Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.22 “The Pirate’s Promise”

Posted on March 22, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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, there’s something in the fog! Can Micki and Ryan stop the horror of the thing in the fog? FOG!

Episode 1.22 “The Pirate’s Promise”

(Dir by Bill Corcoran, originally aired on June 27th, 1988)

In the 18th century, a group of pirates killed their captain, Angus McBride, and stole his treasure. They used the money to start a seaside village in New England and to become respectable citizens. Over two hundred years later, the spirit of Captain McBride is hanging out in the fog and desiring vengeance on the descendants of his crew.

Hmmm …. this sounds familiar.

This episode has more than a little in common with John Carpenter’s The Fog. This time, as opposed to it being the result of an anniversary curse, it’s a crazed lighthouse keeper named Joe Fenton (Cedric Smith) who summons the ghost of Captain McBride with a cursed foghorn but otherwise, much of the plot and the show’s imagery feels as if it was lifted directly from Carpenter’s classic horror film. Captain McBride emerges from the fog several times during the episode. He kills his victim’s with a hook and then tosses a few coins at Joe.

Micki and Ryan show up in town to retrieve the foghorn. (This is another episode in which Jack is not present.) It’s interesting how these cursed antiques often tend to end up in small towns, like the one in this episode or The Quilt of Hathor. The previous few episodes featured Ryan having to say goodbye to someone as a result of a cursed item. This time, it’s Micki whose heart is broken when the sweet proprietor of the local history museum is stabbed with a saber while trying to protect her. The episode ends with Micki sobbing while Ryan tries to comfort her, which is quite a change from how these things usually go. For once, Micki is the one who gets to show emotion while Ryan is the one who takes a more pragmatic approach to dealing with the horrors of the cured antiques.

As for the episode, it wasn’t bad. Director Bill Corcoran did a good job of creating a properly ominous atmosphere and Cedric Smith was perfectly creepy as the evil lighthouse owner. The low-budget was evident by the fact that the time itself seemed to be nearly deserted. Even though the town was described as being small, it still seems like it should have been home to more than just a handful of people and I found myself wondering if maybe the show decided to save money by not hiring extras. That minor quibble aside, this was an effective episode as long as you were willing to overlook the plot’s similarity to Carpenter’s film.

Next week, hopefully, Jack will come back and maybe Micki will have cheered up. Someone likeable dies in every episode so you would think they would be used to it by now.

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Fast Company (dir by David Cronenberg)

Posted on May 26, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Released in 1979, Fast Company is a Canadian film about fast cars and the fast-living people who drive them. Lonnie Johnson (William Smith) is a veteran drag racer who is so good at his job that his nickname is “Lucky Man.” He rarely loses a race. He’s never without an adoring fan or two, though he always remains loyal to his girlfriend, Sammy (Claudia Jennings). Lonnie is so lucky that, even when one of his cars explodes, he walks away without even a scratch.

Lonnie and his protégé, Billy (Nicholas Campbell), are being sponsored by Fast Company, an international oil consortium. The money is okay but Lonnie is getting old and he would like to step back and spend some more quality time with Sammy. Unfortunately, the team boss is Phil Adamson (John Saxon) and the viewers knows that Phil is a bad guy because he’s played by John Saxon and, instead of driving to the races, he pilots his own private plane. When Lonnie starts to rebel against Phil’s management, Phil schemes to not only replace him and Billy with rival driver Gary Black (Cedric Smith) but he also plots to repossess Lonnie’s prized car!

Okay, so it’s kind of a silly and predictable film. In fact, there’s really only two reasons why Fast Company is remembered today.

One is because it was the last film to feature B-movie star Claudia Jennings before her death in a traffic accident. Jennings was nicknamed the “Queen of the B movies” and, over the course of her brief career, appeared in a lot of films about fast cars. She gives a likable performance as Sammy, even if the film’s script doesn’t really give her much to do.

Secondly, this film was directed by David Cronenberg. This was Cronenberg’s first time to direct a film that he hadn’t written. This was his first job as a “director for hire” but, interestingly enough, it was while directing this film that Cronenberg first worked with some of his most important future collaborators, including cinematographer Mark Irwin and actor Nicholas Campbell. Cronenberg directed Fast Company in between Rabid and The Brood and Fast Company might as well take place in a different universe from either of those films. To be honest, there’s not much about this film that would lead anyone to suspect that it had been directed by Cronenberg if they hadn’t already seen his name in the credits. Cronenberg’s signature style is really only evident when the camera lingers over the scenes of the mechanics working on the cars. In those scenes, there’s a hint of the Cronenberg that everyone knows, the Cronenberg who is fascinated by both the relationship between man and machine and how things work inside the body of both the driver and the car.

For the most part, Fast Company is a typical 70s racing film, one that was made for drive-in audiences and which makes no apologies for that fact. (Nor should it.) There’s a lot of shots of denim-clad Canadians cheering as their favorite driver crosses the finish line. William Smith brings a world-weary dignity to the role of Lonnie Johnson but, while John Saxon is always fun to watch, Phil Adamson is so evil that he threatens to throw the tone of the film out of whack. The light-hearted scenes of Lonnie, Billy, and head mechanic Elder (Don Francks) don’t always seem to belong in the same movie with scenes of John Saxon scheming to cheat and risk the lives of his drivers.

