Category Archives: TV

Thriller – The Purple Room (10/25/60)

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tpurpleroom01We slowly zoom in on the old — and by “old”, I mean “future” — Bates house.  Through the eerie music, an eerie girl is in bed repeating, “Jeremy, is that you?  Jeremy, why don’t you speak?  Jeremy, in God’s name, why don’t you speak?”

Through the miracle of 1960s television, and cheap DVD transfers, as we get very close, we can see that the girl is holding a pistol.  Another clue is when she starts firing it off repeatedly, now screaming, “Jeremy!”  Well, that’s no way to get him to answer.

Flash forward 100 years.

Duncan Corey is at the reading of his brother’s will where he learns he has been left his brother’s house.  Corey is only interested in flipping it, however; perhaps to that hot-ass Bates woman and her weird son.  But wait, there are terms . . . “Should you decide after one night under the roof of Black Oak that you do not choose to take up residence there, the estate will pass to our beloved cousin Rachel Judson and her husband Oliver.”

However.  “After a period of one year’s residence, you will be free to dispose of the estate in any manner you see fit.  But I believe by that time only death would part you from it.”

Duncan, Rachel and Oliver go to visit the house.  Duncan expects that Rachel and Oliver will try to scare him off that first night so they can inherit the house.  They escort him to the titular Purple Room where he will spend the night.

As Rachel and Oliver attempt to toast his first night in the house, Duncan insists on switching glasses, lest they try to poison him.  After Rachel and Oliver leave, Duncan locks the door.

He paces around the room, gun in hand, finally falling asleep until more noises downstairs awaken him.  He goes downstairs to investigate the noises, still waving the gun around.

tpurpleroom03Finally from a dark corner emerges a figure with dagger plunged into its chest.  This gives Duncan quite a hoot as he assumes it is Oliver.  The creature continues closing in on Duncan and he stops being too cocky.  Duncan finally fires several shots into the figure and collapses in fear.

Turns out it was cousin Oliver and Duncan is dead from a heart attack.  Rachel and Oliver drive out into the woods to ditch the car — literally — so it appears Duncan had a heart attack while driving.

That night, history repeats itself as Oliver hears noises downstairs and goes to investigate.  Oliver cowers at what he sees, and Rachel awaits in bed with a pistol.  As Rachel sees a figure approaching the bed, she too begins pumping lead like Bonnie Parker.

And yada yada.  Strangely, upon rewatch (since I was too tired to make any notes the first time), I wasn’t that thrilled with it (no pun intended). But on the first viewing, it was pretty thrilling (pun intended).  This is odd as there are no truly unexpected twists or scares.

tpurpleroom04Again, a good episode.  Rip Torn was again playing the cocky young jerk who thinks he has managed a real score.  Richard Anderson was good to see — he was always great as Oscar Goldman in The $6 Million Man.  I don’t know much about Joanna Berry, but she did a fine job also.  Despite my lackluster writing — more so than usual due to a tough week — this one was a winner.

Post-Post:

  • Joanna Heyes appearing in a Douglas Heyes directed episode!  What are the odds?  Well, about 83% according to IMDb.
  • Holy crap, Joanna Berry (Rachel) appeared in a TV movie called The Jerk, Too — a sequel to Steve Martin’s The Jerk.  I had no idea this even existed!

THAT should be the subject of today’s post.

Everyone remembers the original movie began “I was born a poor black child . . .”  The IMDb description for this sequel is

“A man who struggles with gender identity who is beaten up on a daily basis by his father leaves his home to join a gay frat house.”  

Does that suggest laughs to any one?  Who would have possibly green-lighted this piece of shit (admittedly, I have not seen one second of it)?

The main character even shares the same name as in the original — Navin Johnson — so it is clearly intended as a sequel.  Is it his loving father from the original that is now suddenly beating him?  It is telling that the only External Review listed on IMDb goes to an abandoned website.

In a bad sign, it stars Fridays alumnus Mark Blankfield as Navin.  Generally, you see Fridays on a resume, just avert your eyes (unless you’re talking about Larry David or the guy he saved from a future of abject poverty in show-business, Michael Richards (although he was GENIUS as Kramer)).

Directed by Michael Schultz who went on to have an impressive resume.  One of his early hits was Carwash.  So who knows.

Holy crap, it’s on You Tube — I might have to check it out.

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Dead Man (09/26/92)

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bradbury02As Michael Corleone said, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

I was so happy to be through several episodes on the final fifth disc, and now the Bradbury Industrial Complex has randomly pushed me back to disc 4 for this episode. Sorry.

