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.
Episode 2.14 “Bed and Boar”
(Dir by Sara Driver, originally aired on January 21st, 1990)
Traveling salesman John Dennis (a young Steve Buscemi) just wants to get a good night’s rest in a sleazy motel but, unfortunately, the couple in the room next to his is making a racket. A woman and a man are fighting and yelling at each other. “Bitch! Bitch!” the man seems to be yelling. Finally, the woman (Jodie Markell) leaves her room, runs through the stormy night, and ends up in John’s room.
John take one look at the woman in her white nightgown (which has gotten soaked in the rain) and decides that he has absolutely no problem with her staying in his room. He has no problem with her removing her wet nightgown and wrapping herself in the sheets of his bed. The only problem that John has is with her husband (Charles Kay-Hune), who not only tries to break into the room but also has the head of a boar.
You would think that would be enough to convince John to find another motel but instead, after chasing off the board husband, John spends the night with the woman. John declares that he’s falling in love with the woman. When her husband literally tears down a wall to get at them, John fights off and kills the woman’s boar-headed husband.
And it’s only then that it occurs to John that the woman might be a witch (“He wasn’t yelling bitch, he was yelling….”) and that maybe she was the one responsible for turning her husband into a pig. (Someone has obviously never read The Odyssey.) Of course, by this point, John is himself starting to turn into a pig.
The good thing about this episode is that it features a young Steve Buscemi, playing one of his trademark quirky characters who never knows when to stop talking. The bad thing is that the episode doesn’t really give Buscemi much to do, other than be an idiot. Since it was obvious, to me, that the woman was a witch and that she was the one who turned her husband into a boar, I spent the entire episode waiting for some sort of a surprise twist. I was waiting for John to reveal that he was a warlock or a werewolf or a vampire or anything other than just a salesman in a motel room. But that never happened. As a result, the whole story felt rather pointless.
On the plus side, the husband was frightening. The show did a good job with the boar makeup because I I did jump a little when that thing came bursting into the room. This was a case where the monster was better than the story.
Through the Shattered Lens 