Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, we start the second season of Monsters!

Episode 2.1 “The Face”

(Dir by Allen Coulter, originally aired on October 1st, 1989)

The second season of Monsters opens with two redneck brother, Ray (Gregory Grove) and Clifford (Gary Roberts), breaking into a house that is owned by an old widow (Imogene Coca).  Because the woman is known for paying for everything in cash and doesn’t even have a bank account, the brothers suspect that she has a fortune stashed away somewhere in the house.  (I’m not really sure how the brothers know that she doesn’t have a bank account and, for that matter, neither one of them really come across like they could open a bank account either.  Maybe just don’t judge people on whether or not they have a bank account, you know?)  When the dumbass brothers stumble across the woman in her bedroom, a struggle leads to Ray suffocating her but not before she bites a chunk out of his hand.

The wound on Ray’s hand refuses to heal.  Instead, it starts to resemble the face of the old woman and soon, Ray is hearing her voice and the wound itself appears to be talking.  Yikes!  Is Ray being driven mad by his own guilt and paranoia or is the woman’s spirit truly haunting him?  And will Ray ever be able to get the voice to stop or will he end up doing something unthinkable to his hand?

Either way, that talking hand wound is not particularly pleasant to look at.  The second season premiere of Monsters takes it cue from both the body horror of David Cronenberg and the comedic grotesquerie of Sam Raimi and that means that we get a lot of closeups of Ray’s bloody hand and we also see every detail of the lengths that Ray goes to try to silence the wound.  I started this episode cringing and, by the end of it, I had my own hands over my eyes because some of the imagery was just way too …. icky.

While the imagery was undeniably effective in its nauseating way, the overall story really didn’t carry much of an impact.  Ray and Clifford were both such idiots that it was difficult to really care about any story involving them.  In the end, they weren’t even interesting enough to make their downfall fun to watch.  This episode worked best as an example of gross-out horror and, if I had to guess, I think the episode’s main aim was to let viewers know that season 2 was going to be even more graphic than season one.  The episode makes for a fine highlight real for the show’s VFX and makeup teams but, as a story, it just falls flat.