NOTE:  This is the 2nd episode of the final season.  Like last week, it is an English production.

An elderly couple thinks they have solved their problem by feeding their son to the dogs.  It is the ancient trope of the Monkey Paw again, but that’s OK; it is always fun.  They used their first wish to bring their dead son back to life.  Seeing the horrific results (i.e. he is a millennial who demands to live in his old room and stay on their insurance), they used the 2nd wish to send him to the Dobermans.

The interesting thing is that we are told nothing about the first wish or their son or the Monkey Paw.  The scene takes only a few seconds, and has little exposition.  TFTC has trusted us to fill in the blanks to set up the story.  I appreciate this new confident and economic storytelling, but if they had been a little more efficient, maybe we could have skipped this atrocity completely.^[3]  Anyhoo, the woman thinks she is doing a smart thing and impetuously uses the 3rd wish to wish the Monkey Paw to another owner “who really deserves it.”  Although, if she were really a humanitarian, she’d wish it back to the monkey.  Unfortunately her wish means the current owner must die, so the dogs attack them.  I’m out!

Bloody hell, there’s more.

At Mr. Fingers’ Curio Shoppe and Massage Parlor, Yvonne is either tidying things up or making them messier.  It is really hard to tell the difference in a Curio Shoppe.   She wants to expand their inventory to bring in more customers, but her sister Delores doesn’t want to cheapen their fine reputation.  Among the curios is a glass casket containing their dead father.

Somehow this devolves into Delores being criticized for not being married.  Yvonne says, “There’s a good reason no man will have you and it has absolutely nothing to do with that ugly hammertoe of yours.”  I don’t care for these English productions, but they can be funny.  I just can’t see Brooke Shields selling that line.  She says men avoid Yvonne because she is dull, “Duller than Buckingham Palace.”  Although she is clearly forgetting the excitement when Prince Philip said, “Prince Harry is marrying a what?” ^[1]

Delores and Yvonne want to sell the shoppe, but the younger sister Marlys refuses.  They discover the aforementioned Monkey Paw in a shipment from the estate sale of the couple seen earlier.^[2]  Luckily, they already know the legend, so we are spared hearing it its origin again (cool, it only took the Spiderman movies 20 years to figure that out).  Even knowing the misery that has plagued every single owner in history, Delores makes a wish for one million Pounds.  Shockingly, the uber-literal Monkey Paw did not add the pounds to her ass.

Seconds later, the phone rings.  Their father’s lawyer tells Marlys she has inherited 750 pounds.  This is an interesting bit of misdirection 1) to get us wondering why it is 250 Pounds short, 2) to show us that Marlys actually owns the shop, and 3) to show her sisters do not like her (although, being cute and 10 years younger, we could have guessed that).  Wait, so why do Yvonne and Delores want her to sell the shoppe if they are not part owners?  After that crazy-ass Entail in Downton Abbey, I’ve given up trying to understand the English.  Especially the Welsh, literally.

That night, Marlys is in a car accident and dies.  Delores discovers Marlys had a million Pound insurance policy.  Delores is distraught that her wish caused Marlys’ death.  Yvonne advises her to destroy the Monkey Paw, but she is convinced that she can beat it.  Before Yvonne can stop her, she shouts out, “I wish Molly was the way she was just before the accident!”

Seconds later, the phone rings.  Yvonne answers, the Funeral Home has asked them to come there.  Delores is giddy, but Yvonne knows this ain’t good.  Delores goes, but finds Marlys is still cold, pale, and stiff as a board; and not just because she is an English chick.  She had crashed her car because she was shot in the head, so “just before” the accident, she was already dead.

This is wrong in 2 ways.  First, unlike traditional Monkey Paw wishes, this one has really not caused any damage — Marlys is still dead.  Second, the coroner did not notice the bullet hole before?  JFK’s coroner couldn’t have missed that.  Surely they are not saying that the Monkey Paw increased its scope of work to include this murder.  That’s not how the Monkey Paw works.  It is Union all the way.  If it is not in the original contract, fuhgeddaboutit.

The story further flouts the traditional rules, and for no good reason.  The ending twist is a good one, but could have easily been accomplished without playing the pronoun game.

However, TFTC won me over this week.  The move to England, which was so off-putting last week, was a actually a feature this time.  Starring 3 British babes instead of Bob Hoskins probably helped.  A good script and fun direction also helped, but then — note to Hollywood — they usually do.

