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!
There’s nothing scarier than going to the dentist! Especially when he has a cursed electric chair!
(As a sidenote, I was planning on reviewing this last week but I was not feeling well so I held off until this week. I apologize for the delay in the writing and posting this review! These things do happen and I’ve recently been told that I need to start getting more rest and looking after my health so it may happen more than once.)
Episode 1.17 “The Electrocutioner”
(Dir by Rob Hedden, originally aired on April 18th, 1988)
In 1978, Eli Pittman (Angelo Rizacos) was sitting on death row, an innocent man who had been wrongly convicted of murder. Sentenced to die in the electric chair, Eli’s cries of innocence fell on deaf ears. The warden of the prison didn’t care. The judge didn’t care. The prosecuting attorney didn’t care. Miraculously, Eli survived the first attempt to electrocute him. And, fortunately, his death sentence was overturned before he could be shocked a second time.
Ten years later, Eli is working as a dentist at a school for runaways. Though he presents himself as being a charitable doctor who just wants to help the less fortunate, Eli is actually a deeply bitter man. He wants revenge on everyone who sent him to prison. Eli has purchased the electric chair in which he was meant to die. He’s disguised it as a dentist chair. When his teenage patients sit in the chair, they are reduced to ash. Eli is then able to generate electricity through his body. He uses this power to get his revenge.
Can Ryan, Micki, and Jack stop him?
After a really good opening scene (which is filmed in black-and-white and makes use of a handheld camera to generate a genuinely nightmarish atmosphere), this becomes one of the sillier episodes that I’ve watched so far. Angelo Rizacos is good in the flashback scenes and he makes you feel a good deal of sympathy for Eli. But, in the modern day scenes, he overacts to an extent that Eli goes from being a victimized man driven by revenge to a rather broadly-drawn supervillain. He’s like a character from a B-comic book movie, the sort of villain that would expect Venom or Morbius to battle in a pre-credits sequence.
Add to that …. an antique electric chair? This show is at its best when the antiques are stuff that you could imagine actually stumbling across in an antique store. The idea of that big, bulky chair being in the store (and subsequently being disguised as a dentist chair) was just silly.
But you know what? Friday the 13th is a fun show, even when it’s silly. Chris Wiggins, John D. LeMay, and Robey made for a good team of investigators and, if nothing else, it was fun watching them interact in this episode. This was a silly episode but at least it was silly in an entertaining way.
Through the Shattered Lens 