What’s up with the Weems?  First Borgus, and now the indestructible Clarence.  OK, they aired 14 years apart, so I guess there is no conspiracy.

The board of the Knights of the Golden Lodge came up with a boffo idea for their members.  They bought a plot of land to be used as a cemetery.  The problem is, people aren’t exactly dying to get in.  Taxes and upkeep are killing their cash flow.

They agree that the problem is that no one wants to be the first, so they must find someone to occupy the first grave.  Their first thought is of Clarence Weems, a member who has been in ill health for the past year.  They decide to offer him $50 / week (over $400 in 2014 dollars) until he dies if he agrees to be the first customer at Elysium Fields.

The men go to Weems’ 4th floor apartment to make their pitch.  He doesn’t want charity but agrees to the deal as a business proposition. Papers are signed.

Weems immediately takes a turn for the better; also for the nurse, as he begins feeling frisky.  He applies to have his membership in the lodge reactivated.  The board climbs the 3 flights of stairs to visit him again, but he is asleep.  He does manage to make it to the lodge dance, though.  And enter the cha-cha contest.

The board pays another visit to Weems.  His doctor tells them that they are responsible for his amazing recovery, that having the security of the lifetime annuity has added years to his life.

They decide to see if Weems will accept $500 to release them from the contract.  When they go to his apartment, they see him moving a piano (correction, seems to be something else, but I like my idea better).  This so enrages the Grand Poobah of the lodge, that he keels over on the stairs.  Weems generously offers his grave for the Poobah to be buried in.

A simple, fun little episode even though the Poobah didn’t really deserve to die.  They could have ended the episode with the face-palm realization that it was their generosity that doomed the lodge.  It would have been a bloodless, A.A. Milne type episode, but still rich with irony.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors, but Don Keefer gave it good try, just passing away in September at age 98.
• Keefer was in The Caine Mutiny where there was a character named Keefer.  There was also a character named Keith, and the similarity always confused me.

Set in London seven years before The Hands of Mr. Ottermole.   1912 slacker Sam Saunders is in his father’s pawnshop hitting him up for money.  His father tells him that at 35 it is time he stood on his own two feet, and he will not give him any more money.

Sam is not much of a negotiator, saying to his father, “Are you afraid if you give it to me there won’t be enough left for you to get drunk on?”

At the saloon, Mae has just finished pounding out a tune on the piano when Sam starts hitting on her.  When Sam finds out she is going off on a holiday, he says, “I ought to have my head examined, wanting you, knowing what you are,” basically calling her a whore.  This guy could really benefit from the Dale Carnegie course; and in 1912, he could take it from Carnegie personally.

She laughs off his proposal saying he is gutless and never has any money.  He says he’ll come back when he has plenty of money.  She says to ask her again when he has the money.

What a whore.

Sam overhears his father talking to an old friend.  The friend is dodging the police who wrongly suspect him in a murder, and there is a 50 quid bounty on him.  Sam goes to the police and rats out his father for harboring a criminal, leading to an awkward meeting at the police station.

However, the friend has disappeared after getting a warning from Mae, who was disgusted by Sam’s weaselly maneuver.  He does get the reward, however.

On the way out of the police station, he falls down the steps.  This episode is just unbelievably lame — he doesn’t even die, he just hurts his knee.

I give it 1 out of 3 pawnshop balls.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch: No survivors.
• Edmund Gwenn played Santa Claus in Miracle on 34nd Street.

The episode opens at the Tiffany Studio of Creative Taxidermy.  Early that-guy Henry Jones hands over a giant ram’s head that he has stuffed and the customer tells him to put it on his bill.  If you have a tab running at a taxidermy shop, you’re already a suspect.

But this is Jones’ story, not that of the evil customer who then returns home where he has a young woman captive in a stony oubliette (just speculating here). Jones goes back into his workshop where is he is working on stuffing an enormous horse.  Tiffany is donating the horse, Napoleon, to the city at a celebration to be hosted by the mayor.  Napoleon had given kids rides at the city park, but now — and this is great! — the hollowed-out horse is to be used as a time capsule.  Current day items will be placed inside the horse, to be opened in one hundred years.  I like to think it will be opened like a piñata with kids literally beating a dead horse.

At lunch, he goes to his home above the shop.  His wife gives him the bad news that her brother Waldren is coming to visit.  When Waldren arrives, his sister does not recognize him.  OK, it’s been 25 years, but she was expecting him, so this is strange.

When Jones comes back upstairs, he is baffled by this strange man in his home with his wife.  He is positively stumped by the presence of this stranger . . . who had told them he was coming.

Waldren is a lazy ungrateful slob, plopping down in Jones’ favorite chair.  He hangs out for a week, complains about drafts, eats their food.  When Jones’ wife collapses in the kitchen from exhaustion, Waldren can’t be troubled to go see what the racket was.

Jones reaches his breaking point and types a going-way note from Waldren.  When Waldren comes downstairs to nag Jones to cook dinner, he hands Waldren a large syringe and a large glass bottle of formaldehyde.  Then he does a new stuffing job — stuffing a hammer into Waldren’s skull.

I assume he handed those things to Waldren to occupy his hands during the attack.  But why did he hand him the glass bottle of formaldehyde? Upon attack, the bottle will surely break.  An alternative Hitchcockian ending could have had Jones passing out from inhaling the fumes, and being busted for the murder.  But I wouldn’t trade that for the ending used.

As the horse is being loaded onto a truck, one of the men comments that it is a lot heavier than he expected.  Hey, you don’t suppose . . .

At the commencement ceremony, the mayor tells Jones that he expects when this time capsule is opened in a hundred years, it will put the town in the national limelight.  Jones agrees.

Another great episode, from performances to story.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.
• The actor playing Waldren had almost as short a lifespan as his character, dying at 28.
• I appreciate this creative use of taxidermy much more than in the tedious Tales from the Crypt episode.