Amazon sez: “A man kills a young hoodlum who has just robbed a liquor store.” Ya know, if that’s the whole story, it’s enough for me. The bigger crime this week is how riddled with commercials Amazon has become. But I digress . . .
Gerald Clarke pulls into America’s cleanest alley and enters an immaculate liquor store. He grabs a six-pack. The elderly clerk says she can’t break a five, but was a seven during the Hoover Administration. She offers to let him settle-up later, but he refuses. In the background, we see the aforementioned hoodlum emerge from the storeroom.
Said hoodlum jams the gun in Clarke’s back causing him to sweat profusely. The clerk tells the kid he has the loot, so skedaddle — and, for God’s sake, take some of that Zima display with you! The kid runs out, and the clerk reveals she had a pistol but was too scared to use it. [2]
Clarke grabs the pistol and runs after the kid. He sees the getaway car getting away and fires two shots into it. The car crashes into a wall. Clarke fires 2 more shots just to be sure. Dude, you have 2 more bullets!
At the police station, the cops are pretty sympathetic to Clarke. Actually, they are very sympathetic. I mean, I’m a law & order guy, but sadly you’re not allowed to chase the bad guy down and kill him, even here in Florida. They say the robber was 18 year old Jimmy Philips.
Clarke explains why he panicked when confronted — or even conbacked — with a gun.. When he was in Germany during WWII, he saw a man get killed. It was not even combat, but an argument over a Fraulein. Since that day, he has broken out in projectile sweating, heart palpitations, and extreme nausea every time he even sees a pistol or a Spätzle. [3]
Sgt. Schwartz says Clarke is free to go. The detective assures him, “A man has a right to defend himself.” You know, from a crashed car with a dead driver.
A woman in the waiting room mistakes Clarke for a policeman. She begins crying and Clarke hands her his handkerchief. Given the buckets he was sweating an hour ago, I have to think he is doing her no favor. She talks about her little angel Jimmy, raising him as a single mother. She can’t understand why he was killed for waving around an empty gun. Tell it to MSNBC, baby! Hearing the gun was not loaded further flusters Clarke.
Clarke goes to Jimmy’s gravesite for the service. Strange that for all the dead bodies on AHP, we don’t see many funerals. I’m sure the fact that she is a single blonde chick — and, hey! — suddenly without kids had nothing to do with it. He approaches a man who turns out to be Mrs. Phillips’ boss. Clarke wants to pay for the funeral, but the boss has already taken care of that. The man tells Clarke not to worry too much, that this was all Jimmy’s fault. Say, no wonder they made this guy the boss!
Mrs. Philips tracks Clarke down at work. He says they can meet at his place to talk.
[FREAKIN’ COMMERCIALS]
Mrs. Philips masterfully interrogates Clarke as brutally as O’Brien grilled Winston Smith in 1984 or like Megyn Kelly destroyed Jake Tapper in 2025. [2] She goes through the whole sequence of events. Clarke nervously tries to justify why he took the clerk’s gun, why he chased Jimmy into the parking lot, and why he kept firing after Jimmy was hit and the car was crashed. He says he panicked with that gun stuck in his back. When he turns back to face Mrs. Phillips, she is pointing a pistol at him. Ach du Lieber, how many gats does this family own? Golly Moses, naturally he’s a punk! [4]
Even more so than in the liquor store, Clarke breaks out in panic. This was very well shot to highlight his beefy sweaty face, glistening like the end of a Porn-Hub video. He pleads with Mrs. Phillips to put the gun away. He says this will solve nothing, it will just ruin her life.
She puts the gun down and gets her coat from the closet. When she turns around, the profusely sweating Clarke is pointing the pistol at her. Why do these chowderheads keep turning their backs on people with guns?
He shoots her and she collapses on the floor. Then he gives her a John Wick double-tap, blasting her again. He screams, “I told you not to point a gun at me!” Dude, you have four more . . . OK, that’s probably enough.
This reminds me of the very first episode of AHP (not covered here). It is such a shock and so brutally callous that it is exhilarating! Kudos!
Other Stuff
- [1] The kid, perhaps erroneously, flees out the same door he emerged from. [UPDATE] I saw that mentioned as an error on another site. In reality, he was hiding behind the door. That’ll teach me to believe some idiot blogger.
- [2] Seriously, you will see what a worthless waste of oxygen 99% of “journalists” really are.
- [3] Would also have accepted Sülze (Head Cheese), but Spätzle seemed more uniquely German. Plus, sounds like pistol !
- [4] OK, as any heterosexual who can stomach only this one musical [5] can tell you, the link above goes to America, not the quoted Gee Officer Krupke. While Krupke is also a masterful hoot, I can’t watch that supercut of America without reloading 3 times.
- [5] Would also have accepted The Blues Brothers.
- Robert Paget (Jimmy the Hood) is credited as “Auditioning Hitler” in The Producers (1967). Boy, that guy really played some bad eggs.
- As usual, a better write-up of the story and production can be found at bare*bones e-zine.
Smoke on your pipe and put that in.
After being mocked by less-attractive classmates, Susan takes the walk-of-shame home, unwisely taking the shortcut-of-shame through the woods. She stops at a small lake and looks at her reflection (which would be impossible from her position, BTW). After hearing voices telling her she is a nothing, she throws rocks at her reflection (actually, it would be the reflection of the camerman. Acting!). Voices tell her to make herself important. She tears a few pieces of her clothing and goes running, screaming out of the park.
U-Boat 147 is docked off the coast of Northern Germany. Everyone who thought Germany was landlocked, rise your 
As depth charges explode around them, the Captain decides to surface and surrender. Hitler is dead, the war is over, and he has no clean turtlenecks left, so what is the point?
Extras in laughably anachronistic clothes flee from Purdy’s Pharmacy like they just found out the Coke no longer contains cocaine. Purdy tells Fire Chief Keating that the fire started from nowhere. He calls over local high school doofus Tim Plunkett to confirm his story. Tim says he was nowhere near the barrel that caught fire, but he rats out Patty and Alice. Purdy vouches for Patty, but Alice is new in town. Like all pretty young blondes with a snappy bod, she is ostracized by the kids at school. If she wore glasses, they’d stone her.
Sadly, she takes a shortcut through the woods that goes past the ol’ Plunkett shack. Tim grabs her and drags her inside. Within seconds, we hear her screams and fire shoots out of the window. Alice runs out in tears. Tim stumbles out with burnt arms and — presumably — massively swollen bruised balls.
Will says in disbelief, “It started all by itself! I saw it!” Mildred says, “Not by itself. There’s a devil in her! She’s a witch!” Sadly it ends there without us seeing Will boot Mildred out of the house.