Category Archives: TV

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – One Grave Too Many (05/22/60)

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It’s hard to call a guy a loser when he’s married to Neile Adams.  Joe makes a pretty good case, though.  He watches TV until 2:00 am, sleeps until noon everyday, then goes to the movies after lunch.  His unemployment benefits expired because he considers himself too good for manual labor, clerical work, or sales.  Also, he’s a smoker.

While his wife Irene is chewing him out at breakfast, she notices the power has been cut off.  I thought I caught them in a continuity error with the toaster working, but they slyly manipulated the events to make sense.  I thought I busted them over the light-bulb not working, but then realized she might have a gas stove.  What I’m trying to say is this show rules!

Joe, parodoxically, tries to look at the bright side of the electricity being out.  He says, “Candles can be romantic” trying to slip in a matinee before the matinee.  Irene is not amused.  He promises to 1) get a loan, and 2) take any job the employment agency has available.

He goes to the Friendship Loan Company, which sounds like a brothel.  They somehow twist his lack of equity, assets, job, or even unemployment benefits into an excuse to deny him a loan.

On the way home, Joe sees a dapper older gentleman carrying an umbrella get off the bus.  Joe, and the audience, suspects this debonair dude is probably loaded (which is crazy, because he was riding the bus).  Before Joe really has much time to be tempted into mugging the man, the gentleman keels over with a heart attack.  Joe lifts the guy’s wallet, but despite the weather report, leaves the snazzy umbrella.

He tells Irene he met an old army buddy who repaid him a forgotten $275 loan.  Irene is thrilled and Joe suggests they be more prudent with this windfall, try to make it last, spend only on essentials, or maybe start a business.  Naw, he says they should get a steak at the most expensive joint in town.  And maybe a carton of Luckies.

Going through the man’s wallet, Joe finds a card that says:

What an awesome set-up!  Joe curses his luck and tosses the wallet away. He quickly realizes, though, that he must do something.  Having seen Breakdown on Alfred Hitchcock Presents 5 years ago, he knows how horrific this could be for the man.

Joe goes back to the corner where the man fell over.  The ambulance is just pulling away.  This was no dark alley, it was a busy street.  What took so long?  Anyway, a cop confirms that the man just hauled away was dead, ceased to be, expired and gone to . . . you know the rest.

Joe goes across the street to a phone-booth and calls Dr. Kruger.  Only able to get an answering service, Joe slams down the receiver.  He walks away, but then decides to try the police.  He tells them about the stiff just carted away, “Isn’t really dead . . . You shouldn’t bury him!  Whatever you do, don’t bury him!”  The cop suggests Joe come in to talk about it.  Knowing he would have to explain how he had this info, he hangs up.

After a fight with Irene, Joe goes to the police station.  Lt. Bates comes down to see him — hey, it’s Biff Elliot from this week’s SFT, Project 44!  After trying to convince the lieutenant the man wasn’t dead, Joe is so determined to save the man that he finally confesses to stealing his wallet.  The two men go to the morgue.  Turns out the dead man was a notorious pickpocket who had stolen that wallet containing the card.

By doing the right thing, Joe incriminated himself for no reason.  Bates puts an arm around Joe and says, “Let’s go upstairs.  We’ve got some talking to do.”  Crazy as it sounds, I think this might just be just the thing to turn Joe’s life around.  I think he and Irene will both live long healthy lives.  Only his will be in jail.

A rare AHP where no one is murdered; at least onscreen.  Strangely, no one mentions the shrunken disembodied head of Lucille Ball they have on top of the refrigerator!  Other than that oversight, a great episode.

Other Stuff:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  Neile Adams still kickin’ at 86.  Why did I even check on the actor credited as Elderly Gentleman in 1961?
  • Sir Alfred’s wraparound is uncharacteristically lame this week.  I don’t even understand the bit with the giant golf bag.  Oversized household goods iz always funny though.  Anyone?

Twilight Zone – Something in the Walls (01/28/89)

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Starting off with a great title like that, this is TZ’s to blow.

Psychologist Dr. Mallory Craig is arriving for his first day at Crest Ridge Sanitarium.  The narrator tells us, “There is a terror behind those cold institutional walls that nothing in his education has prepared him for.”  So maybe they have a Republican working there.

Nurse Becky is the underpaid woman at every company that actually runs things.  She shows him his office and hands him his mail.  Reviewing the files that afternoon, Dr. Craig asks her about only one patient, Sharon Miles (coincidentally the hottest patient in the joint).  She self-committed after constantly rearranging furniture and demanding to sleep in an all-white room (hey, maybe she’s the Republican!). [1]

She is frequently repainting her entire room whenever she sees a spot, she dresses only in solid colors, and only ventures out for meals and counseling.  Nurse Becky says she has never seen a patient so utterly terrified.  That night, Dr. Craig stops by her room.  She is sitting in a white room with one white chair and one lamp.  A non-Becky nurse brings her some fresh blankets with a pattern and she freaks out.

