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!

Hi, everyone!  I sprained my wrist yesterday and today, it still hurts to type so, just as with T and T, today’s review is going to be a quick one.  You might even call it a mini-review!

Episode 2.5 “Symphony In B Sharp”

(Dir by Francis Delia, originally aired on October 31st, 1988)

Oh, Ryan!

You would think that, by this point, Ryan would know better than to fall in love with anyone, seeing as how he had to leave one girlfriend behind in a Mennonite village and he lost another girlfriend to an insane news anchorman.  Add to that, Ryan has also seen Micki repeatedly lose the people with which she has fallen in love.  But, once again, the episode finds Ryan falling in love.

This time, his lover is Leslie Reins (Ely Pouget), who plays violin in the local symphony.  Her former boyfriend, Janos Korda (James Russo), was believed to have been killed in a car accident but instead, he’s alive but terribly scarred.  He hangs out in the rafters and the basement of the symphony hall and kills anyone who get too close to Leslie.  He has a cursed violin that is slowly healing his disfigured appearance in return for Janos using a sharpened bow to kill people.  Janos’s newest target is Ryan.

Yep, it’s Phantom of the Opera all over again, with Leslie Reins’s last name deliberately invoking the name of a past actor who played the Phantom, Claude Rains.  It’s not a bad episode.  There’s plenty of atmosphere and James Russo makes for a good villain.  That said, the cursed antique is not that interesting and the whole episode leans a bit too much into the Phantom of the Opera story.  It was a bit predictable, right down Janos accidentally killing Leslie before taking his own life and Ryan ending yet another episode in tears, with a concerned Jack and Micki watching from a distance.  Ryan listens to a recording of Leslie playing her violin and swears that he’ll never fall in love again.  We know that’s not true, Ryan.  I guess we should be glad that Ryan is no longer looking to hook up with his cousin but still, it’s hard to feel that the guy just can’t get a break!

Next week, hopefully, things will look up for Ryan.  (It would seem that they certainly couldn’t get any worse.)  We’ll find out soon enough.