Tales from the Crypt – Comes the Dawn (01/11/95)

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Even this could not stop me from fast-forwarding through the Cryptkeeper’s segment.

Oh, come on!  TFTC already did Came the Dawn!  I was disappointed that Dawn was not the insatiable female lead in that one.  Predictably, TFTC did not learn from that mistake.  On the other hand, this episode starts off with a nice tracking shot along a bar with a few bits of business along the way.  So all is forgiven.  Although, I always wonder if shots like this were in the script or the work of the director.

The shot ends with a, er, rather severe looking blonde with short hair, a bandana, and a biker jacket putting on lipstick like she was driving down a bumpy road.  She is surprised when a couple of hunters show up to the bar.  Burrows and Parker stumble in, bundled up against the cold Alaskan weather and order schnapps.

Burrows says the night is “colder than a witch’s left one” so I guess there will be no nudity in tonight’s tame episode.  Parker says they are looking for a guide that ignores the Endangered Species List, which rules out that bleeding heart Michelin Guide with their snooty no Bengal Tiger Tartare rule.  She suggests her ex, Jeri (the gender ambiguity is lost in print) who was busted for dynamite-fishing.  But the bartender doesn’t care for poachers and picks up the phone to call the game warden.  So Burrows shoots her.

In an edit more jarring than the bone-to-satellite in 2001, the boys are suddenly offering Jeri $100 to help them bag a grizzly bear.[1]  Where they are or how they found her is a mystery.  And, by the way, shooting the bartender was pretty gratuitous.  I mean, it would have made sense if it had been Michael Ironside, but it was the other guy.  Anyhoo, she is no longer in that business.  Parker sees her name on a Purple Heart citation and plays the Colonel-card.  She jumps at attention and accepts the mission to find that bear.

They go to an abandoned government weather station which Jeri says the bears love.  Parker agrees, “It is a perfect place for Winter hibernation.”  Wait, are they going to shoot them while they’re hibernating?   No, they find some fresh tracks and set up camp.  But someone been hunting there already.

Just when I feared the episode was going to play out as a straight monster-fest, a couple of pretty ingenious curves are thrown into the story.  It is not giving away much to say this is a nest of vampires — that isn’t the twist.  The story beat 30 Days of Night to the Alaskan Vampire scene by 5 years.  That might have been dazzling in 1995, but is still appreciated here — and not the twist.

The twists both have to do with Jeri’s role in this society and with one of these two men.  It is not mind-blowing, but is just a nice bit of storytelling.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] By the way, Jeri is a hot Chinese woman.  OK, maybe the bartender dug Asian chicks.  Or was TFTC trying to pass her off as Inuit?
  • Minor nitpick:  In the first scene, shown above, the vampire bartender was looking in a mirror to apply her lipstick.  What the heck — there is nothing for her there.  Yeah, vampires don’t have reflections, but mostly I mean because she is really unattractive.

Outer Limit – Tribunal (05/14/99)

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I think I’ll pass on this one.

It begins in a German Concentration Camp.  The excellent production values immediately pull you in.  The camp, the crowds, the costumes, the casting . . . all show that they took extra care with this episode.  It is so effective and so evocative of The Holocaust that I’m not interested in fooling around with it.  I doubt you’ll see Cinema Sins doing Everything Wrong with Schindler’s List.

A few random comments:  Saul Rubinek is less annoying than usual; certainly more tolerable than in Gotcha!  Lindsay Crouse is always welcome.

This is the first time I recall an Outer Limits episode title being shown in anything other than the standard OL font.  TRIBUNAL is shown in a classic German font (like Wolfenstein).  This is strange because the titular tribunal is not in Nazi Germany.  Their representative is not even German. [1]  I don’t see the point.

Outer Limits is usually pretty tame on the language and graphic violence.  This one did contain one of their most graphic, or at least brutal, kills.

There is a dedication at the end by the writer.  It is a tragic real-world cap to the episode.  It just seemed disrespectful to include it here.

It doesn’t feel right to say this was one of Outer Limits’ best episodes.  Even though the story has strong sci-fi elements, the real-world connection puts it in its own class.  It is excellent, though.

Footnotes:

  • [1] I don’t know Alex Diakun’s ethnicity, but he did play Indian Joe on Huckleberry Finn and his Friends.  Wait, Indian Joe?  I guess it makes sense to sanitize the nickname for a kid’s show.  Otherwise Huck’s friend Jim wouldn’t be in it at all.

Science Fiction Theatre – Bullet Proof (05/11/56)

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“One of the most important parts of air research is the efforts of the metal scientists known as robots metallurgists.”  They are researching materials that can withstand super-sonic speeds in aircraft.  Drs. Connors and Rudman are witnessing another failure in the wind tunnel as a model melts from 2,500 MPH winds.

