Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.26 “Bottle of Dreams”

Posted on April 19, 2024 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, season one comes to a close with a trip down nightmare lane.

Episode 1.26 “Bottle of Dreams”

(Dir by Mac Bradden, originally aired on July 25th, 1988)

It’s clip show time!

To be fair, the first season finale of Friday the 13th does come up with a clever way to justify being a clip show. Micki and Ryan get trapped in the vault of Curious Goods with an ancient, Egyptian urn that causes people to confront the memories of their worst fears. Not surprisingly all of Micki and Ryan’s worst fears are connected to the cursed antiques that they’ve spent the past year seeking out and dealing with.

So, once again, we get to see the cursed doll that started the series. We see the weirdo wandering around with his cursed cupid statue. We see the vampire. Oddly enough, we don’t see the pirate ghosts or the gangster who killed Micki’s boyfriend, even though both of those events were very traumatic for Micki. We don’t see the magic pipe that killed Ryan’s father, despite the fact that episode ended with Ryan in tears. We don’t see the newscaster who killed Ryan’s girlfriend or the cursed quilt that nearly caused Ryan to get burned at the stake. In short the clips seem to be a little bit arbitrary and they also all seem to come from early in the season, which leads me to suspect that this episode was put together long before it actually aired.

The cursed urn and the flashbacks are all a part of yet another attempt by Uncle Lewis (R.G. Armstrong) to return to the world of living. Fortunately, Jack’s friend Rashid (Elias Zarou) shows up and helps to push Lewis back into the netherworld. It’s always nice when one of Jack’s associates shows up to help. It creates the feeling that there’s an entire magical underground out there, all dealing with cursed antiques and malevolent spirits. While Ryan and Micki deal with their bad memories, Jack and Rashid are the ones who save the day and it makes for a nice conclusion for the first season. Our heroes may have started out as skeptical amateurs but now they’re a strong team. Micki and Ryan know that they can count on Jack, which is good considering that almost everyone else that that they get close to ends up dead.

The first season of Friday the 13th: The Series was pretty good. The horror was effective. The cast had a lot of chemistry. With a few exceptions, the cursed antiques were all interesting and worked in genuinely clever ways. The show had a sense of humor but it never let it get in the way of mayhem. Even the fact that the show claimed to be set in America even though it was clearly filmed in Canada and filled with Canadian actors only served to increase the dream-like atmosphere.

Will the second season live up to the first? We’ll start to find out next week!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.4 “Rerun”

Posted on April 17, 2024 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, we learn about the dark side of celebrity.

Episode 2.4 “Rerun”

(Dir by John Auerbach, originally aired October 22nd, 1989)

Allison (Rachel Jones) and Max (Mitchell Whitfield) are anthropology students and roommates. Max would like to be even more but Allison is hopelessly in love with a man who she has not only never met but who is dead!

Tony Sterling (Max Nassar) was an actor who starred on a show where he drove a motorcycle across America. Tony recently died but Allison keeps a big poster of him hanging in her bedroom. Allison says she isn’t worried about studying for her upcoming exam because she’s been praying to the poster. Uhmm …. okay …. I mean, I had a huge crush on James Franco back in the day but I never prayed to him….

Suddenly, Tony appears in the bedroom and declares his love for Allison. Allison is so overjoyed that she doesn’t care that he’s dead and that he keeps biting her neck. Max, however, is a bit more concerned so he goes to see Tony’s agent (Kaye Ballard), who explains that Tony was a Satanist who couldn’t even ride a motorcycle! In fact, Tony couldn’t even talk to people. He had to have his small talk written out for him by a crack team of publicists.

Max returns to the apartment to confront Tony with proof that he’s both a talentless hack and a lamprey-in-human-form. (Earlier, Max talked about a tribe that believed that everyone’s soul was an animal. Apparently, Tony has the soul of a lamprey.) Realizing the truth about Tony, Allison rejects him. Tony attacks Max. Can Allison flush a ring that Tony gave her down a toilet quickly enough to send Tony’s soul back to Hell?

