One Step Beyond – Ordeal on Locust Street (09/22/59)

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Host John Newland shows us a house in Boston.  He says the door is kept locked at all times.   The curtains on the window are always drawn.  If they show a Pizza Guy driving up, I’ll get chills.

Anna Parish and her mother are planning for Anna’s beau Danny to visit the house — the first time anyone has been inside since they moved to Boston.  As they work on the Boston Baked Beans and Boston Cream Pie, they are surprised to hear someone shriek outside.  Mrs. Parish assures her daughter that no one can see in the windows.

Outside, Mr. Parish catches Danny still looking toward the window.  “What is it?” Danny cries.  He is shocked and tells Mr. & Mrs. Parish he had heard stories, but now “I saw for myself!  A red velvet chair!”  Well, that is an affront to good taste, but hardly worth screaming like a girl.  He continues, “That’s what was so horrible!  A red velvet chair with a high back!”  OK, lazy-boy, we get it.  Oh wait, he goes on to describe the occupant of the chair which he says would have seemed more at home in the sea than in a house. 

Over Anna’s objections, Mrs. Parish tells him that is her son, i.e. Anna’s brother.  Mrs. Parish assures him the problem is not hereditary or contagious but that they all got two shots and multiple boosters because Twitter experts unanimously told them too.  Danny contemplates missing out on Anna’s Pie and a hoped-for Southie, then flees like he just met Marilyn Munster’s family.

Anna screams that she hates her brother.  Mrs. Parish gives her two really good slaps. [2] Anna runs out of the room.  Her father tells his wife that either they put Jason “some place” or he will leave her.  So that’s the end of Mr. Parish.

Mrs. Parish brings in a defrocked doctor who has had success using a “mind force.”

Dr. Brown hypnotizes Anna as an example.  He does the usual tricks.  He has her raise her hand, act as if she had been burned, ignore the pain of a pin-prick, and check her 401(k) without digging her MAGA hat out of the closet.  He suggests to her that she will forget the pain of Danny running away and, hey, are those beans for anybody?

After reviving Anna, Doc Brown gets the key to Jason’s room.  The scene is from Jason’s POV.  He explains to Jason how he lost his medical license because he doubted the efficacy of masks, but might make an exception in this case.  He also warns that this might take a while.  We see the doctor take his scaley hands.  

Three months later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Parish comes back home.  He has brought someone with him who will take Jason to a hospital.  Ma Parish is distraught; she will hear nothing of Jason being taken from his home.  She even gets a pistol out of the desk.  

As she is about to ventilate Mr. Parish, Anna enters the room, all smiles.  With her is Jason, now a handsome, unblemished young man.  Doc Brown’s crazy hypno-therapy got him out of that room!  Although the two of them living in there eating beans everyday for 3 months was probably also a factor.

John Newland tells us Doc Brown did not live to see hypnosis become accepted in the medical community.  No shit — I probably won’t either.  

Well, I guess OSB realized what I’ve said from the start.  Sticking to their slim slice of the genre pie was not sustainable.  There was just too much “sameness” to the ghost stories regardless of what time period and majority-white country they took place in.[1]  I appreciate their attempt to branch out, but this was a titular Step in the wrong direction.

Hypnosis might have its place in certain stories, or in helping people quit smoking, but this does not seem a likely application.  Just using the mind caused genetic deformities to disappear, caused scales to fall from his body, and left no scarring.  That’s a leap, even on the Christmas episode of a show about the supernatural. [3]

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  I’ve lost count (and interest) how many OSB episodes are set outside the USA, but they did seem to shoot for about 50%.  As I’ve mentioned before, they never got to Africa or Asia.  Well, they did have an episode in India, but I guess you can’t say “the Orient” any more.
  • [2]  Note to self:  Learn to make GIFs.  Also: running low on peanut butter.
  • [3]  Rules broken:  1) I’ve skipped other episodes about kids with “issues”, but Jason seemed to be older; even though I guess he had been a guppy at one time.  2) I usually skip Christmas episodes because they are so predictable and mawkish.  OSB tricked me by making the episode last 3 months.  And it felt that way, too.

Suspense – The Doors on the Thirteenth Floor (05/31/49)

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We open on two dead women having lunch.  Well they’re dead now, not in the scene below.  Although the one on the left is iffy. [1]

Agatha asks Sally [5] (pop quiz, hotshot: which is which?) how work is going.  Sally says the hours are long, but it keeps her in New York.  She also mentions seeing a lot of George who lives in her building.

Well, hey, George drops by the table and greets his Aunt Agatha.  He says he is surprised Sally isn’t working.  She says, “The typewriter’s under the table” although I’ve never heard it called that.  George has brought a taxi to pick up his elderly aunt.  She has not finished her tea so tells him to have the taxi wait.  Sadly, he does not have enough cash.  Agatha gives Sally that knowing look.  They hear thunder, so Agatha decides to leave after all.  She gives Sally cash to pay the bill and asks her to drop by her apartment that night.

