Not much of a palate cleanser since it has a body count higher than most of the movies here.
The Curse of Millhaven – Nick Cave
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Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Night of the Execution (S3E13)
Prosecuting Attorney Warren Selvy is being chewed out by his boss as he throws file after file on his desk of cases in which Selvy has failed to get a conviction. Whether any of these defendants were actually innocent seems to be irrelevant. To make matters worse, his boss is also his father-in-law.
Selvy would like to be District Attorney, but his father thinks that this losing streak is going to be a problem. Not only that, his father-in-law says he believes his daughter Doreen is getting impatient with Selvy’s slow rise to the middle. He tells Selvy that the jury doesn’t just want logic. In the current Rodman case, he needs to show some passion, put on a show. So the old man is a visionary, foreseeing the OJ trial 30 years down the road where evidence doesn’t mean shit.
His father-in-law tells him that if he can send Rector — er Rodman — to the chair, his political future will be secure. Unfortunately he has an adversary in the courtroom named Vance who is a master of self-promotion.
All charged up, he returns to the courtroom and demands a guilty verdict from the jury, and also that they send Rodman to the electric chair.
Selvy calls his wife — who is way out of his league, by the way — down to a local bar to await the announce-ment of the verdict. In a surprisingly quick decision, Selvy finally wins a big one.
That night, he receives a visit from an old man who says that he is actually guilty of the murder that Rodman was convicted of. Selvy is torn — he doesn’t want an innocent man to be electrocuted, but he also wants to win the trial and not have to marry some other woman who is in his league. When the old man realizes that he will get the chair for committing the murder, he recants his confession.
The old man comes back later, a few minutes before the scheduled execution, and threatens to go public with his guilt, Selvy is worried about the effect on his marriage and political career so clocks him with . . . . er, a clock, killing him.
His wife and father-in-law return home just in time to see the dead man on the floor. The father-in-law recognizes the old man as a crank who confesses to crimes all the time. As Selvy stands there in shock at having killed an innocent man, the clock he used to kill the old man rings for midnight and the execution of Rodman.
KInd of a strange episode. Normally, the clock striking midnight in Selvy’s hands, signifying the death of Rodman would have been a gut-punch. Here it is just a reminder that the real criminal was put to death. Big deal — as Ernie Banks said, “Let’s fry two!”
On the other hand, I expected that Rodman was going to ultimately die and be found innocent, so the episode faked me out. Which is a good thing.
Post-Post:
- AHP Deathwatch: Georgann Johnson, last seen in One for the Road, still hanging in there.
- Selvy (Pat Hingle) was Commissioner Gordon in the 1980s Batmans.
- Edward Schaff gets only a few seconds on screen, and I’m not sure he had any dialogue. He got more exposure as Hitler in Russ Myer’s Up!. But not as much as Kitten Natividad. Or Raven De La Croix. Or Candy Samples. Etc.
Night Gallery – The Sins of the Fathers (S2E21)
God help us, another segment described by Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-hours Tour as “considered by many the show’s finest hour.” There’s the first clue — it is 30 minutes long, but feels like an hour.
Michael Dunn, the 20th century’s Peter Dinklage, returns to his master’s house on horseback and tells them that everyone they are looking for is busy or dead or both. They suggest Dylan Evans, so the diminutive Dunn continues his ride.
Sadly, Evans is about to croak himself. First he was sick with the plague, now he is sick with the famine. The family has not eaten in a week. Dunn tempts Evans’ wife with talk of lamb, eggs, onions, bacon, bread, cake, cheese . . . but there is no way Evan can make the trip.
The deal is that Evans is a sin-eater. Upon the death of a villager, the corpse is surrounded by a smorgasbord. By eating the food laid out near the corpse, the sin-eater absolves the deceased of his sins. Sounds a little too convenient during a famine, like God telling Joseph Smith that multiple teen wives were the way to salvation.
Unfortunately, Dylan is too sick to make the journey, so his wife comes up with a plan. She will send their son Ian to be the sin-eater. He is to send the mourners out of the room and stuff the food into his cloak, bringing it back home for their family. He protests that he doesn’t know the routine, but his mother assure him it is just a lot of wailing and moaning.
So Ian and Dunn go back to the Craighill house. Ian is spotted right away as a phony, just a boy, not a real sin-eater. He salivates looking at the food laid out beside the body featuring colors unseen elsewhere in the segment. He sends the others out and stuffs the food into his clothing. He is doing the requisite wailing and moaning as he is so frustrated at not being able to eat this feast yet. The mourners outside take this as a sign that the sin-eating has succeeded.
Despite having not eaten in a week and having a cloak full of food, he runs the 12 miles home without taking a bite. His mother neatly puts the food in bowls, but will not let Ian eat. She places the food around his now-dead father, and expects Ian to do some real sin-eating. He is to be the sin-eater of the sin-eater. At the thought of his exponential sin-eating, being damned forever, and being damned hungry at the moment, he begins wailing and thrashing about.
I really don’t understand the whole concept. At one point, it is said that the food must be eaten off the body like Sushi Girl, but that never happens.
And unless I complete misread what was happening on the screen, Ian’s mother was sopping up the sweat on his chest with a piece of bread.
Frankly, a little disappointing. After reading about how great this was supposed to be, and how controversial, I really expected some cannibalism.
Post-Post:
- Twilight Zone Legacy: Cyril Delevanti was in four episodes, but must have been small parts. Alan Napier was in one episode, but is better known as Alfred in the 1960’s Batman.
- Michael Dunn was everywhere and always great — Star Trek, Wild Wild West,etc. Richard Thomas does a little too much screaming for my taste here, but he carries it off believably.
