Twilight Zone – Our Selena Is Dying (11/12/88)

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Dramatis Personae

Martha  Brockman

Selena  Brockman

Diane  Brockman

Debra Brockman

Kent  Brockman

What a mess!  Maybe there’s a reason this original story from Rod Serling never got produced.  At least in Number Twelve Looks Just Like You we didn’t have to meet all twelve; and they were hot!

Why would they start out with this shot of a girl in a B&W photo?  We don’t know who she is, and won’t know the significance until 2/3rds into the episode.  It sets us up for nothing.  Did any viewers really recognize the bandage on her arm that appears to be a sleeve?  Benedict Cumberbatch wouldn’t have noticed it.  I mean, Sherlock Holmes would have.  I just assume Cumberbatch is an average Joe (with occasional superhero tendancies) like me and probably would not have.

Young Doctor Burrell is making a house-call to check on elderly Selena Brockman, which might be the single most fantastic premise in this entire series.  But such personal care is why he went into medicine.  He quickly regresses to the medical mean by giving the old woman a fistful of pills.  Her niece Diane Brockman uses the opportunity to hit on the doctor.  No, wait, that’s why he went into medicine.

Another niece, Debra Brockman, has received a phone call asking her to come see Selena whom she has never met.  Diane greets her and introduces her to Orville the Handyman.  Diane calls him the village idiot but says it is OK because he is deaf and she had her head turned.  Debra sees another woman staring catatonically out the window.  Diane says that is her mother which I guess makes her Martha Brockman.

Diane takes Debra upstairs to meet Selena.  Debra tells the old woman she will be helping to take care of her.  Selena takes her hand so firmly it hurts.  It leaves a mark which the doctor later tells Debra is a liverspot, but he might have just been flirting.  When the doctor next visits Selena, he is surprised she is dressed and sitting up alert in bed.

That night, however, the doctor gets a call from Debra who asks him to come to the house.  When he arrives, she is sitting in the dark.  He takes her to the hospital, but they can find no reason for her apparent premature aging. You know what I can find no reason for?  Not showing her aged face.  At the house, her face is kept in the shadows.  She is not shown at the hospital at all.  This is the point where her older self should have been revealed.  We know what is happening, and Debra thought it was severe enough to call the doctor.  Instead, we see her a few minutes later, after we have gotten used to the idea.  And she is not hideous enough to warrant any suspense that might have built up.

Back at the house again, the doctor is taking Diane’s blood pressure.  She says she is fine and her mother Martha is fine also.  He notices a nasty burn scar, which she says is from an accident when she was a child.  Selena rolls her wheelchair in and says they are both fine.  Dr. Burrell notes the irony that Debra is aging as Selena is getting younger.  She tells him his services are no longer needed.

Orville catches Burrell outside and shows him a diary.  There is the photo inside of the girl wearing wearing a bandage in the same spot as Diane’s scar, and it is dated 1940.   But the entry says it is her mother Martha in the picture.  The camera pans away from them in a textbook camera move guaranteed to create suspense — who is around the corner . . . did they overhear the doctor . . . is Orville in danger for ratting the Brockwomen out?  But no . . . yawn . . . the pan stops on a statue.  Hunh?  There’s actually a good gag to be had there, but I don’t think they realized it.  Also, it was aleady sorta used on the original TZ’s A Penny for your Thoughts.

Back at the hospital, we finally get our first look at the prematurely aged Debra.  That night, Burrell sneaks back to the house.  He rolls up the catatonic Martha’s sleeve and sees no scar.  He says, “You’re Diane!  You’re the daughter!”  Diane walks in and Burrell accuses her, pointing out that Martha has no scar.  Also that she had green eyes like Diane did.  “How old are you really, Martha?”

He busts into Selena’s bedroom and shouts, “It’s not right!  Give Debra back her years!”  His pleas fall on deaf ears.  Literally.  Heh heh.

Selena says, “What do you know about it doctor?  The game is longevity.  You play at it with your medicine and your stethoscopes, but we’ve won.  There’s one rule doctor.  It has nothing to do with morality or love.  When illness approaches, the trade takes place.”

