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Tales from the Crypt – For Cryin’ Out Loud (S2E8)

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Lee Arenberg living out Al Bundy’s fantasy

Marty Slash is so anxious to get in the electric chair, he runs ahead of the guards and slips into it as quick as Mike Moffitt into George Costanza’s parking space — which makes sense as both characters are played by Lee Arenberg.

Iggy Pop appears as himself showing how cool, hip and edgy he is by dropping about — yawn — 15 F-bombs in 30 seconds.  Between him and anticipating the vastly over-rated Sam Kinison later in the episode, I was ready to jump into Old Sparky myself.

Slash is Iggy Pop’s manager and has been running a scam of benefit concerts to save the Amazon rain forest while pocketing the donations himself.  Now that the receipts have hit $1 million, it is time for him to take off.  He opens up a wall safe hidden behind an Alice Cooper poster and his conscience speaks up in the voice of Sam Kinison.

tftcforcryin03Katey Sagal shows up dressed a goth chick — a 36 year old goth chick.  If Chloe O’Brien couldn’t pull it off, no way Peg Bundy can.  Turns out that was just disguise to enter the club.  She is really a banker — Miss Kielbasa, named after her father no doubt — who is on to Marty’s scam.  She saw Marty withdraw the $1 million that morning and wants half.  As Katey counts out her half, he goes all Pete Townsend on her head and stuffs her in a drum case.  Whether it was a stunt-woman or rubber legs, they looked pretty convincing being stuffed into that case.

As his conscience yells at him, he rebels by pouring medicine in his ear and reaming it out with a giant Q-Tip.  When the Q-Tips don’t work, he threatens to stab his conscience with a sharpened pencil.  He wises up just before puncturing his eardrum.

As he goes out in the club, his conscience, doing what Sam Kinison does best, begins screaming.  It screams to the waitress that Marty killed his banker and taunts Marty that she heard him.  He is so sweaty and manic that their reaction to him makes him wonder if they really did hear his “confession.”

He turns the music up in the club to drown out his conscience.  That brings in the cops.  Convinced that his conscience has screamed his secret, he busts the sound system and says, “I didn’t mean to kill my banker.”  He opens his briefcase, spilling the money into the crowd which is strangely subdued at the sight of $1 million cash.

Turns out the looks people were giving him were not reactions to the screams of his conscience, but to the bloody pencil still protruding from his ear.  A more reasonable reaction might have been to say, “Dude there’s a bloody pencil in your ear.”  His conscience taunts him that if he had kept his mouth shut, he could have gotten away with it.  For 2 years on death row, his conscience torments him until he is begging for the chair.

Lee Arenberg was made for TFTC.  His hammy, over-the-top acting and rubber face brought campy humor back to the series.  Sam Kinison was great in the small dose and, as a bonus, we didn’t have to look at him.  Iggy Pop just came off as an asshole.  The Stooges were strangely absent.

Post-Post:

 

Outer Limits – The New Breed (S1E14)

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Good news: Director Mario Azzopardi worked on 21 Outer Limits episodes, so he should have this down pat.  Bad news:  This was the first.

olnewbreed01

The secret of my nanobots is to make them look like tanks.

John-Boy Walton is giving a presentation of his revolutionary nano-technology which will clean everything from polluted rivers, to cancerous livers, to grass stains on your kid’s clothes.  By attacking problems at the molecular lever, he can cure everything from cancer to dandruff.  When asked if he is playing God, he responds, “Let’s just say God created a flaw in man — I think I can do better.”  So you know he’s screwed.

John-Boy’s friend Andy shows up in the lab and tells him that he is going to marry his sister — John-Boy’s, not his own.  30 seconds later, he finds out that he has pelvic cancer.  Chemo and surgery are not promising options.  So naturally Andy breaks into John-Boy’s lab; because a sociologist would totally know how to navigate the equipment and administer the nanobots.

