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, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting 1981’s Galaxy of Terror!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime and Tubi! I’ll be there co-hosting 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!
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? 1974’s Black Christmas!
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.
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, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting the holiday film that launched a thousand memes, SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT PART 2!
GARBAGE DAY!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime and Tubi! I’ll be there co-hosting 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!
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!
This week, the departed return!
Episode 2.21 “Wedding in Black”
(Dir by Rodney Charters, originally aired on May 8th, 1989)
In South America, a man named Calvin Collier (Stephen Meadows) is carrying around a snow globe and strangling women. After he kills a young Jill Hennessy (credited here with playing “Spanish Hooker,”), Calvin is taken to prison. However, an ominous voice says that it has need of Calvin’s soul.
In Africa, Brother Antonio (Guy Bannerman) is caught trying to rape a woman and is promptly set on fire.
In America (or maybe Canada), Maya Zedler (Carolyn Dunn) is released from prison and promptly kills herself.
What do all three of these people have in common? They all know the folks at Curious Goods! Calvin is a friend of Micki’s. Brother Antonio is an acquaintance of Jack’s. Maya used to be Ryan’s girlfriend. And even though all three of them are now dead, Lucifer sent them back into the world of the living because he’s decided that he wants Micki to give birth to his child.
Calvin and Antonio show up and draw Micki and Jack out of the store and into a sudden blizzard. Suddenly, all four of them find themselves in the castle that sits in the middle of Calvin’s snow globe. Calvin sets about trying to seduce Micki on behalf of Lucifer.
Meanwhile, Maya shows up and tries to keep Ryan distracted so that he won’t go looking for Micki and Jack. However, it turns out that Maya still has a conscience and eventually, she turns on Lucifer and sacrifices herself to help Ryan.
This episode was an interesting change of pace. The snow globe may have been an antique but wasn’t one of the antiques and instead of Micki and Ryan stumbling into whatever terrible thing was happening, Lucifer instead came directly for them. If nothing else, this episode showed that the producers of Friday the 13th: The Series understood the danger of falling into a rut and that they were capable of changing things up without losing the overall macabre atmosphere of the show. The scenes in the castle were appropriately surreal and both Chris Wiggins and the often underused Robey gave good performances. Of the three souls, Guy Bannerman made the strongest impression just by playing his character as being totally and unashamedly evil.
At the same time, it was hard not to feel that this episode was a bit of a missed opportunity. While it was interesting to have Micki, Jack, and Ryan meet up with three spirits of people who they used to know, it’s hard not to feel that the episode would have worked better if the producers had reached into the past and brought back some of the show’s former guest stars. Not an episode passed in which Micki, Jack, or Ryan doesn’t lose someone that they cared about and it would have been fun to see some of those people come back. Imagine the emotional impact if John Stockwell or Catherine Disher or maybe one of Jack’s old war buddies had returned to life.
All in all, this was a good episode that could have been even better.
Due to the holidays, this is my final Friday the 13th review for 2024. These reviews will return on January 3rd!
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 tries to be funny and it actually succeeds for once!
Episode 3.2 “Murray’s Monster”
(Dir by Scott Alexander, originally aired on October 7th, 1990)
Murray’s Monster opens with Sherwin (Joe Flaherty) laying on a psychologist’s couch and talking about how much he hates his overbearing wife while Debbie (Teresa Gaznel) takes notes. Debbie suddenly tells Sherwin that they’re out of time because Sherwin has to see his next patient. Sherwin sits up on the couch and Debbie returns to the reception desk. It’s an obvious joke but one that is well-played by both Joe Flaherty and Teresa Ganzel. That’s another way of saying that it made me laugh, even though I saw it coming.
Sherwin’s new patient is Murray (Marvin Kaplan). Murray is nervous and apologetic. He even apologizes for coming to his appointment, offering to come back next week if it’s too much of a bother for Sherwin to see him that day. Murray explains that people have been kicking him around all of his life and he’s sick of it. Sherwin, after telling Murray that he’s less than a man, puts Murray under hypnosis. Sherwin tells Murray to be more assertive. Murray promptly turns into an angry ape-man (Colin Penman). Ape-Man Murray is angry and destructive but, once he calms down, he turns back into Murray.
