The Hitchhiker – Videodate (02/16/85)

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Writer Jack Rhodes made a video for a dating service.  He says “I am 31 years old.”  The actor is a pretty close 33, so I can’t use my standard “f***n’ actors, man” line.  However, according to Hollywood age rules, he will probably end up with a 12 year old girl.  He awkwardly says, “I enjoy sports, traveling, movies, museums, and art galleries” rather than delivering some “A” material like “and I got yer Colossus of Rhodes right here, baby!” And he calls himself a writer.

A woman selects his video and they meet up at an art gallery.  In the first exhibit, visitors are encouraged to toss a TV set.  In another, several dummies [1] appear to be walking on a treadmill accompanied by wacky music.  The gallery has everything — atmosphere, visually interesting displays, social commentary, a guy in a beret . . . everything but, ya know, actual art.

They go back to Jack’s place and hit his B&W zebra stripe sheets — now that’s art!  Afterwards, he puts the woman in a cab.  We find out that it was not his swanky apartment.  He slips the doorman a few bucks to let him use it for his many con-quests.  I guess the owners never notice the rumpled sheets and empty liquor bottles.  Although I suspect there is never a package missing from the condom bowl.[3]

Whoa, this is new.  The titular hitchhiker finally appears eight minutes into the episode.  As Jack is driving home, he stops to tell the hitchhiker, “Sorry pal, I live just down the street.”  This is the first time we’ve seen him interact with another character. I wish I could say it was as exhilarating as that time Rod Serling broke the 4th wall, but no.  No, it is not. [2]

Turns out Jack was only pretending to be a writer; we learn that he is a TV salesman.  At his store, he is stalked by Barbara who earlier filmed him leaving the apartment.  She also films him driving home to his shabby apartment.  Inside, we see he has a bulletin board with pictures of his one night stands.  Even more classy, he has a handwritten banner on the board:  CHICKS.  There is another Festrunkian column marked FOXES which is sadly empty.

There was a VHS tape left at his door, which he pops in.  The woman stalking him is wearing just a bra and panties.  She says her name is Barbara and that she has been admiring him for some time now.  She tells Jack to meet her tomorrow at 5:30, then takes off her top.

They meet at the City Cafe.  After playing a godawful 1980s arcade game, they make plans to have dinner at her place tomorrow.  After 6 minutes of absolute nothing at casa de Barbara, she goes to change into something more comfortable.  As all men do, Jack sneaks back to peek at her changing.  They have dinner which kills another couple of minutes.

Blah blah blah.  There is a twist, but everything that precedes it is such a bore it is hard to care.  They had a lot going for them.  Gregg Henry (Jack) is still consistently working as a character actor 30 years later.  Shannon Tweed (Barbara) was so beautiful that even the godawful photographers at Playboy couldn’t ruin her layout.[4] They had the art scene to satirize, they had videodating, they had some arcade games, they had some bondage, and managed to do nothing with any of it.

The DVD will not play and the You-Tube quality is pretty bad.  I will not do what the Playboy staff could not — make Shannon Tweed look bad.  So no pictures.  Googling is encouraged.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Actual dummies, not the patrons who support this nonsense.
  • [2] Did Serling really break the forth wall?  Well, every episode, really.  In that TZ episode, it was more like breaking the first wall.
  • [3] Worst Thanksgiving football game ever.  Insert USC Trojans joke here.  Or any joke.  Just to get one in before this carnage is finished.
  • [4] Frequent crimes: Airbrushing girls to look like plastic mannequins, near-pathological refusal to have 100% nudity, a sheen on the model’s skin you could practically see your reflection in, gauzy filters, posed in my grand-mother’s house, relying on heavy make-up instead of girl-next-door types, rendering celebrities unrecognizable.  But I haven’t seen one in 20 years; I’m sure they’re great now.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Road Hog (12/06/59)

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I wouldn’t mind seeing London.  I guess it would be interesting to see France.  But in the opening shot of this episode, I did not need to see a little girl’s underpants; and she is literally credited as “Little Girl” on IMDb.[1]