Three days later, his cancer is almost completely gone.  And he gives his fiancee a real pounding.  Like Spiderman, his vision has even been corrected.  He tells John-Boy that he injected the nanobots; John-Boy is furious and wants to deactivate them.  Andy will not allow that, so they begin testing the effects on him.

After the sex gets too rough, Andy’s fiancee walks out; but not in a straight line.  The next morning, he rushes to the lab and shows John-Boy that the nanobots have started constructing gills on his neck, having interpreted his inability to breathe underwater as a “defect.”  Andy finally agrees to have the nanobots deactivated even though the new ability to breathe through his neck might have won his fiancee back.

The flush-and-deactivate command does not work.  He sends Andy home for a good night’s sleep.  The next morning, John-Boy goes to Andy’s apartment.  He is complaining of a pain on the back of his head.  John-Boy checks it out and discovers that the nanobots have taken Andy’s inability to parallel park without a mirror as another “defect” and have now given him perfect 20/20/20/20 vision like Lolac of Twilo.

John-Boy concludes the only way to kill the nanobots is to electrocute them.  He sends three surges through Andy which have the slight side effect of killing him. John-Boy is able to CPR him back to life.  Over the next few days, the nanobots do more renovation on Andy,  They have covered his chest with jellyfish type stingers and reinforced his chest cavity to make him invulnerable to attack, or from treatment by John-Boy.

Andy stabs himself rather than go through life as a freak.  After he collapses, the nanobots slowly slide the scalpel out of his gut.  He awakens, and realizes they will not let hem die.

olnewbreed08Andy asks John-Boy to electrify him again, but really turn it up so he and the nanobots are both fried.  John-Boy takes all the vials of his serum and smashes them on the floor which seems like exactly the wrong thing to do.  But then he turns on all the gas jets and sets fire to his papers.  As he leaves the lab, it explodes in the background.

As Andy’s fiancee is packing, she cuts her finger on a broken picture.  When she goes to get a band-aid, it has already healed.

Another good episode.

Post-Post:

  • Writer Grant Rosenberg was responsible for the  Start Trek TNG episode that introduced Brian Bonsall as Worf’s son.  I’m sure it wasn’t his idea, but what a cross to bear.
  • Andy and his fiancee in the episode were actually married 5 years later.

Ray Bradbury Theater – A Miracle of Rare Device (S3E2)

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It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! — Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Well that clears that up.

Robert (Pat Harrington) and Willy (other guy) are driving a well-worn GMC pickup through Utah.  OK, I have no idea where it is, but it looks like the scenery in In the Dead of Winter, so I’m calling it Utah.  They seem to be on the run from a lone motorcyclist who is a dorky version of Leonard Smalls.  They pull off behind a billboard and the biker cruises on past.

Apparently this biker is constantly following them and horning in on their good luck.  It is not immediately clear what good luck they might have had, 2 scuzzy drifters with no chicks, ratty clothes, and a beat-up truck with their belongings heaped in the back.  Or what the biker is doing with his “harvest” as he appears to shop at the same dumpster.

But apparently Robert has an instinct for finding opportunity.  His spidey-sense leads him down a dirt road.  At the end of the road, looking out over the vista, in the distance they see a domed city of skyscrapers.  Sometimes it is New York, and sometimes it isn’t.  Robert points out there are many tire tracks leading to this point.  It is the only place this miracle can be seen.

Despite being public land, Robert and Willy put themselves a sign out on the highway and charge people a buck to look at the miracle.  An old couple pulls up and is euphoric seeing exactly what they want to see.  Soon people are flocking down this dirt road to see the miracle.  They are seeing city skylines from New York to Rome to Paris to London.  A dweeb shows up, sees Xanadu, and thankfully begins quoting Taylor’s Kubla Khan rather than the John Travolta movie.

Robert has a reverence for the site and how the city is different for each person.  Willy is all about the Washingtons, excited at the prospect of “steak dinners and new shoes!”  Then the biker shows up.  Having observed the traffic all day, he went to the gummint and put in a claim to homestead the area.  But the biker can’t see the miracle.

