Today’s scene that I love comes from Dario Argento’s 1980 masterpiece, Inferno. In this music scene, a music student in Rome finds himself suddenly being watched by the legendary Mother of Tears (played by Ania Pieroni). Inferno is one of Agento’s best films and this is one the film’s best scenes.
I read yesterday that Reggie Bannister, one of the most beloved horror character actors out there, isn’t doing too well. He has gone into hospice care. Those words — “hospice care” — will always bring a tear to my eye. My Dad went into hospice care last year and died a month later, which I was told was longer than most people survive in hospice. Being the naive idiot that I was, I have to admit that, up until the end, I was still expecting my Dad to make a full recovery and just magically get out of bed. Sadly, that’s just not the way these things work. Hospice is end-of-life care and any medical professional who doesn’t make that clear while recommending it is doing a disservice to not only their patients but also their families.
Reggie Bannister is best-known for his appearances in the work of Don Coscarelli. He’s one of those actors who just makes you smile whenever he appears on screen. Anyone who has watched Phantasm loves Reggie, with his ice cream truck and his guitar and his whole laid back vibe. Today’s scene that I love is a simple but wonderfully human moment from 1978’s Phantasm, featuring Bill Thornbury and the great Reggie Bannister.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we celebrate the 121st anniversary of the birth of the great British film director, Terence Fisher. Though Fisher worked in all genres, he is best remembered for the horror films that he directed for Hammer Studios. Along with proving that there was still an audience for horror, he also helped to make stars out of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Terence Fisher Films
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, dir by Terence Fisher, DP: Jack Asher)
The Horror of Dracula (1958, dir by Terence Fisher, DP: Jack Asher)
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961, dir by Terence Fisher, DP: Arthur Grant)
Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1973, dir by Terence Fisher, DP: Brian Probyn)
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 Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The entire series can be found on YouTube!
This week, it’s all up to Johnny Ventura!
By the way, it is true that these reviews usually run on Friday. This week, however, all the cold weather caught up to me and I spent most of yesterday in bed. As a result, this week’s review got preempted to tonight. Now, let’s find out what’s been going on in the world of cursed antiques!
Episode 3.4 “Crippled Inside”
(Dir by Timothy Bond, originally aired on October 21st, 1989)
This week’s episode opens with teenager Rachel Horn (Stephanie Morgenstern) nearly getting gang-raped by a group of jocks. Rachel manages to escape from them but, as she runs away, she’s hit by a car and left a quadriplegic. Feeling that her life is over, things start to look up for Rachel when an old man (John Gilbert) gives her his antique wheelchair, which he suggests will help her regain the ability to move. When Rachel sits in the antique wheelchair, she can send out her astral form. Each time she uses the wheelchair, her body heals just a little bit more. The only catch is that the wheelchair only works if Rachel kills people while in her astral form. Hey, I can think of at least four guys that Rachel might want to kill….
With Jack and Micki in London, it falls to Johnny Ventura to try to get the wheelchair back. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical when I saw this episode was going to be a solo effort on Johnny’s part. I was like, “Johnny’s only been a regular for two episodes and he’s already working alone?” (I have to admit that my feelings towards the Johnny Ventura character are very much influenced by how much I liked Ryan.) But I have to say that this was a good episode and a lot of that was because Johnny was working alone. Not understanding the true danger of the cursed antiques, Johnny was torn about whether or not to take the wheelchair away from Rachel. Rachel was a very sympathetic character and the people she was targeting truly were terrible. Johnny, not understanding that Rachel was losing her soul to the devil, actually gave the wheelchair back at one point. By the end of the episode, he realized he had made a mistake. Steve Monarque did a wonderful job portraying Johnny’s growing realization that there are no good curses.
This was a good episode. I still miss Ryan but Johnny held his own. The story was emotionally effective and the ending left me feeling genuinely unsettled. Johnny learned the truth about curses and I learned that, even during its final season, Friday the 13th: The Series was capable of producing intelligent and memorable horror.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 9 pm et, Deanna Dawn will be hosting #ScarySocial! The movie? 2004’s The Grudge!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
The Grudge is available on Prime!
See you there!
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.
This week, the survivors of the end of the world discover that they might not as along as they think they are.
Episode 3.10 “The Waiting Game”
(Dir by Bruce Spandello, originally aired on December 9th, 1990)
Following a nuclear war, four survivors are stuck in two different shelters. In one shelter, Lt. Eric Tyler (Doug McKeon) and Captain Stanley Levitt (Stephen Burleigh) wait until it’s safe to go outside. They are in communication, via walkie-talkie, with Lt. Maureen Knox (Carrington Garland) and Capt. Andrew Garza (Leo Garcia). Knox and Garza are not handling things quite as well as Tyler and Levitt. In fact, Garza is convinced that he sees people moving outside of the bunker and he wants to go outside and investigate, despite the fact that the whole world is presumably radioactive now. Tyler and Levitt struggle to keep Garza and later Knox from going outside to look for phantom survivors. Soon, Tyler and Levitt start to realize that they aren’t as alone as they thought they were.
The idea behind this episode of Monsters is an intriguing one. Though a nuclear war has wiped out most of human civilization, it hasn’t destroyed an ancient vampire who is now roaming the world. In fact, the war has just made the vampire even stronger. The nuclear fallout has blocked out the sun, plunging the world into darkness and allowing the vampire to move around freely. Once it becomes obvious that Knox and Garza have both been captured and turned into vampires, Tyler and Levitt are faced with the question of how long they can resist. They may have survived the war but now, it appears that they’re going to be trapped in their bunker for the rest of their lives.