Diane tries to brain him with a fireplace poker, but they get into a struggle.  While they wrestle, Martha enters with a oil lamp and cries, “Mommy”  Diane backs away from her saying, “Get away from me!”  the lamp falls and breaks and the wild fire spreads like . . . er, wildfire.  Only Burrell gets out alive.  Maybe.

The police say that neighbors saw one woman escape, clothes on fire.  Debra returns to the house looking young and cute again.  Meanwhile at the hospital, an old indigent woman with massive burns has been admitted.  A nurse notes that Jane Doe’s left arm seems to be healing quickly.  Another nurse in the hall shows a friend a burn mark on her left arm that she doesn’t remember getting.  Well gee, it couldn’t have been from Jane Doe — her hands are shown completely bandaged over.

The old greedily leaching youth from the young is nothing original, but that’s OK.  It’s one of those tropes that are too good to leave alone; especially as I get older.  This production, however, just seems a little busy.  I think dropping one of the Brockmans would have tightened the story up nicely.

Maybe it would have made this crazy family less dysfunctional.  Debra has never met her aunt Selena or her aunt Martha?  OK, I guess families move away or split up.  Why is Martha being abused by her mother as the walking fountain of youth?  It is demonstrated at the end that it need not be a blood relative.  For that matter, why did they recruit cousin Debra at all?  Couldn’t they just have placed an ad for “Hot nurse wanted.  Must provide uniform” like I do?

Other Stuff:

  • Sweet Jeebus, I haven’t watched a TZ episode in weeks.  Was the new guy’s narration this insipid before, or is he going a new way?  Why do they try to make this show so . . . what, normal?  Melodramatic?  This is the MFing TZ, bitches!  Where is the edge, where is the menace?

Pigeon Blood – Paul Cain (1933)

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The woman was bent far forward . . .

Now that’s how you start a story!

It regresses to the mean quickly as she is only leaning over the steering wheel with squinty eyes looking at the road ahead and checking the mirrors for the car following her.  Her eyes get the opposite of squinty as they begin firing on her.  One shot blows out a tire, and a parting shot thuds into the back of the seat beside the woman.

The brave drive-by missers speed away, leaving the woman fortuitously stranded by a gas station.  She gives the mechanic her card and cabs her way back to Manhattan.  They see from her card that she is Mrs. Dale Hanan [1] of the Park Avenue Dale Hanans.  The mechanic recognizes her his the name.  “She’s Hanan’s wife — the millionaire.  Made his dough in oil” which is why his bread is so yummy.  His partner says, “That’s swell.  We can soak him plenty.”

Her cab stops at  63rd and Park Avenue.  Hey, there’s the Regency — I’ve stayed there!  She calls her husband and tells him what happened.  An hour later, he is paying a visit to Mr. Druse.  Hanan tells Druse that Jeffrey Crandall just tried to kill his wife.  Hanan says his ex-wife Catherine has gone through about $115k of her inheritance gambling.  She has further run up a debt of $68k.

Hanan says his wife still has a set of rubies named “Pigeon Blood” by the worst marketing department on earth.  The plan was for Crandall to steal the rubies, Catherine to collect the insurance to pay him back, and Crandall to give her back the rubies.  Which sounds great, although, I’m not sure why Crandall needed to be involved at all.  Anyhoo, Crandall gave her back some phonies, doubling his take.  She threatened to rat him out to the insurance company even if she had to go to jail.  That’s when his boyz started shooting at her.  Druse agrees to help out for the low, low sum of $35k.  What the hell, that’s $650k in 2018 dollars!

Druse goes to her place and finds her drunk, with a dead man in her apartment.  The dude tried to sneak up the fire escape so she brained him with a niblick.  They leave the apartment.  Druse asks how long she and Hanan have been divorced.  Like every woman I talk to, she takes about 3 seconds to tell him she is married.

They go to Druse’s luxurious penthouse apartment.  It is as fabulous as you would expect from a guy who takes $650k cases.  It lacks an infinity pool, but has an infinity carpet — the living room is open to the dark city skyline outside, without even a railing.

Druse leaves Catherine and uses a phone downstairs to call Hanan.  He tells Hanan his wife Catherine is dead — what a scamp!  Then he goes to see Crandall and gives him the same story.  Crandall turns out to be pretty honest as gangsters go.  The rubies had already been switched out when he stole them.