Fear not — she can! This is one of the few episodes of Monsters to have a straight-up happy ending and I’m glad that I did. Allison and Max were a cute couple and it would have been unbearably cruel to not allow them to be together or to have one of them turn out to be a demon. You want them to get together and if it takes dealing with an incubus for them to come together, so be it.

Actually, this episode is probably more relevant today than it was when it was first release. There’s not much difference between Allison praying to her poster of Tony and the people who spend all day searching social media for any heretics who fail to worship at the altar of their favorite performers. If this episode were made today, Allison would be praying to Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Swift. That’s not to say that Timothee and Taylor are lampreys, of course. It’s just that people have always worshipped those who have accomplished some sort of celebrity. Anyone who is anyway famous has at least a few people who have devoted their lives to them. It’s creepy but it’s the way of the world.

Live Tweet Alert: Watch Silent Predators with #ScarySocial

Posted on April 13, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, for #ScarySocial, Deanna Dawn will be hosting 1999’s Silent Predators!

If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime and YouTube. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.25 “What A Mother Wouldn’t Do”

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, a crib from the Titanic demands blood!

Episode 1.25 “What A Mother Wouldn’t Do”

(Dir by Neill Fearnley, originally aired July 18th, 1988)

After being told that her unborn child should be aborted because it’s just going to die anyway, Leslie Kent (Lynne Cormack) seeks peace inside an antique shop called Curious Goods. The shop’s owner, Lewis Vedredi (R.G. Armstrong), shows her an antique crib that he says was on the Titanic. Leslie is intrigued by the crib and, six months later, she is overjoyed when her friends reveal that they have purchased the crib for her as a gift. Seriously, who wouldn’t want a crib that was once used by a baby who probably drowned in icy water when the Titanic sank?

The crib does have a special power. It can cure sick babies! Of course, the cure only works if the crib’s owner first kills seven people in a body of water. After baby Allison is born, Leslie and her husband Martin (Michael Countryman) start killing random people in an effort to save their baby’s life.

It presents quite a moral quandary. If Micki and Ryan don’t retrieve the cursed crib, Leslie and Martin will continue to kill. However, if they do get the crib, Allison will die. Are they prepared to sacrifice an innocent baby just to get their hands on the crib? To its credit, Friday the 13th: The Series didn’t shy away from these questions. In this episode, the villains are not unsympathetic. Martin hates to kill but he’s trying to save his baby. As for Leslie, the episode’s title says it all. What wouldn’t a mother do to save the life of her baby? As disturbing as the murders may be, they’re nowhere near as frightening as the cold and clinical way that Leslie is ordered to get an abortion at the start of the episode.

In the end, both Martin and Leslie end up sacrificing themselves to save Allison’s life. But Allison disappears from her crib, leaving a terrified Micki to wonder if the evil within the crib has taken her. Fear not. As the final shot show, her babysitter Debbie (Robyn Stevan), grabbed the now healthy baby from the crib and then got on bus to start a new life. The baby looks up at her and smiles for the first time. Awwwww!

This was a good episode, with Micki and Ryan both coming to realize that the owners of the antiques are often as much victims as those they harm. Chris Wiggins dif good job of portraying Jack’s single-minded determination to find all of Lewis’s cursed antiques while Lynne Cormack and Michael Countryman were poignant as two villains for whom you couldn’t help but feel some sympathy.

Next week, season one comes to an end!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.3 “A Bond of Silk”

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Never jump on a spider web! Seriously.

Episode 2.3 “A Bond of Silk”

(Dir by Ernest D. Farino, originally aired on October 15th, 1989)

Nash (Marc McClure) is an oilman who has just married Portia (Lydia Cornell) and is taking her on a New York honeymoon. A travel agent has arranged for them to be picked up at the airport in a limousine and driven to a posh hotel. Sure, it’s strange that the hotel appears to be completely devoid of staff and other guests but Nash and Portia just assume that’s a part of the ambience. As Portia puts it, they don’t have anything like this back in Lubbock!

