Category Archives: TV

Night Gallery – The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (S3E2)

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Lots to be thankful for:  This is the beginning of the last season of Night Gallery . . . I get to skip the execrable first episode as it was inexplicably put on the Season One DVD . . . Joanna Pettet is making her fourth appearance.

On the downside, they have done away with Gil Mellé’s theme which was almost as unnerving as TZ’s.  And Serling’s intro is shamefully weak:  “Let me welcome you to this parlor of paintings . . .”  But the play is the thing, so let’s get to it.

Photographer David Faulkner (James Farentino) is developing film in is darkroom when he sees a picture of a hot babe that he doesn’t remember shooting.  The girl in the photo (Joanna Pettet) walks into his darkroom, but now the picture is not of her anymore.  He doesn’t complain about her opening the door and exposing the other negatives, but who would?  He invites her back the next morning for test shots.

The next day, he fires off hundreds of pictures of her, using the time-honored TV style of photography — constantly moving the camera so it would be impossible to get a focused shot unless he has the shutter speed at 1/30000000.  He should really get a tripod; and during the bikini shots, maybe did.  Heyoooooo!

The next day, he has a meeting with Mr. Munsch from Munsch Beer who is looking for just the right girl to be Miss Munsch in his ad campaign.  He even has a miniature billboard mocked up with a white outline reserved for the perfect white model.  None of the usual suspects in Faulkner’s portfolio excite him until he gets to Joanna.  And we’ll stick with calling her Joanna because she has no name in the episode.

Soon, Joanna’s picture is adorning beer billboards all over the city.  His pal Harry is steamed that Faulkner has not introduced him to her.  When he sees her billboards, it’s like she’s looking back at him.  He is drawn by her eyes that seem to know things about him that she could not possibly know.  Faulkner throws Harry out and makes an early night of it.

Joanna apparently plans to make an early night of it also as she hooks up with Harry downstairs.  Faulkner notices the two of them walking down the sidewalk together.  He goes down to follow them but only sees her running away alone.  He also remembers her ominous admonishment to him that she is never to be followed.  So he returns to his studio as Harry rolls down a ditch, dead.

nghungryeyes20

Joanna Pettet, also figuratively hot

The next morning Munsch says he wants to meet the mysterious Joanna.  That night, Faulkner sees her kissing another man who collapses on the sidewalk.  She tries to use her magic eyes on Faulkner, but he runs back to his studio.

As soon as he enters, Joanna is already there.  He is starting to realize this is no ordinary girl, and I don’t just mean her smoking body.  He takes all her negatives from his file cabinets and throws then on the floor.  He dowses them with lighter fluid as she screams, and he sets them on fire.  She curls up like an old negative and burns.

Outside trying to get some fresh air, he sees a billboard of her bursting into flames  It would be fun the think every picture of her on billboards and in magazines is also bursting into flames across the country, but the writer lacked even the imagination of Come Back to Me‘s scribe.  Or more likely, lacked the budget.

OK, so she was a vampire who reeled guys in with her looks and hypnotic eyes — pretty standard vampire tropes for both vampires and vampirettes.  Originality is over-rated, I always say.  But where did she come from?  Why did she pick Faulkner?  Why did she let him set the photos on fire?  Why did that result in her dying?  What if the billboard had been set on fire first,would that have also killed her?  Why doesn’t she ever get that hair cut?  Good performances, but ultimately pointless.

For some reason, I think this shot was intended to be a shocker.

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy: John Astin was in A Hundred Yards over the Rim.

Tales From the Crypt – On a Deadman’s Chest (S4E3)

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An emcee introduces the band Exorcist to us and their inexplicably adoring fans.  The almost well-named lead singer Danny Darwin’s prodigious musical talent is matched only by his linguistic skills enabling him to work the F word in three times in three sentences.  I have to go back to Demosthones or maybe even Iggy Pop to find a wordsmith of such a skill.