Druse regroups with the Hanans back at his crib.  Druse lays out the whole story and someone inevitably goes over the edge of that open-air living room.  The story is pretty standard, but the image of that death is staying with me.  That would be worth the price of admission in a movie.

And by “price of admission” I mean a month’s Netflix fee because God knows they haven’t earned their $7.99 in months.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I refuse to watch The Handmaid’s Tale because of the producers’ hysteria that it could become reality any day.  On the other hand, the old convention of sticking Mrs. In front of the husband’s full name is about as close to Offred as you can get.
  • Druse has a Filipino boy working for him at his pad.  We know this because the phrase “Filipino boy” appears 13 times in 3 pages.
  • Paul Cain was last heard from in One, Two, Three in this same collection.  So either he is a great writer, or he has a lot of stuff in the public domain.
  • First published in the November 1933 issue of Black Mask.
  • Also that month:  Duck Soup released.

Tales of Tomorrow – The Fury of the Cocoon (03/06/53)

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Borden and his guide Brenegan come staggering out of the dense jungle into a slightly less dense area of the jungle.  They are showing up 15 days late and without the porters slaves and supplies they were supposed to bring.  Borden blames Brenegan for their associates slaves abandoning them.  He was “vicious, inhuman toward them.”  Like some kind of partner-master.

They walk a little more, calling out for the group they were supposed to meet.  They quickly arrive at a cabin which just baffles me.  If it was this close by, why didn’t they just rendezvous here?  The cabin is stocked with food, so Borden says they will stay the night.  On the table, they notice a large titular cocoon.

They hear a scream and run outside.  Their last porter has found the bodies of his co-workers fellow slaves.  Borden says, “Some giant leach of an animal drained them of every drop of blood.”  They hear noise in the brush and Brenegan raises his weapon.  A woman staggers out and babbles incoherently about “hundreds of them” before fainting.  Borden carries her back to the cabin.

While Borden tends to Susan, who I think is his daughter or niece, Brenegan reads from the notes of the late Dr. Blankford:

August 3 . . .  The creature died this night.  Conclusion: it could not have been of earthly origin.  By some miracle, the meteorite brought it here.  A sample of life from beyond our universe in the form of a monstrous, invisible insect.”

Borden grabs the notebook and reads of Blankford’s discovery of a giant cocoon.  An invisible creature the size of a large dog crawled out of it.  Blankford and his assistant caught the creature and covered it with plaster to create a visible statue of it.  Borden continues reading:

July 23 . . . the plaster model is finished.  It is the most dreadful insect I have ever seen.  Note to self, order another case of model glue.

I hope it was worth the wait since the journal entry dates suggest the plaster took 11 months to dry.

July 28 . . . I discovered what the creature feeds on.  Its exclusive nutriment is . . . human blood!”

Exclusive?  No wonder it was so pissed off.  It must have gotten pretty hungry back on its homeworld with no humans.  They look around and find the plaster model Blankford made.  It is indeed hideous, a modern art masterpiece.  Susan wakes up groggily saying, “Run away, hide!  There are hundreds of them!”

When she is fully awake, she tells of the attack of the invisible creatures.  She says, “Mr. Bordon, please don’t leave me.” [1]  Brenegan gets the idea that the insects could be inside the cabin already and grabs his gun.  That night they are awakened by scratching noises and one of the beasts really does make it into the cabin.

The invisible critter attacks Brenegan, and Borden inexplicably saves the maniacal paranoid whiner.  He is able to pry the insect off and tie it up.  We see the “empty” coil of ropes moving about as it struggles.  Then Susan is attacked; wait, no, she just fainted.

That night, Brenegan finally gets full cabin fever.  He takes down the boxes stacked in front of the door and makes a run for it.  In seconds he is screaming off-screen as the insects attack him.  His death was not for nothing though.  First, it raises the caliber of the acting about 50%.  Second, he knocked over a box of insecticide canisters and that seems to have killed the insect they captured.  Hmmmmm, insecticide is fatal to insects — who knew?

Borden and Susan load up with canisters of the bug spray and make their escape.  They make it safely to the river.  Back at the cabin, we see hints that one of the insects has gotten into the cabin.  It goes to the statute of its fallen comrade and pulls it over with a black string visible even in this lousy transfer.