Other Stuff:

• [1] That might not be true, but he does say some crazy shit.
• [2] It is a sad commentary on the quality of TV that the reintroduction of the Monkey Paw and callback to the opening strike me as brilliant.
• [3] Completely gratuitous — it turned out to be quite enjoyable.  But at that point in the episode, I was worried.
• Delores refers to Ozzy Osbourne as Iggy Oswald.
• The Monkey’s Paw story is more traditionally told in the 1972 Tales from the Crypt movie.

I had read on another site that production for Season 7 was moved to England.  Holy crap did they ever move it to England!

The locations, the actors, the director, the tone . . . I know the original Tales from the Crypt movie and sequel were British joints, but there is something uniquely American about this series when done right.  It works best with good ol’ American shameless greed and capitalism, shysters, con-men, modern art, televangelists, zoot-suiters, gold-diggers, carnies, door-to-door salesmen, speed traps, kangaroo courts, the death penalty, pulp comics, lumberjacks, ventriloquists ^[1] . . . and all kinds of American pop references.  Sadly, even the fact that they shipped it overseas to save a buck is evidence of its essential Americanism.

But I already shelled out an outrageous $25 for the Season 7 set, so here we go. ^[2]

Of course rich old Mycroft Amberson wears a silk robe and ascot, of course he lives in a Downton Abbey style castle, of course it is surrounded by statues, of course he has a butler, and of course he has a limey name like Mycroft.  If there is a Fiona or Hermione here, I’m done.

Mycroft’s banker says it is time that he get his affairs in order; i.e. have a will drawn up.  To assist, he has brought in the lovely Fiona Havisham — damnit!

Mycroft says that he has three sons, but that 15 years ago Frank left home.  Actually, it is more like Mycroft threw him out, saying, “I don’t want your sort in my house.”  The reason is only clear at the end.

We next meet his son Justin who is practicing Tantric sex with a topless girl.  I’m warming up to this new European vibe.

His other son Evelyn is quite the butterball.  Maybe he developed an eating disorder because his father gave him a girl’s name.  Hopefully he plays an ironically small role because I can’t understand WTF he is saying.

Mycroft describes them as monsters.  He amends his will to require that Justin and Evelyn find Frank within 6 months of Mycroft’s death or they get nothing.  How does that make sense?  If he wants them to be a family again, why wait until after he’s dead?  If they make the effort and fail, why penalize them?

There are a few bright spots, but the relocation across the pond kind of ruined it for me.  The ending will be no shocker to anyone who has seen the British film The Crying Game.  But America did it first 9 years earlier in Sleepaway Camp — Team America, F*** yeah!  American ingenuity and creativity wins again!  Oh, wait, TFTC used the exact same twist in The Assassin just last month.  Damnit!

Other Stuff:

• [1] Maybe they had ventriloquists in the old country, but it took Americans to make one a star on radio.
• [2] This blog started because I needed something to force me to watch the $9 set of Ray Bradbury Theater that I just could not finish.
• [2] The packaging for Season 7, TFTC’s final season, is awful.  I guess they figured no one would last that long.  Season 6 of AHP is also much cheaper than the previous seasons, and has yet another season to go.  I expect those discs to say AOL on the back.

The big gimmick is that Humphrey Bogart has been awkwardly inserted into several scenes.  There seems to have been a big deal made of this at the time even though the same director made Forrest Gump a year before and Woody Allen did something similar in Zelig 12 years earlier.  The effect is nothing special, yet there is fun to be had here.

The whole episode is a flashback, which is almost never a good idea.  It does not flash back to the 40s or 50s when Bogart was alive, though.  It begins in the present, or least, the present in 1995.  We see Bogart’s mug in the side-view mirror of a wrecked car as he narrates.  It is simultaneously off-putting and interesting.  The image shown appears to merely be a colorized 2-D photo of Bogart.  They further deaden the dead actor with the stylistic choice to not have his lips move.

On the other hand, this is not supposed to actually be Bogart, but a gangsta who had plastic surgery to look like him and, apparently, talk like him.  He has been killed in a car crash.  The entire episode becomes a Weekend at Bogie’s exercise with the POV story eventually seen through the dead man’s eyes.  They could have taken some license and had his lips move in the numerous mirrors, but they made the right choice.

A couple of hours earlier, Bogart look-alike Lou Spinelli was in a conference room at his company.  Oddly, no one seems to realize he looks like Humphrey Bogart.  Or I guess they are just used to it the way long-time co-workers never comment on my resemblance to Brad Pitt.  They are also immune to the fact that his advertising director looks like 1980s Sherilyn Fenn, which I don’t think I would ever get used to.  Her beauty is not lost on Lou who calls her “doll” and “baby” but, commendably, not “babydoll”.

