Tag Archives: Douglas Jackson

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 3.5 “Stick It In Your Ear”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 hearing aide turns into a snake and heads explode all over wherever this show is supposed to be taking place.  I always assumed this show took place in Canada but some people insist it was set in Chicago.  I just know it’s taking place somewhere cold.

Episode 3.5 “Stick In Your Ear”

(Dir by Douglas Jackson, originally aired on October 16th, 1989)

Hack stage mentalist Adam Cole (Wayne Best) has come into possession of a cursed hearing aid that allows him to hear the thoughts of other people.  This is great for act!  However, the hearing aid also sometimes becomes so full of other people’s thoughts that Adam has to commit murder to keep his head from exploding.  Yikes!

This is yet another episode where more time is spent with the person using the cursed object than with Jack, Micki, and Ryan Johnny.  There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that and Wayne Best does fine  in the role of the not-particularly sympathetic Adam Cole.  But, watching this episode, I still found myself missing the old days — let’s call them the Ryan days — when the chemistry between the three leads was often just as important as the gore and the horror.  As a character, Johnny still often feels a bit half-baked, as if the show’s writers still weren’t quite sure who he was.  When he was first introduced, he was cocky and streetwise.  Then he went to prison for a murder he didn’t commit!  Then, he was revealed to be a baseball fan who liked to build ships in bottles.  And now, in this episode, he’s suddenly an aspiring writer who enjoys reading the tabloids.  Steven Monarque does what he can but the character is so inconsistent that Johnny still feels a bit out-of-place in the show’s world.  At the very least, Ryan had a reason for sticking with the often grisly hunt for the antiques.  He wanted to do it with his cousin.  (I know, I know …. ewwww!  But it was also Ryan’s most defining motivation.)  Johnny’s motivations are a bit more opaque.

This episode did feature some Cronenbergian body horror, a nice reminder of Friday the 13th‘s Canadian origins.  Not clearing out the hearing aid leads to some exploding head action which is quite graphic even for this show.  That said, it bothers me that one person’s head more or less implodes in front of an entire studio audience and you really do have to wonder how exactly that’s going to be explained to the press.  I would think an exploding head and a snake-like hearing aid would lead to a lot of people saying, “Hey, maybe there is something out there.”

This was a gory episode, nicely acted and featuring an intriguing antique.  That said, I still miss Ryan.

Cinemax Friday: The Paper Boy (1994, directed by Douglas Jackson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

12 year-old Johnny McFarley (Marc Marut) is a paperboy who desperately wants to be a part of a stable family.  He wants Melissa Thorpe (Alexandra Paul) to be his mother but Melisssa has moved to a different town.  Johnny solves that problem by suffocating Melissa’s mother with a plastic bag, which causes Melissa to return home.  That’s one way to do it!

As soon as Melissa and her daughter, Cammie (Brigid Tierney), move into Melissa’s mother’s old house, Johnny starts making himself indispensable by doing things like mowing the lawn for free.  He also does things like break into the house in the middle of the night, plant hidden cameras, and demand that Melissa bake him a pie.  He wants Melissa to be his mother and because Melissa feels sorry for him, she indulges Johnny and his mood swings.  Even after everyone else in the neighborhood tells her that Johnny is a little bit off, Melissa continues to allow him into the house.  Not even the crazy religious lady saying that Johnny has “the mark of Cain” can dissuade Melissa.

Johnny will do anything to make Melissa his new mother.  But then Brian (William Katt), Melissa’s boyfriend, shows up and Johnny really goes off the deep end.

The Paperboy is an adequate killer child film.  Marc Marut gives a good performance as the creepy and disturbed Johnny and the movie does make an attempt to provide him with a believable backstory to explain why he’s become the little killer that he is.  The kills are all imaginatively staged and all the more disturbing because they feature a child as the killer and that really is the whole point of the whole psycho kid genre.  The main problem with the movie is that Melissa keeps overlooking Johnny’s clearly unstable behavior.  At the point when just about anyone else would have told Johnny to stay away and perhaps even called the cops on the little bugger, Melissa keeps letting him back into her life.  By the time that Melissa finally realizes that maybe Johnny actually is as dangerous as everyone has been telling her, you’re too frustrated with her to care.

One good thing about The Paperboy is that it features William Katt in a supporting role.  If there’s ever a Late Night Cinemax Hall of Fame, William Katt will be entitled to an entire wing.  Even though he spent the majority of the 90s appearing in low-budgets movies like this one, Katt always gave a good performance, like he does here.

 

Natural Enemy (1996, directed by Douglas Jackson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

This one’s pretty dumb.

William McNamara plays Jeremy, who was given up for adoption 24 years ago and has never gotten over it.  After killing his adoptive parents, his birth father, someone’s mistress, and a private investigator played by Tia Carrere, Jeremy wants to celebrate his 25th birthday by killing his birth mother, Sandy (Lesley Anne Warren).  However, Jeremy wants to draw out Sandy’s suffering so he comes up with a plot so complex that it’s hard to believe that anyone could actually pull it off.

After Jeremy finds out that Sandy’s new husband, Ted (Donald Sutherland, massively slumming), is the head of a small brokerage firm, Jeremy reads every book that he can find and somehow become an expert on the stock market.  Even though Jeremy could have a high-paying job with any firm, he wants to work for Ted’s little firm.  Ted hires Jeremy and Jeremy proceeds to worm his way into Ted and Sandy’s life.  Jeremy also frames Ted for securities fraud, which leads to Ted losing his job and being blacklisted by all of Ted’s highly ethical Wall Street colleagues.  (Yes, I managed to write that with a straight face.)  Despite the fact that Jeremy is obviously disturbed and that Ted and Sandy’s life starts to fall apart from the exact moment that Jeremy becomes a part of it, only Ted and Sandy’s son, Chris (Christian Tessier), suspects that there’s something strange about Jeremy.

This is one of those dumb revenge thrillers that is dependent upon everyone in the movie being as dumb as possible.  Even Jeremy turns out to be dumb.  After killing almost everyone that he meets, Jeremy suddenly decides to keep one person alive and, of course, that decision comes back to haunt Jeremy in the end.  Jeremy is smart enough that he can trick people into believing that he’s a brilliant stock broker but he’s dumb enough to make an obvious mistake.  Of course, everyone else is dumb enough to to not catch on to the fact that Jeremy is a sociopath so the mass dumbness evens out in the end.

Probably the most interesting thing about this movie is that, somehow, Donald Sutherland ended up starring in it.  Even great actors have to put food on the table and hopefully, Sutherland ate well as a result of starring in Natural Enemy.