Category Archives: TV

Tales from the Crypt – Smoke Wrings (06/21/96)

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This episode is cited a few places as being the worst of the series.  I have to put up a weak defense.  Not because it is good, but because there has been so much other crap.

The first scene is yet another example of how the producers did not understand their own program; especially after the bastards shipped it across the pond.  It has all the ingredients to grab the audience and make a great first impression.  We are in an advertising agency.  What better place for some dazzling creativity (well, around Super Bowl time, anyway)?  Various admen, adwomen, adLGBTQ, adnauseum are making their pitches for the latest new & improved toothpaste.  To be fair, the editor got it, as it was finely chopped between each brief presentation.  Sadly, the performers are so lifeless, and the music so insipid that the setting and editing are squandered.  It just sits there like the Queen.

The episode is redeemed, momentarily, by the appearance of Daniel Craig.  Wait, what?  Yes, young Daniel Craig, playing Barry 007 years [1] before his first appearance as James Bond in the great Casino Royale and subsequent erratically-timed disappointments.  He proudly proclaims to Jacqueline that he has no portfolio or pitch to make.  He says that he has the same swagger as she does and should be hired on that basis.  Apparently that plus tight jeans, a leather jacket, and dreamy blue eyes is enough.

WTF? Is that a Cable Ace Award?

In his first meeting with a client, he attacks his agency’s own presentation as boring.  Jacqueline agrees and tells him to be ready with his own ideas in the morning.  We learn he is in cahoots with Jacqueline’s former boss, Alistair Touchstone, [2] who she forced out of the company.  The old man gives Barry a device which causes minds to be very receptive.

At the meeting, Barry clicks on the device and shows Jacqueline a boring picture with the Chalmer’s Chocolate logo on it.  She immediately chows down on some chocolates he thoughtfully brought in.  He shows the same picture with Amazon Cola’s logo, and she grabs a can.  The same picture advertising Alanis Lipstick causes her to grab a luscious pink-hued tube, and an ad for Moonlight Condoms does about the same.  Barry foolishly shows them the device that is making them so receptive. [3]

Barry is assigned the prestigious Chalmer’s Chocolate account.  The current Ad Exec asks what happens when Barry’s gadget breaks down.  The ex-Exec gets sacked, and not in the good way.  On the other hand, he can probably walk out with a gross of those prop condoms as severance cuz womens love unemployed guys.

Barry goes to see Jacqueline and says he has a message from her old partner, “Drop dead.”  What follows is utterly incomprehensible.  Barry, covered with blood, tells Alistair he killed Jacqueline and framed Alistair for it.  The sacked Adman suddenly reappears and says, no it is Barry whom the police will arrest!  The cops do show up and chase Barry through the building.  Inexplicably, he leaps out a window to his death with no parkour, jet-pack, or parachute-wearing metal-toothed ectomorph to save him.

On the sidewalk where he just plopped, [4] Jacqueline, Alistair, sacked Adman, and a client are huddled, clearly in cahoots.  Turns out there were no cops; that was just a suggestion implanted by the group using the device.  Jacqueline says, “You’re right, the silent version is much more powerful” even though v1.0 also made no sound. [5]

Wait, Alistair had demonstrated the device by making Barry imagine rats — his biggest fear — climbing all over his body.  Wouldn’t the device now have also made the whole group paranoid about cops?  After all, they were conspiring to commit a murder.

The client cheerfully agrees that the advertising firm can keep her account, which is a little strange.  She just sells chocolate, you wouldn’t expect her to be so callous to the suffering and death of a member of her team.  It’s not like she’s selling iPhones.

There really was no point to this ruse other than it was necessary for the episode.  Kinda like there was no reason for this episode other than it was necessary to squeeze a 7th season out of this lumbering mess of a series.  Finally, Jacqueline suggests they celebrate with a drink.  The client says, “Suddenly, I’m dying for one” and they all howl in laughter.  Yes, a guy is dead, but this is a real non sequitur.