Miss Weldon (Louise Fletcher) is taking a bus to her new hometown when it almost hits one of the local bumpkins, nearly turning him into a speedbumpkin.  Some time later, the haggard man, Odd Martin, takes off his hat, places it on his chest and slowly lays flat in the gutter in front of the grocery store.

The police try to rouse him.  The sheriff and barber nudge him with their shoes, but he doesn’t move. They get some of the other rubes to lay him out on the sidewalk so, at least, he doesn’t take up a revenue producing metered space.

That night, Miss Weldon sees Odd Martin aimlessly shuffling down the street.  When she encounters him the next day, she tries to engage him in conversation about the kitten he is carrying to be drowned.  He claims to have been drowned once himself.  Yeeeeah, she offers to adopt the kitten.

The next day, the barber tells Miss Weldon the story of how a flood destroyed Martin’s farm 20 years ago.  He was missing for a while too.  Then he came walking out of the waters, claiming to have drowned, insisting that he was dead.  Again that night, she sees him shuffling like the living dead.

The routine continues with the townspeople lifting him out of the gutter the next morning, apparently a daily routine.  Miss Weldon wakes him up to give him some cologne “It helps keep you cool.”  I thought it was to take the stink off.

That night Miss Weldon asks Martin to walk her home.  Along the way she admires a dress in a store window.  Martin asks why she has taken an interest in him.  She says, “Because you are quiet.  And not loud and mean like the men at the barber shop.  I’ve had to fight for a scrap of respect there, but still they look right through me.  I’m like a window with no glass, not even a reflection.  I’m lonely.”rbtdeadman17

She tells Martin he should stop telling everyone he’s dead.  She says he’s “just half dead from the absence of a good woman.  What else could it be?”  You know, I’m not feeling so good myself.

He buys her the dress she admired in the window and brings it to her apartment.  He asks her to marry him.  The next day he strolls into the barbershop for a haircut and a shave.  Says he bought a small place for them just outside of town.

A neighbor boy sees them walking away that night, Odd in his suit and Miss Weldon in her new dress.  They go through a gate, and walk through a graveyard, and into a small mausoleum.  They enter and the crypt door slides shut.

rbtdeadman08Miss Weldon has spent a sheltered life taking care of an old mother who finally died, but casting Louise Fletcher was a mistake.  She plays it well, but she is too attractive to believe she would really have to lower her standards to a guy who sleeps in the gutter.

And even if she was half dead, as Odd was, due to loneliness — didn’t they have each other now?  Why the trip to the crypt which surely signified them both dying.  Were they both giving up just when they had found someone?  And where did he get the money to buy the dress?

Too many things just make no sense- — I rate this DOA.  It is well-performed, and well-directed, it just makes no sense.

Post-Post:

  • What small town barber has a woman manicuring all of the men getting haircuts?
  • And isn’t Korean?
  • In the short story, the men all give Odd Martin a bath in the back of the barber shop.  I think this was wisely trimmed from the screenplay.  Although it might explain why Miss Weldon couldn’t find a man in this town — they’re all getting manicures and bathing other men.
  • And why was he going to drown the kitten?  That wasn’t in the short story.
  • Otherwise, it is a pretty faithful adaptation except that Miss Weldon in the short story is not new in town — making it all the more unbelievable one of these dandies hadn’t ever hit on her; even if it were only for a beard — in a barber shop — oh the irony!

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Foghorn (03/16/58)

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ahpfoghorn001Lucia Clay (Barbara Bel Geddes) is tossing and turning in bed, drenched in sweat, dreaming.  A foghorn blows and she turns in bed, saying, “Why did I do that?” leading the audience to believe she just farted. Well, any viewer in the Kevin Smith dick & fart joke generation.

She reflects back to the first time she met Allen Bliss (Michael Rennie). She was dancing with her fiancee John at a high society party.  John was angling for an entry into Allen’s business.  After meeting Lucia, Allen was angling to get into hers.  During a dance, both Allen and Lucia learn their preconceptions were wrong — she was not a money hungry shrew, and he was interested in things more varied and finer than the almighty dollar (remember, this was 1958).

ahpfoghorn003Out on a foggy balcony they discuss the excitement of not knowing the path ahead.  He suggests that she should board a ship on her honeymoon and sail and sail until they hit the Fortunate Isles.  He wishes he had the strength to tell off all the bankers and do the same. They are having quite the moment until the butler announces a call for him from Mrs. Bliss in Boston.  D’oh!

Their paths cross again on another foggy night.  It is very thick and people are squinting trying to see — oh no, wait, they’re in Chinatown.