Why the constantly changing look?

The next day, Sharon makes a rare excursion to Dr. Craig’s office to apologize.  Before she can enter, though, he must roll up a patterned carpet and put it aside.  She explains that it wasn’t the blankets that scared her; it was the patterns.  The patterns on blankets, on walls, and on ceilings sometime form faces.  Dr. Craig explains, “That is the way the brain works; it tries to bring order out of chaos.” [2]  

She recalls lying in bed one Sunday watching shadows on the wall cast by the trees outside her window.  The shadows formed into a face which seemed to be pressing outwardly from the wall.  She is horrified, thinking it is looking right at her, but it disappears when the phone rings.  Great, but who was calling her at 3 AM?

Dr. Craig suggests maybe she just imagined it was looking at her.  Sharon compares it to crossing a street where a car is waiting for a light.  Even if she can’t clearly see the driver’s eyes, she can feel them on her ass; or something like that.  She dismisses Dr. Craig’s explanations and says, “It’s trying to kill me!”

They continue talking the next day.  She describes how she saw more faces and how they seemed to form in the patterns of ceilings, wallpaper, shadows and “the doodles of my 7 year old son.”  That’s why she stopped wearing patterns.  “That’s how they get through.”  She thinks they are whispering about her, looking in from somewhere else.

In a confusing edit, she is tossing and turning in bed.  The headboard and room are very simple.  Then we cut to her reading in a much more stylish bed and homey bedroom.  So I guess she is dreaming of herself at home in bed, just like the doctor does except not on all fours.  She turns off the light and sees shadows on the wall and hears muffled whispering.  As she approaches them, faces and heads begin stretching the wall like latex, their heads and faces protruding menacingly.  She runs to her son’s room.  He is OK, but the entities write on his wall:  TELL NO ONE.  She wakes up screaming in the sanitarium.

She immediately calls Dr. Craig and says she wants to tell him everything.  She thinks she knows what they want.  The next morning at the hospital, Becky tells him Sharon had another episode last night.  She was screaming, pounding on the door to get out.  I guess we didn’t see that one, we just saw the one in the flashback.

He runs to her room, but finds her in the hall.  She serenely says she realizes she was just being silly last night.  She says she was wrong to abandon her son and husband.  Wait, who?  She’s married?  Where was her husband during the flashback?  Did he go on a business trip and leave little Bobby with this maniac?

She congratulates Dr. Craig for this therapeutic breakthrough.  She even plans on checking out that day.  He admits being shocked, although maybe that was just the part about her having a husband.  She is even wearing a nice pleated skirt and a colorful scarf.  He suggests a session just to wrap things up, but she curtly cuts him off and says they’re done.

He stops by her room to help her pack.  In her room, he hears strange noises.  Sharon claims to hear nothing.  After he leaves, she looks at a water stain on the ceiling.  She hears voices and sees a face straining to get through.  It says, “She’s one of them!  That’s not me!”  She smiles.

This should have been a chilling resolution.  To be fair, Deborah Raffin’s (Sharon) smile at the end is perfect, and she is great throughout.  As usual, though, the score is blah and the second the narration begins, any suspense is killed.

Damir Andrei (Dr. Craig) had an interesting style.  It sometimes seemed like they were trying to light Nurse Becky as evil.  If so, it was ineffective and unnecessary.

Even with the flaws, I like that it still has me thinking after the episode is over.  Who are those people?  What will happen to Sharon in the wall?  What shenanigans will fake Sharon get into?  Will her son notice?

Other Stuff:

  • [1] It’s so easy.  No wonder everyone on TV does it.
  • [2] He is talking about pareidolia, which well-worth googling.
  • I kept calling him Dr. Craig because I was going to mock his first name.  Unless you wrote Le Morte D’Arthur, Mallory is a girl’s name.
  • Sadly, I was unable to work in this classic:

Tales from the Crypt – Operation Friendship (11/09/94)

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The scariest part about this episode is the first scene where the geeky computer dweeb eats a candy bar, then carefully folds the wrapper up length-ways exactly as I do.  Luckily, this compulsive OCD lunatic tucks one end into the other to make a ring, whereas I tie the wrapper in a knot.  Totally different.

Nelson is a twitchy dweeb lacking in self-confidence, and is taken advantage of by co-workers.  He must never have gotten a Participation Trophy. In his case, an Existence Trophy might have been more appropriate.