There were good performances from Ute Lemper (Jacqueline) and Daniel Craig.  However the lazy writing and somber tone make this another failed effort on the order of Quantum of Solace.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Oh, alright, 010 years before.  But it was one of those “facts” too good to check. You know, like you see on MSNBC.  Or NBC.  Or ABC.  Or CBS.  Or PBS.  Or CNN.  Or Fox.
  • [2]  An unrecognizable Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • [3]  The device brings up the Bewitched paradox.  OK, it casts a spell on the client in the office to think the ad campaign is genius.  Maybe they even put the ultrasound in commercials.  But it won’t be playing in the store, and the effects seem to wear off immediately.  They don’t even have Elizabeth Montgomery as a distraction.
  • [4]  Easily the best feature of the episode is the sound and visual of Barry hitting the pavement.  Kudos!
  • [5]  Unlike Microsoft, Adobe and WordPress, apparently this device’s upgrades actually make the product better.
  • Title Analysis:  What smoke?  What wrings?  What crypt?  They’re not even trying.
  • Ute Lemper?

Science Fiction Theatre – One Thousand Eyes (09/07/56)

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I’m calling an audible; but one of those written-down audibles.  The boring review can wait, we’re skipping ahead to dessert.

I was going to finish up by including some corny 60 year old song with almost the same title as the episode, but it tricked me by being groovy as hell (except the Speedo guy).  Note the first girl crushed under the boulder, the naked lesbians making out under the umbrella,[2] the brunette shaking her yayas [1] on the rock, the sea-weed boa that chick is sporting, and — holy cow! — the workout the redhead gives that motorcycle!  This might be the best thing I’ve seen since the lock-down.

[1]  After 30 seconds of research, it appears — against all odds — that yayas is not a synonym for breasts.  I shall be submitting an entry to the OED in the morning.  Or maybe the Urban OED.

[2] Your Rorschach may vary.

Anyhoo:

Welcome to CSI: Large Midwestern Town (SFT continues its trend of being set in generically described cities).  Vincent Price fires a bullet into a water tank that seems to have no water, then examines it under a microscope.  Dry — just as he suspected!  Also a perfect match to a bullet used in the crime he is investigating.  The ballistics and the blood sample should send this perp away for good, even without the confession the cops beat out of him.  The detective insists that the case was solved by “good old-fashioned police work, not hocus-pocus.”  Price tells him the day will come when every murder is solved in the crime lab.

Price’s former fiancee Ada drops by the lab and grinds the episode to a halt.  Price opens the door and she just stands there a few frames too long, then she slowly enters and begins speaking very slowly.  She says, “I want you to save my husband Robert March from being killed.”  Price knows her husband as the inventor of the March Motion Picture Projector.  Ada says his new invention, the April Motion Picture Projector, is the most important thing he’s ever done, as it really brings out the flesh-tones on those Bettie Page slides.  Unfortunately, someone is trying to kill him for it.

She wants Price to use his CSI skillz to make her husband’s lab safe — bullet proof glass, cameras — that sort of thing.  Price does a little research and finds that March believes in ghosts, seances, and the supernatural.  The newspaper archivist tells Price, that March “was married to a beautiful woman much younger than himself.  She is supposed to have jilted her poor fiancee to marry the rich Dr. March.”  Oh, I get it — well-played, SFT!

Price meets Ada at March’s lab that night to measure for Kevlar curtains.  I guess this makeover is meant to be a surprise because Ada waited until she saw March’s car leave.  When they enter the lab, however, they see March has been shot in the back.

The detectives are called and Price brings all his CSI training to bear on this mystery.  He determines from the powder-burns on March’s back that he was shot in the back from the back.  He also deduces that March knew the killer because “he had to come in through that door.”  The door behind March?  Check your math on that one.

The cops gave Ada a sedative because she had become hysterical, although for Ada, that might just mean she blinked and cleared her throat.  When she is back to her usual effervescent self, she tells the police the only person who might have known about the invention was March’s assistant, John Clifton.  Luckily, after being thrown under the bus by Ada, Clifton has a pretty good alibi — he’s dead (although not killed by a bus).

Blah blah.  That’s enough of that.  Go watch The Vast of Night on Amazon Prime.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Man Who Found the Money (12/27/60)

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Are the stories getting thinner or did I just get fatter during the COVID-19 lock-down?  Yesterday’s One Step Beyond seemed pretty slight, but today’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents is like me going back to my old elementary school to vote and seeing my 747 hangar-sized cafeteria has shrunk to the size of an airport Bojangles.

