Tag Archives: elliott smith

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 3.18 “Spirit of Television”

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, people are dying and somehow television is to blame.

Episode 3.18 “Spirit of Television”

(Dir by Jorge Montesi, originally aired on April 30, 1990)

Ilsa (Marj Dusay) claims to be a medium.  She uses a television set to summon the spirits of the dead for her rich clients and then, later on, the spirits kill her customers and Ilsa, who has a degenerative disease, gets another ten days added to her life.  If she doesn’t continually kill, her skin starts to look like rubber and her fingernails fall off.  Agck!

This was largely a Jack episode.  Jack is the one who, with his years of experience as a magician, assumes that Ilsa is a fake.  He’s also the one who recruits an old friend named Robert Jandini (Paul Bettis) to go undercover and check Ilsa out.  And when Robert is inevitably killed as a result, Jack is the one who has to live with the guilt.  One thing that I’ve always appreciated about Friday the 13th is that it doesn’t shy away from showing what a lifetime of battling the supernatural would do to someone’s psyche.  At the end of this episode, Jack is about as depressed as I’ve ever seen him.  The great Chris Wiggins was always Friday the 13th’s not-so secret weapon and he gives another stand-out performance here.

In fact, this episode is so focused on Jack, Jandini, and Ilsa that Micki and Johnny largely feel like bystanders.  There’s nothing wrong with that, to be honest.  Micki and Johnny just don’t have the same sort of enjoyable chemistry that Micki and Ryan had.  Still, watching Johnny in the background, it’s hard not to consider that the third season’s writers never really figured out who the character was meant to be or what they really wanted to do with him.  I have sympathy for Steve Monarque because he doesn’t come across as being a bad actor.  Instead, he comes across as being an actor who was saddled with an extremely inconsistent character.

As for this episode, it was nice to finally get an episode that was just about a cursed antique and that didn’t feel the need to try to reinvent the show’s format.  That said, the television seems likes a really bulky object to curse.  How did Ilsa even figure the curse out?  What if the television had been purchased by someone who wasn’t terminally ill?  Can Ilsa watch regular programming on the television or is it always a portal to Hell?  These questions go unanswered.

Still, it’s an atmospheric episode and Chris Wiggins gives a strong performance.  For a season 3 episode, this wasn’t bad.  It’s also the the third-to-late episode of Friday the 13th.  Only two more left to go.

I’m going to miss this show.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 2.10 “Night Hunger”

Posted on 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, we’ve got the saddest episode of Friday the 13th yet!

Episode 2.10 “Night Hunger”

(Dir by Martin Lavut, originally aired on January 9th, 1989)

As a young boy, Michael Firono was constantly told by his father, Dominic (Nick Nichols), that he should always play to win and that, if he lost, it was because he was a wimp.  Needless to say, once Mike became a teenager, he did not have a great relationship with his father.  Seeking an escape from his abusive household, Mike spend all of his time at the local antique store where, on his 16th birthday, the store’s owner, Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong), gave him a special silver chain.

Mike (played by Richard Panebianco) has grown up to be an angry young man.  He always wears the chain around his neck.  Hanging on the chain is the key to his car.  Mike loves to race his car and, far from being the loser that his father claimed he would grow up to be, Mike cannot be beat.  His car is amazingly fast and Mike is incredibly (one might even say supernaturally) skilled behind the wheel.  His main goal is to defeat his childhood rival, Deacon (Real Andrews), who is now a street racer himself.  Deacon is hesitant to race Mike, precisely because Mike seems to be so driven to win that racing with him can be even more dangerous than usual.  To Deacon, street racing is fun.  For Mike, it’s an obsession.

Of course, Mike has a secret.  As long as he’s wearing the silver chain, he can’t be defeated.  But he has to kill people and dip the key in their blood for the chain to work.  Jack, Micki, and Ryan set out to reclaim the silver chain but an accident results in both the chain and the key being absorbed into Mike’s body.  With the chain and the key now sitting next to Mike’s heart, Mike’s eyes not only glow red but his car seems to have a mind of its own….

