The Hitchhiker – Joker (04/21/87)

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Next up in rotation was an episode called Made for Each Other.  Sadly, disc 1 of the 3rd DVD set is not playing, and it is not online that I can see.  On the plus side, it starred Bill Paxton, so I’m not subjected to his performance.  RIP.

A home movie is playing of George W. Bush clowning around in a Hawaiian shirt, with snakes in a can, an exploding cigar, and the nuclear launch codes.  No, wait, it is Bush doppelganger Timothy Bottoms as psycho Peter (qu’est-ce que c’est).  He was picked up by the cops for being covered with blood.  All they got out of him was an address — the apartment of a woman named Teresa.  The police found her bathroom covered in blood, but no body.

The police question him about Teresa, but all he wants to talk about is his ex-wife Melissa (Kelly Lynch) We get a flashback of Melissa at her office birthday party.  She brings the party to a halt when she says it is not her birthday.  It had started when someone gave the Hot Cops’ least hot cop a few bucks and a fright wig and told him to go to the office as Tarzan to get the birthday ball rolling.  OK, maybe he brought the balloons, but where did the cake and ice cream suddenly come from?  As the party breaks up, we see Peter in the shadows giggling like a madman even though he is hidden from the office, and we already know who he is.  He tells the cop that it was actually his birthday, but I guess Melissa didn’t make the connection.

Seriously, WTF is this thing?

At home that night, Melissa is surprised by a joy-buzzer [1] on her refrigerator.  When she gets out the Orange Juice, we can see one of the few items in her fridge is a huge brown gelatinous blob.  I thought surely this was another prank, but she has no reaction to it.  The camera not only lingers on it, she leaves the door open so we can see it.  She puts ice in the glass, but it is the wacky fly-in-the-ice-cube gag.  Once again, she makes no connection to her high-larious ex-husband Peter.  Peter screams to the cop that Teresa and Melissa are the same person, violating the show-don’t-scream rule on screenwriting.

Melissa goes into a storeroom to change for her yoga class that night.  1980s office dweeb Alan says, “Would that I were a fly on the wall.”  As I was cringing at this subjunctive Shakespearean lament, Melissa replied, “As far as I’m concerned, you are a fly on the wall.”  I’m not sure it makes sense because they do seem to have some kind of relationship.  However, I admire the symmetry and the snappy diminution of him to insect status.

As she is changing, the lights go out.  She threatens to kick Alan, “really hard in a certain place.”  She walks around the storeroom in a really half-assed scene.  She could easily put her blouse back on or remove it completely, but she holds it her chest as she searches the large room and threatens Alan with a harassment suit.  This isn’t HBO, this is TV.  Alan suddenly appears in the aisle naked except for something down below which it is mercifully too dark to make out.  Peter has him at gunpoint and duct-tapes the two of the together.

He is wearing a mask and a hoodie, and his voice is electronically altered,  so I guess it is reasonable that Melissa still doesn’t recognize him as he giggles and dances around and photographs them.  He has also shrewdly disguised his height as he now seems to be 2-3 inches shorter than Melissa in this scene.  The next day the photos are sprinkled around the office.

Blah blah blah . . .

Peter confronts Melissa in her home.  Actually, he breaks into her house and confronts her, then does the exact same thing in the next scene.  It is just a bizarre waste of time.  The script is so inept, it is still not clear if Melissa is really his ex-wife or if he is delusional.  He chases her into the bathroom.  Soon water starts running under the door.  He breaks in to find Melissa has slit her wrists.  As he tells the story, he gets so worked up that he has a heart attack.

The cops did not find her body, but we do.  It is at a motel washing the red out of her hair.  She looks in the mirror and says, “Hello Melissa.”  The home movie continues running and shows a woman taking off a mask and laughing.

Well.  Either this was the most consistently incoherent series on TV, or I’m just not smart enough to watch it.