This is some swell apartment building with a doorman, a mailman, a bellhop, and an elevator operator.  Unfortunately, they are all one creepy guy named Andy.  He takes George, Agatha, and her neighbor Harry Crane [2] up to the 13th floor.  On the way, Harry complains that Agatha is playing her radio next door too loudly at night.  Although, because the show is Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy, it is actually coming from across the alley. [6]   They get out on 13, but George asks Andy to wait because the elevator doesn’t have a meter like the taxi.  Agatha asks him to stay, but he says he has things to do.

After he leaves, she notices that a jade Buddha and some other items (a pyrite Joseph Smith and a rare Reese’s Jesus made out of chocolate and peanut butter) are missing.  The window is open.  She calls the cops, but a beefy hand covers her mouth.

Sally comes home.  She knocks on Agatha’s door, but gets no answer.  Harry comes out into the hall and tells her 1) it is too late to be knocking on doors, 2) her smelly cat sneaks into his window at night and wakes him up, and 3) he believes FDR is still alive and we never landed on Guam.

After she puts away the groceries, she decides to try Agatha’s door again.  She discovers her own door will not open.  She does not see what we see — an eye staring in through her peephole!  She tries to make a call, but the phone is dead.  Yikes!

She writes a note for the milkman that I-am-trapped-by-a-killer-please-for-the-love-of-God-let-me-out!, and also no more cheese because it makes the cat fart.  She slides it halfway under the door, but seconds later notices the paper has already been taken.  Through the peephole, she sees Andy leaving Agatha’s apartment.  Well wait, was he doing wind-sprints from Agatha’s door, to Sally’s door to grab the note, back to Agatha’s door, then fleeing Agatha’s door again?  She tries to get the attention of the Peeping Tom across the alley, but his wife busts him before she can get her blouse off.

Next, she ties a note to her cat’s collar and sends it out on the ledge to Harry’s window. [3]  A little later Harry knocks on her door, and she opens it right up. Hunh?  OK, maybe someone unlocked it from the outside, but she did not know that and she did not hesitate for a second to open it.  Anyhoo, he chews her out for letting the cat go in his window again.  She tries to explain about her door and seeing Andy, but he doesn’t care.

She tries the fire door to go drag George into this, but it won’t open.  She sees a paper on the floor.  But wait, this note is folded up like the one she attached to her cat, not flat like the one she shoved under the door.  How the heck would that have gotten there?  I guess Crane could have dropped it when he returned the cat, but why should this be worth dwelling on?  Even if it was the milkman note, so what?  She goes to Agatha’s apartment, but does not see her.  There is a single shoe beside the refrigerator. She opens the refrigerator door and screams in revulsion at some old cottage cheese, and the old woman’s body.  Oh, wait, that’s not cottage cheese.  Sally staggers to the phone and calls the police.

At the same time, Andy and George are dragging a large wicker basket from the elevator to Agatha’s door.  Andy says he killed Agatha because she came home early and caught him in her apartment, and that he fortuitously just got a great deal  on the basket at at Pier 1.  They open the door and drag the basket in — wait, if  Andy has a master key, why did he come in through the window for the heist?  And, hey, where is Sally?

Andy and George argue over how Agatha’s leg came to be sticking out of the door, and whether she might still be alive.  As they argue, there is a shockingly well-composed shot of Sally hiding in the living room.

The men begin pulling Agatha out of the refrigerator and the credits begin.  Well that didn’t resolve much.  The abrupt conclusion on Tubi is noted by reviewers at IMDb.  It just seemed egregious even for this series, so I searched for another copy of the episode at YouTube after finding nothing at Pornhub.  Sure enough, the last 2 minutes had the climax.  At YouTube, I mean, not Pornhub.

Sally tries to flee the apartment, but George catches her.  She distracts him, runs out into the hallway and locks Agatha’s door.  What kind of crazy apartment building is this where tenants can be locked in?  Where does this take place, Wuhan?  No wonder the cat is always trying to escape.  Naturally Harry comes out to complain about the noise and fluoride in the water.  He threatens to call the police, and Sally begs him to.

Of course, the episode is dreadful by today’s standards.  But is that really an excuse?  They had made some pretty good movies by this time.  Hitchcock had several suspense classics under his belt, but who could ever see them there? [4] All the pieces were there, but the low budget, live TV, poor picture quality, and intrusive organ music undermine the whole production.

Maybe it is better to judge these episodes on what they were attempting.  There were a couple of set pieces designed for the titular suspense here, so they did make an effort.  I guess what I’m trying to say is, what the hell happened to this country where we can’t count all the votes in 2 freakin’ weeks?

