Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!

This week, Freddy is just as confused as the rest of us.

Episode 2.13 “What You Don’t Know Can Kill You”

(Dir by Ken Wiederhorn, originally aired on January 7th, 1990)

Psychiatrist Dr. Rothman (David Hern) has been hypnotizing his female patients and then molesting them.   (This was something that apparently used to happen quite often with Victorian-era hypnotists.)  When a colleague (Phil Proctor) discovers what Rothman is doing, Rothman hypnotizes and programs one of his patients, Derby Brown (Fran Montano), to become an assassin.  However, Rothman screws up the programming and ends up getting shot by a hypnotized Derby.  Derby’s girlfriend suggests that Derby should have plastic surgery to disguise his appearance.  They see a handsome man’s photograph in a newspaper and they decide that’s the face they want.  As a result of the surgery, Derby now looks exactly like Vinnie (Paul Regina, playing both roles).  Unfortunately, Vinnie is a mob informant and there’s a hitman after him.

Got all that?

This episode was pretty dumb.  Paul Regina did a good job as Vinnie and his new doppelganger but, for the most part, I’m not really sure why this was even an episode of Freddy’s Nightmares.  There was nothing supernatural about either story and neither story was particularly scary.  Freddy only appeared in his host segments and he seemed to be fairly bored with the whole thing.

Usually, I love it when a show embraces the melodrama but this episode wasn’t subversive enough to work as a satire.  Despite the over the top plot, it still felt oddly generic.