Frightened at first, Sherwin soon realizes that he can use Murray to his advantage. He invites Murray to have dinner with his wife, Luann (Miriam Flynn). His plan is that Murray will get angry with Luann, turn into an ape, and kill her. Then Sherwin will be free to pursue Debbie. Sherwin’s plan works in that Murray does get frustrated and he does turn into the ape. But, instead of killing Luann, he instead picks her up and runs off with her.
The next day, Sherwin is shocked when Murray and Luann show up at his office. It turns out that, since Murray was sick of people always telling him what to do, Ape Murray decided to disobey Sherwin’s wishes and has instead fallen in love with Luann. When Sherwin gets upset and starts yelling, Murray turns into the ape again. Uh-oh!
(As Luann puts it, “You’re a bad psychologist, Sherwin, because you never listen to your patients!”)
I have to say that I usually cringe whenever Monsters tries to be deliberately funny but this episode actually made me laugh. Joe Flaherty and Marvin Kaplan both had great comedic timing and, even though I saw the final twist coming, the dialogue was still clever enough and the performances sharp enough to hold my interest. This was a good episode. Good for Murray. Good for Monsters!
With the the holidays approaching, this is my final review of Monsters for 2024. My Monsters reviews will return on January 1st, 2025!
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, a detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!
This week, we wrap up Baywatch Nights.
Episode 2.22 “A Thousand Words”
(Dir by Tracy Lynch Britton, originally aired on May 16th, 1997)
After two seasons of gangsters and monsters, Baywatch Nights ends with yet another haunted house story.
Well, technically, it’s actually a haunted restaurant. Diamont drags Ryan and Mitch to an abandoned restaurant that is said to be haunted. Accompanying them is a researcher into the paranormal, Sarah (Kathy Tragesar). Sarah explains that the restaurant has a long history of strange occurrences. Diamont explains that, recently, two women have been killed and a man left in a coma after entering the restaurant. Diamont thinks that it’s a poltergeist. Mitch, as usual, is skeptical.
*sigh*
Seriously, why is Mitch still a skeptic? I’ve gone into this before but it continues to bother me. After everything that Mitch had seen and experienced over this season, why does he still refuse to believe in the supernatural? Even Agent Scully eventually admitted that Mulder had a point.
Anyway, Ryan vanishes and finds herself in another dimension where she’s menaced by the knife-wielding murderer (John Snyder). The murderer is driven by his relationship with his mother, whose portrait hang around the restaurant and whose painted facial expression changes depending on how determined her son is to kill. (That was actually a nice touch.) Mitch puts a call into his old friend (and season one co-star), Garner Ellerbee. Garner shows up with psychic named Kira (Jazmin Lewis) and soon, Kira is in the other dimension as well….
Long story short, the poltergeist is eventually defeated. Kira and Ryan come back to our world. Mitch says that he loves Ryan. He and Ryan share an embrace and start in on some really passionate kissing. (Woo hoo!) The show ends.
The main problem with this episode is that Mitch and Ryan didn’t really get to do that much. For the most part, Kira did all the work and the episode so focused on her that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was meant to be a sort of backdoor pilot for a proposed series about Kira. As well, the killer poltergeist is scary when he first appears but he becomes progressively less scary as the episode goes on. By the end of the episode, he’s just kind of whiny. As a series finale, this was definitely a bit underwhelming.
That said — hey, Mitch and Ryan kissed! Seriously, I’ve been waiting for that moment ever since I first started reviewing this show. No matter what else one might say about Baywatch Nights, David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon had great chemistry together. I won’t necessarily miss reviewing this show but I will miss seeing the two of them together.
In the end, Baywatch Nights was a pretty uneven show but it was definitely fun. I think it had potential but I’m going to guess it was doomed by being a part of the Baywatch franchise. People who didn’t like Baywatch weren’t going to watch a version of the show that took place at night. People who did like Baywatch were undoubtedly disappointed by the lack of red swimsuits. The ratings went down. Judging from the final few episodes, the production budget got seriously cut. The Hoff and Harmon were fun to watch but their chemistry couldn’t save the show.