Darwin, blissfully, takes a break from his godawful set to announce that his guitarist Bosch has gotten married.  The girls in the audience jeer as they would at a similar announcement from Justin Bieber; or like guys would the second he walked on stage.

Darwin drags Bosch’s fiancee Scarlett (Tia Carrera) onto the stage, much to her displeasure.  He warns Bosch not to get pussy-whipped, calls Scarlett a bitch and pushes her off stage.  So that Dale Carnegie course really paid off.

Bosch drops the guitar and walks offstage.  Stopping the show, Darwin follows, and Bosch attacks him as much as a guy with big hair, earrings, a necklace and a mesh shirt can.  He demands an apology, but Darwin says it is was just a joke, further demonstrating his grasp of the English language, and communication in  general.

tftcdeadmanschest04Darwin goes to his dressing room where there are a couple of skanky sluts.  They say they hate Scarlett, too because she treats them like skanky sluts.  So far there is exactly one person in this episode that I don’t loathe (although her taste in men is appalling).

One of the skanks, Vendetta, starts to grow on me as she unzips her leather top.  Sadly, she has destroyed her beauty with a dreadful new tattoo of a snake curled around her breast.  She tells Darwin to look closer, and he sees a tongue slither out of the snake’s mouth.  She promises to reveal the location of this magical tattoo artist if he will sleep with her.

The next morning, she drops Darwin off at the home of Farouche, the magical tattoo guy.  Farouche is also a tattooed douche-bag, but he has an eye-patch treats Darwin like shit, so I kind of like him.  Darwin wants a tiger, but Farouche says he will decide what to create; he “finds what is inside and brings it outside.”  Like my lunch when I think that low-lifes like these are the future of our country.

When Farouche is finished, Darwin races to a mirror — a common practice for him, I imagine — and sees that the artist has put a massive tattoo of Scarlett on his chest.  Outraged, he refuses to pay and storms out.

tftcdeadmanschest14Back at the house, Scarlett comes in and immediately tears into Darwin for being unprofessional.  She reminds Darwin that Bosch writes and produces the songs and that a lot of labels would love to have him as a solo act.  His reasoned response is, “You’re trying to break up the band, you stupid bitch.  Can’t you see we’re the hottest band in the country?”  Which is why they share a house.

At the small club (where the hottest band in the country plays every night) he finds Vendetta and accuses her of giving Farouche a picture of Scarlett to tattoo on his chest.  She has her first reasonable suggestion and gives Darwin the name of a plastic surgeon who can remove the tattoo.  Because this is the chick whose advice is gold, baby!  The doctor does his thing, but a ghost of the Scarlett tattoo remains.

tftcdeadmanschest17After apologizing to Bosch and telling him he wants to keep the band together, he skips the next gig.  While the band is playing, he sneaks back into his own house while Scarlett is slipping into the tub.  While Bosch is headbanging on stage, Darwin does some headbanging with Scarlett, and not the good kind.  He viciously slams her noggin repeatedly against the tile wall until she is dead.

Bosch comes into the dressing room and asks Darwin (as he is putting on his guy-liner) if he has seen Scarlett, which just baffles me.  The band was on stage during the murder.  Didn’t anyone miss the lead singer?

Darwin tells Vendetta that he killed Scarlett.  He peels the bandage off his tattoo scar and the tattoo has fully returned.  When he finally makes it onstage for the second set, something is bouncing around under his shirt .  He runs offstage, belts Vendetta, returns to the mirror and has a chest-burster scene that makes Alien look tame.

He then engages in a little self-surgery of the non-plastic variety.  As the climax is spoiled in the first shot of the episode, I don’t feel the guilt that I also haven’t felt spoiling every other episode.

