Tonight, for our horror on the lens, we have the fourteenth episode of the 2nd season of Friday the 13th: The Series!
In this episode is a sequel to the Vanity’s Mirror episode from season 1. The gold compact is back and this time, an aging model is using its power to maintain her youth. Unfortunately, there’s a price for looking young and that price is …. can you guess it? ….. murder!
This episode originally aired on February 11th, 1989.
Maybe I’m getting cantankerous, but my tolerance for incompetence is at a nadir. Not to say that these were the worst stories I’ve seen, but they were up there. Maybe making a horror series is a way to pass the time? The budgets must be REALLY small. For example, look at this guy’s truly FAKE beard:
It looks like if Party City fell on hard times or Santa Claus became a Ginger Pederast. That is a CREEPY beard and that’s not what they were going for, but it’s what they got.
The B-Story didn’t even have live action! It was just animated!
Not to say that big budget studios don’t cut corners. Netflix can’t afford lights. I’m assuming that’s the case because every show looks like it was filmed with a Key Chain Maglite. EG:
The above is from a Netflix show called Midnight Mass and I guess that they heard Chairman Mao’s saying, “It’s always darkest, just before it goes completely black” and just leaned in. I can’t tell what’s going on here. I guess these….Three?? guys are in a canoe or maybe that’s just a really big raccoon in flannel on the end there. Who knows? It could be a raccoon; I’ve seen raccoons in Texas as big as Labrador Retrievers and they’re really organized too! I saw one raccoon with a hat and clipboard directing 8 enormous raccoons and these were just ordinary suburban raccoons! Could imagine what these mutant raccoons could do with some funding?!
Anywho, back to this aggressively mediocre program – Creepshow. It’s created by Greg Nicotero who also created The Walking Dead, which was just ok on it’s best day! I’m glad to see that Greg is consistent. Don’t let success go to your head- aim low. Greg, thanks for delivering another Center of Mass performance review! As Casey Kasem’s mediocre brother – Chad Kasem would say, “Keep reaching for the remote, but keep your ass on the couch.”
These two episodes were both varying degrees of stupid. The first episode was about Tim and his magical armoire. Really. Instead of the wardrobe showing where the wild things were, it was more of a desk that caused time to do stupid things. He would go into the magical closet and time would zoom by for him, but slow down for everyone on the outside of the closet. This is general relativity in reverse because the writer fell asleep in basic physics. If Tim did go into a black hole or whatever, time would slow down for him, but not for the folks outside of the closet. Tim should’ve returned and everyone would be way older, but nope. He never seemed to grasp that he was aging A LOT every time he went into the closet. Shocker, he dies- *eyeroll* I cared not!
The second story was like if an 8th grader got a very small budget to make an 18 minute scary cartoon. The town of Oakwood is about to celebrate is bi-centennial and they decide to open a really scary looking box to celebrate. It looked haunted and gross. This is the box that everyone thought it would be great to open:
I won’t write that everyone dies….most do though. If you’re bored and really want to watch something that’s the equivalent of a day old room temperature Chick-Fil-A sandwich, this is for you!
Reviewing Fear The Walking Dead’s seventh and final season is going to be difficult for me.
You have to understand that I’ve only seen a few episodes of Fear The Walking Dead. I watched the first two or three episodes of the first season. Then I got bored. I tried to watch the second season. I got bored. I was determined to watch the third season but I changed my mind halfway through the season premiere. Again, I got bored Seasons 4, 5, and 6, I didn’t even try. I was exhausted with zombies and, even more importantly, I was exhausted with the world of The Walking Dead.
But I am going to try to watch season 7 because it’s the final season. With both The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead reaching their conclusions, a pop cultural era is coming to an end. And so, despite not having the slightest idea what’s going on or who the majority of the characters, I’m going to attempt to watch and review Fear The Walking Dead.
Fear the Walking Dead‘s seventh season premiered last Sunday. I only got around to watching it today because I may be determined but I’m not particularly enthusiastic. “What,” I asked myself, “can this show possibly provide me with that The Walking Dead and countless other zombie films haven’t?”
