Local douche-bag Jerry Macklin takes an ancestral mask off his wall to show his party guests. He shouts to his business manager, “What did I pay for this one, Mike?” $4,000. “I took this to an appraiser and he valued it at what?” $16,000. He figures to donate it to a museum, take a tax write-off and double his money. He sees a another woman giving him the eye across the room and goes to her.
He asks if he knows her and she says no. This is where being a woman is handy; his next question to a dude would be “WTF are you doing in my apartment?” Her name is Tanya. Mike interrupts while Jerry is hitting on her. Someone fell through a rotten railing at one of his properties and plummeted a couple of stories. Since Tanya has disappeared, Jerry goes to check it out.
The place is definitely a fixer-upper, has character, is a slum. He goes in and checks out the crumbling building. He sees a snake slither into an apartment and, inexplicably, follows it. The old woman living there knows his name. She thinks it is strange that he owns the building but has never been there. He says he owns stock in General Motors but has never been to Detroit.
She asks what he is going to do about people being hurt in his building. He says, “I’m going to make repairs.” As she is stroking the snake, he says he will fix the railing, and fix the heat, “all kinds of stuff”.
He tells Mike about the building as they are working out at a gym. There are 2 easily mockable things in this scene. First, Mike is wearing insanely short shorts. Second, Jerry is only lifting 2 plates on his machine. What is that, 23 pounds, sport?
Jerry wants to do the right thing. He asks Mike how much it would take to fix the place up. Mike says it would cost him the beach house he had been dreaming of.
Back at home, Jerry stares wistfully at a model of his dream-house. There is a very creepy shot of a snake crawling around a hanging plant basket.[1] Jerry carefully carries it to the bathroom and cleverly puts it in the shower stall. He calls the super and says, “This is Mr. Macklin in 7-B.” There is a knock at the door. He abandons the call and opens the door to reveal 1) Tanya, and 2) that he lives in apartment 7-5, not 7-B.
Nice work with those 2 plates, he-man!
Tanya gives him a massage as he tells his favorite story, how he got rich. Mike calls. While Tanya slips into a negligible negligee, Jerry tells him to sell the building. Tanya unbuckles Jerry’s belt — hey, she’s a snake handler, too! Wait, you don’t think . . .
Tanya rubs him down with oil, then they have the sex.[2] Jerry wakes up alone in the morning. He sees a spot of blood, then more, then way more. His right leg is a bloody mess. He goes to the emergency room. They clean off the leg and reveal a fresh tattoo of a huge snake from his ankle up to his thigh.
After he is cleaned up, he goes back to the building. He accuses the old woman of siccing Tanya on him. She says she didn’t sic anyone on him . . . wink, wink. He shows her the tattoo (and the most precious little anklet sock — seriously dudes, there is no acceptable style where a guy wears less than a full sock). She says he brought it on himself — literally on himself — by not making the repairs.
He says he will make the repairs and give the building to the tenants. He asks if that will satisfy her. She says, “It is not me you have to satisfy.” He rips open his shirt and sees the tattoo has moved up around his chest.
Later at his apartment, he sees the tattoo has advanced over his shoulder and is up to his neck. Tanya comes in. She gives him a knife and tells him to cut off the head of the serpent before it strikes. He sees the snake around his ankle begins to ripple. His skin bulges. We can see something running beneath the tattoo, working its way up to his neck. A snake bursts its head through the skin near his neck. He screams and falls to the floor.
When he gets back up, the snake and the tattoos are gone. He throws the model of his beach-house out the window. He looks out the window. He sees the old woman walking away.
This is an example of what The Hitchhiker should be. It is an interesting story, well-shot, an genuinely creepy. Well-done.
Other Stuff:
- [1] This is worth the price of admission for me. There was a scene in the old movie Frogs which had a snake in a chandelier. The question of how that snake got into the chandelier was a conundrum that still boggles my mind.
- [2] In the commentary, Harry Hamlin says he got the idea of their sex scene from a copy of an old nudie magazine called Eros. Really, no one could independently come up with the idea of inter-racial sex?
On the way to Sentinel Mesa, Julie spots a man sleeping under a tree by the side of the road. She yells, “Pops!” and tells the professor to pull over. Pops jumps in the car and helps himself to the Professor’s cigarettes, and lighter. The Professor is next railroaded into picking up Julie’s brother Harry, who is kind of a thug.
Throughout the episode, the Professor is constantly taken advantage of and scammed. Edgar Buchanan is perfect as Pops. He has an old-timer, country-bumpkin charm to him that masks what a snake he is. You really want to like him. Collin Wilcox Paxton as Julie is a paradox. She seems to be a terrible actress, but she might have out-smarted me. She comes off as such a sexy, feral maniac that you can’t help but like her. Maybe Harry was adopted.
After the broadcast, Christie and Shauna go see Marc at his photo-graphy studio. His current gig is shooting scantily-clad, athletic young women exercising. Shauna helpfully says, “Remember when you had a body like that?” She hands Christie a card for her miracle water, Aqua Vita.
As soon as she gets home, she runs to the water cooler. Despite the earlier shot of the key, the water is fine. In fact, because of a continuity error, there is actually more water in the tank than when she left. The water works immediately and she takes off the scarf and glasses to reveal her younger self.
The next scene is them as an elderly couple. Well, as the Aqua Vita man explained they only look old. They can still go have wild sex . . . whoa, did they think this through? I hate to say it, but it is kind of sweet until Charles Aidman’s insipid narration ruins the moment.
Coleman Fuller shows up in the office of detective Percy Warren. His rich uncle Henry Fuller was bumped off and he doesn’t trust the police to get the killer. He admits he found Warren by going to the Yellow Pages and backing up through the private dicks. Not only does he not seem to appreciate the insult to Warren, but that was also a shot out of nowhere against Nero Wolfe and V.I. Warshawski. On the other hand, given that this was 1932, I guess we should just be thankful he didn’t find Charlie Chan in the Yellow Pages.
At the generically named Research Center for Advanced Studies [1], we see the most advanced thinking machine ever constructed — blinking light and knob technology made great strides in the 1950’s. People from all over the country submit questions to the machine like “WTF are we doing in Korea?” Host Truman Bradley tells us that, like a human being, a computer can have a nervous breakdown, a bug not worked out until the HAL 9001.
He stops by the pharmacy to pick up whatever you take for being electro-cuted and flat-lining for a couple of minutes. He sees a hot blonde in the phone booth and asks Pete the soda-jerk [2] who she is. Pete is busy adding up the day’s receipts, but says she lives in the apartment above him. Vic amazes him by adding the columns of figures instantaneously. With his new super-hearing, he can hear Sally’s boyfriend Frank being mean on the phone.
The next day, Vic goes to Dr. Stern at Leland University “to get an answer to his dilemma.” Although, I don’t think dilemma means what the writer thinks it means. Miraculously, Vic catches him during office hours. Had he arrived 15 minutes later, he would have missed him; or 15 min-utes earlier. The professor suggests he would be better off seeing a psychiatrist. Then Vic is able to tell him the conversation on a call he receives.
Back in the pharmacy, Sally meets up with Vic. She thanks him for saving her life. Vic tells her that his brush with death has inspired him to “swing the pendulum” the other way, to go back to school, to enter the bustling field of medical research. He encourages her to do the same. Of course, his brush with death was the result of a lab accident which endow-ed him with super-powers; and hers was a failed suicide attempt resulting from soul-crushing depression and a overwhelming sense of loneliness, hopelessness, and despair. But I’m sure they’ll be fine.