- Unfortunately, someone had the bright idea of taking horror babe Barbara Steele and dressing her in a burka like Heather Graham in Outer Limits.
- Skipped Segment: You Can’t Get Help Like That Anymore.
Tales from the Crypt – None But the Lonely Heart (S4E1)
The camera pans across expensive old crystal, fine old silver, and a real antique putting on lipstick. Young, handsome Howard Prince wheels in a cart with some fine food perfectly mushy for a toothless-American who also travels on wheels; also a 1966 Chateau Lafite Rothschild.
As he shares the wine with his superannuated wife, Howard smoothly pulls a contract out of his snazzy dinner jacket for the old woman to sign which enables him to buy a company. She asks him to do something for her which, thank God, turns out to merely be reciting To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) who would go on to write The Incredible Hulk (although records are sketchy from that time).
Strangely the poem is about a suitor wishing he had eternity to worship some hot babe, body part by body part. Who doesn’t like boobs, but “two hundred years to adore each breast.”? Russ Myer wasn’t that obsessed. Ironically, it is not Howard who “time’s chariot” is chasing down, but his elderly wife. And the poison he put in the wine is really cracking the whip on those horses.
The old woman dies before he can get through the poem, even though he really gave her a sporting chance by starting in the middle and skipping several lines. He immediately calls 9-1-1 and acts as distraught as Treat Williams is capable of.
At her graveside, he is joined by his business partner Morty who has assisted in his scheme to marry and murder several old women. The law is closing in on them, and Morty thinks it is time to quit and flee to an island which he can’t pronounce and I can’t figure out even with subtitles.
Howard wants one more victim to really retire in style. He fast forwards through a video-tape dating service until he comes across Effie Gluckman (Ma Clavin) who is just seeking a companion. She rejects him as being too young and possibly a gold-digger until he claims that he can’t date women his own age because they have “certain needs and I am unable to fulfill.” By feigning impotence, he makes his interest in her plausible, and has an excuse not to have the sex with her. Birds: 2, Stone: 1, Bees: 0. Brilliant!
Demonstrating the gamut of his acting range from A to B, this is exactly the same reaction he had to Wendy Jo Sperber in 1941.
He doesn’t foresee the fact that her late husband was also impotent so she had gotten quite horny. She throws him on a table and . . .
Well, I don’t really want to imagine what follows, but she brings him breakfast in bed where he nervously claims that he had not been able to perform like that since college. She also gives him a letter that says “Another one? Stop before it is too late.”
Howard assumes it is from Morty, so pays him a visit at his office. He shoves Morty’s tie into one of those TV paper shredders that don’t have a plug or an OFF button, and are more industrial strength than the one used on Hillary Clinton’s emails. OK, her current batch of data is digital, but you know in the old days, she had a diesel cross-cutting shredder with a built-in incinerator.
The next morning Effie and Howard get married at city hall. She has wasted no time in changing her bank accounts to both their names. She goes upstairs to start the Jacuzzi, and Howard gets another note, “Another one! What you’re doing to these women is criminal!”
Obviously with Morty dead, the list of suspects has narrowed. So he goes to the video dating service and kills the owner. Effie’s butler has suspicions, so he has to go too.
He tries the old poison wine trick on Effie, and soon she is dead. That doesn’t quite take, so he throws her down the stairs. When leaving for the airport,he finds another note asking him to go to the mausoleum.
Note to self, after you’ve unjustly killed a bunch of people, don’t go to the graveyard.
A pretty good episode.
Post-Post:
- One of two writing IMDb credits for Donald Longtooth, both on TFTC. That was the very apropos name of the titular character in The Reluctant Vampire. I smell a nom de plume. Also oranges.
- WTF? Treat Williams was in The Empire Strikes Back?
- Title Analysis: Meh. Song by Tchaikovsky and movie starring Cary Grant, neither containing anything similar to the themes here.
Outer Limits – The Light Brigade (S2E18)
The spacecraft Light Brigade has just made a jump into enemy space where, according to the captain, they are going to unleash the “most powerful weapon ever built by man, a sub-atomic warhead.” Sub-Atomic doesn’t really sound like the “ultimate weapon” as it is, by definition, sub.
To be fair, the label seems to have acquired a different meaning in the future. It is a bomb which breaks down the forces holding together individual atoms. It just seems like they could have used this opportunity to come up with a cool, new. less confusing name.
Six hundred humans on nine ships are taking this doomsday device to the enemy’s homeworld. Just as the captain is about to read the crew the poem the ship was named for, they are attacked. And what a coincidence, the poem is about the valor of 600 soldiers.
By their radiation badges they can see that they’ve taken a lethal dose of radiation during the attack. This just continues the unlucky streak of Major Skokes as he had been captured by the aliens in the excellent Quality of Mercy. It is strange that the previous episode is barely referenced and there are no clips from it.
On the other hand, Skokes did escape with the help of one of his Light Brigade crewmates, and he got a swell new mechanical Terminatoresque hand; ironic, as he is played by T-1000 Robert Patrick.
A small band of doomed survivors makes their way through radiated chambers and a long series of access tubes to get to the the bridge to activate the bomb.
There are a couple of twists and turns, and it is a pretty good episode. Robert Patrick and Graham Greene are both excellent in their portrayals. Sadly, Wil Wheaton just doesn’t pull off his character. I was never a Wesley Crusher hater, but he was just miscast here, or maybe just has too much TNG baggage for another space opera. Michael Dorn managed to make the leap and make a good performance in an earlier Outer Limits episode, but he had the benefit of having a completely different face than in TNG.
Post-Post:
- Canadian DVD title: La Brigade Stellaire
- Naturally, the US can’t be identified as heroes, so the mission is run by the United Nations. Although the way it turns out sounds like a UN mission after all.