From a hill, Robert and Willy watch the biker collecting the money from the gawkers.  Robert is glad they are out of it.  It was wrong to set up rules and charge people to watch.  They should have just put the money on the first church poor box they came to.  Soon, they see the people are demanding refunds and the biker bailing on the site.

The go back to the site, but the miracle has disappeared for them too.  However, a family drives up and takes in the site with great joy and reverence.  Soon Robert and Willy are re-redeemed and see it again also.

Not much going on here, but I kind of liked it — for RBT, that is a miracle of rare device.  I appreciated that the highway scenes were actually filmed on location.  Even Pat Harrington, who I usually find annoying, did a great job.

Post-Post:

  • This was inspired by a mirage Ray Bradbury saw as a child in the Southwest US, possibly a Fata Morgana.  He seems tight with details, just calling it a “miracle” as far as I can find.
  • Correction: Willy says they are 90 miles from Phoenix, so they are in Arizona.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Cream of the Jest (S2E24)

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Broadway actor Claude Rains stops by his favorite watering hole and orders a scotch.  He has been cut off due to his bar tab, and it literally becomes a watering hole as that is all they will serve him.  What he wants is an alcohole.

Being the kind of bar that has caricatures of actors on the wall, there just happens to be a copy of Variety on the floor.  Enjoying his water on the rocks, he sees that Wayne Campbell has a new play.  He goes to Campbell’s office, but Campbell is on the way to a cocktail party.  His secretary talks him into seeing Rains.  Being pre-ADA, Campbell tells him he is a drunk and he won’t hire him.

Rains says he feels that he is only his characters, there is nothing underneath and that’s why he drinks.  Rains says he will blackmail Campbell about the 3 years he spent in prison.  They were both from a bad area of Philly, and had made up more glamorous stories of their background when they got to the big city.  Campbell had stolen $5,000 as a bank teller long ago, but now is married to a high class society dame from a rich family that has probably stolen millions exploiting the working man; so Campbell’s small-time larceny would be humiliating to them.

Campbell gives Rains $20, and leaves him crying in his office.  Rains takes the $20 back to the bar and begins performing Macbeth for the bartender.  It should have been worth another sawbuck to get him to knock it off.  “Nobody writes like that anymore, Jerry,” he says.  Well that is understandable, it has been 350 years.  He laments the modern playwrights as Campbell enters the bar and overhears him.

They speak briefly and Rains passes out, this being back in the good old days when $20 could get it done.  Campbell takes him back to his office and puts him to sleep on his sofa.  Campbell is remorseful about how he treated Rains earlier that day and says it would be an honor to have Rains in his play.

The next morning, Campbell tells Rains there is big role open in the play, but Campbell says he is too soft, which is ironic since the role is of a blackmailer.  Rains tells him he can perform the role through make-up and acting.  He even does a cold-read to convince Campbell of his skills.

ahpcream02Campbell stops him mid-monologue and tells him he is great!  Campbell still needs to convince the backer, so he sends Rains over to see Nick Roper, a gangsta who has decided to dabble in culture.  Rains goes out to get a clean shirt and a shave, or maybe it was a clean shave and a shirt.  Back at Campbell’s office, the secretary is called away, so Rains types up the monologue himself to carry with him to the audition for the backer.

Going all method, Rains barges into Roper’s office and without proper introduction, begins the monologue which in which he identifies himself as Charlie Richtor.  He continues the monologue describing a crime with which Roper is obviously familiar.  Roper pulls a gun and kills Rains.

Roper’s goons hear the shot and rush in.  He tells them somehow “Richtor” knew “all about the Donovan job.”  Searching for how Rains knew of the crime, he finds the script in Rains’ pocket with Campbell’s name on the letterhead.  The episode ends abruptly with Roper saying, “Wayne Campbell.”  It is a strange place to end the story as you don’t know what the crime was, how Campbell was involved or what Roper will do next.