This episode is frustrating in its perfect illustration of the limitations of the time.  It was created by the team of Don Medford and Frank De Fellita, who have been responsible for the best episodes of the series.  It has all the elements for a classic episode, but is frequently undermined by technology.

As always, the transfer is just awful.  But it is just a kinescope of the original live broadcast.  Whaddya gonna do?  Have ya seen that Apollo 11 film lately?  The best argument against a moon-landing hoax is that hoaxsters would have had better footage.

Some of the acting is just over-the-top hammy.  I’m sure in 1953 that actors had figured out they didn’t still have to play to the last row of a live audience, or wildly over-emote like they did before talkies.  However, I think this genre still brought these traits out in them.  Borden was OK, but Susan was a little hysterical.  Brenegan was just a maniacal, cackling wild man.

The music was fine.  There were even bits that are pretty close to music in some classic movies.  There is a bit from The Shining [2] and a sequence that sounds a lot like the shark attack theme from Jaws.

In looking for that Jaws clip, I realized that the episode needs no excuses.  For what they had to work with in technology and budget, they did a fine job.  The set-up and key plot-points could have provided Halloween-level suspense — maybe in 1953, it did.  Zooming through undistracted by note-taking, I was struck by the interesting camera-work . . . the zooms in on Brenegan’s eyes (or the insect’s eyes), the focus on Susan as the men fought the insect, the effect of the tied-up invisible insect, the overwrought music (used effectively for a change).  If you have the imagination to look past the superficial problems, and appreciate what they were going for in 1953, this is another winner for Medford and De Felitta.  Relative winner.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] But I thought they were related.  When the two men were searching for their companions, he called out, “Bordon!”  But his name is Bordon, so I assumed the other person was his brother (as his father would have been far too old for such shenanigans; the 20 year old dame I mean, not the safari).  Pffft, I have no idea who these people are.
  • [2] Bartok, I see from You Tube comments.
  • Nancy Coleman (Susan) previously acted in Dangerously They Live (1941), The Gay Sisters (1942), and Her Sister’s Secret (1946) which are the last three clips I watched on Pornhub.

Outer Limits – Monster (07/10/98)

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“Hey, it’s April 1st.  I saw this cartoon about a cow who rang the farmer’s doorbell then ran away.   You should totally try that, Frank!” **

The episode begins with a nice switcheroo.  We see a farm with cows wandering around, mooing about their day.  The camera then pans down through through untold yards of earth, the first couple feet of which are probably cow-shit.  We arrive in a underground hallway immediately identifiable as a secret government installation by the stark design and florescent lighting. [1]  Mr. Brown tells the visiting brass that his test subjects are “just like you and me, except that they have this special skill — this ability to move things with their minds.”  Yeah, except for that.  And also except that they look like Harry Hamlin and Nicole de Boer.

Mr. Brown takes them to lab 507.  Four people are sitting at a round electronic console which helps channel their telekinetic abilities.  Brown orders them to crush a cement block sitting on the console.  They make the block explode, which is amazing because: 1) they used only the power of their minds, 2) they created a fiery explosion from a dry cement block, and 3) the blast two feet from their faces did not land a speck of dust on them.  Based on their success, the military gives them the job to assassinate some blockhead in Serbia.

Well, wait a darn minute — when I dropped out of modelling school to take a job with a secret military outfit working in a cold-war bunker funded by the Pentagon covertly located 200 feet underground to move stuff with my mind, I didn’t expect this.  Mr. Brown tries to convince Harry and Nicole that this Serbian is a really bad guy.  The other two subjects, Roger and Louise, clearly did not get by on their looks.  No disrespect, I just mean they were smart enough to see where this experiment was heading.

Nicole wants to go home, but Mr. Brown will not allow her to leave.  He suggests she and Harry just take the elevator up for a walk “to get some fresh air.”  Although that seems unlikely, as they are still situated under that cow farm.  Actually, Harry is more pragmatic than Nicole.  Not only does he accept that this assassination could prevent thousands of deaths, he also didn’t wear his good shoes for their walk.

Nicole reveals that she only got into this because of her brother Dougie is a druggie (did they do that on purpose?).  He was in jail and Mr. Brown said if Nicole joined the project, he could get Dougie released at the public’s risk, and a bottomless pension also at the public’s expense.  Harry had some shady business dealings that forced him the join the project.

