Twilight Zone S4 – Passage on the Lady Anne (05/09/63)

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tzladyanne1Coming off a mediocre Tales of Tomorrow and an unwatchable Fear Itself . . . if it turns out the other passengers on the Lady Anne are just dead, I’ll scream.

Alan and Eileen Ransome go to a Travel Agency to book a trip to London.  They hoped travel by ship, but the Agent says they are all booked.  Well, all the reputable ones are.  Reputable, I fear, meaning ones where all the other passengers are not dead.

Eileen asks about the Lady Anne.  It is the slowest boat on the water, but leaves in less than a week.  Despite Alan and the Agent’s resistance, she insists on purchasing two tickets.

Alan and Eileen arrive at the dock and meet an elderly couple — Toby and Millie — that are pretty close to validating my fear.  Toby can’t believe this young couple actually has tickets and makes them prove it.  Seeing them, he still insists this is a mistake, that this is a private excursion.

tzladyanne3Eileen is thrilled with their large ornate cabin.  Alan is not far off the mark when he proclaims it “maybe the most ridiculous room in the world.”  Of course, he never got to see the gilded New York Casa de Trump.

They go up on deck. Toby and another elderly man ask them again if some mistake has been made.  They try to scare the Ransomes into leaving by telling them what an old dilapidated ship this is.  Then they try to bribe them by offering $10,000.  Ransome must be doing pretty well as he refuses.  In fact, it is his pre-occupation with work that led Eileen to insist on this trip.

The next morning, Eileen is up at the crack of eleven.  They go up on deck for the mandatory Fire Drill training.  They are stunned to see that all the other passengers are old enough to literally remember the Maine, which might explain their enthusiasm for the fire drill.  Alan later finds that they are the only ones on the ship under 75.

tzladyanne2At the bar, they order a couple of martinis.  Eileen tells Alan she wants a divorce. Because, what better time than the first day of an expensive cruise where they will be stuck on a fully-booked ship and share a single room for a week.

They have dinner with Toby and Millie.  Toby gives them the good news that they will be allowed to stay on the ship.  Millie explains that he means they won’t have to die. Hmmmmm.

To make an interminable story short, when Alan thinks he has lost Eileen, he realizes how much he has neglected her.  They learn that the oldsters had fallen in love on the ship eons ago and want to finish their lives together on it.  How they intended to do this is not clear.  Were they going to poison themselves?  Were they going to sink the ship?  Run it aground into a waterfront Farmer’s Market?  Serling only tells us they sailed into the titular Twilight Zone.  The super-annuated passengers are basically sailing to Valinor. [1]

Not what I feared, but not really what I wanted either.  Your nautical mileage may vary.

Post-Post:

  • It would just be churlish to question who was crewing this ship.  Were there a bunch of 75 year old men shoveling coal down below?
  • Wilfred Hyde-White (Toby) was always great playing bumbling old Englishmen — actually the same bumbling old Englishman. He didn’t have much range, but was a great character.  And always old.  So old.
  • [1] Kind of a non-sequitur, but I love it:

 

White Meat – Don King (1934)

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sascoverOne hundred black Monbuttus . . . danced about the nude white man chained to a stake.

Well, this is going to be uncomfortable.

I mean because of the naked dude — let’s get back to the topless babes like every other story in this collection so far.

We get a description in pretty good detail of the man being burned at the stake.  As he is partially consumed by the flames, he screams in agony.  Finally, he is dead, the constraining vines have burned away and he falls to the ground.  The Monbuttus then . . . uh, eat him.

The rest of this is pretty standard stuff for the era, maybe — British colonials, broad-shouldered American savior, virginal blonde daughter [1], cannibalism, white slavery, etc. But sitting here at 2 am in 2016, it doesn’t play very well, and is too mean-spirited to even enjoy mocking.

But what did I expect from a story called White Meat?

These posts are just a tool to force me to experience a bunch of TV shows and short stories that I never got around to.  Mission Statement accomplished.  This one can be quietly entered into the record as short story # 11 in Spicy Adventures.

Post-Post:

  • [1] Who are these professors and colonials who drag their beautiful, blonde, clothes-shedding virginal young daughters into the jungle?  I don’t know, but God bless ’em.
  • First published in April 1934.
  • Kane Bedford’s name changes to Kane Wilbur halfway through the story.
  • Probably too late for a sequel called The Other White Meat.
  • The other Don King.