As if to answer my question, Fear the Walking Dead opened with several atomic warheads exploding. Certainly, there have been other zombie films that have opened with nuclear bombs going off. Fear the Walking Dead, though, may be the first television show to do so at the start of its seventh season. On the one hand, the people incinerated did not return as walkers. However, those who died of radiation poisoning did. Seriously, that’s a terrifying through. Radiation poisoning is a bad enough way to die without spending the entire time knowing that, once you do die, you’re going to return as a zombie.
The majority of the show’s regular cast did not appear in the first episode, which was fine with me since I don’t really don’t know who any of them are. Instead, the episode centered around Strand (Colman Domingo), a regular character who had kind of set himself up as a warlord over the radioactive landscape and Will (Gus Halper), a wanderer who was eventually picked up by Strand’s men. At first, Strand had little use for Will but then Strand discovered that Will knew Alicia. I, of course, don’t know Alicia but this is all stuff for which I’ll have a better understanding after a few episodes. What’s important is that it was obvious that Alicia was important to Strand.
Fortunately, I didn’t really need to understand all of the backstory in order to enjoy this episode. The Beacon, as the premiere was entitled, was a visual triumph, with the nuclear hellscape becoming as important of a character as either Strand or Will. The inevitable battle between Will, Strand, and a group of walkers was also nicely handled, with the shadowy walkers emerging from a dark mist in a style that brought to mind John Carpenter’s The Fog. In this episode, the walkers were frightening in a way that they rarely were in the recent episodes of The Walking Dead.
As for Strand and Will, Domingo and Halper did a good job playing opposite each other. They’re both intriguing characters. Unfortunately, the script was full of clunky dialogue, which seems to be an issue on all of the shows that make up The Walking Dead universe. Still, the episode was visually impressive and well-acted so I’m going to continue to watch the final season of Fear The Walking Dead and, after a few more episodes, I will hopefully actually know what’s going on.
Tonight, for our horror on the lens, we have the eleventh episode of the 2nd season of Friday the 13th: The Series!
In this episode, a beekeeper (Art Hindle) uses killer bees to take out his enemies! AGCK! I have to admit that I am a little bit scared of bees, mostly because I’ve never been stung by one. There’s a part of me that will always be worried that I might be allergic to them. Plus, I think it’s kind of depressing that bees spend their whole life looking for someone to sting and then they die as a result. I feel bad for the bees, even as I fear them.
This episode originally aired on January 21st, 1989.
Tonight, for our horror on the lens, we have the sixth episode of the 2nd season of Friday the 13th: The Series!
In this episode, an actor uses a makeup case that was once owned by John Wilkes Booth to improve his looks! Unfortunately, the makeup is fueled by murder! This episode features horror and romance. Prepare to shed a tear for poor Micki. This episode also features a shout out to the great Boris Karloff.
This episode was directed by Tom McLouhlin, who also directed Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives!
This episode originally aired on November 11th, 1988.
First off, you may be looking at this review and thinking, “Someone’s a little late.”
Yes, I am. Thank you for pointing that out. I’m sure you’ve never had a busy week either.
That said, despite the fact that you shouldn’t have pointed it out, it is true that Day of the Dead premiered last Friday and it was only today that I finally got around to watching it on the DVR. That wasn’t necessarily intentional on my part. I just haven’t had a chance to sit down and really watch it or any other shows until tonight. In fact, ever since I first saw the commercials for the show on SyFy, I’ve been looking forward to watching it. Even though it looked like yet another Walking Dead rip-off, the fact that it was on SyFy held some promise as SyFy’s shows usually move quickly and feature lots of carnage. If AMC always seems as if it’s trying too hard to turn its zombie franchise into a prestige factory, SyFy promises the opposite approach.
The show is named after George Romero’s Day of the Dead, which featured a group of survivors trying to ride out the zombie apocalypse in an underground bunker. While the first episode did feature zombies and an anti-fracking plotline that felt like it could have come from one of Romero’s later films, it otherwise didn’t have much in common with Romero’s classic shocker. The zombie apocalypse did start about halfway through the episode and apparently the show is going to focus on a group of people trying to survive the end of the world but, during the first episode, there was no bunker. There was no Dr. Logan. No one shouted “Choke on them” while his intestines were being devoured. There was, however, some underground scenes due to the whole fracing subplot and there is a sinister character named Rhodes so I imagine we’ll be heading for some sort of underground bunker soon. I guess we’ll find out over the course of the next few episodes.
