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, a mansion is full of …. well, one surprise.

Episode 2.18 “Funhouse”

(Dir by Gilbert Adler, originally aired on February 11th, 1990)

Turk (Todd Allen), the moving man, is busy this week.

In our first story, Turk helps a young married couple, Emma (Robin Greer) and Robert Palmer (Clayton Landey), move into an old mansion.  Turk talks about how the previous owners came to a bad end.  Emma finds herself having dreams in which both Turk and her former lover, Colin (Joseph Brutsman), come aftter her.  She comes to realize that the house is not haunted by a ghost but instead by a man looking for revenge.  As is often the case with these type of stories, it all ends with a booby trap involving a bed of nails.  Yikes!

In our second story, Turk helps another couple move into the house, Evelyn (Valerie Wildman) and her much older husband, Victor Hall (Robert Dowdell).  This time, it’s Turk who ends up getting seduced by both Evelyn and the maid, Jillian (Laura Austin).  However, it all turns out to be an elaborate game tht Evelyn, Victor, and Jillian enjoy playing.  The bed of spikes booby trap makes yet another appearance and it’s so cool that it doesn’t even matter that Freddy’s Nightmares basically just repeated the twist from the first story in the second story.

This episode was fun.  There really wasn’t anything supernatural going on but the cast of both stories seemed to enjoy playing up the noirsh aspects of their characters and Todd Allen was amusing as the cocky but stupid Turk.  The bed of nails was an enjoyable macabre little twist.

Even at its best, Freddy’s Nightmares tended to be incredibly uneven but this was actually an enjoyable little episode.