This was a superior episode of Monsters. I don’t know the specifics of what was going on behind-the-scenes but Monsters seems to have really hit its stride during the third season. The production values are noticeably higher than they were during the first two seasons. The guest stars are better-known. In general, the stories themselves are far more interesting and intelligently written. This episode is atmospheric and appropriately claustrophobic and it also features four excellent performances from McKeon, Burleigh, Garland, and Garcia. It’s hard to imagine an episode this good airing during the show’s first or even second season. But it’s definitely an example of the quality that I’ve now come to expect from the third season.
Personally, I would have stayed in that bunker for as long as it took. And I really do think the vampire kind of screwed up. By turning everyone into a vampire, he pretty much guaranteed that he and his new friends are going to run out of food in record time.
Today is both President’s Day and Don Coscarelli’s birthday! As such, it only seems appropriate that today’s scene of the day should come from Coscarelli’s 2002 film, Bubba Ho-Tep.
In this film, Elvis (Bruce Campbell) and John F. Kennedy (Ossie Davis) team up to battle the killer Mummy that is haunting their nursing home. Personally, I choose to believe that both Elvis and JFK were exactly who they said they were in this film.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 9 pm et, Tim Buntley will be hosting #ScarySocial! The movie? 1980‘s Funeral Home!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Funeral Home is available on Prime and Tubi!
See you there!
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 Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The entire series can be found on YouTube!
This week, a bunch of new characters show up! What the Hell!?
Episode 3.3 “Demon Hunter”
(Dir by Armand Mastroianni, originally aired on October 14th, 1989)
I have read that one of the biggest mistake that aspiring screenwriter make when they attempt to create a compelling spec script for their favorite show is that they’ll often introduce new characters. Instead of focusing on the established stars of the show, they’ll have a new character show up and suddenly become the center of the story. It’s a mistake because, no matter how good the script may be, it doesn’t work as an episode of the series that the writer is trying to get a job with. Showrunners don’t want a writer who can write about new characters. They want a writer who can work within the framework of what the show has already established.
This week’s episode of Friday the 13th feels very much like a failed spec script.
Make no mistake. Jack and Micki are in it. They spend the entire episode at Curious Goods, where they are originally seen putting a cursed dagger in the vault. With Ryan having been transformed into a child in the previous episode, Micki makes Jack a partner in the shop. Johnny Ventura (played by new series regular Steve Monarque) is also in this episode, though he’s called to the store a bit later than Micki and Jack. I guess Johnny is now a part of the group, even if he doesn’t have a job at the shop. For all the time the show spent establishing Johnny as being an edgy delinquent during the second season, this episode finds Johnny as a rather conventional leading man. He listens to a baseball game and, at one point, he’s seen making a model ship.
That said, the majority of the episode is dominated by a bunch of new characters. The Cassidys are a family of militia types who, having rescued Bonnie Cassidy (Allison Mang) from a bunch of cultists, are now on the run from a demon that is determined to kill them. The Cassidys have some sort of demon tracker device that leads both them and the demon to Curious Goods, where Micki, Jack, and Johnny join in the effort to destroy the demon. The Cassidys are so prominently featured in this episode and take up so much screentime that the episode almost feels like a backdoor pilot about them. The Cassidys are even featured in black-and-white flashbacks that show us how they rescued Bonnie.
The problem, of course, is that we don’t know the Cassidys so its a bit jarring to see them take over the episode. After what happened in the previous episode, I think most viewers would have a lot of questions about what happened after Jack, Micki, and Johnny returned from France. For instance, what did they do with Ryan? Did they drop Ryan off with his mother? Did they leave him in France? We don’t find out in this episode and it’s actually kind of insulting to anyone who has spent the previous two seasons getting wrapped up in Ryan and Micki’s adventures. Instead of answering the questions that they had to know that viewers would be asking, the show’s writers expect us to care about the Cassidys.
Even without John D. LeMay, Robey and Chris Wiggins had a likable chemistry. Micki and Jack were the strongest thing this series had gone for it as the start of season 3. Why push them to the side for a family that we’ve never seen before and will probably never see again? As far as guessing what the rest of Season 3 will be like is concerned, it’s not a good sign.
Hopefully, I’ll be proven wrong in the weeks to come.
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.
This week, Monsters loses its head of another series.
Episode 3.9 “The Young and the Headless”
(Dir by Tom Abrams, originally aired on November 25th, 1990)
As you can tell from the title, this episode of Monsters is meant to be a parody of soap operas. Two scientists, Victoria (Karen Valentine) and Edward (George Reinhardt), have been have been married ever since Victoria’s lunkhead ex-boyfriend, Hunk (John Schiappa), disappeared while on a soldier of fortune mission. However, when Hunk suddenly returns, Victoria and George are left with a dilemma, especially after Edward tricks Hunk into killing himself and then removes his head.
Victoria and George decide to reanimate the headless Hunk, bringing him back to life with microchips. (Sure, why not?) They treat the headless Hunk as a servant but it turns out that Hunk doesn’t need a brain to get his revenge.
The plot was nonsense but the episode did have good performances and a memorable monster in headless Hunk. I think the main problem is that the episode tried very hard to parody the soap opera genre but, since most soap operas are already self-parodies that cheerfully embrace the melodrama and make no attempt to pretend to be realistic, a lot of the humor fell flat. It’s hard to make fun of a genre that is, for the most part, defined by its self-awareness.
Through the Shattered Lens 