Dr. Rudman’s daughter Jean enters because, as is usually the case on SFT, the older scientist has no wife, but has a hot daughter.  Also, typical of the show, Rudman’s protege happens to be dating the daughter.  They go out to dinner, leaving Rudman to his work.  He is interrupted by a man in black.

The intruder introduces himself as Ralph Parr and says he just escaped from prison.  He knows Rudman has been researching metals and pulls a roll of black metal from his jacket.  He demonstrates how the material can be rolled up, and can be easily cut.  Then he pulls out a pistol and fires several shots at it.  He says, “Lead bounces on this stuff like spitballs off a brick wall.”  Hunh, his spit bounces?  Maybe this was during the polar vortex of ’56.

Parr asks Rudman what it is worth, and the scientist says, “Priceless, absolutely priceless.”  Rudman worries that he is being scammed, but Parr assures him, “Just because I’m a con doesn’t mean I’m a fake.”  He hands Rudman the gun and tells him to try it himself.  Once he has the gun, Rudman demands that Parr give him the key to the door, although I’m not clear why Parr has the key to a door in Rudman’s house.

When Parr makes a move, Rudman fires the gun.  Unfortunately, the bullet ricochets off the mysterious metal and he hits himself.  They aren’t fooling around — the shot hits him right in the melon.  He puts a hand to his face and falls to the floor.

Soon after, a crime wave is sweeping the city.  The police say the robber has “a strange disregard for firearms.”  They know his identity but “the mystery of the Bullet-Proof man goes unsolved.”  Dr. Connors inexplicably deduces the Bullet-Proof man is the same man who killed Rudman.  In the lab, he says, “Whatever the killer stole from this room made him Bullet-Proof.”  So, he is completely wrong in both of his deductions.  We need an act break to sort this out.

OK, the BP man continues his one-man crime wave.  We see the police firing at him as he runs away wearing a cone over his head, or maybe it is the governor of Virginia.  Such are the amazing properties of this metal that it somehow prevents the police from firing at his chest, or even chasing him.  OK, maybe he is wearing metal long johns, but he seems pretty agile. [1]

Still pursuing his theories 2 weeks later, Connors goes to see George Martin, president of the nation’s largest steel mill who oddly went on to be the Beatles’ go-to producer.  Connor wants Martin to issue a press release announcing to the BP man that the metal he possesses would be worth a billion dollars!  Parr later hears the announcement on the radio.

Jean and Connors go see Martin after he hears from Parr.  Martin says, “He took the bait, but he priced it a little high — $50,000.”  Bloody record executives!  Wait, was $50k more than a billion in the 1950s?  I know the British changed the definition of billion; did we do that too?

Martin stuffs the $50k into a valise.  Connors will deliver the loot to Parr.  That afternoon, the Connors and Parr meet in the desert.  To prove the density of the metal, Parr takes off the black metal cone from his head and sets it on the ground.  He fires a bullet that ricochets off the cone.  The bullet does not penetrate, and does not even knock the cone over.  That also demonstrates the density of the writer.

Connors asks how Parr knew Rudman had this metal, and Parr finally sets him straight.  The night he escaped prison, he saw a UFO.  He shows Connors some of the debris left behind by the aliens.  Connors thinks maybe we can use that metal to visit their planet.  Like every villain on AHP, Parr gets busted.  He is pretty chill, though.  When the cops take the $50k, he says, “Easy come, easy go.”

Footnotes:

  • Sadly, the regularly scheduled episode When a Camera Fails does not seem to be online anywhere.
  • [1] BP later describes the cone as being “hot as a furnace”, so I don’t think he is wearing the aforementioned long johns.

 

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Doubtful Doctor (10/04/60)

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We start out in the office of the titular doubtful doctor.  Being the first to appear and with his prominence in the title, you might think this episode is about him.  Strangely, he is a very minor character and doesn’t even get a name; but you, for goddamn sure, better call him “Doctor“.

Ralph Jones has come to see a psychiatrist.  Jones flashes back to a strange experience he had recently.  He came home after a lousy day at work.  He immediately began sniping at his wife Lucille.  Their baby had swallowed a button that morning and she did not call to tell him everything was OK.  Of course, he didn’t pick up a phone and call either.

Also her brother needed $200 to close the “uptown option” and Ralph had just given him $300 to close the “downtown option”.  By “option” I think he meant prostitute, but I might be having my own flashback.

Also, their rent is going up, Lucille wants another button-muncher (another baby, not another lover), and on top of everything else, the f***ing Hornsbys are coming over for dinner!  He says, “Things seem to be closing in all of a sudden,” and pours himself a drink.  Lucille asks, “Must you drink before you shower?”  The real question is “Why not drink in the shower?”  What a time saver!  I thought shaving in the shower was good, but this is better.  He admits to Lucille that he misses his bachelor days, which goes over about as well as you would expect.