  • I think it is safe to say that Teresa was a new identity assumed by Melissa after she left her lunatic husband Peter.
  • I assume the woman taking off the mask at the end of the home movie is Melissa, but damn if I can make her look like Kelly Lynch. I’m willing to accept maybe it is the B&W, the poor transfer, the bright blonde hair, the previously unseen big smile and a little face blindness tripping me up.
  • If it is her, didn’t the cops watch this movie before interrogating Peter?
  • If it is not her, is the reveal just to show that Peter really is delusional?  I don’t think this is the case, but it would be interesting since they don’t seem too concerned about logic.
  • And what is the point of showing end of the film?  Having her say “Hello Melissa” at the motel already resolved the question of her identity.  Although her hair is still much darker than the woman in the movie.
  • How did Melissa fake her suicide for Peter?  Those cuts looked pretty real, but her wrists looked OK at the hotel.
  • Where did she get gallons of blood with 30 seconds notice that was good enough to fool Peter and the police?
  • The police say the blood stains were bovine.  What blood stains?  Peter had some blood on his face.  Melissa’s bathroom looked like an abattoir.  Stains is a funny way to describe either.
  • Are they saying this was bovine blood in Melissa’s bathroom?  Then why are they looking for a “body” if there was no human blood?  And WTF did she get cow blood?
  • Waaaaaait a minute.  One of Peter’s “pranks” was to smear blood on a new dress prototype in Melissa’s office.  OK, you can stop waiting — I got nothing.
  • She faked the suicide in her bathroom, so if you’re thinking Peter had some spare blood stowed there, nope.  If you are thinking Melissa smeared her own dress to set Peter up, that’s just too dumb to rebut.
  • Melissa didn’t do anything wrong.  At the end, why is she dying her hair, changing her identity back, and hiding from the cops at a motel?  OK, she is reclaiming her old life now that Peter is no longer a threat, but why run away?
  • In fact, some people might have actually called the cops when someone broke into their house and left novelty items,  sexually assaulted them in a storeroom, and later threatened their life.
  • This is out of the filmmakers’ hands, but the IMDb synopsis says, “Deranged Peter relentlessly stalks and terrorizes Teresa, a lovely young lady who Peter thinks is his ex-wife Melissa.”  But isn’t she Melissa?  She said she was Melissa.

I can’t, as the kids say, even.

I must say Timothy Bottoms was incredibly annoying, just as the role demanded.  He was great.  Kelly Lynch didn’t really have any heavy lifting to do, but she looked great.  Many of these episodes leave me feeling stupid because I think I must have missed some key points.  Surely nothing this incoherent could have been televised.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Do they even exist anymore?  Suffice it to say, it is not a sexual aid although that would be a pretty good name for one.
  • It took three writers to create this.
  • Amazingly, the director went on to work on such great shows as Fargo and Breaking Bad.  Or maybe it was a dude with the same name.  Colin Bucksey? No, probably not.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Special Delivery (11/29/59)

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10-year old Tom is excited to receive a box of mushrooms in the mail from the Great Bayou Novelty Greenhouse. [1] He hasn’t been this wound up since the Spinach Telegram of ’56.  These are Sylvan Glade Jumbo Giant mushrooms that can be raised in your basement for fun and profit.

Tom’s father Bill is flagged down by his neighbor Roger.  He asks if Bill has noticed that people are disappearing.  Roger says, “Something strange is going on in the world.  Something terrible has happened.”  Bill recalls Mrs. Goodbody said something about flying saucers.

What the . . . Mrs. Goodbody was just mentioned three posts ago in The Screaming Woman.  That was a reference to the Ray Bradbury Theater episode Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!  This AHP episode was adapted from the same short story, 30 years earlier.  Mrs. Goodbody does not actually appear in this episode, so viewers and readers had to wait three decades to be disappointed.  By the 1980s, TV technology had advanced so far that RBT could disappoint viewers on a weekly basis.

Tom tells Bill he is “afraid for me, my family and even right now for you.  And your friends, and your friends’ friends” although their friends can go f*** themselves.  He advises Bill to keep his eyes open for the next few days.  He predicts something terrible is going to happen.

