Category Archives: TV

Ray Bradbury Theater – Silent Towns (10/10/92)

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We open on a rocky red landscape but we know this is Mars because there are blue skies and this is Ray Bradbury Theater.  The barren Martian desert gives way to a small frontier town.  It has been deserted, and we know this because a lone newspaper sheet is blowing down the street.

The camera stops at the Mars Irrigation Board.  Employee Walter Grip is calling in to complain that no one has come to relieve him in 2 weeks.  He tells the answering machine he’s coming in to town to rip somebody a new one.  We see him hustling through sewers and treatment plants and up ladders, finally exiting on the side of a red mountain.  Whether this is a real location or a model, it is one of the most impressive things seen in this series.

Image 021In a car that seems to be made from corrugated Quonset hut surplus metal, he tears through some rugged terrain to get to the town.  The art direction on this episode really is a step up.  Along the way, he notices that, like NASA, there is not a single rocket left at the base.

Seeing the town completely empty and with newspapers frequently blowing by, he pulls over to the curb. Getting out, he notices a sign that says MARS EVACUATION DEADLINE SET, and decides he needs a drink.  He has quite a few and begins a conversation with himself like Nicholson in The Shining, about how beautiful his girl Clara is.  Although, to be fair, Nicholson did not have such a conversation about Shelley Duvall.

Image 024After making himself a salami sandwich with meat that has been sitting out for God knows how long, he goes back out into the street, where the newspapers continue to blow by.  Wouldn’t they all eventually be on the other side of town?  They are not a renewable eyesore like tumbleweeds.

Trudging past some Mars tract housing, he hears a phone ringing.  By the time he gets to it, it is dead.  He hears another phone down the street, several houses down.  He breaks a window to get in, but again just misses the connection.  Apparently star-69 is not a thing on Mars; but phones that can be heard a quarter-mile away are huge.  A few more houses down, another call.  It is a recorded message about the last rocket leaving Mars.  I wonder if the politicians would have carved out an exemption for this in the Do Not Call Registry?  Sure, it would save lives, but there’s no real opportunity for graft.

Grip decides to be proactive and goes to some sort of station where he is able to scroll through the names and numbers of all of the rImage 037esidents.  It sounds much more daunting than it really is — the phone numbers on the screen appear to only have 3 digits.

He is desperate to find his beautiful girlfriend Clara, but strangely never seems to call her number.  He gives up before he is out of the A’s and thinks to himself, “Where would Clara go?  Where would she be?” Despite all his big talk about how beautiful she is, his bright idea is to begin calling beauty salons.

He gets several recorded messages — just to let patrons know the shop will be closed. You know, what with the planet being evacuated.  However, he does miraculously reach a live woman, the last one on Mars.

The other big face on Mars.

The woman is thrilled to hear him. He is happy to hear that she is named Genevieve because all Genevieves are hot.  Also Heathers — you could look it up.  Walter immediately forgets Clara and sets out on the 900 mile journey to meet Genevieve.

He leaps from the car and enters the Martian Mystery Beauty Salon.  He calls for Genevieve and . . . well, apparently the hot-Genevieve rule only applies on earth.  It is interesting that they didn’t make her grotesque or morbidly obese, but she would definitely be a disappointment to any blind date.

She leads him to a cafe where she has set up a little dinner for two, although I suspect she was having a dinner for 2 every night before she met him.  She asks him to wait, and she returns a few minutes later wearing a wedding gown.

Gripp, not one to settle, high-tails it back to his Quonset car and speeds back home leaving her standing in the street in her wedding gown.

Post-Post:

  • An unusually cruel story from Bradbury who is usually so naïve and goodhearted that it’s like he was born in another century.  I mean millennium.  I mean . . .aw crap.
  • Kudos for the local newspaper being called The Martian Chronicle.
  • Walter Gripp also gets a mention in short story The Long Years, but oddly, no connection is made to his actions here.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Bull in a China Shop (03/30/58)

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ahpbull03Sweet Jeebus!  I take a few weeks months off and Netflix removes seasons 2 and 3 from streaming.  Hulu did the same thing with Outer Limits last year.  Oh the humanity!  The nooses are tightening, sheeple.  Hulu, as always, sucks.

Mr. O’Finn goes to see his neighbor Miss Hildy-Lou across the court, at her invitation.  She is 75 years old — 30 years older than O’Finn — but can’t stop making googly cataracts at him.  She invites him into the parlor where her similarly old friends are just as enamored of their hunky young neighbor.  There is Miss Bessie (83), Miss Birdie (76), and Miss Samantha (47).

