The Outer Limits – Valerie 23 (S1E2)

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valerie2301OK, Outer Limits gets another chance after my ordeal with the commercials last time.  I noticed that this episode was written by Jonathan Glassner who directed my favorite episode of this series; one of my top 5 favorites of any series, ever.  I remember Trial by Fire from its original airing, and have watched it many times since.  It is consistently intelligent, suspenseful, surprising, just outstandingly executed in every way.

However, we are here to discuss Valerie 23.

Uber-that-guy William Sadler is Frank Hellner, a wheelchair-bound engineer working on a synthetic skin project.  His friend / boss Charlie wants to set him up with a new employee.  He assures Frank that she knows about his condition and it isn’t a problem.  Frank, but not the audience, is shocked when she turns out to be incredibly hot.

valerie2304aWhen he finds out she is a robot, he is furious that Charlie thinks he needs a mechanical device to help him live his life — you know, other than the chair . . . and the special van.  After a swing and a miss at his physical therapist, Frank grudgingly agrees to give Valerie 23 a test drive.

The engineering team (which includes Byers from The Lone Gunmen) tells him he will have to keep a log (heh, heh), and that there will be a daily de-briefing (heh, heh).

Things start off awkwardly as Frank compares her to a dishwasher.  He is surprised that she is hurt by this.  He comforts her as she begins to cry.  Clearly Innobotics has a gender-based division of labor — programming handled by the women, hardware was handled by the men.

At the next debriefing, the team tells Frank that he needs to make more of an effort with Valerie, to actually treat her like a human.  Also that he needs to try out some of her other documented features as a — ahem — companion; the word being used in the same sense as on Firefly 7 years later.

valerie2308aAfter a little snuggling on the sofa, Frank freaks out and bolts to a bar.  Seeing another couple there, he realizes his loneliness.  Back at the house, he finds that Valerie now has a 2nd outfit.  Then no outfit.  Finally Frank wises up and puts Valerie to the work for which she was designed.

Showing that his accident also left him brain-damaged, he is wracked with guilt and / or self-loathing the next day.

His therapist has suddenly become available, so Frank meets her at the bar.  Valerie follows him and reads their lips through the window like HAL in 2001.  With pretty much the same results.  The next day, she follows them on a date rappelling (again,  I am apparently the last person on earth who can’t rappel) and confronts them.  Frank is able to put her in sleep mode before she throws his date off a cliff.  There is another confrontation and ultimate resolution that I will not describe.

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I could just post pictures of her all day

Overall, a very well produced episode.  In fact, my memory is that this was a very good series.  I also see that they are commercial free on You Tube, so there  will be more to come; just with crappier screen-caps.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • It is an insult to give William Sadler that-guy status.  He has had a huge career and is recognizable from many roles.  Looking over his IMDb page reminded me of a great offbeat movie of his that not many people have seen.  Some rainy afternoon catch up with Freaked.  If it isn’t a cult classic, it ought to be.
  • Sofia Shinas does a great job as Valerie.  She has an almost too-perfect face, and looks great in that white jumpsuit.  She also excels in making sure we remember she is not quite human — the head tilts, the wide-eyes, the inflections.  For my money, her performance is equal to Brent Spiner’s as Data; and with contractions!  She should have been a bigger star.
  • A year before this episode, she witnessed Brandon Lee’s death on the set of The Crow.
  • BTW, the therapist was genre perennial Nancy Allen.

Inside (2006)

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insidecover0220 horror movies for $5; what could possibly go wrong?

I started with Inside because it was the first movie I found in this collection that did not get uniformly dreadful reviews.

It starts out with a nice switcheroo as a kid is eavesdropping on a couple who are talking about him.  At the cue of a toilet flushing we realize that they were not talking about him, but about the guy in the bathroom.  About to be busted, interloper Alex quietly flees the house.

Alex (Nicholas D’Agosto) has an interesting hobby: intruding, lurking, spying, staring.  Just generally being on the outside looking in.  Or in the first scene, on the inside looking further in.  And then in the park, on the outside still looking out.  He had seen Josie (Leighton Meester) in the library where she busted him for staring at another couple.  He then follows her to the park where he is busted again, this time for staring at her.

So apparently hot teen girls like to go with dweeby voyeurs back to their place after they are caught staring at them in the park.  That has not been my experience.  She did, however, try to steal his wallet.  OK, this is starting to ring true now.

