Greg Wrangler | Through the Shattered Lens

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 Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!

The cannibals are back!

Episode 2.20 “Dust to Dust”

(Dir by Bill Froehlich, originally aired on February 25th, 1990)

Tony Dow, Amy Lyndon, and Sandahl Bergman, the three cannibals from Prime Cut, are back! They are now all living together and are members of Cannibals Anonymous. For months, they have resisted the urge to taste human flesh. But, when an escaped prisoner breaks into their home, they give into temptation and have a good meal.

Uh-oh, it turns out that escaped prisoner was actually an astronaut who returned to Earth infected with a space virus that eventually reduces its victims to dust. And now, the cannibals all have the virus! The government abducts them and takes them to an underground lab where a group of scientists dispassionately watch as they become hypersexual before going insane and turning into dust. One scientist (Tim Russ) sympathizes with the cannibals and soon, the entire lab is infected.

This episode had potential but it ultimately failed because it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be funny or scary. There’s a lot of terror to found in the idea of being held prisoner until your transformed into blue dust. At the same time, the symptoms of the space virus were so over-the-top and the actors went so overboard in performing those symptoms that it was hard to really care about any of it. Having the victims quote a movie before turning into dust probably seemed like a good idea but it doesn’t work in execution. The whole thing ultimately felt like a community theater production of The Andromeda Syndrome.

Not even Freddy appeared to be that interested in this episode.

Only two more episodes to go!

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, an detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on Youtube!

This week, Mitch considers the blues!

Episode 1.9 “Blues Boy”

(Dir by Reza Badiyi, originally aired on November 25th, 1995)

Lyle Logan (Michael Preston) is a 13 year-old musical prodigy who plays a guitar on the Malibu Pier with his guardian, Ned Simon (Greg Wrangler). Seven years earlier, Lyle witnessed the murder of his father by his Uncle Willie (Nathan Cavaleri). Now, Uncle Willie has just been released from prison and he’s searching for Lyle because he believes that Lyle knows where his father stashed the money from a robbery.

Uncle Willie has his men abduct Ned, planning on using him for leverage to get to his nephew. Lyle approaches Mitch and hires the detective agency to track Ned down. However, Mitch, Ryan and Garner are more interested in learning the truth about Lyle’s background. Though Lyle at first refuses to open up and even tries to run away when Mitch asks him about his background, Lyle eventually comes to trust the group. Together, they save Lyle from Uncle Willie. As for the stash of money, it’s in a first aid kit that breaks apart when it’s tossed into the ocean. The money watches up on the beach, where everyone goes crazy trying to grab some for themselves.

This was a pretty simple episode. In fact, it was a struggle to come up with 200 words to say about the plot. There’s not a lot going on, beyond Lyle running up and down the pier and Uncle Willie-looking evil. The only thing that kept this from being an episode of Baywatch was the presence of Angie Harmon and the lack of red bathing suits. In many ways, this episode highlights one of the biggest problems for Baywatch Nights. Far too often, the show just feels like a detective-themed episode of Baywatch (a show that actually did feature several detective-themed episodes both before and after the Baywatch Nights experiment). This episode, for instance, barely features any scenes that take place at night. Mitch does most of his investigating during the day, which is when he really should be working as a lifeguard.

The episode’s inability to escape the shadow of its parent show is exemplified by a scene that occurs about halfway through the episode. We get an extended sequence in which Ryan, Garner, and Mitch listen to Lyle play his guitar and they all have flashbacks to their past. Ryan’s memories deal with being the daughter of a navy officer. Garner remembers tossing a football back and forth with his father. And Mitch …. well, Mitch just has Baywatch flashbacks. It’s one of those silly, overly earnest scenes that one expects to find any production starring David Hasselhoff. (And the montage is, of course, scored by the Hoff singing a song.) Still, it’s hard not to notice that, while Ryan and Garner both have a past, Mitch just has another television show.

The episode ends with Lyle meeting and playing with B.B. King. Hopefully, B.B. adopted the kid. Seriously, he had been through a lot.