Tales From the Crypt – Carrion Death (S3E2)

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tftccarriondeath01The question is, how much of a suspension of disbelief are you willing to concede.  I’m pretty lenient — I’ll normally check my brain at the door.  And I mean my door, before I even leave for the theater.  Sometimes, even the previous day.  There is one huge glaring flaw here, but it doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the episode.

We start off in a town that reminds me of the facades of Rock Ridge (when they come in to destroy the real Rock Ridge, they’ll actually be destroying the fake Rock Ridge, but they’ll think it is the real Rock Ridge, but we’ll know . . .).

Hoping to steal a few G’s, including a 2nd one for last name, Earl Digs (Kyle MacLachlan) has just robbed the local bank.  This, after escaping from Yuma Prison where he was to be executed for the murder of 3 student nurses (during a slumber party — just speculation on my part).  The radio says he escaped in “a late model” Cadillac, although the one on screen looks pretty beat-up.

tftccarriondeath08Driving through the desert, Digs notices a cop trailing him.  The cop pulls up beside Digs and immediately takes a shot at him.  Digs edges him off the road and he and the bike go down.  But he bounces back, rights the bike and continues his pursuit.  I’m starting to like this guy.

When Digs hears the siren again, he spins the car around and begin charging the cop.  The cop rolls off his bike and down a rocky hill, but the bike continues riderless and rams Digs car creating a huge fireball like the car was made of C-4 and the bike was made of anti-matter C-4.

Digs decides to make it on foot, using the little-known route to Mexico.  This cop is like a Terminator — he regains consciousness, climbs back up the hill and pursue Digs on foot through the desert.

They finally have a showdown in an abandoned store.  The cop is able to handcuff his wrist to Digs, but Digs is able to grab a gun and shoot him.  The cop’s last act is to swallow the key.  So now Digs is free to head south of the border down Mexico way, only 6 miles away, but he has a dead man attached to his wrist.  He resumes his trek with the cop slung over his shoulder.

tftccarriondeath26a

Bloody hell — It’s always just after you washed the car!

Here is the problem:  There is a simple, obvious solution to his problem — just hack the cop’s hand off at the wrist.  Find a sharp rock, bite it, or just break his wrist and start a-twisting.  Digs can’t be squeamish, after all he was in the can for murdering 3 student nurses (in their lingerie — again, just speculation on my part).  He even admits to killing another 5 in Chicago.  So a little cop’s blood isn’t going to phase him.

The rest of the episode is a Weekend at Bernie’s scenario with him dragging or carrying the cop to Mexico.  It finally does occur to him to hack the cop off at the wrist.  But it doesn’t work out as he planned.  And the buzzard makes another appearance.

Despite that one oversight, it is a fun episode.  Although, would have killed them to have a flashback to the — just speculating here — nude pool party where the nurses were killed?

tftccarriondeath28a

I always appreciate the use of the official “$” logo’d bank robbery bag.

Post-Post:

  • I could also take issue with the title.  Like Lower Berth, someone here doesn’t seem to know how puns work.  Carrion Death makes no sense because Carry-On Death or Carrying Death is not a well-known phrase. A better title would have been Carrion Baggage.
  • Surely that title was not dreamed up by Steven E. de Souza.  He has writing credits on Commando, Die Hard, Die Hard 2 and 48 Hours.  I think he knows what he’s doing.
  • Digs, not Diggs?

Outer Limits – Mind Over Matter (S2E5)

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olmindovermatter15At Horton University, Dr. Sam Stein (Mark Hamill) is giving a demon-stration of his Computer Aided Virtual Environment (CAVE) system. He is assisted by Dr. Sarrazin and Dr. Rachel Carter (Debrah Farentino).  The subject is a paranoid schizophrenic who has visions of his dead father telling him to kill his girlfriend.

Stein and the patient are hooked into the CAVE which basically puts them in The Matrix. Together, they occupy a virtual setting which can also be televised to observers. The virtual space is a nightmarish construct of roaring hell-fire.  It is later revealed that Stein can control the environment, for instance, to be a tranquil lake setting.  Maybe this would have been a better setting for therapy of the homicidal maniac.

olmindovermatter07There is a strange series of hiccups in logic in the next scene:  1) Dr. Sarrazin interprets a 78% chance of recovery as meaning the patient can “absolutely” be cured.  2) The CAVE system asks for more input on the emotions of fear and love, yet we were just told “everything written on human psychology is cataloged in the CAVE’s RAM.”  And 3) Stein comments on skiing:  “Call me crazy, but sliding down an icy hill on two planks of wood just seems to challenge the laws of gravity.”  Well, that’s more a demonstration of gravity than a challenge of it.

Stein is hot for Dr. Carter, but too shy to make his move.  Once he finally approaches her, she is run down by a car and put into a coma.  Luckily, he has an app for that.

olmindovermatter22Stein is able to meet with the comatose Dr. Carter in the CAVE. But they are not alone  — there is another entity.