In the end, though, the important thing is that the cars are fast and so is this quickly paced movie. I’m enough of a country girl that I have to admit that I have a weakness for fast cars that leave a cloud of dust behind them. On that level, I enjoyed the film and really, that’s the only level that matters when it comes to a film like Fast Company.

Boobs, Music, and Sci-Fi: Heavy Metal (1981, directed by Gerald Potterton)

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Jedadiah Leland

I think I was twelve when I first saw Heavy Metal. It came on HBO one night and I loved it. So did all of my friends. Can you blame us? It had everything that a twelve year-old boy (especially a 12 year-old boy who was more than a little on the nerdy side) could want out of a movie: boobs, loud music, and sci-fi violence. It was a tour of our secret fantasies. The fact that it was animated made it all the better. Animated films were not supposed to feature stuff like this. When my friends and I watched Heavy Metal, we felt like we were getting away with something.

Based on stories from the adults-only Heavy Metal Magazine, Heavy Metal was divided into 8 separate segments:

Soft Landing (directed by Jimmy T. Murakami and John Bruno, written by Dan O’Bannon)

Heavy Metal opens brilliantly with a Corvette being released from a space shuttle and then flying down to Earth, surviving reentry without a scratch. Who, after watching this, has not wanted a Space Corvette of his very own?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWMPe3wF9jQ

Grimaldi (directed by Harold Whitaker)

On Earth, a terrified young girl listens a glowing green meteorite called the Loc-Nar tells her that it is the source of all evil in the universe. This sets up the rest of the film, which is made up of stories that the Loc-Nar tells about its influence. The Loc-Nar is the film’s MacGuffin and, seen today, one of Heavy Metal’s biggest problems is that it has to find a way to force the Loc-Nar into every story, even if it meant sacrificing any sort of consistency about what the Loc-Nar was capable of doing. Even when I was twelve, I realized that the Loc-Nar was not really that important.

Harry Canyon (directed by Pino Van Lamsweerde, written by Daniel Goldberg)

In this neo-noir tale, futuristic cabby Harry Canyon (voiced by Richard Romanus) is enlisted to help an unnamed girl (voiced by Susan Roman) to find the Loc-Nar. Slow and predictable, Harry Canyon does feature the voice of John Candy as a police sergeant who attempts to charge Harry for police work.

Den (directed by Jack Stokes, written by Richard Corben)

Nerdy teenager David (voiced by John Candy) finds a piece of the Loc-Nar and is transported to the world of Neverwhere, where he is transformed into Den, a muscular, bald warrior. As Den, David gets to live out the fantasies of Heavy Metal‘s target audience. On his new planet, Den rescues an Earth woman from being sacrificed, overthrows an evil queen and a sorcerer, and gets laid. A lot. Den is the best segment in Heavy Metal, largely because of the endearing contrast between the action onscreen and John Candy’s enthusiastic narration.

Captain Sternn (directed by Paul Sebella and Julian Harris, written by Bernie Wrightson)

heavy-metal_captain-stern On a space station orbiting the Earth, Captain Lincoln F. Sternn is on trail for a countless number of offenses. Though guilty, Captain Sternn expects to be acquitted because he has bribed the prosecution’s star witness, Hanover Fiste. However, Hanover is holding the Loc-Nar in his hand and it causes him to tell the truth about Captain Sternn and eventually turn into a bloodthirsty giant. Captain Sternn saves the day by tricking Hanover into getting sucked out of an air lock.

Captain Sternn was a reoccurring character in Heavy Metal Magazine and his segment is one of the best. Eugene Levy voices Captain Sternn while Joe Flaherty voices his lawyer and Dean Wormer himself, John Vernon, is the prosecutor. Even National Lampoon co-founder Douglas Kenney provided a voice.

B-17 (directed by Barrie Nelson, written by Dan O’Bannon)

After the Loc-Nar enters Earth’s atmosphere, it crashes into a bullet-riddled World War II bomber, causing the dead crewmen within to reanimate as zombies. Scored to Don Felder’s Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride), B-17 is one of the shorter segments and its dark and moody animation holds up extremely well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELUP-oZQKM4

So Beautiful and So Dangerous (directed by John Halas, written by Angus McKie)

Nubile Pentagon secretary Gloria is beamed aboard a spaceship that looks like a giant smiley face. While she has sex with the ship’s robot captain, the two crew members (voiced by Harold Ramis and Eugene Levy) pour out a long line of cocaine and shout “Nosedive!” before snorting up every flake. So Beautiful and So Dangerous is so juvenile and so ridiculous that it is actually all kinds of awesome.

Taarna

Sacrificed In the film’s final and most famous segment, Taarna, the blond warrior was featured on Heavy Metal‘s poster, rides a pterodactyl across a volcanic planet, killing barbarians, and finally confronting the Loc-Nar. She sacrifices herself to defeat the Loc-Nar but no worries! We return to Earth where, for some reason, the Loc-Nar explodes and the girl from the beginning of the film is revealed to be Taarna reborn. She even gets to fly away on her pterodactyl. Taarna was really great when I was twelve but today, it is impossible to watch it without flashing back to the Major Boobage episode of South Park.