She is a butterfly whisperer, playing with a Monarch Butterfly on the porch of a rural gas station / cafe. Salesman Ed Fratus takes pleasure in grinding it under his shoe as he steps up on the porch. [2] When she starts to cry, he laughs and musses her hair.  He obnoxiously tries to sell the cafe owner on various salacious products — key chains with nudie picture viewers, risque playing cards, Pomade lubricant — oh wait, that’s for your hair.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch — literally, the Pine ranch (although they do not literally raise pine trees) — Davey Pine has just been gored by a bull.  His father and brother load him into the bed of the pickup to take him to the hospital.  They get stuck behind Fratus, poking along on a narrow dirt road.  Clay Pine blows the horn, trying to get by, but that just irritates Fratus who yells, “Stupid farmers!  Cornholing Cornpicking yokels!”  Clay yells that it is an emergency.  Fratus yells back, “So what, ain’t no skin off my nose!”

Pa Pine tells Clay, he has to get around the car, no matter what it takes.  When Clay tries to pass him, Fratus runs him off the road into a mudhole.  The Pines have to fill in the mudhole so they can drive out.  They finally make it to the hospital, but it is too late.  Davey is dead.  The doctor says if they had only gotten Davey there 15 minutes earlier . . .

Sons Clay and Sam Jr are ready to find the man and kill him, but Pa says they will do things his way.  Pine psychically goes to the gas station and demands to know who the driver of the station wagon is.  The owner rats out Ed Fratus.

Pine sits in the cafe day after day waiting for Fratus to return.  He just sits and stares at the cafe door, even refusing a free beer.  Eventually Fratus does return — and fortuitously on a day when Clay and Sam Jr are in the cafe.  When he enters, Clay and Sam Jr go outside.  Clay puts a hose in his mouth and starts siphoning the gas out of Fratus’s car.  They leave him enough for 2-3 miles, which would have been about a gallon back then.

Pa says nothing as Fratus and the owner do a little business.  Fratus leaves, and a few minutes later, the Pine family finds him stranded by the side of the road.  Pa says he has a drum of gas back at the ranch and uses his truck to push the car back to his house.  He tells Sam to gas up the car while he and Fratus have a drink.  As we are all guilty of doing, Clay was storing two bottles of unlabeled clear liquid on the same shelf — one liquor and one poison.  They make a big deal about preventing Fratus from drinking the poison.  After a few glasses, Pa tells him the story of Davey and how he died because of a titular road hog.

The perfectly-cast sweaty, fat-faced Fratus says, “You did poison me.”  He screams that he still has time to get to the hospital.  He takes off in his car, but darn the luck, Clay’s truck is blocking the road.  Trying to pass Clay, Fratus runs off the road and is killed.  Of course, it is revealed that there was no poison.

Classic AHP.  Robert Emhardt (Ed Fratus) was so smug and full of hate, I don’t know how he went out in public without people punching him in the face.  If I ever meet Stephen Colbert, I’ll ask him.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  I always thought the rhyme referenced “a little girl”, but it seems to be the more generic “someone.”  I guess I could rewrite the opening, but do I appear to put that much effort into this?
  • AHP Deathwatch:  Richard Chamberlain, Jack Easton and Betsy Hale are still making the effort.
  • [2] Unlike Eckles in A Sound of Thunder, this was done on purpose and gleefully.  I actually did expend some effort to add that above, but couldn’t figure out how to do it.
  • These were the two filthiest vehicles I’ve ever seen, even before running off the road.

Twilight Zone – Shelter Skelter (05/21/87)

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Sally Dobbs and her daughter Deidre are lugging luggage out to the car.  The men-folk — Harry and his young son Jason — are downstairs practicing on the family pistol range.  Sally calls Harry on an intercom to send Jason up.  He tells her to send down another beer . . . his third . . . to the pistol range.

Sally (Joan Allen) dutifully brings the beer down to the titular shelter.  Harry (Joe Montagna) is teaching Jason to shoot, including the importance of ear-protection (although he clearly considers eye-protection to be for pussies).  She sends Jason upstairs and hands Harry the beer.  He opens it, carelessly spraying her with fizz.  She thinks Jason is too young to train with guns.  Harry says he wants his family to be safe.  I know he is being set up as the bad guy, but I’m not seeing it so far.