After opening with an exciting flashforward the featured plenty of undead chaos, the first episode focused on election day in the town of Mawinhaken. Mayor Paula Bowman (Miranda Frigon) is concerned about getting reelected but the election is brought to halt when the dead suddenly rise up from their graves and start eating all of the voters. I got the feeling that we were meant to dislike Mayor Bowman because she’s an ambitious politician who has apparently put her career before her family but, as far as I’m concerned, Mayor Bowman was the best character on the show. No sooner have the dead arisen than she’s running around with a gun and blowing them away while saying stuff like, “Second amendment, motherfucker!” Hell yeah! Plus, she has a great name. Mayor Bowman has a nice ring to it….
(But if I was mayor, would I still have time to watch and review Lifetime films? That’s the question.)
As for the rest of the characters …. well, there’s a lot of them. Hopefully, a few of them will get eaten during the next episode because, otherwise, it’s going to be a struggle to keep everyone straight. I did like Keenan Tracy, who played Cam McDermott, the son of a police detective who mows lawns to bring in extra money. The scene where he mowed over the dead as they rose from their graves was a highlight of the episode. Otherwise, the characters felt a bit interchangeable. The only woman working on the fracking crew is former special forces. The mortuary assistant is sarcastic. There’s two bullies who like to give Cam a hard time. They all made just enough of an impression that I can remember that they’re on the show but I’d by lying if I said any of them jumped out at me the way that Mayor Bowman and Lawnmower Cam did.
Anyway, it was a good enough first episode. The action moved quickly and the zombies were gruesome without being quite as icky as the decaying corpses that pop up on The Walking Dead. So far, the Day of the Dead zombies appear to move faster than the Walking Dead zombies and that’s definitely an improvement. It’s probably debatable whether or not, at this point, there’s anything new that can be done with whole zombie apocalypse thing but I’ll definitely give Day of the Dead a chance to show me what it has in mind.
Someone has to review this and I guess I drew the short-straw….again. Short horror is likely the mostly challenging short because you have to elicit two feelings: Concern and Fear. The problem is that if you don’t care about the actors, you can’t feel the fear because you can’t identify with them. Their demise is as important to you as whether or not you should do light or heavy starch.
Poor poor What’s Her Face house-sits for her father and takes a bunch of stupid pills. Not that she’s using drugs, but I’m assuming stupid pills were taken because What’s Her Face does A LOT of stupid things. A creep tries to get access to her apartment building, she refuses. He gets in any way and threatens her. A normal person would at least try to call the police or her Dad. She does, however, take out the garbage when she knows a psycho is out and about, and this act of stupidity gives him access to her father’s flat and the psycho kills her. That’s it.
I don’t mind if something is gratuitous, but please don’t make it boring. It did allow me some time proof my bread; so, I suppose the film did do that.
Tonight, for our horror on the lens, we have the fourth episode of the 2nd season of Friday the 13th: The Series!
Colin Fox plays a Satanist who plans to use a magic coin to summon the dead and take over the world! Can Micki and Ryan stop him and his cult?
This episode originally aired on October 21st, 1988! It was apparently as close as the 2nd season of Friday the 13th got to doing a Halloween show as the next episode wouldn’t air until November 4th.
Tonight, for our horror on the lens, we have the third episode of the 2nd season of Friday the 13th: The Series!
Kate Trotter plays a psychiatrist who, due to a cursed radio, is capable of helping even the most troubled of her patients! Unfortunately, for everyone that she helps, someone else has to die!
This episode originally aired on October 14th, 1988.
Tonight, for our horror on the lens, we have the first episode of the 2nd season of Friday the 13th: The Series!
Guess what? Uncle Lewis is, once again, trying to reenter the world of the living! Can Micki and Ryan stop him!?
This episode originally aired on September 30th, 1988.