Tom’s mushroom crop is, er . . . mushrooming.  They give his mother the willies, but she wouldn’t know a toadstool from a toad’s tool.  Roger’s wife Dorothy calls and tells Bill that Roger, “vanished, disappeared, dropped out of sight.”

Bill goes to Roger’s house to interrogate his 10-year old son Joe.  The boy says he didn’t see or hear anything.  His dad’s closets were just empty, and he was gone.  As Dorothy begins speaking, Joe turns and stares directly into the camera.  This might be the single creepiest image I’ve seen so far for this blog.  Dorothy says there was no history of insanity in Roger’s family . . . that maybe he was kidnapped.  Bill snaps at her about why the kidnappers would take all his clothes.  Dude, she just lost her husband and is left with a demon child — give her a break!  Joe turns away from the camera and goes down to their cellar.

Bill goes home and tells Cynthia, “He’s gone all right.”  She says, “Doesn’t this kind of thing happen to a lot of men in their 40s?”  They get a telegram  from Roger: TRAVELING [SIC] NEW ORLEANS.  THIS TELEGRAM POSSIBLE [SIC] OFF-GUARD MOMENT.  REFUSE ALL SPECIAL DELIVERY PACKAGES — ROGER.

Bill gets a call from the police.  Roger was just picked up on a south-bound train in Green City.  The police say “he was polite, cheerful and in good spirits” and denied sending a telegram.  The only special delivery package they received was Tom’s mushrooms.  Bill calls Dorothy to see if they received any packages.  She says, like all the boys on the block, Joe has taken up mushroom farming.

Bill ponders whether Roger was right.  Maybe the earth is being invaded by things from other worlds.  “How could creatures from outer space invade us without us noticing?”  He realizes it could be done by dust, spores, fungi, mushrooms.  And the swamps of Louisiana would be a great places for them to take root.  Bill stares directly onto the camera and asks “Tonight.  In this very minute.  In how many homes all over the USA are billions of mushrooms being grown by innocent boys in their cellars?”

Seeing Tom has stored some mushrooms in the refrigerator, Bill conjectures that the alien species would propagate by people eating the mushrooms and being controlled.  Bill opens the cellar door.  Tom tells him to not turn on the light because it is bad for the mushrooms.  There is a very tense confrontation and an ending that that leaves just the right amount to the imagination.

It is strange that AHP let Bradbury get away with sci-fi stories like this and Design for Loving.  I can think of only one other sci-fi / fantasy episode in the 4 1/2 seasons I’ve watched.  On the other hand, they seemed to have an excellent system of vetting stories.  This episode is so good that I’m surprised it is not as iconic as Lamb to the Slaughter or Man from the South.  It certainly isn’t representative of AHP, but is one of their most effective episodes.

Since the RBT version was not as good, I have to wonder how much of the success is due to Norman Lloyd’s direction.  The episode was filled with great moments such as two characters addressing the camera (and I think the kid was going for 4th wall breakage), the glowy white mushrooms at the bottom of the stairs, and Bill almost being hit by a car.  The ending becomes more like Thriller as Bill realizes what is happening, yet is drawn into the conspiracy.

Excellent.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] The return address is 713 Canal Street — a McDonald’s.  I might have known.
  • Cheers that I’ve actually eaten there.  Jeers that I was in New Orleans and ate at freakin’ McDonald’s.  C’mon, it was just breakfast.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  Roger’s family — Dorothy and Joe — is still with us.  I must say, though, Joe’s photo on IMDb might be even creepier than when he stared into the camera.  It looks like he has just wrapped up a porn shoot.  He is naked, daintily holding a towel over his junk.
  • [UPDATE] I somehow missed that this was covered in depth over at bare*bones ezine.  Interesting and well-written as always.
  • [UPDTE 2] Another blog reminds me that this is suspiciously similar to Bradbury’s Zero Hour.  Both feature aliens taking over the world by using children to carry out seemingly innocuous tasks that are baffling to their parents.

 

Completely off-topic, but this story of the nurse being arrested is burning me up.  As a supporter of the police, the first shorter video is infuriating.  The longer second video makes me question my beliefs.  A cop, with other officers standing by, explains to the nurse why this is her fault like every guy who ever slugged his wife.