(And right there is where I massively rolled my eyes.)

The honeymoon suite is in the basement of the hotel. It doesn’t look like much. Oddly, the closet is full of clothes from previous guests. And, in the bedroom, there is what appears to be a giant web. Nash declares that it must be a hammock and he jumps on the web. He soon discovers that the web is sticky (duh!) and he’s stuck. Portia correctly deduces that that web must have been spun by a giant spider. She also figures out that no one who has ever checked into the room has ever left. The travel agent, the limousine, the hotel …. they’re all a part of plan to keep the spider fed.

Nash insists that he’ll figure out a way out of the web but the more he tries to escape, the more stuck he becomes. Finally, it falls to Portia to figure out a way to safely cross the web, free her husband, and get out the room. Unfortunately, as Portia quickly realizes, the spider is waiting for her to attempt just that.

There was a lot about this episode that worked. The hotel was a creepy location. Nash’s struggle in the web was frightening and the visual of him getting more and more stuck in the web was effectively claustrophobic. By today’s standards, the special effects were not particularly impressive but still, they were good enough to not totally take me out of the story.

That said, this was yet another episode where all of the action was dependent upon the characters acting in the dumbest ways possible. Eventually, Portia reveals herself to have a lot of determination and to be a lot more clever than she originally came across. Nash, however, remains an idiot through the entire episode and it’s hard to have sympathy for someone who sees a giant spider’s web and automatically thinks, “Hey, let’s jump into it!” While neither spoke with a convincing Texas accent, both Marc McClure and Lydia Cornell were likable but the actions of their characters requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief.

As for next week’s episode, it appears that college students will be raising the dead! Uh-oh.

Mia Goth and Ti West take us to 1985 in the MaXXXine Trailer!

Posted on April 8, 2024 by Leonard Wilson

The X trilogy kind of snuck up on everyone. The end of March 2022’s “X” gave us a sneak peek at Pearl, which ended up releasing later in theatres that same year. Now, director Ti West and actress Mia Goth are closing the loop with MaXXXine, which arrives in theatres this summer.

MaXXXine is a direct sequel to X, with our heroine still wanting to be a major star after the events of the first film. Though she may not realize it, Maxine has a lot in common with Pearl, and those elements may put her into some dark circles.

MaXXXine also stars Kevin Bacon, Halsey, Bobby Cannavale, Elizabeth Debicki, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, and Michelle Monaghan.

Live Tweet Alert: Join #ScarySocial for Exists!

Posted on April 6, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight, at 9 pm et, Tim Buntley will be hosting #ScarySocial! The movie? 2014’s Exists!

If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! I’ll be there tweeting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Exists is available on Prime and Tubi!

See you there!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.24 “Pipe Dreams”

Posted on April 5, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Ryan discovers that Uncle Louis’s latest victim is his own father!

Episode 1.24 “Pipe Dreams”

(Dir by Zale Dalen, originally aired on July 11th, 1988)

Ryan has been invited to the wedding of Connie (Marion Gilsenan) and Ray Dallion (Michael Constantine). Ray is Ryan’s estranged father. As Ryan explains it to Micki, this is only the latest of Ray’s many marriages. Ray has spent his entire life trying to get rich and he often neglected his son while pursuing his dream. Ray will do anything to get rich. Ryan feels that there are more important things than money, like tracking down cursed antiques. Ryan decides to go the wedding but he brings his cousin Micki along with him for moral support. I mean, considering that Micki has just lost two potential husbands in a row, why wouldn’t she want to attend a wedding?

As the result of inventing a new type of gun, Ray has come into money. Ryan is horrified that his father would get rich off of weaponry but Ray explains that he was inspired by Uncle Louis. If Louis could get rich just by running a rinky dink antique store, why can’t Ray get rich from his inventions? Ryan explains that Uncle Louis got rich by selling cursed antiques and selling his soul to the Devil and now, Ryan and Micki spend all of their time traveling around the country (which is totally Canada, regardless of what the show occasionally claims) and trying to undo Louis’s evil. Ray doesn’t seem to be particularly surprised by any of this.