Well, that completes Baywatch Nights! Retro Television Reviews is going on a holiday break but, on January 7th, I will start reviewing a new show in this timeslot! Until then, happy holidays to all the lifeguards out there.
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? 2013’s Open Grave!
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.
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!
This week, things get dark.
Episode 2.20 “Mesmer’s Bauble”
(Dir by Armand Mastroianni, originally aired by May 1st, 1989)
Howard Moore (Martin Neufeld) is the latest in a long line of nerdy Friday the 13th villains. With his long hair, unwashed appearance, and crazy eyes, Howard is an easy target for some of the less compassionate citizens of Canada. Of course, Howard doesn’t help things by having a totally creepy personality. He works in a vinyl record store, where he offers up unsolicited music advice to the teenage customers, the majority of whom giggle awkwardly whenever he’s nearby. Howard is obsessed with a singer named Angelica (Vanity) but there’s no way Howard could ever actually meet her.
Or at least, that’s the case until he finds Mesmer’s Bauble. Having once belonged to the inventor of hypnotism, this crystal pendant grants Howard anything that he asks for, as long as he first uses it to hypnotize people and then kill them. (It turns out that merely looking at the pendant is enough to send someone into a hypnotic trance.) As with so many Friday the 13th villains, Howard quickly comes to love having the power to kill people. I’ve always felt that the majority of this show’s villains are basically addicts. Instead of being addicted to drugs, they’re addicted to the rush of power that comes with using a cursed antique to get what they want. That’s certainly the case with Howard.
At first, Howard thinks that he wants Angelia to love him. He kills both her publicist and her manager in order to get closer to her. But, once he’s finally close to her, Howard apparently realizes that he actually wants to be Angelica. In an effectively nightmarish sequence, Howard and Angelica’s body appear to merge into one. Howard literally turns into Angelia while Angelica presumably withers away into nothingness. Howard is now Angelica, which will undoubtedly upset Ryan, who has bought two tickets for Angelica’s latest show.
It’s up to Micki and Ryan to recover the pendant and they manage to do so in the most anticlimactic way possible. They go to Angelica/Howard’s concert and Micki grabs the pendant while Angelica/Howard is singing. Without the pendant, Angelica dissolves into Howard and then a panicked Howard is promptly electrocuted on stage.
Howard’s dead but so are a lot of other people. At the shop, Micki and Ryan confess to Jack that they feel that they failed because so many people died before they got the pendant. Jack shrugs and basically tells them “that’s life.” What a dark ending! Actually, it was rare that Friday the 13th didn’t end on a dark note.
This was an effectively creepy episode, one that worked because of just how dark it allowed things to get. Even Jack pointed out that the pendant’s powers didn’t always make sense, which made it even more dangerous in the hands of someone like Howard. There were a few loose ends. I found it a bit odd that there wasn’t a bigger public reaction to a famous black woman turning into an ugly white guy and then dying in front of a crowded club. In fact, the show left it a bit unclear as to what actually happened to Angelica after Howard transformed into her but I’m going to guess it was nothing good. In the end, though, this episode was effectively macabre.
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, we begin the third season of Monsters!
Episode 3.1 “Stressed Environment”
(Dir by Jeffrey Wolf, originally aired on September 30th, 1990)
The third season of Monsters starts off with the story of an experiment gone wrong.
For twelve years, Dr. Elizabeth Porter (Carol Lynley) has been experimenting with lab rats, trying to help them evolve into a higher form of intelligence. Her work is supervised by Dr. Robert Winston (Victor Raider-Wexler) and her assistants are the cowardly Keith (Scott Weir) and Gina (Kathleen McCall). The episode opens with a lengthy (by Monsters standards) scene of Gina undressing and then putting on her special rat feeding uniform while Keith tries to discreetly watch. It’s a scene that really has little to do with the rest of the episode but I guess the producers of Monsters decided that the best way to survive to a fourth season would be to appeal to teenage boys.