The next day he follows the couple from the library to their home.  As he is peeking in the window, the woman catches him.  She believes she saw their dead son, who Alex does resemble.  Alex lets himself in and listens to them argue about their inability to cope with their son’s death.  There is something disconcerting about the simplicity of the scenes where Alex has intruded, and passively observes without the residents seeing him.  Then they see him.

Rather than calling the police or bringing out the Louisville Slugger, they invite him to dinner.  He is a dead ringer for their son who died a year ago.  Alice (Cheryl White) shows Alex a picture of her ex-son Timmy.

insidenotpictured01This not a nit-pick site because I don’t care about the length of cigarette ashes, positions of water glasses, what year cars are made, etc.  But I am baffled by obvious errors that slip through.  On the cover, Alex has a mole just above his lip on the left.  In the movie, Alex has that same mole, but it is on the right.  OK, when Alice brought out the picture of Timmy, I thought maybe he was the one on the cover; but no, he also has the mole on the right.  I could produce photographic evidence, but frankly all this talk of moles is making me a little sick.

Alice asks him to stay and just watch TV with her like Timmy.  He falls asleep and wakes up the next morning.  As he is leaving, Alex is hit by a car, and the Smiths take him in as a replacement for Timmy.  Soon they are having family movie night, gardening together, tossing around the football, playing Monopoly.

Alex begins to realize that the Smiths’ problem is not just depression or neediness, but a delusion that he really is Timmy.  This is especially true of Alice, as Mark (Kevin Kilner) still seems to have a connection to reality, seeing Alex as more a surrogate than resurrected Timmy .

The suspense deepens when the family is visited by their priest and later a therapist, neither of whom know that Timmy died (what did they do, bury him in the backyard?  oh).  Alex is a close enough match that they suspect nothing, and his protests are taken as tinsidealice02een angst.

Alex, needy in his own way, is partly complicit in this, but eventually realizes that he needs to go home.  When he tries to tell Alice he is not Timmy, she washes his mouth out with soap, and eventually she goes all Annie Wilkes on him.  Luckily he was already hobbled in the accident so no ankles were harmed in the filming of this scene.

And by the way, what happened to the driver?  Luckiest hit and run perp ever.

Alex tries to escape in a squeaky  wheelchair one night.  Alice stops him, but in the struggle, he falls, hits head, and they bury him in the garden.  He regains consciousness in the suspiciously illuminated grave and begins calling out for help.  The camera pans down to show Timmy a couple of feet further down, now just a skeleton.  Not sure that is decompositionally accurate, but it works.

Josie goes to the Smith house, but I am not clear on how she knows about them.  Jose digs Alex up while the Smiths are out shopping.  A twist is revealed that explains why Alex has allowed this to go on.  Of course, they are busted trying to leave and there is a confrontation.

Overall, I liked it.  Inside deserves better than being $.25 of a $5.00 DVD.   The performances were almost all very good.  Alice is given the heavy lifting, and handles it like Vasiliy Alekseyev.  It was a little disconcerting that Mark constantly reminded me of a hybrid clone of Huey Lewis and David Puddy, but he was also good walking the line between delusion and clarity.  Unfortunately, every time I saw Alex, I thought of Toby McGuire; but he gave a good subdued performance.

insideleighton01Josie seems a little over the top, but no more than I have seen in real people.  I wouldn’t call her the comedy relief, but she does at least raise the pulse of the film.  Her big problem is that the screenplay has to really strain to keep her in the story.  Not being a Gossip Girl guy, Leighton Meester has only shown up on my radar through her role as Behrooz’s girlfriend in 24 S4 where she was less obnoxious, did not drop F-bombs, and was very cute.  So they killed her.

I rate it just a little bit inside.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Good, but not to be confused with the very good French movie Inside.
  • In addition to the apparent flipped image on the cover, I also have to call them out on Leighton Meester’s photo which is terrible.  And unless the tag line is “Stars of the first season of Heroes . . .”, I’m not sure it helps.
  • Still thinking about how good Cheryl White was.  She was plain, beautiful, nurturing, crazy, whatever she needed to be.
  • What is with this sign in the library?  Are they really thinking that some Authors’ last names are going to start with DK?  Is this part of the Dkewey Decimal System?

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    Spidey-sense is tingling!