Ray has an antique of his own, a pipe that Louis gave to him. Whenever Ray smokes the pipe, it produces an orange smoke that disintegrates anyone that it surrounds. You know that gun that Ray invented? Well, it turns out that he didn’t actually invent it. Instead, he stole it after using his magic pipe to kill the original inventor. When Jack shows up for the wedding and informs Ryan of all of this, Ryan cannot believe it. He may be estranged from his father but Ryan can’t accept that he’s turned evil. But, as we all know from previous episodes, using the cursed antiques is like getting hooked on drugs. Once you use it once, you become addicted to using it again and again.

This is yet another episode of Friday the 13th that ends with a freeze frame of someone sobbing. In this case, it’s Ryan crying. As easy as it id to poke fun at how often Ryan and Micki end up either sobbing or staring at the camera with a forlorn look on their face, it’s actually a sign of the show’s intelligence that it realizes and acknowledges that dealing with cursed antiques is going to take a mental and emotional toll on someone. Both Ryan and Micki has lost a lot of people this season. In this episode, Ryan loses his father and, due to the performances of John D. LeMay and Michael Constantine, it definitely carries an emotional punch. Like so many of the “villains” on this show, Ray was not inherently evil. Instead, he was a man who lost his soul due to Louis’s evil deal with the Devil. The best episodes of Friday the 13th are tragedies and that’s certainly the case with this episode.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.2 “Portrait of the Artist”

Posted on April 3, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, a visit to an art gallery goes terribly wrong.

Episode 2.2 “Portrait of the Artist”

(Dir by Gerald Cotts, originally aired on October 8th, 1989)

Lucille Clay (Lucille Kennedy) visits an isolated art gallery that appears to be sitting in the middle of nowhere. The studio is full of macabre paintings of women and children who appear to be in some sort of mortal danger. Watching over the gallery is Hubert (Darren McGavin), who claims to be just an old farmer who was hired to look after things while the actual artist is in Nepal.

Accompanying Lucille is Roger Darcy (Beeson Carroll), a man who walks with a pronounced limp. Lucille claims that Roger is an art critic but, as soon becomes apparent, that’s a lie. Roger is actually the father of a missing teenage girl and he is stunned when he sees that one of the paintings looks just like her. In fact, all of the paintings appear to be of someone who has recently disappeared. Convinced that the artist is a serial killer, Roger demands to be taken to the artist’s cabin. What Roger doesn’t know is that the gallery hides an even bigger threat.

This episode ends with a twist. It’s not a bad twist and it actually took me by surprise. Unfortunately, the rest of the episode is not as good as the twist ending. I had high hopes when I saw that this episode was going to take place in a gallery and that it was going to star Darren McGavin. But, and it pains me to say this, McGavin just isn’t very good in this episode. McGavin was an actor who always had a tendency to go a little bit over the top. That wasn’t a problem when he was playing Kolchak or the father in A Christmas Story. But, in this episode, he’s so blustery that it’s obvious that he’s hiding something from the start and it makes Roger and Lucille seem all the dumber for trusting him.

Indeed, the other big problem with this episode is that Roger and Lucille continually do the stupidest things possible. None of their actions make sense. Why, if they believed a serial killer was lurking around the gallery, would they split up? Why would they be so quick to trust Hubert? Why, after escaping, would one of them then return without any backup? Why does neither one of them seem to be particularly upset about the possibility that either Hubert or the artist murdered Roger’s daughter and then used her for his painting? They both behave so stupidly that it’s hard to really care what happens to them.

This story had some potential but, unfortunately, the execution just didn’t live up to it.

Live Tweet Alert: Watch The Wasp Woman with #ScarySocial

Posted on March 30, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight, for #ScarySocial, Deanna Dawn will be hosting Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman!

If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime, Tubi, and YouTube. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.