This is another one of those episodes of Friday the 13th where the villain is himself a victim.  Even before he met Lewis and received the silver chain, Mike was doomed.  His abusive father left Mike feeling so insecure and so obsessed with winning that there was really no way Mike wasn’t going to end up snapping eventually.  In the present day, Dominic finally understands how much he hurt Mike and he feels guilty about it but it’s too late to undo the damage that’s been done.  Like a pusher befriending people most likely to get addicted to his product, Uncle Lewis saw Mike as someone who would easily succumb to a cursed antique.  Mike becomes addicted to using the key and that leads to him doing a lot of bad things.  But the real curse here is not the silver chain but instead Mike’s abusive childhood.  Mike never had a chance.

This is a genuinely sad and well-acted episode, with Mike’s obsession eventually destroying him.  As happen so often with this show, Ryan and Micki are left with the knowledge that, while they can reclaim the cursed objects, they can never repair the damage that they’ve done.

Music Video of the Day: Coming Up Roses by Elliott Smith (1995, directed by Ross Harris)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today’s music video of the day is Coming Up Roses, Elliott Smith’s first solo music video.  Elliott Smith would go on to become one of the most influential indie musicians of the 90s, though he never seemed to get the recognition that he deserved when he was alive.  Even his Oscar nomination for composing Miss Misery for Good Will Hunting was overshadowed by all the bombast surrounding Titanic and My Heart Will Go On.

This is a simple video, one that will look familiar to anyone who has ever seen an indie video from the 90s but it feels very appropriate for Elliott Smith and his style of music.  This video was directed by Ross Harris, who was himself a former child actor.  Remember Joey, the little kid who was invited up to the cockpit in Airplane?  That was Ross Harris.

Here are the lyrics for Coming Up Roses, composed by Elliott Smith:

I’m a junkyard full of false starts
And I don’t need your permission
To bury my love under this bare lightbulb

The moon is a sickle-cell
I’ll kill you in time
Your cold white brother alive in your blood
Like spun glass in your sore eye

While the moon does it’s division
You’re buried below
And it’s coming up roses everywhere
You’ve gone red roses fall in love

The things that you tell yourself
They’ll kill you in time
Your cold white brother alive in your blood
Spinning in the night sky

While the moon does its division
You’re buried below
And it’s coming up roses everywhere
You’ve gone red roses

So you got in a kind of trouble
That nobody knows
It’s coming up roses everywhere
You’ve gone red roses.

Ten Years #32: Elliott Smith

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
32. Elliott Smith (946 plays)
Top track (95 plays): Southern Belle, from Elliott Smith (1995)
Featured track: St. Ides Heaven, from Elliott Smith

This October will mark ten years since Elliott Smith’s tragic death. I remember hearing the news only a few months after I started listening to him. The Royal Tenenbaums was my favorite movie at the time, and I picked up his self-titled album after hearing Needle in the Hay in the suicide scene. As if the album’s lyrics weren’t bleak enough already, the relevance of my first experience of Elliott Smith to his death added a whole new weight. It’s a pleasant if odd coincidence that the album soon became intimately tied with one of the most positive experiences of my life.

Smith died in October, and I shipped off to basic training the following month. Music deprivation–the only really challenging aspect of the whole three month process–came to an end when I was marched out of my barracks with my confiscated cd collection back in tow and shipped off to my year-long advanced training. I hopped on a plane in a bitter sub-zero St. Louis February and fell back off in the palm-tree coastal paradise of Monterey, California. Elliott Smith was spinning all the while, and it kept on playing until I left that strange and beautiful place for good. Something about the juxtaposition of Smith’s depressing lyrics and ethereal performance perfectly captured the simultaneous homesickness and bewilderment that I experienced as a rural 19 year old alone and out of his element with an enormous Army pay check, left to roam the hills of one of America’s most affluent coastal cities every night. That otherworldly vision of a serene Pacific bay surrounded by city lights will always go hand-in-hand with this album for me, and I can’t bring myself to listen to any other Elliott Smith recording without being overcome by a desire to put his self-titled back on, close my eyes, and relive the experience. It might not be exactly what Smith had in mind when he recorded it, but I would rather like to remember him for the beauty lying beneath his depression than for his death.