Twilight Zone – The Card (02/21/87)

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Linda Wolfe is invited to the offices of the THE CARD card.  It is an exclusive new invitation-only credit card operated out of a strip shopping center across from the   7-11.

Ms. Foley immediately brings up Linda’s past problems.  “Mrs. Wolfe, you have a very spotty credit record . . . AMEX, Visa, MasterCard have all cancelled you in the past.  So have the department stores.  Even Union-76.” [1]  Linda swears she’s learned her lesson.  Mrs. Foley says they offer credit to those who can’t get it anywhere else, but they have some stringent requirements:  They require a minimum payment within se7en days of purchase.  She is honest that there are some serious penalties.  Mrs. Foley hands Linda a contract which has only slightly more fine print than a standard non-Twilight Zone cardholder agreement.  Like only 100% of applicants, Linda signs without reading.  Mrs. Foley hands her an onyx THE CARD with her name already embossed on it.

Back at home, her husband notices a bottle of perfume and the new card and asks about it.  Linda replies 3rd personally, “Are we going to start fighting about Linda’s problem again?”  Her husband, hoping to ever see her naked again, says, “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea at all.”  He does carefully ask her to be careful, though.

You know there is going to be trouble when a title card pops up that says “ONE WEEK LATER.”  She is looking for their cat, but he has disappeared.  No one else in the family even remembers them having a cat.

Two days later, they are shopping for a new refrigerator.  They pick out one with a $1,698 price tag, which would be — holy crap — $3,700 in today’s dollars!  Natch, she blows this purchase also, and the dog disappears.

Then the car breaks down; there’s another $360.  Using the card again even though she is already delinquent earns her an immediate penalty.  When she gets home, the kids have disappeared and her husband doesn’t remember them.  The mass extinction of all 3 kids at once answers one of my questions — why not just buy a bowl of goldfish and be late on the card every week?  I guess they delete all like items at once, so that wouldn’t work.  But you could still make it work for you — did I mention my pet termites, Mrs. Foley?

Linda understandably flips out like a woman whose kids are missing.  She runs to the kids’ room, but their stuff is gone.  The family portrait seen earlier is now just she and her husband.  She realizes it is the THE CARD card.

The next morning, Linda goes to the THE CARD office and demands to see Mrs. Foley.  While she is waiting, she sees her kids in the hall [2].  She screams for them, but they seem not to recognize her.  Mrs. Foley calls her into the office.  “Yes those were your kids.  Earlier this month, we acquired your cat and your dog.  What seems to be the problem?”  Linda finally hands Mrs. Foley a check to get her kids back.

Linda rushes home to yell at her husband about her day.  She says she wrote a check out of their joint account.  He says the bank called him to approve it and he told them not to honor it.  She screams and runs out to the car — which disappears.  She tries to call Mrs. Foley, but furniture starts disappearing.  Then her husband disappears from the family portrait which is now just of her.  Her The Card, lying on the floor, now says Linda Wilson, presumably her maiden name.  There is a good laugh as she digs through a kitchen drawer looking for scissors.  As she removes each item from the drawer and places it on the counter, it disappears.  Great stuff.  Or maybe I’m just reminded of Zinc Oxide.

She cuts the THE CARD card in half.  In an exterior shot, we see the house disappear.  The card halves flutter to the ground.  Even Linda has disappeared.

Great episode, and not just because I’m a sucker for nobody-else-remembers-what-I-remember stories.  There was a lot packed into this episode and they did an amazing job making it fit.

I’m undecided on whether they should have shown the kids again.  It provided an opportunity for Linda to give a great reaction; plus, it is creepy that they no longer recognize their mother.  On the other hand, I would have liked the idea of them just being gone, blinked out of existence.  I guess the The Card needs to make a profit off of them, though.