 

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Emissary (S2E3)

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cover02Well, the good news is that there are only 12 episodes in the season — an unusual mini-season for a 1980s series.  Did they foresee the fatigue that it would inflict upon future viewers?  More likely it was a result of the show’s weird provenance, changing networks, going almost 2 years between seasons 1 and 2.  There didn’t seem to be a lot of demand for this show, and maybe for good reason.

In another gauzy  episode scored with electronic tinklings, we meet Martin, a boy with an unnamed disease that renders him completely healthy as far as we can tell.  Sure, he sticks pretty close to that bedroom, but he’s moving around, leaning out the window, going downstairs to eat.  I’m not seeing a bedpan, an IV, wheelchair, casts or bruises.  If you’re going to get a disease, this is the one to get; just don’t expect many callers at your telethon.  His only friend is his dog, Dog.

There is some fun early in the episode as we get a Dog’s-eye POV of him running through the town collecting  artifacts to keep Martin in touch with the outside world.  Sadly, Martin has made a tag for Dog to take out into the world to recruit some friends. emissarytag01

Not so sadly, this tactic reels in 80s babe Helen Shaver, last seen in The Sandkings.  She sees that the dog belongs to her missing student, and marches straight into his bedroom.  This being pre-Letourneau, Martin’s mother leaves them alone.

Almost immediately, Martin crushes on Ms. Haight despite the horrible job the make-up, hair and costume people have done on her.  She brings flowers, reads to him, teaches him about Jules Verne, Jack London, Robin Hood, the Pyramids; frequently laying on his bed.  This inspires Martin to write his own book from which she reads aloud a passage he has written about her.  Awkward.

That night, Martin’s mother receives a call telling her that Ms Haight has been killed in a crash.  Martin watches the funeral procession from his window.  Dog, being the faithful psychic pal, knows what he must bring back to Martin to make him happy.

So we have a reverse Pet Semetary (which came out 5 years earlier) in which a pet resurrects a human.  And it works out just about as well, as we see the filthy Dog come into Martin’s room, and a gray decaying hand grips the door.  Sometimes, dead is better.

Once again, the ending is botched.  Leaving the episode open to interpretation and deliberately muddying the story are two different things.  Is this a happy ending or a horror ending?

Case for horror ending: The music and the wind suggest an evil presence returning to the house. Martin’s lamp goes out when Miss Haight enters his room.  She has been invisible up to this point — and I mean invisible, not simply out of the frame.  It could have been the POV in some shots, but when the front door slammed, where was she?  The only thing we finally see of her is a decaying hand on the bedroom door.

Case for happy ending: This has been a sugary sweet episode up until now with warm relationships between Martin, his mother, Miss Haight, and Dog.  Dog has always had a preternatural instinct to bring just the right thing back to his master.  Surely he wouldn’t bring evil, or fleas, into the house.  The gray hand does not seem to disturb Martin.  When his lamp goes out, it is replaced by a heavenly light.  He smiles as he is bathed in this light that washes out the screen.

The last line is said by Miss Haight and could be taken 2 ways, “Come to me.”  The words alone, coming from a corpse, are ominous.  However, they are said in a strange sing-song voice.  But even if said positively, this is a) a corpse beckoning a live child to join her, and 2) a 40-year old corpse beckoning a live child to join her.  No good can come from this.

I have to go with the horror ending, and the short story seems to suggest that.  But how did Dog go so wrong, and why is Martin so happy?

Would it have killed Bradbury to have the kid scream in terror?  Or maybe Martin could have embraced death if his disease had actually caused him to suffer.  It’s all just too nice; maybe that is the pitfall of a Canadian series.

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Although Pet Semetary was published 5 years before The Emissary aired, Bradbury’s original short story was published in 1947 — coincidentally, the year Stephen King was born.
  • Dad gets one scene and is kind of a dick.  He has nothing to do with the story, why is he even there?  Oh, yeah: Men Bad.
  • For some reason, it amuses me that one of the ChiPs guys was a producer on a few RBT episodes.  No, the other one.
  • Why was the teacher named Miss Haight?  Surely not because it sounds like hate.  A Haight Ashbury reference?  Not sure it was anything significant in 1947.
  • Nice economy of set dressing below, as the leaves start just at the property line.  Or did all the other homes have healthy boys whose fathers made them take care of their yards?  Maybe that explains this fishy symptomless disease.