William Benson is enjoying a weekend at the Pinto Casino in Las Vegas.  Or maybe not enjoying at this particular moment, because his chips are being depleted faster than the Ozone.  Hey, whatever happened to that crazy Ozone?  It was going to kill us all, now it never even calls.  In a move that seems reckless to a non-gambler like me, he puts his remaining chips on Black 11 [1] at the roulette table.  The ball lands on Red 25.

Benson takes it like a man, and leaves while he still has a few bucks in his pocket; so not really like most men.  He walks back to his room.  In the parking lot, he nearly trips over a huge money clip holding $92,000.  He looks around to see if anyone dropped it if anyone saw him.  Smoothly, he kneels, picks up the loot, and stuffs it in his pocket.  He goes back to his room alone with the $92,000.  Whereas, I would not have been alone and only had $91,000.

He counts out the cash, then looks for a place to hide it.  After trying a few locations, he decides on the brand new concept of stuffing the money in his mattress.  But ultimately, he sits in a chair with it in his hands from 3:50 am until he goes to the bank the next morning.  He rents a Safe Deposit Box for $1.75.  He pockets the other $.25 change to get a steak dinner and some back pills later.

Like a good citizen, he reports the found cash to the police.  He is shown in to see Captain Bone, which was my nickname in college.  Bone already knows about the cash, but he says $102,000 was reported missing!  He is dubious that Benson did not take the other $10k for expensive scotch or hookers or worse — waste it.  There are tense accusations and denials before Bone calls the owner of the cash.

Another upright citizen comes to meet Benson — Mr. Newsome, owner of the Pinto Casino.  Newsome, and even Bone in a reversal, could not be nicer.  They say the missing $10k will show up somewhere.  The 3 men go to the bank to pick up the cash.  Newsome is so pleased to have it, that he tells Benson to fly his wife Joyce in for a week to stay at the Pinto, all expenses paid!

Everything is cool.  Newsome drops Bone at the Police Station, and takes Benson to the Pinto.  Benson is set up with free drinks, and told the house will stake him at any game he wishes to play.  A few cigarettes later, Newsome calls him into his office and hands him the phone.  Benson’s wife Joyce says, “There are 2 awful men here”, then Newsome snatches the phone.  He says menacingly, “You fooled the police, but you didn’t fool me.  I don’t believe in holding grudges.  Be straight with me now, or something will happen to her.  It won’t be pretty.  Now let’s have my $10k you stole!”  Dunh dunh dunh.

I felt cheated when I watched the episode — it felt more like an act break than a real ending.  In reviewing it, however, I see I was wrong.  This is a masterful surprise ending, and a subverting of the usual AHP tropes.  Innocent people often get the shaft on AHP, but they aren’t usually the protagonist.  Benson has been nothing but honest and honorable for the entire episode.  That’ll teach him.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I was going to make a possibly racist reference to a player wearing #11 in the NFL.  Since I can’t name a single active player of any color or number, I went to Google.  The first few pages of football players were all soccer players, so I guess I’m possibly a nationalist too.  Finally, a site offered the best NFL player by jersey number.  They selected Larry Fitzgerald for the honor.  His blurb also mentioned he was an 11-time Pro-Bowler, and I actually thought, “Wow, he bowls too!”  What a maroon!  I have no idea if he is black or white, but isn’t that how it should be?
  • Sadly I never got to reference the vice scene in Casino.  Just watching it again on You Tube, I don’t think I even want to link it.

One Step Beyond – Premonition (03/10/59)

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Oh, One Step Beyond, every week I find something to compliment you on.  It might be the direction, the set design, the use of stock footage, or Cloris Leachman’s slinky dress.  But the visual triumphs are always in service of a slice of the genre pie that is shrinking every week.  Honestly, after this week’s slight entry, I don’t know how much lower OSB can go.

Dude, you never go full-Biden!

In 1901, rambunctious 11-year old Lisa is being hunted down for her ballet lesson.  The maid and her French personal ballet instructor find her on the veranda.  So, yeah, her widowed father has money.  When Lisa sees her father watching, she runs to him and he goes full-Biden, hugging her and picking her up.  It is a little strange because the 11 year old is played by a 15 year old who is a little too curvy for the part and a little too chunky for the ballet.  Oh well, in 5 years, Hollywood will be casting her as the mother.