He says he doesn’t remember exactly when “it” happened.  He left the apartment, and got in the elevator.  Then he woke up in his old bachelor apartment.  He was surprised to see snow in July, but maybe Al Gore was coming to lecture.  He found his old clothes in the closet, and a calendar from 2 years ago.  His surly landlord knocked on the door and demanded the two months overdue rent.  The landlord is portrayed with the anger and humorless rage of a man owed three months back rent.  Seriously, this guy is like Pauly Walnuts.

Ralph decided to go talk about this with his then-fiancee Lucille at her old job at the Eagle Soap Company.  He told Lucille that he knew in one hour, her boss would sign as a new account for Ralph and they would go to lunch.  Strangely, her boss is out of town.  Did he get the date wrong, or is the past changing?  Then Lucille doesn’t like salmon, but she had ordered it on their first date.  Even more strange, she does go to lunch with this nut.

They went their separate ways after lunch.  Ralph took a walk down to the construction site which would be his apartment someday.  Lucille went back to the Eagle Soap Factory where it was her turn to test out various bath oils and creams as men with clipboards watched through a two-way mirror [footage missing].

Ralph sat down at the construction site, not sure where to go.  He bought some baseball cards off a kid who, surprisingly, was not him.  Then drowned himself.  Yada yada, Ralph goes back to the future.  And somehow has the wet baseball cards with him.

This was more like a Twilight Zone episode.  It was more like a Twilight Zone episode than some of the 1980s Twilight Zones I’ve posted about here.  Even before you get to the paranormal twist [1], that construction site is about as post-apocalyptic as you see on 1950s TV (there is a little trash and some 4X4s lying not quite parallel).  The score also is pretty eerie at this point.

There were similar twists in several TZ episodes.  For example, just 5 days before this aired, TZ ran King Nine Will Not Return — a dude inexplicably goes back in time, and returns with tangible evidence of his experience.  Pretty close.

Dick York is great in his niche, unfortunately I don’t think this was it.  He was Ludacris as a gangster in Vicious Circle.  However, he rebounded as smiling psychopaths in The Dusty Drawer and The Blessington Method.  There was not much room for his humorous side in this episode.  He came off as crazy and angry — a pencil-necked Brian Keith.  Even this is OK when he is in a comic situation, but there is no Endora or Dr. Bombay here to play off of.  Could have been worse; could have been Dick Sargent.

Not a bad episode, but York was a little grating and the supernatural element just seemed out of place.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Hey, that should have been the B-Side to The Monster Mash.

Twilight Zone – Special Service (04/08/89)

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John Sellig is shaving and thinking how much he looks like the guy from American Werewolf in London.  He is using a noticeably odd wall-mirror, small and not part of a medicine cabinet.  That design is necessary as one side suddenly gives way and the mirror begins swinging.  It reveals a camera behind the mirror.

John calls for his wife, but an English guy enters the bathroom instead and repairs the mirror.  I have no beef with the English, but this guy is just awful.  Being the 1980s TZ, you know there is a good chance they will squander a good premise.  I peeked ahead, and sure enough this is prime example.

They take an idea so good that The Truman Show won Oscars for it 9 years later, strip away all the nuance, slap on one of their patented, god-awful scores, and completely blow it.  Archie is just the first sign.  His chirpy demeanor, unthreatening accent, and tubby body are the perfect metaphor for this show.  Take anything unique, and grind it down until it is a featureless ball with no edges.  I know they only had 20 minutes to work with, but somehow Rod Serling did it 25 years earlier, backwards and in heels (although I might be mixing up 2 Hollywood stories).

David Naughton is a fine actor, but completely miscast here (actually he is well-cast for what TZ wanted to do — they were just wrong).  He always seems like a nice, dull, relatable guy on-screen.  That’s what made him effective in American Werewolf.  He was an average guy thrust into something horrific (lycanthropy, not Jenny Agutter).  When you take a dull guy and water down the conflict, you just get a dull, wet guy.

The story, such as it is, doesn’t even play by its own rules.  WTF would Archie show up to cover up the mirror?  How was he there so quickly?  Why is he English?  How does he think taking John into a closet to talk is not suspicious to viewers?  Then why does he keep spilling the beans after they leave the closet and go to the front door?  The ending tries to be clever.  In a way, it is, but I’m not even sure they meant it that way.

How to wrap up this mess?  Have John tap dance in his living room while the dreadful closing narration decisively undermines the episode.  There might be no better example in this series of an great idea just pissed away.

Other Stuff:

  • Title Analysis:  Hunh?  Special Service?  There is no way, in combination or individually, that I can relate these words to the episode.