There is a great story here, but it is somewhat undermined by Mark Hamill who is just a terrible actor.  I never once got the feeling he was the character or had any idea of the meaning of the medical jargon he was using.  On the other hand, Debrah Farentino is going to be awesome anywhere she appears.

Post-Post:

  • Peter Breck gets a strange “Special Cameo Appearance By” credit.  And is it technically a cameo if you are in two scenes?
  • Jonathan Glassner also wrote Valerie 23.  His stories are good, but the casting is awesome.
  • Debrah Farentino is the daughter of James Farentino from Since Aunt Ida Came to Stay.
  • Can it be just coincidence that there is a Dr. Sarrazin in this episode and Michael Sarrazin starred in the previous week’s episode?
  • Is it just my imagination, or were Dr. Carter’s breasts about 50% bigger in the CAVE?  It could have actually been justified by the denouement.  Now that’s good writing!
  • Hulu sucks.

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Murderer (S4E2)

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rbtmurderer07The episode starts out like Koyaanisqatsi with a fast-mo montage of clouds moving across the sky, cars racing along the freeway, people rushing through a train station, people walking down the street.

Dr. Fellows is going to see Albert Brock in Meadowbrook Penitentiary.  En route, he gets a cell call from his son asking for a tele-transfer of his allowance, gets a pass printed out from a fax machine in his briefcase, punches in an electronic code to enter the prison, and enters another code to enter the the hallway, and enters another code to enter Brock’s cell.  So we kind of see where this is going.

rbtmurderer10Fellows comments on how quiet it is in the cell.  Brock demonstrates why it is quiet by biting a chunk out of the doctor’s phone.  And dropping his tape recorder in a glass of water; although, since it was set on Record, I don’t think it would have made much of a racket.  See, Brock is in jail  for murder . . . of machines.

He recounts the day he lost control. Awakened by a robot alarm clock, blasted by music in the shower, hit with cell calls before he reaches his desk, met with yards of paper spewing out of his cutting-edge dot-matrix continuous feed printer.  Back at home, the robot cook tells him to take dinner out of the oven, the robot maid tells his son to wipe his feet, and his wife won’t shut the hell up with her electronic interactive Spanish lessons.

The next day at work, he pours a pitcher of coffee into the videophone system.  Then he stomps on his cell phone.  And pours a chocolate milkshake into his fax machine.

rbtmurderer06The next day on the subway, he gleefully shorts out everyone’s devices with some kind of gizmo.

He complains of the tyranny of the majority:  “They figure that if a little music was charming and keeping in touch was good, that a lot of a good thing would be that much better!  But it’s not!”  Actually, I’m starting to like this guy.  Out with Barack, In with Brock!

After his adventure on the subway, he is arrested.  So he purchases an “equalizer machine” which looks a lot like a gun.  Fortunately, his rampage is limited to electronic devices spewing noise pollution.

Dr. Fellows returns to his office.  Besieged and assaulted (if those are not the same thing) by all sorts of noises that he had taken for granted before, he begins to sympathize with Brock.

There is a lot of truth and prescience in this episode.  That is good because the acting and script are pretty weak.  Although, there is none of Bradbury’s usual flower prose, much of the script is just set-up-and-spike exposition dumps from Brock to the doctor. Unfortunately, I think Bruce Weitz is a good actor who just made some bad choices in his performance.

rbtmurderer05Post-Post:

  • Roger Tomkins directed 5 RBT episodes.  Nothing else before or since.  I continue to ask, where did they get these guys? And where did they go?

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – A Little Sleep (S2E38)

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ahplittlesleep02Barbie Hallem is pulling a Zou Bisou Bisou, making herself the center of attention at a proper conservative 50’s party where all the men are wearing ties and the dames have not a tattoo to be seen.

For a straight-laced house party (and episode of a 50 year old TV show), Barbie’s dance is very seductive.  She is swinging them hips and showing off some skin in that spaghetti — or at least linguine — strapped little number.  But, everyone seems to be enjoying her display, smoking cigarettes, drinking cocktails, snapping fingers, clapping along, laughing.

All except the chick on the top-right.  She is immediately identifiable as the heavy in this piece — alone, self-absorbed, jealous.  The strange thing is, after this obvious bit of wordless exposition, that’s it for her.  She is never seen again.

Barbie begins dancing with one of the men, then orders him to go fix her a Horse’s Neck. While he obediently fetches her drink, she goes out on the balcony and swaps spit with an older man (an action I encourage in young blonde floozies).

When her dancing partner finds her with the drink, he asks why she does things like that.  She very reasonably explains, “I did it because I wanted to.”  Despite being 1:00 in the morning, Barbie decides she wants to go to the mountains to see a cabin which she recently inherited.  Her boy-toy tags along.  When he complains about her driving, she ditches him and drives off.

Unfortunate composition as the visor makes her head look flat.

Unfortunate composition as the visor makes her head look flat.