A good episode with brief moments of greatness, largely ruined by too many entirely repulsive characters.

tftcdeadmanschest23Post-Post:

  • Title Analysis:  Again, no thought was put into it.  First of all, it’s not “Deadman’s Chest”, it’s “Dead Man’s Chest.”  Second, who is the titular dead man?  The only person killed is a woman.
  • Danny Darwin is an awful name for this character.  If you want to keep Darwin (and there really is no reason to), name him Darwin Dedmon (I have never known anyone with the last name Deadman), then change the title to Dedmon’s Chest.  Both problems solved.
  • All I can think is that Darwin is almost an anagram for drawing?
  • Gregg Allman, as the club manager, was far more normal that I expected.

Outer Limits – Out of Body (S2E20)

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oloutofbody01Dr. Rebecca Warfield (hey, it’s TV’s Roz from Frasier!) has been in a fatal car accident and is having an out-of-body experience; also an out-of-focus experience.

Her really sketchy (by today’s standards, but I kinda dig it) ghost hovers above the street and looks down at her bloody carcass.  Turns out it was just her recurring nightmare, but this time it was different as she actually died in the dream.

Roz is trying to get funding for her research on the human soul.  She is showing the committee a film of a chimp named Duncan in the hyperspace chamber.  This puts  him into a near-hibernation state, but resembling REM sleep in a human. Somehow this is supposed to show that the chimp is having an out-of-body experience and part of his soul is going to another dimension.  I don’t get the connection, but I wasn’t a call-screener for a shrink for 10 years.

oloutofbody06One committee member asks when she is going to put a human in the chamber (hmmmm, I wonder who the first one will be).  Another member (Hey, it’s TV’s Cigarette-Smoking Man (aka CGB Spender) from The X-Files!) wants to know on what moral grounds she is conducting these experiments.  He accuses her of presuming to know God’s will and questions how such sacrilegious research come to be sanctioned.

Back at the lab, she asks her assistant Amy if she believes she has a soul.  Not surprisingly, since he is wearing a cross necklace, she sheepishly says yes.  That night she gets a visit from CGB and tells him about Roz’s research.  She tells him Roz believes we are made of sub-atomic vibrating loops; basically the silly-String Theory.  CGB doesn’t care about the details, he just knows that such sacrilege must be stopped.

After losing her funding, sure enough, she goes into the chamber herself.  The computer goes berserk, as they are wont to do, and takes the session to Level 5.  This could all have been prevented by making four the highest number.  As it shuts down, Roz runs to Amy’s station to see what when wrong, but Amy can’t see her —  her body is still in the chamber.

oloutofbody07She finds she can walk through walls and people, and instantly zip from place to place.  She overhears a phone conversation telling her husband Ben that she has been taken to the hospital.  Roz and Ben get to the hospital at the same time despite her ability to instantly teleport anywhere.  Corporeal Roz is still unconscious.

She drops in at Amy’s apartment and CGB stops by by.  They are clearly in cahoots — she admits to him that the power went out of control and she froze before she could find a way to stop it.

Roz starts swinging her hand through the phone, the TV, all of Amy’s electrical appliances trying to make herself heard — same trick Geordi and Ro tried on ST:TNG. She later tries the same trick at the hospital.

Back at the lab, Amy turns on the light and says she can feel Roz.  She commands her to make the light flicker like she did at the hospital.  We can’t see Roz, but we do see the light flicker.  Just when we expect logic to prevail, Amy screams, “This is the devil’s work!  Man’s arrogance must be stopped!”

Joloutofbody10esus Christ, we’re back at the hospital again.  The doctor starts using a heart defibrillator on her, but she dies, and ghost-Roz fades out.

When another patient who just had a near-death experience tells her husband that he talked to Roz, her husband rushes back to the lab.  A flickering light tells him she is there. Her husband gets in the machine, but Amy takes an axe to it, and it blows up.

So they are together again.

Post-Post:

  • Canadian DVD Title:  Voyage Astral.
  • That was some bizarre wreck.  The other car is completely upside down, but Roz’s is right beside it and right-side-up.  So how did the other one flip in place like a rotisserie?
  • They have GOT to find a way to get that black-lunged son-of-a-bitch on the X-Files sequel.  A clone?  Was Jeremiah Smith still alive by that point?