Maybe they have an adoption service that places the kids for a fee.  But what lucky guy gets the pixie-haired Linda as part of his Rewards Program?  Actually, it would have been the interesting for the 2nd segment of this episode to be a stand-alone story that showed The Card operation from the opposite POV.  We would see where the cat, the dog, the kids, Linda, her husband and the house go.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I was prepared to say Linda had caused the jingoistically-named Union-76 to mercifully go under before it had the chance to trigger any snowflakes.  Turns out, they still have a few stations.  OK, 1,800.
  • [2] I have no idea if that link is representative of their work.
  • Classic TZ Legacy:  And When the Sky was Opened.  A rocket returns to earth with its crew.  One by one, the crew disappears with only one crew-member remembering them.  Then he disappears and no one at all remembers any astronauts . . . just like today.
  • Skipped Segment: The Junction.

Faith – Dashiell Hammett (Unpublished)

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Fifty men are sitting in the barracks of the canning factory listening to Morphy rail about the factory, the boss, the equipment, the pay.  They are described as “migratory workmen”, which means they were Americans who traveled the USA doing those jobs that Americans won’t do.

Feach laughs, which is considered a huge faux pas.  Morphy asks what is so funny.  He says, “I’ve saw worse, and I expect to see worse” ironically not referring to his grammar.

The next night Morphy proclaims there is no God.  Feach clearly believes otherwise. Morphy demands proof of God’s existence.  Several nights later, Feach wags his finger at Morphy and screeches, “Of course there’s a God!  There’s got to be!”  It took him a week to come with that?  Pascal put more thought into it.  He also cites “the moon and the sun and the stars and flowers and rain.”  Morphy is unimpressed and says “Edison could have made them for all you know.”  Yeah, except he wouldn’t have let God get the credit.

Feach’s most convincing argument is that he knows there is a God because God cursed him.  He had a wife and kid in Ohio — lightning burned down his house with them in it.  He started work in a coal mine and 3 days later a cave-in killed 14 men.  He worked in a box factory that burned down within a week.  He was sleeping in a house in Galveston that was destroyed by a hurricane.  He shipped out of Charleston and all hands except him drowned.  Tough break about the wife and kid, but I’m not seeing the curse.  Feach thinks God is trying to kill him — what a glass-half-empty kind of guy.

Feach says it is happening “because I done a thing” but doesn’t elaborate.  Morphy says “A hell of a Jonah you are!”  Feach warns them that something bad is coming, and not just that last episode of Ray Bradbury Theater in 5 days.

That night, Feach pours gasoline around the 2 barracks and burns them to the ground.  His excuse to Morphy is “Maybe I done it.  And maybe Something used me to do it.  Anyways, if it hadn’t been that, it’d maybe been something worse.”

I’m not sure where Hammett was going with this one.  Are Feach’s tragedies self-inflicted?  Maybe he set the fire that killed his wife and kid, but he didn’t cause a hurricane.

Or was killing his family the thing he done and God really was trying to kill him with the other calamities?  If so, then Hammett muddled the narrative by having the box factory burn down — that could have been by Feach’s human hand.

Was the box factory the same situation as the barracks — him causing a disaster to prevent a larger disaster?  We know he is a fire-bug.  Or was God indeed working through him?

I liked the story and the style.  Of course, it was unpublished, therefore maybe not finished.  If you take it as a fragment, it’s pretty good.

Other Stuff:

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Screaming Woman (02/22/86)

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Drew Barrymore is in bed screaming.  Unfortunately, this is 1986, not 1996; and she is reading a copy of Tales from the Crypt.

Unlike her real childhood, she apparently has parents in this episode.  Her mother sends 11 year old Drew to get some ice cream.  To avoid a DUI, she takes her bike.  She rides through the standard ET / Poltergeist neighborhood of the type that you won’t be seeing much more of on RBT (i.e. American).

We see her buying ice cream at Baskin-Robbins, which is probably product placement by Dairy Queen.  She is next reading her TFTC inside a construction pipe. This is another shot of the type that you will not be seeing much more of on RBT — well composed and executed.  But what happened to the ice cream?  Oh, the humanity!