Apparently it is the the Chinese New Year given all the fireworks and paper mache dragon heads.  Allen suggests they get their bearings somewhere warm like one of the 200 Chinese Restaurants on the block.  Allen is happy to hear that Lucia has called off her engagement to John.

They pursue things their common interests that she could never share with John, ahpfoghorn005browsing a bookstore, a favorite poem, sailing, eating Chinese food, constantly getting lost in fog.

Eight weeks later, Lucia says she must stop seeing Allen.  She doesn’t care what people say, but everyone from her parents to the housekeeper is talking about her running around in the fog with a married man.  She wants to end it before she really falls in love with him — so apparently she does care.  Seeing just the opportunity he has been waiting for — i.e. his last chance — he tells her he is getting a divorce regardless of her answer to his proposal.

Still tossing in bed, she screams out Allen’s name, fearing something awful has happened.  Her screams have brought — what? — a nun into her room.  She tells Lucia she is not at home, and that there has been an accident.  Lucia still screams for Allen, but the nun says she will get a doctor.

ahpfoghorn006Lucia remembers being back in the Chinese restaurant, waiting for Allen. Finally she leaves and finds Allen outside, once again in the fog.  His wife won’t give him a divorce.  Screw that, he tells Lucia the next day as they are sailing that he has bought two tickets to Canton — the man loves his Chinese food.  He’ll leave his wife enough money so that she won’t miss him.

Unfortunately, the fog starts rolling in on them.  There is a calm and Allen loses his bearings, not having a compass or sextant or radio or brain.  They could row, but have no idea which direction.  They are not sure which foghorn they are hearing, but it turns out to be coming from a ship which plows over Allen’s boat like Al Czervik’s over Judge Smails’.

ahpfoghorn008

Terrible old age make-up and looking not nearly as good as Barbara Bel Geddes did on Dallas almost 50 years later.

Sadly, Allen was killed.  She looks at the Chinese Wishing Ring Allen had just given her the day before and sees her hands are not young and beautiful.  They’re pruny, and it ain’t from the water.  She looks into a mirror and realizes she has been in a sanitarium for 50 years. And drops dead.

Everyone is entirely adequate. And I must admit I was completely suckered in by her face never being seen except in the flashbacks.  It was almost an Eye of the Beholder moment.

But it just didn’t do much for me.  I don’t like flashbacks in general, and the rest was a little too melodramatic for my tastes.  I can imagine it being the bee’s knees back in 1958, though (two years before the classic TZ episode).

Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.
  • The doctor mentioned she had had no visitors for 50 years.  What a family of assholes.
  • The passage Allen has her read in the bookstore is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.
  • Not related to Ray Bradbury’s short story of the same name — one of his more famous short stories, even made into a movie, yet not included in his 100 Most Celebrated Tales Collection that I foolishly bought.

Night Gallery – Something in the Woodwork (01/14/73)

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ngwoodwork01Metaphors for Night Gallery abound in the opening of this episode.  There is the old house full of cobwebs and the promise of a ghost. There is the desperate 1st wife trying too hard, but unable to match the new girl that never gets old in a man’s mind.  And down the stairs comes a young handyman who she pathetically begs to stay to keep her company.

Night Gallery had a lot of political turmoil backstage, but maybe it just was doomed from the start.  Serling’s style of writing was on the way out.  Even in its contemporaries — you never see the maudlin, long-winded, preachy monologues in the other old shows covered here — Alfred Hitchcock or Thriller.

It could be argued that Serling was creating deeper characters, but was he?  Even the hour-long Thriller seems to be less padded out than a lot of Serling’s work in Twilight Zone (don’t even start on the hour-long season) and Night Gallery.  Mostly, it felt like he was just looking for a platform for his liberal (in the good way, before liberals went insane) speeches.  There’s a reason Strange Interlude never really caught on.

Even Serling himself went through a transformation which, though in step with the zeitgeist, did him a disservice.  He started out a very straight-laced Don Draper type hosting Twilight Zone in 1959 — perfect dark suit, perfect short hair, perfect thin black tie. Probably wore a perfect hat.  He was the the very model of the modern major company man around whom things went askew — just as in many on his TZ episodes.  That itself cast in relief the other-worldliness in TZ (and is why it was a mistake to ever have Boris Karloff host such shows).