Well, well, well, the idealistic Nicole decides keeping her brother out of jail is worth the cold-blooded murder of a foreigner (and an American to be named later who Dougie will probably kill).  The group assembles, and by executive order takes aim at some commie.  They warm up by creating a breeze where he is dining al fresco, then shattering his tea-cup.  Then they give him a heart-attack.  And it must be a bad one because the actor hams it up like Fred Sanford or Ralph Kramden.

Nicole begins having side effects.  She gets nosebleeds, emits static electricity, and seems to involuntarily mind-throw a pot of hot coffee at Roger.  When Louise is found dead, Brown suspects Nicole.  Just then some roaring beast begins pounding on the vault-like door.  It is so ferocious that when it claws at the 6-inch thick steel door, we see the scratch-outlines on the inside — C’mon!  When it tries to pound its way in, the group runs out the other exit — like all super-secret, secure areas, it has a back door.  When they are safe, Brown tells them all to calm down.  As they do so, the sounds from the titular monster subside.  Temporarily.

The group hides in the generator room hoping the electrical field will protect them from the monster created by their thoughts.  Not so much, as the monster finally appears as a large angry cloud.  It scoops up Roger and kills him.  Nicole has sudden new-found respect for the 2nd Amendment and screams for Mr. Brown to shoot it . . .  shoot the cloud, I say.  She wants him to kill the gaseous energy field . . . by shooting it.  Meh, worth a try.  He shoots at it, and the army also shows up to shoot at it, but they are all killed.  Harry and Nicole try to escape, but are cornered.

And then Outer Limits fools me.  Nicole begs Harry to kill her.  It is apparently her mind creating the entity and she doesn’t know how to stop it.  Even Mr. Brown had said she had to be killed.  As she begs Harry to turn the gun on her, the typical OL response would be for him to tell Nicole he loves her and let love vanquish the monster just as mere calmness had subdued it earlier.

But, naw, he shoots her.  Just f***ing blows her away.  But the monster does not disappear.  Harry delivers a line that I always love hearing in any horror / sc-fi situation like this, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”   Just a hoot — why don’t we hear that more?

Much as I love to be surprised, I’m not sure the ending they went with makes sense.  He sadly admits to the shockingly not-dead Mr. Brown, “I’m the one who made it happen, and I let her think that she was the problem.  But I hated this more than she did.  I hated myself for being a part of it.  I hated all the killing I had done in the past . . . I am the monster, goo-goo-ga-joob.”

Soooooo . . . Harry 1) knew he was the monster, and 2) hated the killing.  Ergo, he 1) shot someone he knew was not the monster, and 2) killed her.  And the “You’ve got to be kidding me!” line becomes nonsensical since he said it only to himself.

He ultimately does the right thing, but I think he could have done it before the death of a  really cute girl . . . and, I guess, the other four people in the project and countless soldiers.  Or, at least, after the other four people in the project and countless soldiers, but before the cutie.

Still, another fine episode.  The special effects are pretty bad, but I never deduct points for that.  Harry Hamlin was as good as I’ve ever seen him.  Everyone else also performed well.  Except the commie having the heart-attack . . . Lizbeth! [2]

April Fools!  Will try to start again in May.

** Cow ringing doorbell.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] To be fair, it appears to be the base of a civilian contractor.
  • [2] Apologies to the estate of Redd Foxx.  His portrayal of cardiac arrest was much more accurate than the one here.

Science Fiction Theatre – Dead Storage (10/08/55)

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Army engineers are using a chainsaw to cut something from the ice in the Arctic, and that always turns out well.  They teletype their findings to the Institute of Scientific Research in DC, apparently a competitor to the United States Scientific Research Commission in DC mentioned in an earlier episode.  The narrator tells us they found something frozen in the ice, “a weird, frightening relic belonging to the very dawn of time,” just like this series.

Dr. Robinson tears the report from the teletype.  He is adamant that the object be preserved.  Dr. Avery says, “All those specimens found in Siberia were completely ruined in the excavating.”  This is as close as they get to divulging that it is a mammoth that has been found.  Whether this is an effort to build suspense or a flaw in the script, I do not know; but I have a hunch.  Because the object has been exposed to the sun, Robinson wires them back to pack it in ice and fly it back to DC.  Strangely, he adds, “And club the sh*t out of some seals and toss them in the plane, too.  Mama needs a new pair of boots!”  Boy those were different times.