Coming home after a rough day at work, though, there is a ray of sunshine.  He is getting the cute across-the-hall neighbor I never had (sorry, Karen).  She mistakes him for the mover, but it’s a start.  As he closes his door, a dude leaps out of his chair wearing a red smoking jacket and yellow ascot.  He is smiling like an idiot, clapping his hands, yelping, “Daddy’s Home!  Daddy’s Home!”  It is reasonable to guess that his dog somehow became human, but no.

This weirdo, Eddie, mocks the evening before them.  There is the telescope pointed at a 400 pound neighbor in her underwear, the microwaved leftovers, and surfing the internet.  Unfortunately, this is conveyed with Robin Williams style antics and voices.  But it is about as funny as watching Robin Williams after you know what happened to him.  Eddie chews him out for letting people at work take credit for his work.

They are interrupted by Nelson’s new neighbor Jane knocking.  The phone company did not show up, and she wants to use the phone.  In possibly the only gag that works in the episode, Nelson opens his door with the still-yapping Eddie behind it. He invites Jane in.  When he closes the door, Eddie is gone.  Bravo!  And not just because of the absence of Eddie.  But partly that.

OK, so Eddie is the suppressed wildman inside of Nelson.  Nelson and Jane go out for Chinese.  She is very impressed when Nelson orders in Chinese.  Oh boy, Eddie shows up again.  He talks in an exaggerated Chinese accent and begins feeling Jane up, though, she is unaware.[1]  She says she is a psychologist and Eddie quite reasonably wants them to scram.

Nitpick:  Both Nelson and Jane are both socially awkward because they were years younger than their schoolmates.  Jane says, “I was the 3rd youngest person to graduate my college.  I can’t imagine what hell the other two went through.”  Hunh?  Actually wouldn’t she be the only one who could understand?

Anyhoo, she and Nelson have the sex.  Nelson and Eddie duke it out over whether to bail on her.  At one point, Nelson charges at Eddie.  I expected Nelson to 1) dive inside Eddie like Neo did to Agent Smith in The Matrix, or 2) run right through him and out the window behind him.  Again TFTC takes the mundane route — during the fight, Eddie just throws Nelson out the window.  This causes problems.

  1. When Nelson flew out the window, it didn’t break, it just sort of shimmered.  OK, they couldn’t kill Nelson, but when did this become a dimensional portal issue?
  2. At work the next day, we see Nelson, but with Eddie’s personality.  Nelson faded away, so when did Eddie physically become Nelson?  Presumably before he walked back into to the bedroom and continued boning Jane. [2]
  3. How long before someone throws Nelson out a window because he has become such a f*** ing douchebag?

Meh, they should have made Eddie a dog like I first thought.  The weakest part of the episode is just that Eddie is sooooo grating, is it torture when he is on the screen.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] He also does a little Elvis which is cool because the actor played Elvis in Forrest Gump that same year.  He also played Elvis again 13 years later in Protecting the King.
  • [2] A commenter at IMBb says the Eddie actor assumes Nelson’s position at work but no one notices.  No, even with partial face-blindness, I recognize him as the actor who will go on to star in the dreadful 9th season of 24.

 

Outer Limits – Small Friends (02/05/99)

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OK, Gene Morton is in a maximum security prison.  But instead of working in the laundry for $.15/hour, he seems to work in the clean room of an electronics lab in the prison.  And one of his neighbors has a saxophone in his cell.  Toto, I don’t think we’re in Oz anymore.

When Gene gets back to his cell, it is lights-out.  He pulls a match-box from under his pillow and several small balls of light swarm out.  He is able direct them with a small remote.  In seconds, the balls shape a piece of metal into a lovely 6-inch model of a Disneyesque castle, although a shank would have been more practical.

Gene seems uninterested in his parole hearing the next day.  He doodles while his lawyer talks about his career as a pioneering micro-engineer.  Unfortunately, when someone tried to take credit for his inventions, he killed him.  And he won’t swear it couldn’t happen again.

Lawrence, who I thought could not be more obnoxious than when he played the sax in the cell-block, is a motormouth punk.  During a basketball game, he accidentally breaks the Discman of a brute named Marlon.  Rather than letting the Lawrence problem solve itself, Gene intervenes and says he can fix the device.  That night he sends the swarm to repair the Discman.  Unfortunately, Lawrence witnesses them.

Of course, Lawrence then threatens him.  He bullies Gene into taking him to the clean room that night.  Gene foolishly shows him the MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) and the remote that controls them.  That night, Marlon fire-bombs his cell, and Gene uses the MEMS to melt the cell door lock.  So now Marlon knows too.  A few minutes earlier, he had told Lawrence he chose to remain in jail because it was the only place he could keep the MEMS secret.  It made no sense then, and less now.

