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.

Never jump on a spider web!  Seriously.

Episode 2.3 “A Bond of Silk”

(Dir by Ernest D. Farino, originally aired on October 15th, 1989)

Nash (Marc McClure) is an oilman who has just married Portia (Lydia Cornell) and is taking her on a New York honeymoon.  A travel agent has arranged for them to be picked up at the airport in a limousine and driven to a posh hotel.  Sure, it’s strange that the hotel appears to be completely devoid of staff and other guests but Nash and Portia just assume that’s a part of the ambience.  As Portia puts it, they don’t have anything like this back in Lubbock!

(And right there is where I massively rolled my eyes.)

The honeymoon suite is in the basement of the hotel.  It doesn’t look like much.  Oddly, the closet is full of clothes from previous guests.  And, in the bedroom, there is what appears to be a giant web.  Nash declares that it must be a hammock and he jumps on the web.  He soon discovers that the web is sticky (duh!) and he’s stuck.  Portia correctly deduces that that web must have been spun by a giant spider.  She also figures out that no one who has ever checked into the room has ever left.  The travel agent, the limousine, the hotel …. they’re all a part of plan to keep the spider fed.

Nash insists that he’ll figure out a way out of the web but the more he tries to escape, the more stuck he becomes.  Finally, it falls to Portia to figure out a way to safely cross the web, free her husband, and get out the room.  Unfortunately, as Portia quickly realizes, the spider is waiting for her to attempt just that.

There was a lot about this episode that worked.  The hotel was a creepy location.  Nash’s struggle in the web was frightening and the visual of him getting more and more stuck in the web was effectively claustrophobic.  By today’s standards, the special effects were not particularly impressive but still, they were good enough to not totally take me out of the story.

That said, this was yet another episode where all of the action was dependent upon the characters acting in the dumbest ways possible.  Eventually, Portia reveals herself to have a lot of determination and to be a lot more clever than she originally came across.  Nash, however, remains an idiot through the entire episode and it’s hard to have sympathy for someone who sees a giant spider’s web and automatically thinks, “Hey, let’s jump into it!”  While neither spoke with a convincing Texas accent, both Marc McClure and Lydia Cornell were likable but the actions of their characters requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief.

As for next week’s episode, it appears that college students will be raising the dead!  Uh-oh.