He goes upstairs to see his family off to visit Sally’s sister.  Sally is surprised he will notice their absence at all because he spends so much time in the shelter.  Harry grabs her arm and warns her to not tell her sister about the shelter.  “It’s just for the four of us.  Don’t you ever forget that!”  So he wants to limit the occupancy to fit the provisions he has on hand to safely assure his family’s survival; just pure evil.  C’mon, he’s a little crude, but he is protective, spends time with the kids, surprisingly has no beer gut, and they have a very nice home.

Harry’s pal Nick stops by.  He mentions the news saying things are heating up in the Middle East.  Wow, so that area was a powder keg even 30 whole years ago! [1] A 1980s linebacker-shouldered, big-haired reporterette says the President and First Lady have been taken to a secure location.  Nick says Harry is right that “the whole world is going straight down the toilet.”  Harry says we’re already there, “drugs, terrorism, pornography!”  He thinks a bomb would set a lot of things right again.  He says he and Nick don’t belong in a world of degenerate rock stars, hair-dressers and bureaucrats.  He dreams of raising his son in a world with “all the scum burned off.”  Uh, dude, you do remember Nick is not on the guest-list, right?  Awkward!

After a few beers, he breaks his own rule and gives Nick a tour of the shelter.  He tells Nick there is room for five and he is invited to join them.  He just better hope there is a nuclear holocaust before the Dobbs have a third kid.  Luckily for him, I think Sally would prefer that to having sex with Harry again.  Harry show off his communications system, filtration system, food stock, water.  He figures five people can survive down here for five months.

While demonstrating his antenna system, they see a news report that all hell is breaking loose.  Harry calls Sally and tells her to come back immediately.  Her sister calls him Godzilla, and Sally mocks him before hanging up.  Then the big one hits.  Harry and Nick are in the shelter, but the antenna has been destroyed so they have no contact with the outside.  Nick wants to leave to find his parents, but Harry physically restrains him and shows him the lethal radiation level, saving his life.  Yeah, Harry is practically Hitler.

Six weeks later, they seem to be holding up well.  Both have beards, Nick is playing solitaire, Harry is doing a little ironing.  The place seems clean and orderly; although, I suspect Harry is now regretting his stand against pornography.  They hear noises above.  Nick thinks someone is coming to rescue them.  Harry sees the radiation level and says “they would be the walking dead.”  Nick tries to yell for them, but Harry silences him lest they be subjected to that godawful last season.

After ten months, the radiation has not lessened.  Nick goes for a walk outside. When he returns, Harry won’t let him in, and rightly so.  Through the door, Nick says the city is in ruins and it is perpetual night.

What happens next is a cheat, but like so much of Joy Ride, it is a good enough episode that I can overlook the flaws.  It turns out, the blast was not global Armageddon, but an oopsy at the local Air Force Base.  Somehow, within 10 months, the debris has been cleaned up, the radiation is gone, and parks are green, leafy and sunny, and the Women’s Olympic volleyball team practices there.  All of the radioactive ruins have been bull-dozed into a heap, and a giant concrete dome built over them.  It’s not quite as crazy as it sounds.

While I like the image of moving from the dark confined shelter to the sunny park, a few things irk me.  Harry didn’t really deserve this fate.  Cruel undeserved fate is always welcome in the TZ, but they were trying to make him deserving of this and failed.  Also, Sally seems way too happy that her husband, the father of her children is buried under this dome.  She has to suspect he survived the blast in the shelter, but she didn’t speak up when it was being built?

And what was up with that dog-POV shot?  Right after the camera moves outside, we get a shaky-cam at a low level racing along the grass.  There is a dog seen later, but this isn’t his POV:  1) There was no establishing shot of him, and 2) the shot actually begins at human-eye level.  The shot ends with an atrocious portrayal of another reporterette.

But all that can be overlooked.  The great story, combined with an atypically appropriate score make this one a winner.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Boy, I was way off!  This conflict has been going on for thousands of years!
  • Classic TZ Connection:  The Shelter.  But mostly just because they both feature a fall-out shelter.
  • Title Analysis:  Would also have accepted Helter Shelter.
  • Skipped Segment:  Private Channels — An obnoxious punk’s Walkman allows him to hear other people’s thoughts.  With his Watchman, he can see their underwear.
  • I don’t think the Sony Watchman portable TV ever really caught on.  Maybe if they could have added a phone to it.  Also a pretty good segment; but seriously, that kid is annoying.