The rest is fine without me rehashing it.  It is worth mentioning that Roddy Piper is excellent here.  How is it possible he was in only one movie anyone has ever seen, and one other they might have heard of on Up All Night?  Lawrence is unspeakably grating, and no one else really registers.

Special commendation is also deserved for the MEMS.  This was almost 20 years ago, and they look great both as the glowing orbs and in the close-up shots.  Under the microscope, the tiny propellers, arms and clamps were absolutely convincing as being tiny units that could do almost anything.

 

Other Stuff:

  • Ralph Waite (Gene) was Pa Walton.  But I never saw The Waltons, so it doesn’t exist.

Science Fiction Theatre – Project 44 (12/24/55)

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Truman Bradley has a visitor.  Dr. Robert Richardson of Mt. Palomar Observatory has fortuitously dropped by the clubhouse to talk about Mars.  The doc is a real astronomer who actually worked at Mt. Palomar in the 1930s – 1950s.  I am very impressed that SFT gets the distance to Mars correct thanks to Dr. Richardson.  Even the great Twilight Zone could never be bothered to check an almanac or ask a 10 year old boy for accurate space data.  He opines about the atmosphere and life on Mars.  He is sure that, despite physical and mental challenges, men will someday go to Mars.  And by men, rest assured he means both white men and white women.

Truman shows us some of the stress tests astronauts must endure.  Sadly, after the factual opening, I have to call bullshit right away.  I know they test in centrifuges, but it looks like they would just fly right off of this thing.  He also says these men are tested up to 10 G’s (and the meter goes up to 25).  Maybe that’s why the Russkis beat us into space; we killed all our astronauts.

Dr. Arnold Bryan was one of the men on the centrifuge.  His fiance Dr. Janice Morgan is not happy about the risks he takes.  He tells her that is the last time because he has resigned.  However, he gets a telegram that he must be in Washington on Wednesday for a conference.

The conference room in DC is so close to the capitol dome that it must be on top of the senate.  SecDef Sturgis explains that a new fuel has been developed that will enable a man to go to Mars and return.  He is given one year to determine whether humans can survive in space.  If it is possible, Arnold will select and train the crew.  Janice is not thrilled about this.  However, Arnold explains how important it is and offers her a job evaluating the volunteers.

After several months, the project staff is whittled down to eight people with experience in various scientific disciplines.  Arnold tells them of the problems that might be encountered in space: the monotony and utter isolation.  According to Arnold, the trip will take two and a half years.  That is 8 months to get there, and 8 months to return, leaving 15 months to work on Mars.  I hope one of this group is a mathematician.  8 + 8 + 15 = 30?  Is that one of them hidden figures I’ve been hearing about?

He frankly tells the group of other dangers.  He name-checks Fred Whipple, another real astronomer, who estimates they would encounter only one meteor every 6 years.  So the odds sound pretty good.  They would sound better if he knew the difference between a meteor and a meteoroid.

One of the four women raises her hand.  “I’m almost afraid to ask this, but are we women just being included in the test or do we get to go to Mars too?”  Arnold assures them that if they pass the test they will go to Mars, prompting several sighs of relief; mostly from the four men.

Arnold is very progressive.  He points out that women are at least as able to work in different pressures, and “women adjust themselves better to drastic temperature changes.”  These tests were clearly not run any any freakin’ office I ever worked in.

Arnold reminds the volunteers that they have signed a contract to remain single.  However, the government is now encouraging them to pair off with other members of the mission.  Joyce has looked uncomfortable with this whole presentation, but this is just too much.  She says, “This project is insane, completely insane!”  She implores them — the group she recruited — not to throw their lives away.  “You won’t be heroes, you’ll be fools and lunatics!”  The volunteers stand by Dr. Arnold, and Joyce storms out.

The group is put into a small cabin to simulate the close quarters of space travel.  They quickly begin getting on each other’s nerves. They are subjected to other tests of physical stress and endurance.  Sadly, one of the women drops out, and one of the men is thrown out for sabotaging the tests.  The crew is not shorthanded, though, as Joyce returns and she and Arnold take their places.  The final shot is them blasting off to Mars.  It ain’t a train going into a tunnel, but this was 1955.

The domestic drama is the only problem with this episode.  When it stuck to the recruiting and training for the mission, it is pretty good (grading on massive curve as always).  In fact the stress tests seen here are no crazier than what would eventually happen at NASA (the clip from The Right Stuff is not available).  I can imagine a kid in the fifties digging this.