She faintly hears a woman screaming and goes into the woods to investigate.  The sound seems to be coming from underground.  Drew is spooked and rushes home.  She runs into the kitchen screaming, “There’s a woman screaming!  A screaming woman!”  Her mother blames it on the pulps she is reading, and the cocaine.  Her father says if she cleans her plate, he will go back with her to check it out.  So either a) he doesn’t believe her, or 2) he does believe her, but is leaving the woman in peril until Drew finishes her supper and has a smoke.

Drew and her father go back to the woods after dinner, but there is no sign or sound of the woman.  Undeterred, she finds a couple of shovels and recruits her dippy friend Chubby, no her chubby friend Dippy, to help.  They go back to the woods.  They start digging, but before they get far, the owner of the land, Mr. Kelly, chases them off.

Drew decides it is probably Mrs. Nesbitt screaming.  Her parents had talked about how much the Nesbitts fight.  They also said it had been quiet lately.  She goes to the Nesbitt’s house and Mr. Nesbitt answers the door. She nervously makes up a story about Mrs. Nesbitt offering to give her the recipe for peach pie.

Mr. Nesbitt asks her to come inside and wait.  Drew not only goes into house of the murder suspect who is swilling scotch, she tells him about the titular screaming woman on Mr. Kelly’s land.  He chuckles nervously and says, “You certainly have a weird imagination.  How about a drink?”  When he goes to the kitchen to get the vodka, she gets scared and runs back to the woods.

Yada yada, Drew goes back home, hums a song Mrs. Nesbitt wrote, and returns to the woods.  That night, her father remembers where he heard that song, then finds her bed is empty.  Mr. Nesbitt attacks her in the woods.  Her father heroically shows up and brains him. The cops start digging.

Sure enough, they find a large wooden crate, larger than a casket.  They open it up, and after a few seconds, fingers appear grasping the side.  Yea!  Drew has saved the day!

Not to nitpick, but that must not have been the first scotch Mr. Nesbitt drank that week:

  1. So he kills his wife; let’s even give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was premeditated.  He built or bought this big-ass crate in preparation.  Didn’t his wife question what it was for?  Maybe that was the trigger — “You spent $300 on a big-ass crate, you idiot?”
  2. After killing her, he hauled this giant crate out to the woods by himself with no one seeing him?  Or when he bought it, did he tell Home Depot [1] to deliver it to the woods?
  3. Why not just wrap her in a carpet or blanket?  That big box would store way too much oxygen.  Scorpio didn’t leave his victim that much air.
  4. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if, ya know, he had not done such a half-assed job of killing her.
  5. Why dump her body on Mr. Kelly’s land?  Seeing how he quickly caught Drew and Dippy, he clearly keeps an eye on it.
  6. And, as I am tired of pointing out every few episodes:  A dumpy middle-aged guy is not going bury a 3 x 3 x 6 box a few feet down without a backhoe.
  7. Most nit-picky of all, there was no sign of fresh digging, or a 3 x 3 x 6 pile of displaced earth.  Maybe he had a second 3 x 3 x 6 crate that he put the dirt into and carried it away on his f***n’ back.

But none of this matters in a good episode; and this was a good episode.  It really doesn’t take much to satisfy me.  Drew Barrymore was not a natural young actress, but she really does light up and energize a scene.  I got the sense that the director knew exactly what to do with her, too.

Further kudos to the director for some good locations and imaginative shots.  Much of this was probably due to higher budgets in RBT’s first season.  Still, I think he transcended what he was given.  Good stuff.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Or maybe Crate & Barrel, heyyyooooo!
  • The episode is strangely bookended with unnecessary (but not necessarily unwelcome) vignettes.  In the opening, Bradbury does some acting as he leaves his “magician’s workshop” in search of a story.
  • There is a scene at the end in which Drew mentions Mrs. Goodbody and some boys raising giant mushrooms in their cellars.  I take this as a cryptic reference to the future RBT episode Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!  How very Lost-ian to lay the groundwork for a future episode.  Maybe there was supposed to be a Ray Bradbury Expanded Universe.
  • These first season episodes have ranged from OK to pretty good, so I’m not sure why I bailed on the series.  I think it might have had to do with the next episode which I recall as being dreadful.
  • See you in September!