Fear Itself – New Year’s Day (07/17/08)

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Helen wakes up on the titular New Years Day feeling a little woozy.  She manages to make it to the bathroom to pray to the porcelain god.  She hears sirens and a bullhorn warning, “This is not a drill.”  Clearly it is not a drill — it is a bullhorn, duh!  She goes to a neighbor’s apartment and finds blood on the floor.  Checking on her roommate, she finds his room covered in blood also.

finyd1In a scene I can’t figure out, Helen’s cellphone rings. When she answers, she gets her not-boyfriend James’ voice mail as if she called him . . . the end.  For me, anyway.  I did finish watching it, but couldn’t bring myself to make any notes.

I watched this episode stunned almost from the first second at how awful it is.  The performances from Helen and James are incredibly ordinary.  Anyone in the audience of a community theater could have brought more to their parts.  Helen’s roommate Eddie and her girlfriend Christie come off a little better.

The real problem is the visual experience.  The lighting is terrible and the editing is god-awful with constant jump-cuts.  On a completely different level, the choppiness of the narrative also dooms the episode.  We are constantly switching between New Years Eve and New Years Day.  The whole episode is just offensively poorly conceived.

finyd6Along the way we are supposed to care about these adults.  Helen tells James she loves him after misinterpreting something their friend Eddie told her.  Eddie has an unrequited crush on Helen and expresses it with sudden awkward kisses.  Helen is heart-broken to see James swapping spit with Christie.  If the twist of this episode was that these were 13 year-olds who were somehow transported into adult bodies, I would have believed it.

Happily, that was not the twist.  The sole redeeming aspect of this episode is an excellent reveal that caught me completely by surprise.  If anyone is masochistic enough to sit through this episode, they deserve to be surprised.  There is another shocker after that, but spatially it makes no sense, and it adds nothing to the story.

I rate New Years Day 1 out of 365.

Post-Post:

  • Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman of Saw II – IV.
  • Briana Evigan (Helen) was in Burning Bright which I remember as being pretty good.  She is locked in a house.  That is boarded up, preventing escape.  A hurricane is coming.  She has her autistic brother with her.   And, oh yeah, there’s a goddamn tiger in the house!  Best set-up evah — but sadly all I remember is she wore a hot wife-beater for the whole movie.
  • Her father Greg was in a series in the 1970’s about a trucker who traveled with a chimp named Bear.  Them Eviganses loves animals more than the Irwinses!  Well, before.

Tales of Tomorrow – The Dune Roller (01/04/52)

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ttdunerollers02Ol’ Cap Zanser is telling 12 year old Sally Burgess tall tales about Dune Rollers.  They are flaming hoop snakes that roll along with their tail in their mouth, taller than a man can reach.  Cap attributes the high number of deaths on this island to that fabled creature.  The fact that this is called Lightning Island and not Flaming Hoop Snake Island seems to undermine his theory a little.

Sally is going to the dock to meet her father on the boat that identifies as mail.  Before she leaves, she hands Sam some rocks she has collected.  He is paying her a dime each for these special specimens.  He files them away in his special rock file cabinet.

Sally returns from the dock with her father and sister.  When Sam hears Sally’s sister Jean is coming he frets about his appearance and says he would have changed his shirt. In a fitting microcosm of the times, Jean walks in with her arms full of groceries and her father walks in with an armful of science books.  Maybe Sam wanted to change his shirt so she could wash it.

ttdunerollers20Sam shows Dr. Burgess his rocks and is stunned to see the two rocks that he filed have fused into one pointy stone, and that the weight is now double the two stones combined.  Burgess theorizes that the stones are a mineral from a meteor.  The fragments are trying to recombine into the original rock.

Jean calls Dr. Burgess and Sam to dinner.  Sam says he needs to change his shirt.  This guy goes through shirts like Bruce Banner.  Dr. Burgess goes to check on the rocks before dinner and Jean tells him to get to the table.  She calls him Carl so maybe I have misjudged their relationship.