By the time Night Gallery started, the 1960’s were in full swing or in full bore — ironically both cliches have appropriate double-meanings.  Serling was still hosting, but it was a different Serling.  Unlike Don Draper, he changed with the times (but did not buy the world a Coke).   He seemed a little too tan, a little oily — his dictating scripts by his pool has been described often.  And the hair — my God — the hair.  It was longer, wilder, often did not reflect a minute sitting in the make-up chair or having at least a comb run through it.  He was not our rock standing statue-still as he usually was to introduce the Twilight Zone.  He was more like a sunburned hobo with a five o’clock shadow wandering through this cheap set of mostly awful paintings (although why, for the love of God, didn’t they ever use that cool dragon sculpture?).  The societal  deterioration of the 1960s permeated Night Gallery.

It was also the curse of color television.  I have wondered whether watching some of these episodes in black & white might make them a different show — like the black & white DVD that was included in The Mist Special Edition.  Or the way color film of WWII seems to cheapen the events.  Maybe that’s true for some episodes, but I’m not going back and rewatching them in B&W (nice investment on those DVDs, pal).

And maybe, like the first wife in tonight’s episode, it would just never be able to compete with it’s younger “self” — the earlier “golden” age of TV, the newness, the younger age and energy of Serling, and the innocence of the country.  Even the iconic, tight-lipped, vaguely menacing on-screen appearance of Serling was no longer a novelty.

By the time Night Gallery arrived, it was tarted up with color, infused with excruciating throw-away sketches, and creative control was taken away from the man to be be mostly controlled by lesser talents of “the man”.  It was just a desperate attempt to be one of the young, hip crowd; but about as appealing as a potbelly and a comb-over.

But I digress.

ngwoodwork04Molly Wheatland invites her ex-husband over on the pretense of signing some papers. In reality, she has planned a romantic evening. Sadly, her ex-husband Charlie has a younger woman waiting in the car. Happily for him, it Barbara Rhoades who played the hot, young, busty redhead in every show of the 70s & 80s.  Yada yada . . .

Maybe it is just the sadness of the episode that finally brings this series crashing down for me.  Geraldine Page is great in this and certainly not unattractive.  Ironically, maybe this episode launched my rant because the sadness in it is a little too real.

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy:  Fittingly, none.
  • Ironically, Charlie is 13 years older than Molly, so maybe this isn’t his first trip to this particular rodeo.
  • Out of 49 episodes, this one ranked 14th from the bottom.  A better ranking than I expected, but that IMDb rating system has always been a little suspect.
  • I wish I had enough interest to mention that the black & white cookie guy in her eye above looks just like the guy in Star Trek.  Am I going to take the time to look up his name?  I am not.

Tales From the Crypt – Strung Along (09/02/92)

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Image 008Puppetmaster Joseph Renfield (Donald O’Connor) is watching some of his old B&W TV marionette shows presumably on VHS tapes.  Feeling old and nostalgic, he looks out his back window where he see a more interesting set of strings — those holding together the bikini of his much younger wife.  The puppet market must have been very lucrative; you know, back around the time his wife was born.

In the mail that day, Renfield gets a letter offering him a spot on a TV show to revive his old act with Coco the Clown; because there’s nothing modern TV audiences, even in 1982, like better than puppets and clowns.

His wife Ellen seems genuinely to care for Renfield despite their 34 year difference. She recruits one of her friends from acting class who just happens to be a good looking young man to help him prepare for the show.  While Coco the Clown looks on menacingly.

All seems to be going well.  The new kid David is working out well.  Ellen is furious when David updates some of Renfield’s material and storms out.  David then casually mentions that acting classes are on Tuesday, not Wednesday as Ellen has been telling Renfield when she goes out each week.  While Coco the Clown looks on menacingly.

Image 035As David is leaving, Ellen tells him maybe he shouldn’t come back.  It isn’t really clear why she want to get rid of David.  He accuses her of cheating on Renfield.  She says they’ve been married for 8 years — so they were 25 and 59 when they got married.  If she’s in it for the money, she certainly is making a good show of it.  He goes through Ellen’s underwear, probably the first time in a while, and finds a stack of love letters.

In a drunken conversation with Coco, the clown convinces him to take matters into his own hands.  When he awakens in the morning, Coco’s strings are hanging loose and Renfield hears Ellen screaming upstairs.  He rushes up to see Coco repeatedly stabbing Ellen in then chest.

Image 024After Renfield keels over dead in horror, David comes out and it is revealed to be a robotic Coco puppet that David was working by remote.

As Renfield takes his last gasps — actually he already looks stone cold dead — David and Ellen explain their evil plot.

Unfortunately for them, the original Coco is a little more animated than they thought and avenges Renfield’s death.

Nothing special, but solid.

Post-Post:

  • Title Analysis:  They’re finally starting to understand how it works.
  • Why name the guy Renfield?  There is only one famous Renfield in all literature, and he has nothing in common with this character.