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Concrete Mixer (S5E5)

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Ettil Vyre, “bearer of the most famous name in [our] military tradition”, is refusing to go Earth on what he considers to be an ill-conceived escapade.  The Assigner brings in his wife and son to shame him into going.

Tomorrow, Vyre will be part of the invasion of Earth.  Vyre shows his son some old Earth pulp sci-fi magazines of the kind that Bradbury started writing for.  Vyre’s grandfather brought them back from a visit to Earth and they are now forbidden.

Martian leaders believe generations of Earthmen have been reading these magazines where Earth always prevails against constant Martian invasions with one young man, lean and muscled, with a name like Mick or Rick leading the way.  I’m sure our advancements in X-Ray Specs and Giant Mushrooms from the magazine’s back pages gave them pause, as well.  Vyre says the Earthlings “will be ready and waiting for us, yet we fly to attack and die.”

During the journey on the worst designed, most obvious model of a spaceship, The Assigner describes Earth as “what a silly name, what a silly planet, what a silly people.”  He vows to crush them; and by them, I mean, us.

Unexpectedly, they get a video transmission from Earth.  Is it the President?  No, it is William Summers, of the Association of United American Consumers.  My initial thought was that this was Bradbury’s commentary on consumerism, he turns out to be a pretty nice guy.  He extends a welcome to the ships which is strange as he started his message, “Attention Martian invasion fleet.”  He says they are all brothers, which The Assigner concludes is a trick.

rbtconcretemixer12They land and The Assignor looks out the porthole.  “They’re ready for us!” he warns.  “I can see strange weapons!”  This guy has a mind about as sharp as Phobos.  The Assignor opens the hatch and they walk out to face the evil, murderous Earth bastards.  In one of best RBT twists, the emerge into a parade where the “weapons” are batons and brass band instruments.  Thank God they weren’t using the flaming batons or there could have been a massacre.

A little girl comes forward and hands The Assigner a bouquet of flowers.  He responds by calling for the group to surrender.  “You must realize your position is hopeless!”  They are surrounded by reporters as they march to the welcoming committee.  They are presented the key to the city, or actually “the key to Earth” and told that they “have conquered . . . our hearts.”

rbtconcretemixer19The Martians are offered champagne, hot dogs, popcorn, etc.  They march into the city where everyone turns out in the street to welcome them.  One guy is selling T-Shirts that say “I Metta Martian” which is misspelled two ways.  Vyre is still leery, and the Assigner still wants to kill them all, but they parade down the street.  And the Assigner sure is hanging on to those flowers.

Vyre freaks out when he encounters a barking dog, and turns to see a giant clown head, and is almost hit by a car.  He takes off running, finally stopping out of breath in a junkyard.

His crew, on the other hand, is now being hit on by earth-babes, are wearing leis, handed beers and treated like visiting royalty.  Well, if we offered the Queen a beer, a hot dog and a lei.

rbtconcretemixer25The Assigner calls his men to attention, but they are having too much fun.  Finally he drops the flowers.  Vyre sends a telepathic message to his family.  He tells them he was naive to expect guns and bombs,  “We have been dropped like a shovel full of seeds into a large concrete mixer.  Nothing of us will survive.  We will be destroyed not by the gun, but by the glad hand.”  He vows to make a last attempt to save their souls.

I can see why this isn’t part of The Martian Chronicles.  This is the rare story where Earthmen are not the evil, genocidal conquerors.  Basically, the Martians are just dumb-asses.

Coincidentally an old woman with a bible approaches hims and asks if “he has been saved.”  She asks if he would like to go to a better place, a place of milk and honey.  He says yes thinking she means Mars, so I guess they have bees and cows on Mars. When she starts singing, he walks away.