During the meeting he gets a call from his wife Betty who he thought was dead.  He had his pal Oscar send over some goons to knock her off, but she got away.  As he drives home, he thinks about his life.  He came from a tough neighborhood and did what he had to to survive.  After spending some time in jail, he “busted out of the joint and got a new name and a new face”.  Presumably, he chose Bogart’s mug for its inexplicable ability to attract hot babes 25 years younger than him.

Back at his place, he discovers Oscar betrayed him and has been banging Betty for the past year.  They plan to kill Lou, but he is able to take Oscar’s gun from him.  Unfortunately, Betty conks him on the head with a statue. ^[1]  It is poorly staged because he actually has a few seconds to react to her coming at him and does nothing.  Still, it was funny to see him get brained with the sculpture.  Twice.

The rest of the episode is Oscar and Betty dragging the body around with the POV still from Lou’s dead eyes.  This is good, original stuff.  In fact, it surpasses the Bogie/Noir gimmick of the episode.  John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini were great with the over-the-top acting that a good TFTC requires, and have perfect faces for those close-ups from Lou’s POV.

They could have ditched the Bogart angle and still had a great episode.  However, they tried something creative and mostly succeeded.

Other Stuff:

• [1] The sculpture of a nude woman is said to be a Picasso but is utterly unconvincing because it actually looks like a nude woman.

Lovely blonde Willa Sandleton is taking a shower when her husband enters the bathroom.  He asks his nekkid wife to not throw towels on the floor, and where do they keep the antacid.  From the looks of things, he’s seems to conveniently have a roll of Tums in his pocket right now. ^[1]

Luden Sandleton sits down to watch a promotional video about his soap company.  He says most companies use rendered animal parts that are full of acid to make their soap.  “Think about it, would you want the stuff that digests food in your stomach doing the same kind of thing to your face?  That’s why for the past 70 years, DermaSmooth has been all-natural.”

Willa enters and he tells her that soap sales are at an all-time low, and with the Occupy Wall Street generation being born, they won’t be getting any better.  The board seems to think it is because Willa’s artwork has gotten stale.  In a radical departure for TFTC, Night Gallery, and TV in general, the drawing she holds up is actually pretty good.  It reminds me of that old Poco album cover.^[2]  Typical of TV’s ineptitude, however, this fine hunk of art is supposed to be bad.  Anyhoo, she takes the criticism well, and immediately works on some new concepts for the shareholders meeting.

Unfortunately, Luden tells her the board decided to forego her more — er, controversial — work as well in favor of a graffiti artist.  BTW, preceding this was a bizarre scene of Willa appearing on a talk show.  On one hand, it was blatantly and jarringly shoe-horned in only to set up the name of the graffiti artist.  On the other hand, it was a shockingly tight little scene.  Graffiti guy has his moment and shows off his art, the host gives Willa about 15 seconds and hilariously does not show hers, this universe can apparently sustain a TV show about art running against The View, and the host is fabulously clueless and cruel about the mentally challenged artists in the next segment.  This could have been a big nothing that just set up the other artist’s name as a joke.  It gives me hope for TV that someone actually put some effort into this little scene.

But back to Willa and Luden.  When he gives her the bad news she gives him a 2-handed slap in the face.  Both cheeks at the same time — smack — and storms off, her heels clacking on the hardwood floor.  OK, it ain’t Shakespeare, but it’s pretty dang funny.  So, definitely not Shakespeare.

Willa tells Luden that if the board won’t use her design then she wants a divorce.  Her delivery is so over the top that I’m not sure if she is a terrible actress, or is one of the few that actually understands TFTC.  They have built up some good will, so I say Bravo! to her.  Her divorce case gets off to a rocky start as Luden has pictures of her fooling around with another man.

I feel compelled to offer a spoiler warning even though this next bit is not a major twist or unexpected plot point.  Willa picks up a DermaSmooth soap on a rope, spins it so fast it whistles, and clocks Luden right in the face with this massive brick of soap.  Then again and again.  It is fast, brutal and awesome.

Gratuitous, but I didn’t include the shower shots.

Willa takes Luden’s body to the soap company which fortunately has no guards and a drive-through manufacturing plant.  She tosses his body into a vat of soap and hits the START button.  In minutes, bars of DermaSmooth  roll out on a conveyor belt.  She takes a box back home with her.

She is still covered with Luden’s blood, so gets into the shower with one of the bars of soap that he is part of.  What happens next is also fun.  As she rubs the soap over her body, the acid begins to eat away at her, leaving her screaming in a goo of water, soap, and bloody skin.  The camera pans from her ravaged body, to some of her new artwork which is stylistically similar to her current condition.  Bravo on tying her art to her fate!

