Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 3.21 “Talk Nice To Me”

Posted on June 18, 2025 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week, someone won’t stop calling!

Episode 3.21 “Talk Nice To Me”

(Dir by Ernest Farino, originally aired on February 17th, 1991)

A sexist newspaper columnist named Martin (Ed Marinaro) starts receiving phone calls from a woman (Tina Louise) with a sultry voice. She continually calls him, leaving message after message. She refuses to reveal her name or how she got Martin’s unlisted “private” number. (This episode aired during the landline era, before you could block numbers.) Martin tries everything to get her to stop calling. He disconnects his phone for two days but, as soon as he reconnects, she calls again. Martin can’t work. He can’t write. When he invites Linda (Teri Ann Lind) over to his apartment, his paranoia prove to be a real turn-off. He becomes convinced that the stalker has somehow entered his apartment. The truth is even more twisted….

This episode had potential but it was let down by a rather cartoonish performance by Ed Marinaro. I could buy Marinaro as a misogynist. I could even buy Marinaro as a womanizer. I couldn’t buy him as a successful newspaper columnist and, as a result, the whole “you’re going to lose your column!” subplot fell flat for me. That said, Martin’s apartment was an appropriately claustrophobic location and the idea of the nonstop caller was suitably creepy. This was not necessarily bad episode. It’s just an episode that could have been better than it was.

Only three more episode to go and we will have finished up with Monsters. Though uneven, the third season has still been a marked improvement over the first two. Even the third season episodes that don’t work quite as well as they should, like this one, are watchable.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.18 “The Offering”

Posted on October 16, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week features the most fearsome monster yet.

Episode 2.18 “The Offering”

(Dir by Ernest Farino, originally aired on February 18th, 1990)

After a serious auto accident, Lewis (Robert Krantz) wakes up in a hospital with a bandage wrapped around his head. Dr. Hubbard (Orson Bean) tells Lewis that he’s suffered a concussion and must rest. All Lewis wants to know is whether or not his mother’s surgery went okay. Dr. Hubbard sighs and says that they were not able to get all of the cancer.

Lewis’s comatose mother is a patient at the same hospital and, when Lewis sneaks into her room to visit with her, he’s shocked to discover that he can see a giant insect-like creature that is hovering over the bed and producing slugs that are burrowing under his mother’s skin. Lewis sees the same thing when he looks at other cancer patients but Dr. Hubbard insists that Lewis is only having hallucinations.

In order to try to help Lewis come to terms with both his accident and his mother’s cancer, Dr. Hubbard allows Lewis to watch as a patient undergoes radiation treatment. Lewis is the only one who can see that the slugs are drawn to the radiation and will leave a patient’s body to find the source of it. Still unable to convince Hubbard that what he’s seeing is real, Lewis sneaks out his room, steals a radioactive isotope, and prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice to save his mother.

The Offering is a return to form for Monsters. Full of atmosphere and featuring a genuinely disturbing set of monsters, this is an effective and well-acted episode that works because it captures the helplessness that everyone will feels when a family member or loved one is seriously ill. I lost my mother to cancer and my father to Parkinson’s, two diseases that are still not as understood as they should be. Like Lewis, I spent a lot of time wishing that I could somehow just see and understand what was causing their illnesses so that I could know how to save them. Cancer and Parkinson’s and dementia are all monsters that we wish we could just squash under our heel as easily as we could a bug.

In the end, Lewis eats a glowing radioactive isotope so that all of the cancer slugs will be drawn to his body. Couldn’t he have just used the isotope to lead the slugs out into the middle of the street or something? Lewis offers up his own life to save his mother. It reminds me of the old Norm McDonald joke, that dying of cancer is the equivalent of beating cancer because the cancer dies with you. That’s a good way to look at it. Cancer never wins.

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Monsters 1.23 “Mannikins of Horror”

Posted on March 13, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Uh-oh! Here come the Mannikins of Horror!

Episode 1.23 “Mannikins of Horror”

(Dir by Ernest Farino, originally aired on May 20th, 1989)

In a dystopian future, a once renowned surgeon named Dr. Collin (William Prince) is a “patient” in a mental health facility that is more of a prison than a hospital. Dr. Collin is obsessed with dying but he believes that he has found a way to transfer his soul into the very detailed, anatomically-correct clay figurines that he has made in his cell.