None of this really matters.  It is a good tale with a good — if ludicrous —  twist, and Claude Rains is always great.  I rate it a “Party on Wayne, party on Claude.”

Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch: No survivors.  A couple of the actors have no expiration date on IMDb, but they have no birth date either.  A third actor has a birth date in 1892. He has no date of death, but it doesn’t look good.
  • AHP Proximity Alert:  Paul Picerni was in Number Twenty-Two just 2 episodes earlier.
  • The phrase “Cream of the Jest” is from a 1917 novel of that name by James Branch Cabell.  It was also used as the title of a 1962 episode of Have Gun Will Travel.
  • Story by Frederic Brown, who wrote the classic Arena on which the Gorn episode of Star Trek was extremely loosely based.

Night Gallery – Certain Shadows on the Wall (S1E3)

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nightgallery01It is impossible to see that title without thinking of the Statler Brothers song from Pulp Fiction.

Agnes Moorehead’s brother is reading to her from Charles Dicken’s Bleak House.  He and their two sisters all live in this house under the thumb of Agnes as she alone inherited their father’s fortune.  His patience is clearly running out as he has been at her beck and call for 25 years — most of it probably spent reading the 1,000 page Bleak House.

He gives her some pain pills.  She asks him to start reading Great Expectations to her.  At this point, no jury in the world would convict him.

Agnes’ brother is a doctor who has abandoned his failing practice.  After giving her the pills he goes downstairs for some standard Rod Serling padding-out-the-run-time dialogue.  He eventually gets to the point, which is that Agnes “has only a matter of days left.”  Demonstrating the diagnostic acumen that sent his practice into a tailspin, she croaks within 5 minutes.

Hearing a noise upstairs, her brother goes up to check on her and finds her dead.  He calls to make arrangements for the funeral as his sisters, or one of them anyway, get weepy.  They are startled to find that Agnes’ shadow has suddenly appeared on the wall.

ngcertain03The doctor is troubled by the shadow, and calls it a trick of refraction, maybe due to the way the furniture is positioned.

The funeral home calls and the doctor tells then the cause of death was acute dyspepsia — that’s the ticket — and uh, no need any verification on that, no siree Bob.

Wracked with guilt, he tries painting over the shadow, but to no avail — although the paint also does not even cover up the pattern on the wallpaper, so maybe it just isn’t very good paint.  And wouldn’t the solution be to strip the wallpaper, not to paint over it?

Sister #2 believes a cover-up is impossible, and she plainly states that she means covering up the murder also.

Sister #1 puts some of Agnes’s “meds” in the doctor’s tea to calm him down.  He dies just as he killed Agnes.  This whole process is a little too cutesy as far as who knows what.

The sisters don’t seem too upset at his death.  His shadow has joined Agnes’ so he will be reading Dickens to her for eternity.  Or until they redecorate.  “It is just like having them here,” says one sister.  Yeah, if there were silent, grey and two-dimensional before they died — well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.

The shadow of Agnes really is very well done.  The silhouette painted on the wallpaper is great and the coloration is perfect for a shadow.  When they reveal the brother’s shadow, it is obviously a real shadow; clearly they did not want to pay the artist to come back a second day.  There was no attempt to match the colors, and as they pan to show the two shadows, the brother’s shadow is even moving for the first few frames.  Very cheesy.

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  Agnes Moorehead was in the classic The Invaders.
  • Directed by Jeff Corey who was in The Dead Man.
  • Whereas the other tale in this episode, The House, reused the interior from Roddy McDowell’s house in The Cemetery, this episode reuses the exterior of that same house.
  • And minor point, but is it too much to ask that shows be in the same order as they aired or appear on the cover?  20 Horror Movies for $5, Night Gallery and Ray Bradbury Theater all fail on this most fundamental level.
  • RBT is especially a challenge as the episodes are in somewhat random order, and not listed on the box or the disks.  When I say watching that show is a chore, I mean it literally.