Wait, what?  This is strange — she is only 2 years older than O’Finn but fits right in with the other much older ladies.  I would suspect an error on IMBd or that she lied about her age, but IMDb has her dying at 88 in 1999.  So unless she really lived to be 108, 47 would be about right.  Safe to say Miss Samantha was not aging gracefully.

ahpbull02

The Walkers Dead

The ladies know his morning work-out routine and know that he is a homicide detective.  That is why they invited him over.  Not for some squat-thrusts, but because another of their superannuated friends (Miss Elizabeth, uncredited, but probably about 103) is dead on the sofa.

They are disappointed when he tells them to call a doctor to get a death certificate. They were hoping to be questioned by him, but he says his business is murder.  They try their best to get him to stay, but he wants to get back to investigating more alluring women like gun-molls, hookers, and crack-whores [1].

ahpbull04Back at the station, he tells his partner he “felt like a bull in a china shop in that place,” speaking the title, but lending it no more logic.  He gets a call from the crime lab — Miss Elizabeth was poisoned with arsenic.

The old girls get giddy when O’Finn comes back to, you know, investigate the death.  They explain that the arsenic is kept in a sugar bowl as rat poison.  Once O’Finn determines that the death was an accident, he begins to leave, breaking the hearts of the giddy bitties that they won’t see him again.  But Miss Hildy-Lou has a plan.

When O’Finn sees the ladies spying on him through his window, he pulls the shades. Completely cut off from him, they must come up with a new plan to reel in this handsome devil.  But how . . . oh yeah, kill Miss Samantha.

ahpbull05No dummy, O’Finn — except for not seeing the first death was murder, and not getting that leaving your bathroom window wide open just invites peepers — he announces that Miss Samantha’s death by tea deserves a full investigation.  The olden girls are giddy to have his attention again . . . well, the ones still alive are.

O’Finn cracks the case and comes to arrest Hildy-Lou.  At the announcement, she goes all giddy again.  He asks if she understands what he is saying, since dementia is a strong possibility.  “Oh, yes,” she swoons.  “And I think it was very clever of you to have found out.”  When he tells her he must take her to the station, she runs to her room and comes out dolled up in a fancy new hat like they’re going out on a date.

ahpbull07For the two murders, she’ll probably get life — which in her case would be about 3 weeks.[2]

This is all pretty silly stuff, but there is a nice twist at the end.

Post-Post:

  • [1] OK, there were no crack-whores in 1958, but the word just has a great sound.
  • [2] Actually the actress lived another 26 years, dying at age 101.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.  But, Christ, how could there be?
  • Title Analysis:  Hunh?  I guess is O’Finn is the bull, but he isn’t reckless as the cliche suggests, I doubt it was a reference to bullshit, and I can’t imagine what else it would be.
  • Hulu sucks.

Night Gallery – Doll of Death (05/20/73)

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ngdollofdeath02While Brandon is in his West Indies living room harrumphing with his cronies, his young hot wife Sheila is trying on the wedding gown that he has insisted she wear.  She tells the butler, “If Mr. Brandon wants me to be in white, I could have dazzled them with my naked body and a garland of pale roses,” thus producing the best line of Night Gallery dialogue in 3 years.

The gathering is humming along very Britishly until it is crashed by Sheila’s ex-boyfriend Raphael.  As she is descending the stairs, they lock eyes and she stops.  Raphael insists that Sheila belongs to him and it takes her only seconds to agree.

She tells her husband that somehow she belongs to Raphael and has since her first breath.  Although seconds before, it seemed to have started the night he banged her. Nonsensically, she runs off with Raphael leaving Brandon humiliated at his wedding party.

The only black man (besides the butler) shows up, which by Night Gallery rules, means he must be a voodoo master.  Brandon pays him off for a voodoo doll of Raphael.

The next day while Raphael and Sheila are frolicking on his boat, Raphael experiences an ngdollofdeath07attack that is not quite identifiable.  What is identifiable are the giant hand prints which have left red marks the size of his back.  Rather than use the traditional needles on his voodoo doll, Brandon is throttling it in his hands, attempting to squeeze the doll and Raphael to death.  Lucky this is pre-CSI or he would have left some nice 10-inch fingerprints as evidence.