“Log entry #17 . . . hour 3: Still melting.”

Zoologist Dr. Myrna Griffen joins the team when the mammoth lands in DC.  Over her objections, reporter Warren Keath also joins the group.  They observe the block of ice through a window.  Steam is piped in to melt the ice, and it is about as exciting as watching ice melt.  Keath asks what Robinson expects to find.  He says, “even though he has been dead for half a million years, his organs might still contain living material such as bacteria.”  Dr. Griffen suggests that if the specimen was flash-frozen, they might even be able to briefly revive it.

Finally, by 5 am, all the ice has melted.  The group goes to see the specimen which is  — surprise! — a mammoth.  We are 10 minutes into the episode, and just learning this.  There is no big reveal — and God knows SFT loves them some crazy orchestral stingers — so, I think they really did just forget to script that fact earlier.

Despite the all-doctor cast (even the reporter has a PhD), this is not a bright bunch.  It is described as “larger than any animal we know now” totally dissing the blue whale.  The mammoth, maybe 5 feet tall, is described as being just a year old. [1] OK, but one of the doctors says it will grow to 10 times its current size.  Really, like the size of the Cloverfield monster?  They actually seemed to top out around 12 feet.

And I assume this brain-trust also designed the equipment.  While I appreciate that it is not just a bank of blinking lights, why would the gauges be 7 feet off the ground so you needed a step-ladder or, fortuitously, a mammoth to read them?

They apply a “galvanic shock” to revive the beast.  Dr. Griffen has said it could only revive it for a few heartbeats so I don’t know what the point is.  After the shock, Dr. Robinson says, “Apply the oxygen”.  This is to be done with a standard human-sized face-mask.  Which 10% of the beast’s mouth will it cover?  Or was it used on the end of its trunk?  Sadly, the picture is too dark to tell, because that would have been a hoot.  It’s all good, though, as the mammoth leaps to its feet.

30 minutes later, the group is observing the mammoth through a window.  Keath and Griffen want to go into the steam-room to take pictures and maybe have a schvitz.  Robinson reluctantly agrees.  They find the mammoth to be agitated.  Aside from being revived from the dead, being yanked from Mammoth-heaven, awakening 400,000 years later to the crushing loneliness of being the only mammoth on earth, and being enclosed in a strange wood-paneled room under florescent lights rarely, if ever, found in nature during the Pliocene epoch, they can find no reason.

Dr. Griffen suggests maybe it misses its mammy.  It could be Griffen’s own maternal instinct kicking in.  She reveals to Keath that her husband and son were killed in an accident five years earlier, although that might just have been her way of saying she is available.  Just to make the beast’s misery complete, they name him Toby.

Toby begins to eat and grow, however.  This, despite that fact that the doctors calling him a mammoth is really just fat-shaming.  The doctors agree Toby can be released to an open area to live in open air.  They hire a driver to take him to a compound where he can live to a ripe old age as long as it is not the Kennedy compound.  Dr. Griffen is quite the good sport.  Seeing Toby is scared of the trailer he is being hauled in, she rides with him in the tiny trailer.  Unfortunately, the truck jack-knifes on the way.  Dr. Griffen is found unconscious, but Toby has honorably stayed by her side, not galumphing his fat ass off to lawyer-up and fabricate a laughably transparent lie about the accident to preserve his political viability. [2]

The accident puts Myrna in the hospital, and Tobey is moping around too. Keath visits her in the hospital and sees a newspaper headline TOBY NEAR DEATH.  Against doctor’s orders, Myrna leaves the hospital with Keath to see if Tobey is OK.  Sadly, Tobey dies seconds after they arrive.  Keath suggests Tobey died because he was unloved by another mammoth and uses the opportunity to ask Myrna to dinner.

Meh, more of the same.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Nice oxymoron there:  the opposite of a jumbo shrimp = a tiny mammoth.
  • [2] When is that freakin’ Chappaquiddick movie coming out?  I’ve been hearing about it for months.  IMDb says it is a 2017 movie, but it now has a 2018 release date.  I smell a conspiracy.  Roswell!  Roswell!  If this is my last post . . .