She pulls up at Ed Mungo’s Cabins & Food and orders a black coffee.  Ed tells her the other customers there have just come off the mountain where they have been searching for his brother Benny, who killed a girl; and her little dog, too.  Which would explain why they are all packing rifles.

When she arrives at the cabin, she finds a man (Vic Morrow) trespassing there.  Quite the dapper host, he is eating a can of beans opened at the wrong end, and offers her a generic beer.  After taking a swig, she turns on the record player and starts dancing again.  When he tells her his name is Benny, she thinks it might be time to leave.

He can tell she is scared and thinks it is because he killed the girl’s dog which, to be fair, had bitten him.  He seems to not know the girl has been murdered.  When Ed shows up there is a confrontation when Barbie tells Benny that Ed actually killed the girl.

Benny and Ed get into one of the best fights I’ve ever seen on TV.  The hits look real, the sounds are not quite the usual fake slaps, they take some good falls — really good stuff.

ahplittlesleep21There is a nice twist which might have played out better had TV not been so restrained in the 1950s. Benny is clearly intended to be mentally challenged — in the bar, Ed refers to him not being a boy “in most ways,” and he doesn’t seem to know what is going on with his brother or the girl; plus, he is named Benny.  But his condition is so subtly implied that it is very easy to miss.

The audience makes certain assumptions based on believing Benny to have all his marbles.  This ends up undermining the ending.  However, it still ends up being a nice story.

What really carries the episode, though, is Barbara Cook as Barbie Hellam.  She is attractive, but not classically beautiful, and not the standard Hitchcock blonde babe. However she is something much more that the sum of her parts.  When she is dancing at the party, or even just driving in the car, she is absolutely smoking.

Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  Barbara Cook is hanging in there at 87.  She had no IMDb acting credits after 1962, but was a big star on Broadway and singing in cabarets.  In 2011, she was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.
  • Vic Morrow was less fortunate, dying in 1982 when a helicopter crashed on top of him while filming a scene in The Twilight Zone Movie.
  • Was the upside down bean can a sign of Benny’s mental issues?

Night Gallery – A Question of Fear (S2E6)

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ngquestion02Just as yesterday’s Love-Potion-Gone-Bad story is a staple for a show like Tales from the Crypt, a Spend-the-Night-in-a-Haunted- House episode is to be expected from a horror series.

Fritz Weaver, a famous skeptic, agreed to such a challenge and is relating the story to his pals at the club.  He came out a believer and has the white hair — gained overnight — to prove it.

Now it is an eye-patched Leslie Neilsen who is skeptical.  As he clears the pool table, he says he does not believe in ghosts and thinks that Weaver is just a coward.  Naturally, Weaver bets him $10,000 that he can’t spend “one whole night in that house without being frightened to death.”

ngquestion06Weaver drives Nielsen to the house and drops him off at sunset.  Inside, he finds it run-down and covered in spider-webs, and spiders.  He hears voices and sees apparitions. Displaying the same sophisticated strategic acumen as Lt. Worf, he pulls a gun on the apparition.

He continues through the house followed by apparitions, hearing ghostly laughing, finding drops of blood, slimy trails, bricks where windows should be.  He breaks from his exploration of the house to get some coffee from his thermos and have a smoke.  He is interrupted by someone banging on the piano.

He finds a man in uniform slamming his hands on the keys.  The man’s hands burst into flames, but Nielsen notices a cable running to the man’s boot — a robot.  Convinced that this whole night is a sham, he goes upstairs to the bedroom.  He finds it clean of cob-webs and even has a nice fire going.  He checks under the bed and finds another cable which he cuts.

ngquestion09He lays in bed and is shocked as restraints pin him to the bed and a sharp pendulum begins swinging at his throat.

The  alarm clock goes off and he happily goes downstairs.  He goes into the kitchen and Weaver appears on a TV screen — with his hair its original color.  He tells Nielsen to go ahead and eat while they talk.

Weaver tells him of his father, a soldier in Mussolini’s army.  He protested that all he wanted to do was get back to his civilian job as a concert pianist.  Insisting he had valuable info, Nielsen set his hands on fire.

Weaver drugged the coffee in the thermos and injected Nielsen with a serum while he was asleep.  Weaver offers a proof he is not bluffing, his colleague who is in the basement, and received the same injection.  He is now a slug-like wad of skin and no bones like Eugene Levy in Skeleton.

Nielsen does actually panic as he understands now the significance of the slimy trails he has seen in the house.

The ending could have gone two ways, and I think I would have rather seen it take the other slimy path.  However, the performances are strong, there is some cheesy creepiness in the house, and it is a fun ride.

Post-Post:

  • Twilight Zone Legacy: Fritz Weaver was in 2 good episodes.
  • This was the same house used in Psycho.
  • Skipped Segment: The Devil is Not Mocked.  Another well-worn tale — Nazis take over a castle that turns out to be occupied by vampires.  Told many times in the 60s-70s and with far more cleavage.
  • Also, don’t make the head vamp literally be the Dracula — that’s just hokey.