Anyway, Keith’s crush on Gina comes to naught because Gina is killed while trying to feed the rats. It turns out that the rats have gotten smart. They’ve gotten smart enough to build crude spears and crossbows and use them as weapons. Dr. Winston wants to shut the experiment down. Keith wants to go home. Elizabeth, however, wants to protect her rats and see if she can convince them to give up their weapons and live in peace. Dr. Winston points out that if humans can’t convince their own species to do that, how is Elizabeth going to convince a bunch of rats?
And Dr. Winston has a point. Elizabeth may think that she has a special bond with the rats but the rats disagree. Soon, Gina is not the only person to have lost their life to an army of spear-carrying rats. The episode ends with Keith as the sole survivor and his ultimate fate is still up in the air. The rats are angry, ruthless, and armed.
And cute!
Seriously, this episode probably might have been more effective if the rats themselves have been a bit more frightening but it wouldn’t have been as much fun. As it is, the use of crude puppets actually made the rats look kind of adorable, especially when they were holding their little spears and setting up their little crossbows. Of course, one reason why I found the rats to be cute is because I’m used to CGI. I take CGI for granted. This episode was made when special effects people still had to use puppets for their monsters and, as a result, the rats don’t really look like rats. They’re so fake-looking that it’s hard not to like them. They’re a throw-back to a simpler and more innocent time.
This was actually a pretty entertaining episode and a great way to start season 3! I appreciated that this episode of Monsters featured actual monsters. After the uneven batch of episodes that finished up the second season of this show, it’s nice to season 3 starting off on the right foot.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, a detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!
This week, Mitch has a day off but still has to work.
Episode 2.21 “The Vortex”
(Dir by L. Lewis Stout, originally aired on May 9th, 1997)
Mitch has the day off and he’s spending it with Ryan! No matter what else one might say about Baywatch Nights and the direction it took as the production budget grew smaller, David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon made for a cute couple and, as this episode began, I was kind of looking forward to watching them spend the day together.
Unfortunately, when they come across a fortune teller’s shop, Ryan insists that they go inside and discover their future. Mitch mocks Ryan for “believing in that stuff” and says that there’s no such thing as psychic powers or being able to see the future, despite the fact that, over the course of the second season, Mitch has both gotten psychic powers and traveled through time. Seriously, I get that Mitch was supposed to be the skeptic of the group but, by this point in the series, Mitch has seen and dealt with enough that his continual skepticism is just not believable. Especially after last week’s episode, Mitch should be prepared to accept anything. If this was a Lovecraft short story, Mitch would be ranting about the things he’s seen while locked away in an insane asylum.
At first, the store appears to be deserted. Ryan sits at the fortune telling table and, when an actress (played by Priscilla Inga Taylor of Malibu CA), comes in the store, Ryan is able to tell her that she’s going to get the next role for which she auditions. (I’d like to think that Taylor is playing her Malibu CA character, Traycee, here.) After the actress leaves, Mitch and Ryan are suddenly joined by the owner of the shop, Wahote (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman). Wahote invites them to step behind a curtain and into a vortex and soon, Mitch and Ryan find themselves ten minutes into the future and watching as their future selves receive a call from Teague telling them that they need to investigate a boat that’s come back from the Amazon. Future Mitch complains about always having to do things on his day off. What I find strange is that neither present not future Mitch and Ryan seem to be curious as to why Teague, who apparently has connections with the CIA, is always asking the two of them to do these things.
A mysterious woman (Elaine Bilstad) shows up and says something about pollution and the rain forests. Mitch and Ryan jump around in time and eventually, future Ryan and Mitch have to help present Ryan and Mitch get off the boat because the boat is full of mutants that have been created by pollution. Or something. To be honest, I had a hard time following the plot of this one. Time travel nonsense is always a bit difficult for me to follow and the constantly moving camera was a bit of a distraction.
To give credit where credit is due, this episode had a good deal of atmosphere and, as I said earlier, Hasselhoff and Harmon were a likable team. But the episode’s story was nearly incoherent and the fact that Mitch was still a skeptic at the end of the episode required too great of a suspension of disbelief. During this episode, all I could think about was how obvious it was that Baywatch Nights was on its last legs.
Speaking of which …. next week, we finish up Baywatch Nights! It’s time for it all to end.
Through the Shattered Lens 