This was a great, fun episode.  Bruce Davison was fine as Luden and Cristi Conaway was outstanding as Willa.  The fact that her career in Hollywood only seems to have lasted another 5 years shows how little they know about what works.  This was an excellent showing of beauty, comedic-timing, understanding the material, and perfectly toned scenery-chewing.  And they made Julia Roberts the big star of the 90’s?

I am a 99.44% satisfied customer, but I must say that ending was a little sloppy, and not just the entrails.  C’mon, Luden’s body was about 2% of that vat of soap mix.  And even though a handy voice-over reminds that he said animals contain acid, they aren’t totally acid.  And the ending is muddled by his earlier question about the antacid in the beginning of the episode.  Are they suggesting that the acid from his upset stomach was enough to dissolve Willa?  That f***ing tummy-ache should have bled through his shirt like Roy Hobbs in The Natural. ^[3]

But none of that matters.  I don’t know if this episode and The Assassin are proof that all TFTC needs is a hot blonde as the killer to be a success, but it’s worth more testing.

Other Stuff:

• [1] See, because he isn’t jumping this babe.  I’m emasculating him by speculating on the size of his weiner.  Like the old “Are you happy to see me?” joke.  See, is that clear?
• [2] Designed by Phil Hartman, BTW.
• [3] I never understood that scene.  He had just been poisoned, but his gunshot wound was years earlier.  What caused the bleeding?
• Title Analysis:  I dig it.  And as usual Unca Cecil has the answer to a question I never considered . . . pure what?
• She thought this would sell soap? And I thought the guys at Gillette were boobs.

Even this could not stop me from fast-forwarding through the Cryptkeeper’s segment.

Oh, come on!  TFTC already did Came the Dawn!  I was disappointed that Dawn was not the insatiable female lead in that one.  Predictably, TFTC did not learn from that mistake.  On the other hand, this episode starts off with a nice tracking shot along a bar with a few bits of business along the way.  So all is forgiven.  Although, I always wonder if shots like this were in the script or the work of the director.

The shot ends with a, er, rather severe looking blonde with short hair, a bandana, and a biker jacket putting on lipstick like she was driving down a bumpy road.  She is surprised when a couple of hunters show up to the bar.  Burrows and Parker stumble in, bundled up against the cold Alaskan weather and order schnapps.

Burrows says the night is “colder than a witch’s left one” so I guess there will be no nudity in tonight’s tame episode.  Parker says they are looking for a guide that ignores the Endangered Species List, which rules out that bleeding heart Michelin Guide with their snooty no Bengal Tiger Tartare rule.  She suggests her ex, Jeri (the gender ambiguity is lost in print) who was busted for dynamite-fishing.  But the bartender doesn’t care for poachers and picks up the phone to call the game warden.  So Burrows shoots her.

In an edit more jarring than the bone-to-satellite in 2001, the boys are suddenly offering Jeri $100 to help them bag a grizzly bear.^[1]  Where they are or how they found her is a mystery.  And, by the way, shooting the bartender was pretty gratuitous.  I mean, it would have made sense if it had been Michael Ironside, but it was the other guy.  Anyhoo, she is no longer in that business.  Parker sees her name on a Purple Heart citation and plays the Colonel-card.  She jumps at attention and accepts the mission to find that bear.

They go to an abandoned government weather station which Jeri says the bears love.  Parker agrees, “It is a perfect place for Winter hibernation.”  Wait, are they going to shoot them while they’re hibernating?   No, they find some fresh tracks and set up camp.  But someone been hunting there already.

Just when I feared the episode was going to play out as a straight monster-fest, a couple of pretty ingenious curves are thrown into the story.  It is not giving away much to say this is a nest of vampires — that isn’t the twist.  The story beat 30 Days of Night to the Alaskan Vampire scene by 5 years.  That might have been dazzling in 1995, but is still appreciated here — and not the twist.

The twists both have to do with Jeri’s role in this society and with one of these two men.  It is not mind-blowing, but is just a nice bit of storytelling.

Other Stuff:

• [1] By the way, Jeri is a hot Chinese woman.  OK, maybe the bartender dug Asian chicks.  Or was TFTC trying to pass her off as Inuit?
• Minor nitpick:  In the first scene, shown above, the vampire bartender was looking in a mirror to apply her lipstick.  What the heck — there is nothing for her there.  Yeah, vampires don’t have reflections, but mostly I mean because she is really unattractive.