The downtown is still like Mardi Gras with music, drinking, dancing, but sadly lacking in beads-for-boobs bartering (which, frankly, might have saved a lot of Indians).  The Assigner runs across the street to meet Vyre and is hit by a car and killed.

A fat movie producer wants to put Vyre in the movies.  Turns out his name is Rick which makes Vyre crazy.  He runs out into the street, sees the Earthlings and the Martians are starting to wrestle and fight.  Like The Assigner, he doesn’t look both ways and is run over.

Back on Mars, Mrs. Vyre is playing The Imperial March which she tells her son “is one of our victory marches, except they never really had a chance.”  So the Imperial March came from Mars?

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Percentage (S3E14)

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OK, I’m just not understanding anything about this one. Alfred Hitchcock Presents has been my refuge from the frequent non-stories of Ray Bradbury Theater, the often hokey mess of Night Gallery, the uneven tone Tales From the Crypt, and frankly the 60 minutes of Outer Limits (which is usually pretty good, but it’s still an hour of my life). AHP has a great track record for being interesting, logical and pretty leanly written.

Gangsta Eddie Slovak has called a TV repairman (a guy who used to actually come to your house and fix your TV).  His wife is baffled that Slovak intentionally sabotaged the set, then called a repair shop in far away Queens.

Repairman Pete Williams rings the bell, so the appointment must have been three hours earlier.  Eddie opens the door and both men are all smiles as they recognize each other as old army buddies.

ahppercentage09Slovak’s wife Faye rats him out for purposely busting the TV so he could call Pete to take a look at it.  After she leaves, Slovak tears into Pete. He wants Williams to call him a coward for his actions in Korea. Williams seems like a nice guy and says he hasn’t thought about that incident in years.  Slovak says he hasn’t forgotten for one day that he “went chicken one day” and Pete covered for him at risk to his own career.

The titular percentage is the edge that Slovak thinks Pete has on him by keeping this little secret of his cowardice.  He offers Pete big money, even a house to make them even in his mind.  The more Slovak offers, the more Eddie insists he doesn’t want anything except what he can earn on his own.  He is perfectly happy with his modest life.

Slovak is baffled by that and wants to know how much it would cost to keep quiet about him being chicken.  “I gotta pay you back!” he yells at Pete.

They agree to go out to dinner with their wives and he tells Pete’s wife he wants to put some big money in Pete’s pocket.  His wife tries to talk Pete into taking the money, but he just won’t accept anything he hasn’t earned.  When Slovak goes to see Pete’s wife to see how it went, she is all over him.

ahppercentage15When Pete gets home, Slovak berates him for his cheap home, car and furniture, but Pete seems perfectly happy with his life.

A few days later, Pete’s wife invites Slovak over to talk about how to get Pete to take the money, and also to fool around.  Slovak is really only interested in evening up the percentage.  When Louise says she has not really talked to Pete about accepting the money, Eddie kills her.

Slovak is caught red-handed by Pete.  Slovak says to Pete that they are even now. “She made a play for me and I did the best thing I knew.  For your sake, Pete.  All for you. She was no good.”  Slovak implores Pete to make up a story to protect them both just like he did in Korea.  So he thinks he did Pete a favor by killing his wife who he clearly adored?  Pete rats him out to the police immediately.

ahppercentage16Pete goes straight to Slovak’s house. He tells Mrs. Slovak that her husband killed Louise and then they kiss. Hunh?  There was no foreshadowing of this at all.

Everyone did their job, but maybe they should have saved this one for the hour-long season of AHP.

Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  The two wives are still alive.  Don Keefer (Pete Williams) just died last year at 98.
  • Slovak was possibly named for Eddie Slovik, the only American to be executed for desertion since the Civil War.
  • Nice guy Eddie could have been named for Nice Guy Eddie, except Eddie was a dick here — Pete was the nice guy.  And Nice Guy Eddie came along 30 years later.