After dinner, they go to check on the rocks.  They find that two stones have burned their way out of the cabinet, fused together, and burned their way right through the front door leaving a scorched cutout like Speedy Gonzalez.  Later that night, Cap is attacked by the flaming stones and killed.

ttdunerollers29Instead of the usual commercial for Kreisler Watchbands, this episode has a bizarre break where a man gives the mission statement of the series.  “The stories may seem improbable but are they impossible? Nobody really knows.  We do know the universe that surrounds us is an enormous mystery.  Our stories try to break through the barrier of life as we know it through discovery and our imaginations what life beyond may be like.”  And if you understand that last sentence, you should be working for the NSA.

Dr. Burgess and Sam find Cap’s body and assume he was killed by lightning.  Sam says he looks like the “Japs” he saw in WWII who had been hit by a flame-thrower.  They realize that these rolling stones are the mythological titular dune rollers.  Dr. Burgess plans to blow up the main stone, but Sam volunteers to take that risky assignment so Burgess can get the girls off the island.

It isn’t even clear what this is supposed to accomplish.  Is he intending to blow up the main rock?  Wouldn’t it just reassemble?  And why did he drop some stones at the blast site? Was it to lure the master rock?  But the smaller stones seek out the big rock — the big rock isn’t like Uber conveniently picking up the kid rocks.

But the bigger mystery is why this young girl is living on a remote island with Sam and Cap.  At least Jonny Quest had his dad to keep an eye on Race Bannon.

ttdunerollers38The very end should have had one of those horror movie question marks at the end.  We pan to see a glowing dune roller.  But is it a large fragment from the blast?  Is it another one? The last shot is bizarre and difficult to describe.  It is not just a zoom-in on the rock — the soil below it is moving.  I think they were trying to create an illusion that it was growing.  It is pretty clever, but doesn’t work today. On a fuzzy 1952 RCA, who knows? [1] 

Post-Post:

  • [1] Actually, the lousy YouTube version might be a good 1952 RCA emulator.
  • Bruce Cabot (Sam) starred in King Kong.  No, the other one.  Before that.
  • Sally is played by Lee Graham and is clearly a young girl.  Graham’s other IMDb credits include Storekeeper, Marine, Titanic Lookout, Crew Chief and a few more androgynous roles.  Back then these would have been traditionally male jobs.  If this were 50 years later, I would get it, but in the 1950’s, I can make no sense out of it.

Night Visions – Switch (09/23/02)

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nvswitch02This episode is rated dead last in the IMDb User Ratings, redeeming a shred of credibility in that dubious index.  As I watched it, it just seemed like a mess.  At the end, I realized it was worse than that — it was also a hugely missed opportunity.

Rather than the usual snotty recap — because it is almost recap-proof — maybe just a few observations like I had for another fiasco, Poltergeist.

I haven’t seen Pam Grier in many things, but from what I’ve seen and heard, this is a pretty unusual role for her.  She does well as the psychiatrist and not just because the rest of the cast is so bad.  But they are.

Natasha Gregson Wagner gives such an awful performance that the ending made me question whether it was a conscious acting choice.  Maybe the wooden, stilted delivery was meant on convey that someone else was doing the driving.  I don’t think that is the case, but if so, the director should have told her to moderate it a little.  Or a little less.

The director’s thought process also eludes me.  Jefery Levy did a great job with the suspenseful Dead Air.  He also made the bizarre After Life into a solid episode.  His style here is radically different, though.  Granted, he was portraying a different environment — the psyche of a trouble young woman — but this is just off-putting.  The constant jump cuts and flashing lights are just too jarring to be effective.   I would advise avoiding if you have epilepsy; or good taste.  Add Wagner’s leaden voice-over, and it is deadly.

I’m not sure I can fairly evaluate the writing because the execution was so bad.  That’s why the Grammys present separate awards for Song of the Year and Record of the Year.  This episode is like if Elton John were forced to live with William Shatner’s version of Rocket Man as the only rendition of that song the public would ever hear.

There are enough good points — and actual ideas! — throughout, that I tend to think the direction, the performances and the poor presentation on YouTube conspired against this script.  The end reveal is great, and like Bitter Harvest, it is followed up with another twist.

This has been a good series so far; it deserved a better fate.  This episode represents its low-point.

Post-Post:

  • Sydney says she was young when her mother died.  Natasha Gregson Wagner was eleven when her mother Natalie Wood died.  Both mothers died under questionable circumstances.
  • Her father Robert Wagner was in a TV series named Switch.
  • Director Jefery Levy co-wrote Ghoulies.