Dr. Jarris (Glynis Barber) thinks that Dr. Collin can be cured but the new head of the asylum, Dr. Starr (Brian Brophy), disagrees. Starr believes that Collin is beyond saving and of no use to society. And, in the future, those who do not have a use are euthanized. Dr. Starr does not care that Dr. Collin once saved thousands of lives during the world’s most recent war. He doesn’t care that Dr. Collin truly believes that he can make the world a better place through his research. Dr. Starr has not time for imagination or speculation. He is all about following procedure and observing protocol. The arrogant Dr. Starr even takes away Dr. Collin’s figurines.

That’s a mistake because guess what? Those figurines are alive! And when Dr. Starr drinks a bit too much Vodka and passes out in his office, one of the figurines picks up a scalpel and stabs Dr. Starr in the eye, killing him. When Dr. Jarris discover what has happened, she smashes the figurine’s head against Dr. Starr’s desk. Dr. Collin screams in his cell as his face collapse in on itself, leaving behind a bloody mess. Dr. Jarris huddles in a corner and starts to scream as the end credits roll.

YIKES!

Seriously, this was a really good episode. The clay figurines were certainly creepy and the scene where they attacked Dr. Starr was so graphic that I’m a bit surprised the show was able to get away with it. That said, what truly made this episode frightening was its portrayal of a society without compassion. Dr. Starr, who is more of a bureaucrat than a doctor, has the power to decide who is useful to society and who is not. And, if you’re deemed to not be useful, you’re marked for death. It’s a harsh worldview and an example of cold pragmatism taken to its logical extreme. It’s also feels like a pretty accurate representation of the attitude that many government and medical officials took during the COVID pandemic. Just as many seemed to be gleeful about the idea of the pandemic wiping out those who they considered to be undesirable, Dr. Starr can barely suppress his joy in punishing Dr. Collin for not being properly compliant. The little clay figures were scary but Dr. Starr was horrifying.

Monsters has been a fairly uneven show so far but Mannikins of Horror is a triumph.

Robotic Vengeance: Steel and Lace (1991, directed by Ernest Farino)

Posted on October 4, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

On trial for raping concert pianist Gally Morton (Clare Wren), evil businessman Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris) gets four of his sleazy buddies to provide a fake alibi for him. After Emerson is acquitted, Gally goes to the roof of the courthouse and leaps to her death.

Five years later, Daniel and his four friends have made a fortune by illegally foreclosing on people’s houses. They may think that they’ve gotten away with their crimes but what they don’t know is that Gally’s brother, Albert (Bruce Davison), has been building a robot version of his sister. Soon, Robot Gally is killing off all of Emerson’s friends while a courtroom sketch artist named Alison (Stacy Haiduk) and a detective named Dunn (David Naughton) attempt to figure out what’s going on.

A mix of The Terminator and I Spit On Your Grave, Steel and Lace is a classic of its kind. While the deaths are inventive and, considering who Robot Gally is killing, deserved, what really sets the film apart is the strong cast and the inventive direction. Director Ernest Farino wastes no time getting down to business and he inventively opens the film by cutting back and forth between Emerson assaulting Gally and the jury acquitting him of the crime that we just saw him commit. Davison is not in the film as much as you might expect but he still makes an impression as the fanatical Albert and Naughton and Haiduk are likable even if their scenes sometimes feel like padding. Best of all is Clare Wren, an actress who deserved to be a bigger star and who is convincing both as the fragile Gally and as the vengeance-driven robot. Robot Gally eventually comes to question whether justice is truly be served by all of the killings and Wren sells it. Also be sure to keep an eye out for David L. Lander, playing the prerequisite eccentric coronor. (Has there ever been a movie coroner who wasn’t an eccentric?) Finally, Brian Backer — who will be forever known for playing nice guy Mark Ratner in Fast Times At Ridgemont High — is effectively cast against type as one of Emerson’s stooges.

Steel and Lace is one of the best low-budget films to come out of the early 90s, a deeply satisfying tale of robotics and vengeance.