She shows off her skillz for her father, ending up with a series of pirouettes.  Frenchie implores her to go faster, faster.  When she is about to burst into flames, the teacher tells her to slow down.  But Lisa seems to be in a trance.  She continues spinning and can’t stop even as she sees the ceiling begin to crumble and a large chandelier crashes down on her.  This is one of those visual touches that make the series bearable — really well-done.

As the title of the episode might spoil, this did not really happen — it was the titular premonition.  And it is the only premonition in the episode.  It ain’t exactly a train derailment or the Titanic.  See what I mean?  Lisa collapses, and a doctor is called.  He asks her father if she suffers from Vertigo.  I know it left me unconscious the first time I sat through it.

Lisa awakens and begins screaming that the chandelier fell on her.  This is a high-pitched killer of a scream like the kid in the OSB episode Epilogue.  And this caterwauling goes on for almost a full minute.  John Newland, who directed both Epilogue and this episode had no idea how to restrain kids.  I find a 6 mm nylon line perfectly adequate.

That night, Lisa goes to see the chandelier and gets hysterical at the sight of it.  Any time she must enter the room, she will not walk under it.  The sight or her father or maid walking under it gives her a conniption.

Ten years later — I repeat, ten years later — her caring father has a carpenter finally examine the chandelier fixture.  The carpenter says it could withstand an earthquake.  He calls Lisa in so she can hear that for herself.  She is still terrified of it, though.  Her fiance tries to convince her that they can safely dance under it because he was not in her vision.  He’s really a dick about it, reducing her to tears.  But he finally waltzes her beneath it and she is even able smile about it.

We skip ahead to 1947 — I repeat, 1947 — and Lisa is having a coming-out party for her grand-daughter, which meant something completely different back then.  She seems very happy with life until she hears the chandelier rattling in the ballroom.  Lisa rushes into the ballroom, but we just get a shot of the back of John Newland’s head.  We hear a scream and the sound of the chandelier crashing to the floor.

But who was killed?  Lisa’s grand-daughter was pointlessly also named Lisa.  So was that old Lisa screaming or young Lisa?  Was the premonition 46 years ago just that someone named Lisa would die?  Newland even f*cks with us, delivering his usual, “We know to whom it happened, we know when it happened . . . ” spiel.  Well, spill it dude — who was killed?

Again, there were great elements to the episode.  An Analytical Guide to Television’s One Step Beyond (AGOSB) discusses how cleverly the chandelier is photographed much better than I can.  On the other hand, the book also says this is a high point of the 1st season.  I just find it hard to get excited about a premonition that comes true 46 years later.  She could have predicted a World War and been right twice.  A lot of things can happen in almost half a century.

So, well-presented, but these stories need work.

Miscellaneous

The real mystery is, who is Debbie?

  • The episode description on Amazon says, “Debbie is haunted by the fear of her own demise at the hands of a chandelier in her home.” [1]
  • AGOSB refer’s to Debbie’s vision of the ceiling cracking.
  • The cast list in AGOSB includes “Pamela Lincoln (Debbie).”  Strangely, none of the other actors have their character name included.
  • Per IMDB, Pamela Lincoln plays “Older Lisa Garrick.”
  • There is no question that the girl with the visions and her name-sake grand-daughter are both named Lisa.  So where is this Debbie coming from?
  • [1]  Hands of a chandelier?

Tales from the Crypt – Report from the Grave (06/14/96)

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Elliot and Arianne are walking through the cemetery.  Elliott has a contraption that he wants to hook up to a dead brain.  Dude, Arianne is right there; and she’s no rocket scientist!  Quite the opposite, she ridicules his narrow focus on “physics” and “facts”.  She believes metaphysics has the answers.

They enter a mausoleum which holds the body of Valdemar Tymrak.  Elliott says he is #13 in the World Class Psychos Trading Card set.  Literally — Elliot pulls out the rookie card with his name on it.  He reads, “26 certified kills, 19 women, 7 men.  Tymrak was a renowned mesmerist who apparently hypnotized his victims with a single stare.  Under his control, they were made to commit terrible and depraved acts before he murdered them and bathed in their blood.”  Elliott believes Tymrak’s powerful brain makes him a good candidate to hook up to his device.  Some people might have preferred final revelations from Gandhi or Hawking or Einstein or Jeffrey Epstein, but they didn’t have no trading cards.