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Nurse 3D (2013)

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nursecover01There’s a lot of goodness here, but it is loosely packed.

No time at all is wasted in introducing Abigail Russell.  She lures a married man up to the roof, and cuts his femoral artery.  She explains how she is actually doing his family a favor so they won’t have to tolerate his philandering shenanigans; then pitches him over the side.  The surreal shots of his plunge and vivid subsequent 3D-friendly impalement on an iron fence set the tone for the movie.

The setting is further emphasized by the credits which rock out grindhouse-style over pulp covers featuring drawings of the main cast.

Maybe (but only maybe) this not-quite-reality enables Paz de la Huerta to pull off her role.  Because in the harsh light of the real world, this is not a hot nurse.  Also, not much of an actress.  But ya know what?  In this movie, I was willing to accept her.

Everything about her is jarring.  Her line readings are as stilted as C. Walken, but to less effect.  Her body, though great, is certainly unusual in its angles and lankiness.  It is also specifically clothed (or not) to achieve a certain effect. Often slutty to the point that she would be arrested around decent folk; sometimes with nothing below the waist — still a rare enough sight in movies to change the vibe of a scene. Her face is like one of those sculptures that must be turned at a precise angle to cast a shadow of something entirely new — the beauty is there, but holy crap do you have to use precision instruments to find it.

Also clearly not from this world is Katrina Bowden playing Danni, a new nurse and Paz’s protege. She is beautiful in every way that Paz is not.  But she could never have played the titular Nurse 3D.

On her first day on the job, Danni freezes at the sight of a badly injured patient.  After getting chewed out by Judd Nelson, she goes to the shower for a good cry.  Sadly, all realism is forfeited in this scene by having Danni take a shower in her panties.  Another way she is the anti-Paz.

nurse01It soon becomes clear that Paz is on a crusade to rid the world of men who, like her father, are non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in her beloved reality.

This includes Danni’s psychiatrist step-father who they see out with another woman.  Abby quickly insinuates herself into his life as a patient.  She then seduces him by walking in front of his car in a very shear white dress (and frankly looking a little like a tranny).  Maybe he digs trannies — different strokes (weird, weird strokes), and they are soon making out in the car.  She then jabs him with a syringe to paralyze him.  Abby puts the car in reverse, bails, and lets it back slowly out of the cozy ally they had pulled into.  Fortuitously, a huge truck rams the car, killing him.

There is another murder that I won’t reveal.  OK, it was Bender.

Soon thereafter, Danni arrives at the hospital to stop Abby.  The film then really goes into full action mode, and also steps up the obvious 3D-whoring effects.  Lots of girlfighting, some interesting kills, maybe even a surprise.

The ending ultimately plays out a twist revealed earlier, and capitalizes on yet another over-the-top cartoonish character introduced earlier.  But, again, it worked for me in this hyper-world.  This is the only time you will see one of these here, as it actually relates to the final scene:

🙂

Post-Post Leftovers:

  • Douglass Aarniokoski <> Darren Aronofsky.
  • It is strange the emphasis that is put on Abby’s vendetta against bad husbands & daddies for the first 2 kills, plus in a flashback to a formative trauma in her childhood.  After that motive is established, the film really forgets it and focuses on her obsession with Danni.
  • I have seen one of Aarniokoski’s other pictures — The Day.  I remember almost nothing, but gave it 3 stars on NetFlix.
  • Writer David Loughery was one of the writers on Star Trek V, so this is clearly a step up.  At least no one is singing “row, row, row, your boat.”  The life of a screenwriter must be bizarre.  He had some high-profile movies, a gap of 13 years, then a few more.
  • Trying to think where else I’ve see these kinds of purposely over-the-top performances.  So far, just coming up with Raising Arizona.  Anything else N. Cage did, I don’t think was on purpose.
  • In another scene later, she does it again!  C’mon!

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Netflix xilfteN

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There has got to be a reason for this.

xilften03Yes, they are in 2 different districts, but surely it would be more efficient to have them all open on the same side.  Soon, some MBA will see that .05 seconds can be trimmed off the handling time and ensure carpal tunnel for everyone.

Or maybe having x% of the envelopes open on the opposite side actually helps prevent carpal tunnel.  Now that’s a corporate idea that would impress me.