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Nell Harrison (Agatha) was born in 1880.  She might be the earliest-born actor I’ve encountered here yet.  18 years after this episode, in a stretch, she played “Old Woman” in The Producers.  Paging Oscar!
  • [2]  Harry is played by Russell Collins who I previously anointed as the greatest actor in history.  To be honest, he isn’t very good here, but it is one of his first roles.
  • [3]  In a quaint sign of live TV, she can’t make the note stay attached.  Luckily she releases the cat just outside her window so we can’t see her hands as she drops it.  Bravo!  However, she also releases it in the opposite direction of Harry’s apartment.
  • And how crazy do you have to be to use a cat for anything on live TV?
  • [4]  Blatant fat-shaming.  And isn’t the phrase fat-shaming just more fat-shaming?
  • [5]  Where are all the Sallys today?  Seems like a fine name, with attractive connotations.  Sally Ride was cool, Sally Field is still cute at 95.
  • [6]  If this doesn’t make sense, have a séance and ask your grandparents; or a dead nerd.

Tales of the Unexpected – Poison (03/29/80)

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Roald Dahl’s intros don’t usually do much for me or the story.  However, this time it casts a spell over the whole episode.  He tells of the time as a young man that he looked out the window and saw a 6-foot black mamba snake behind the gardener — or as we call them today, the Mexican. er, landscaper.  He shouted to the man to turn around, but the hombre is bitten and DIES!  Hitchcock can deliver his droll intros about murder 1,000 times, but this short first-person anecdote stays with you throughout the episode.  Kudos!

And if that intro did not sufficiently make your skin crawl, the sitar music should do the trick.  I think that’s why George Harrison was perpetually haggard [1] — nausea at all that sitar music.

Harry Pope is a little haggard himself as he has been on the wagon for three weeks.  He is also feeling pressure from his boss.  Harry works in India training citizens there to speak English.  His boss in London orders him to hand over the training classes to Bengali teachers because of reports that some Indian immigrant’s kid in Podunk, KY came in 2nd in the Spelling Bee.

Harry sees this as an opportunity to get back to England so he can enjoy that delicious English cuisine.  And if you’re living in a place where the cuisine makes English food seem tasty by comparison, by God, I doff my chapeau to you sir.

He climbs into his bed which is enclosed in mosquito netting.  Sadly, it does nothing to keep out snakes.  As he is reading [3], we see a krait [2] slither into his bedroom.  He feels a warmth down below and sees the sheets begin to rise, and it’s not because his bedtime reading material is like mine.  He lifts the sheet and sees the snake sitting on his chest.  He is immobile and sweating profusely.  Harry, not the snake.

Hours later, for some reason, his British pal Timber brings a blonde dame back to Harry’s house.  In a low voice, Harry calls him into the bedroom.  He tells Timber and the girl that there is a krait on his stomach, under the sheet.  He implores his friend to call for help, and maybe another girl.  Timber calls Doctor Kunzru — hey there’s an actual Indian in India — that the woman knows.

The doctor has an antidote that might work, but they want a fallback position.  They decide to sprinkle some chloroform on the sheets to put the snake to sleep which sounds ridiculous, but I’m no Indian.  All the while, Harry is motionless and glistening.

The woman is afraid the doctor will recognize her even without her feet in stirrups and blab that she is cheating on her husband.  She sneaks out and takes the doctor’s car, which I guess was her only purpose in the episode.  BTW, what better way to not draw attention to yourself than to steal a dude’s car.

Timber and the doctor slowly pull back the sheets and they all see the snake is gone.  Timber somehow knows where the woman is going so he drives the doctor to get his car.

Harry goes to the kitchen, rather than Europe, which would have been my move.  He takes a bottle of Stoly out of the well-stocked liquor cabinet which all recovering alkies keep close by.  He reaches for a glass and the snake strikes, biting him and coiling around his arm.  He dies on the spot — the spot made by his own pool of urine, I imagine.

So we have a great synergistic intro and a great premise, but no real value is added beyond the suspense that is fundamentally baked into the premise.  There is no revenge, no come-uppance, no karma, no irony . . . he just gets bit in the kitchen instead of the bedroom.  Harry was not a bad guy, so what is the point?  The woman was cheating on her husband, maybe something could have been done with that.  Of course, it would be sexist not to point out that Timber was also guilty of adultery.  The doctor says to Timber in the car that he is not a “failed MD”.  What is that about?

Still, the premise was so great that I have to give it a thumbs-up!

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  As observed by Norm McDonald.
  • [2]  Pronounced CRITE.  Who knew?
  • [3]  Late Call by Angus Wilson is displayed so prominently that it must be meaningful, but dang if I can figure out why.
  • I see that this is not the first adaptation.  Like Post Mortem few weeks ago, I somehow skipped the AHP version.  Cripes, it’s starting to look like I put no thought at all into this thing.  So that will be the next AHP entry.
  • Proximity Alert:  Anthony Steel appeared in Galloping Foxley just 2 episodes ago.  Give someone else a chance!
  • Kudos to Andrew Ray (Harry) who appeared to do some real snake-handling at the end.  Again, not like me with my bedtime reading material.