Elliott opens the tomb and Arianne winces at the smell.  Elliott explains that the smell is formaldehyde.  Well, wouldn’t it have smelled worse without formaldehyde?  For any trip to a exhumation, a COVID-19 N95 mask dipped in camphor or catshit would probably be a good idea.  Anyhoo, I happily suspend disbelief and accept that this guy’s machine can read a dead man’s thoughts.  But after being embalmed?  C’mon, man!

The whole time, Elliott has been a little snippy because he suspects Arianne stole some research papers from him.  Arianne says she has no interest in such things.  She uses a red marker to draw a heart on the palm of his hand and says, “You’ll always have my heart in your hands.”  In a good episode of TFTC, that would literally have come true.

He hooks Tymrak up to the device.  While adjusting the settings, he sees his stolen research papers spill out of Arianne’s bag.  Fortuitously, she happens to be putting the other headset on her own noggin.  He angrily cranks up the volume causing her to scream.  Once she starts shrieking, he suddenly becomes very concerned.  Well, what did he expect?  He pulls the headset off of her and she stops screaming, but I suspect that heart drawn in his palm will be smudged in the morning.

Oh, Arianne was killed.  Elliott wakes up in an asylum due to his guilt — especially after he learns Arianne only took his papers to submit for an award for him.  He dreams of Arianne and 2 other topless women, but seems to have actually awakened before flies land on his window and assemble in the shape of a new circuit.  Elliott uses this new circuit to upgrade his device.  Like every WordPress / Excel / Adobe upgrade in the past 5 years, it is a disaster.

Maybe I fell asleep and missed something — I admit to the falling asleep part — but nothing after this point makes any sense.  He, of course, decides to use his new device to resurrect Arianne.  He appears to have procured 3 dead women for the process, none of them Arianne as far as I can tell.  What are the 3 women for?  Was it just because he dreamed of them?  I dream of topless women all the time, but they don’t show up at my job.  He turns on the device and papers start swirling around the lab like Nakatomi Plaza.

Arianne appears in a ghostly form, then hardens just like Elliott.  That is not the way I expected her to return.  He was working on a scientific approach, not supernatural.  He is OK with it, apparently, as within minutes he is banging her.

Unfortunately, the device must remain on, and Tymrak returns through the same gateway.  Although, he seemed to take a different off-ramp.  Arianne and Elliott are in the bedroom when they hear Tymrak tearing things up.  They rush back to the lab, and Tymrak breaks down the lab door to kill them.  Well, wait — wouldn’t he have also materialized in the lab?  Where did he go?  There was no English bird waiting to have sex with him — he killed them all.  It’s just that lack of foresight that kept him out of the Top 10.

Anyway, Elliott has to shut down the machine to get rid of Tymrak, and Arianne is lost in the process.  A few days later, Elliott is found to have committed suicide.  He is bloody in the tub, probably from trying to scrub the smell of formaldehyde off his wiener.  I guess we are to assume that he was distraught after killing Arianne twice, something not even Tymrak ever pulled off.  Or maybe this was his attempt to join her in the after-life.

However, we also see a sign that she returned to him.  The police notice a heart drawn on the window, but I still can’t figure out what they are getting at.  An officer says to a detective, “It’s on the window sir.  There’s something written in the dew.”  Well, drawn not written — there is a heart.  The officer seems to think it is strange that it is on the outside, and that all the windows are painted shut.  I get the callback to the heart she drew on his palm, but what is the big deal about the dew being outside and the window painted shut?

Of course we are meant to assume Arianne came back and drew the heart, but how?  There was no fore-shadowing of an ability to come back yet again.  Why can’t Tymrak come back?  OK, Elliott was reading a book about talking to the dead, so did he actually find a way bring her back without the device?  Why did he bring her back outside?  Was she floating outside his 2nd floor window?  Can she fly?

Another missed opportunity.  The pacing is humorless and plodding; however, the actors are great in their roles.  Tymrak’s make-up looks like a drunk 3rd grader put it on in the car; however, when combined with the editing, it is surprisingly effective.  The episode is done in by the complete lack of self-awareness, irony, campiness or gore that is supposed to be the sine qua non of the series.

Other Stuff:

  • Title Analysis:  Hunh?  There is a grave — or at least a mausoleum — but no report is filed from it.
  • Great comment on the You Tube version:  Any less pixels ……………….. would make this radio.
  • The awful screen-caps above are from the DVD.  I mucked up the color somehow.