadcast heart data.  Tom Horton stops by for another exam.  They decide to use him as a guinea pig (no police pun intended).  They remotely chart Horton’s EKG for 3 hours without a blip.  Suddenly there is a spike that indicates he is running.  And frankly, the escape of the young thug is the most exciting 10 seconds I’ve ever seen on this series.  Sadly, it is too exciting for Horton and he has a heart attack.

The police are unable to find Horton.  Despite being the world’s oldest uniformed beat cop, they have assigned him a large area of dark alleys.  Stark has the brilliant idea of calling the FCC although I don’t know who he expected to answer after 5 pm.  They are able to find Horton by triangulating in on his signals.  They save Horton and Stark is a hero!

Holy smoke does black & white make a difference!  This was one of the most enjoyable episodes despite a lackluster story.  Not only does the B&W look great, it also provides a comfort level.  The color episodes seemed like they were grasping for something that they just couldn’t reach.  With B&W, you just accept certain limitations because it is unmistakably from another era.

I don’t think anyone in 1956 would have felt the same way.  I’m sure this was seen as a step back.  Another show that show have stayed in black & white:  the 1960’s Lost in Space.  The Netflix remake should have been filmed in black & black so it could not be seen at all.

Footnotes:

  • [1] LOL.  Why would they give a character the hilarious name Dr. Tubor.  I think that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all day.  I know it’s the funniest thing you’ve seen.
  • But it’s still better than Toomer.