That night, Sheila calls Brandon to see if his doctor will come.  The doctor says, Raphael’s had some kind of attack.  She’s hysterical, she claims he’s been murdered — and contends Brandon is the culprit.

ngdollofdeath06The doctor goes to Raphael’s boat, but he is still alive.  She tries to convince the doctor that Brandon is at fault.  The night before their wedding, Brandon took her to see a voodoo priest.

Sheila runs to Brandon’s house. She searches for the voodoo doll, but is caught by Brandon.  She claims to have seen the error of her ways, but Brandon sees through that.  He shows her the doll which has a few strands of Raphael’s hair, a few nail clippings, a swatch of his clothing, and a teeeeeny little mustache in order to make the psychic connection.

ngdollofdeath09She takes the doll and begs him not to do anything further, but he grabs the doll and slams it on the edge of the table.  Ah, but the nimble little minx has added Brandon’s ring to the doll, so he falls over dead with a broken neck.  Raphael and Sheila are reunited.

Strangely enough, even though the doll still had Raphael’s hair, mails clothes and mustache, the ring seems to trump all that, so Raphael is unharmed.

 

 ngdollofdeath10 Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  Barry Atwater was in the classic The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.  Murray Matheson was in the classic Five Characters in Search of an Exit and the mediocre TZ Movie.

Tales From the Crypt – Curiosity Killed (09/16/92)

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tftccuriositykilled01Two elderly couples have taken RVs out into the woods for a little vacation.  Jack and Cynthia are miserable.  Or rather, Cynthia is miserable and Jack is miserable because of Cynthia.  She is not happy at all to be outdoors, eating natural foods like rutabagas and bok choy.

On the other hand, Harry and Lucille, in their own RV are having a civil discussion.  Lucille, who has something planned at midnight (she’s black — gee, I wonder whether TFTC will make her a witch doctor or voodoo queen) wonders why they had to bring this unlikable, constantly bickering couple.  Turns out Jack saved Harry’s life at Guadalcanal — you’d think this might have come up in the past 40 years — this weekend is his chance to pay Jack back.

Jack and Harry go off by themselves with shovels and Cynthia thinks they are digging a grave to get rid of her.  In fact,they dig up Harry’s ex-wife tftccuriositykilled02Emma whom he murdered. Bulbs he buried in Emma’s mouth quickly sprout into large white flowers (thanks to some magic bones provided by Lucille, natch).  That night, Lucille sees that Cynthia has become young again.  Harry has become younger also, but frankly I don’t see much of a change in him — apparently even witch-doctors have not conquered male pattern baldness.

Cynthia is thrilled at the prospect of being young and happy again.  Jack says he is too, but he is not going to waste another 25 years watching Cynthia turn again into a hateful, bitter old crone.  Stupidly, they allow her to beat them back to the campsite where she spikes the magic juice.  They are all having a grand tftccuriositykilled03old time as they drink the potion, but within seconds they become emaciated and fall over dead, cracking open as dried out husks.

Cynthia has wisely saved some of the unspiked potion for herself.  She drinks part of it, spilling the rest on the ground where Harry’s dog laps it up.  For a few seconds, Cynthia is happy as she sees her young face in the mirror, and begins dancing.  Unfortunately, Harry’s dog is feeling younger and friskier too and off-screen either rips her throat out, or humps her leg to death.

This was in between times when Margot Kidder (Cynthia) was having some personal tftccuriositykilled07problems.  She had an auto accident that was so bad that she didn’t work for two years.  Four years later, her bi-polar issues surfaced.  So I didn’t really know how much of the old crotchety Margot Kidder I was seeing was real, and how much was make-up and acting.

Based on a few seconds we see her in her natural state, it seems she did an unbelievable job of acting in this role and was supported by some excellent make-up work.  Of course her character was over-the-top, but that’s what TFTC is supposed to be.  Her every body movement, hand gesture and vocal inflection were perfect for this role.  If there were any integrity in Hollywood, this would have won her an award.

tftccuriositykilled08Her performance made her constant bitching a pleasure to watch.  I think another actress playing the part could easily have made the episode unbearable.

It is also a fine story, and the other actors were fine in their lesser roles. There is a nice twist and a coda of questionable necessity, but it worked for me.

Great episode.

Post-Post:

  • Title Analysis:  Hunh?  Curiosity killed the cat, but there are no cats in the story.  I wouldn’t describe any of the characters as being particularly curious.  I give it a zero on the title.
  • Lucille was played by Madge Sinclair who did a rare two-peat on Star Trek.
  • tftccuriositykilled09