Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, the second season beings with the return of Uncle Lewis!

(For a dead guy, Lewis sure does return a lot.)

Episode 2.1 “Doorway to Hell”

(Dir by William Fruet, originally aired on September 26th, 1988)

The second season begins in much the same way that the first one ended, with Uncle Lewis (played, as always, be R.G. Armstrong) trying to re-enter the world of the living.

This time, he’s doing it through mirrors.  According to Jack, a mirror that “witnesses” an occult ceremony becomes a doorway to the dark realms that sit between Heaven and Hell.  Lewis lives in the dark realms and, since he was a big fan of mirrors, his reflection occasionally appears in the a mirror at Curious Goods.  When Micki and Ryan find evidence that Lewis owned a house, they ignore Jack’s warning and go to investigate on their own.

They discover that the decrepit house is being used as a hideout by Buddy (Charle Landry) and Eddie (Louis Ferreira), two criminals who have just held up a gas station and killed an attendant.  Buddy wants to go straight and was pretty much coerced into taking part in the robbery.  Eddie, on the other hand, is a total psychopath who ties up both Micki and Ryan and laughs when they try to warn him about Uncle Lewis.

The house, not surprisingly, is full of mirrors and soon, Buddy gets sucked into one of them.  When Buddy returns to the house, he’s possessed and shooting electricity from his fingertips.  He kills Eddie and then chases Ryan and Micki around both the house and the dark realms.

Jack and his friend Rashid (Elias Zarou) watch all of this reflected in a shard of reflective glass that they found at the antique store.  Whenever things start to get really exciting or scary at the mansion, we cut to Jack and Rashid staring at shard of glass and saying, “Get out of there, Ryan!”

Eventually, Jack goes to the house, enters the dark realms and distracts Lewis long enough for Ryan and Micki to destroy all of the mirrors in the house.  Jack manages to escape just in time, Buddy apparently become unpossessed and the ghost of Uncle Lewis declares that he will return.  Lewis’s constant shouts of “I’ll be back” are such a cliche that they can’t help but be a bit charming, especially since R.G. Armstrong always seems to be having so much fun chewing the scenery whenever he shows up as Lewis.

The second season premiere did an effective job of reminding old viewers and informing new viewers about what the show was about.  The haunted house was an effectively creepy location and the dark realms were nicely atmospheric.  I do wish that the premiere had not once again deployed the tired idea of Micki and Ryan ignoring Jack’s warning about impulsively investigating something on their own.  I mean, that has never worked out for them.  You would think that Ryan and Micki would have learned the lesson by now.  Otherwise, this episode got the second season off to a good start.