Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 3.1 “Stressed Environment”

Posted on December 4, 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 begin the third season of Monsters!

Episode 3.1 “Stressed Environment”

(Dir by Jeffrey Wolf, originally aired on September 30th, 1990)

The third season of Monsters starts off with the story of an experiment gone wrong.

For twelve years, Dr. Elizabeth Porter (Carol Lynley) has been experimenting with lab rats, trying to help them evolve into a higher form of intelligence. Her work is supervised by Dr. Robert Winston (Victor Raider-Wexler) and her assistants are the cowardly Keith (Scott Weir) and Gina (Kathleen McCall). The episode opens with a lengthy (by Monsters standards) scene of Gina undressing and then putting on her special rat feeding uniform while Keith tries to discreetly watch. It’s a scene that really has little to do with the rest of the episode but I guess the producers of Monsters decided that the best way to survive to a fourth season would be to appeal to teenage boys.

Anyway, Keith’s crush on Gina comes to naught because Gina is killed while trying to feed the rats. It turns out that the rats have gotten smart. They’ve gotten smart enough to build crude spears and crossbows and use them as weapons. Dr. Winston wants to shut the experiment down. Keith wants to go home. Elizabeth, however, wants to protect her rats and see if she can convince them to give up their weapons and live in peace. Dr. Winston points out that if humans can’t convince their own species to do that, how is Elizabeth going to convince a bunch of rats?

And Dr. Winston has a point. Elizabeth may think that she has a special bond with the rats but the rats disagree. Soon, Gina is not the only person to have lost their life to an army of spear-carrying rats. The episode ends with Keith as the sole survivor and his ultimate fate is still up in the air. The rats are angry, ruthless, and armed.

And cute!

Seriously, this episode probably might have been more effective if the rats themselves have been a bit more frightening but it wouldn’t have been as much fun. As it is, the use of crude puppets actually made the rats look kind of adorable, especially when they were holding their little spears and setting up their little crossbows. Of course, one reason why I found the rats to be cute is because I’m used to CGI. I take CGI for granted. This episode was made when special effects people still had to use puppets for their monsters and, as a result, the rats don’t really look like rats. They’re so fake-looking that it’s hard not to like them. They’re a throw-back to a simpler and more innocent time.

This was actually a pretty entertaining episode and a great way to start season 3! I appreciated that this episode of Monsters featured actual monsters. After the uneven batch of episodes that finished up the second season of this show, it’s nice to season 3 starting off on the right foot.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Baywatch Nights 2.21 “The Vortex”

Posted on December 3, 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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, a detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, Mitch has a day off but still has to work.

Episode 2.21 “The Vortex”

(Dir by L. Lewis Stout, originally aired on May 9th, 1997)

Mitch has the day off and he’s spending it with Ryan! No matter what else one might say about Baywatch Nights and the direction it took as the production budget grew smaller, David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon made for a cute couple and, as this episode began, I was kind of looking forward to watching them spend the day together.

Unfortunately, when they come across a fortune teller’s shop, Ryan insists that they go inside and discover their future. Mitch mocks Ryan for “believing in that stuff” and says that there’s no such thing as psychic powers or being able to see the future, despite the fact that, over the course of the second season, Mitch has both gotten psychic powers and traveled through time. Seriously, I get that Mitch was supposed to be the skeptic of the group but, by this point in the series, Mitch has seen and dealt with enough that his continual skepticism is just not believable. Especially after last week’s episode, Mitch should be prepared to accept anything. If this was a Lovecraft short story, Mitch would be ranting about the things he’s seen while locked away in an insane asylum.

At first, the store appears to be deserted. Ryan sits at the fortune telling table and, when an actress (played by Priscilla Inga Taylor of Malibu CA), comes in the store, Ryan is able to tell her that she’s going to get the next role for which she auditions. (I’d like to think that Taylor is playing her Malibu CA character, Traycee, here.) After the actress leaves, Mitch and Ryan are suddenly joined by the owner of the shop, Wahote (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman). Wahote invites them to step behind a curtain and into a vortex and soon, Mitch and Ryan find themselves ten minutes into the future and watching as their future selves receive a call from Teague telling them that they need to investigate a boat that’s come back from the Amazon. Future Mitch complains about always having to do things on his day off. What I find strange is that neither present not future Mitch and Ryan seem to be curious as to why Teague, who apparently has connections with the CIA, is always asking the two of them to do these things.

A mysterious woman (Elaine Bilstad) shows up and says something about pollution and the rain forests. Mitch and Ryan jump around in time and eventually, future Ryan and Mitch have to help present Ryan and Mitch get off the boat because the boat is full of mutants that have been created by pollution. Or something. To be honest, I had a hard time following the plot of this one. Time travel nonsense is always a bit difficult for me to follow and the constantly moving camera was a bit of a distraction.

To give credit where credit is due, this episode had a good deal of atmosphere and, as I said earlier, Hasselhoff and Harmon were a likable team. But the episode’s story was nearly incoherent and the fact that Mitch was still a skeptic at the end of the episode required too great of a suspension of disbelief. During this episode, all I could think about was how obvious it was that Baywatch Nights was on its last legs.

Speaking of which …. next week, we finish up Baywatch Nights! It’s time for it all to end.

Live Tweet Alert: Watch Manhattan Baby With #ScarySocial!

Posted on November 30, 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, I will be hosting Lucio Fulci’s Manhattan Baby!

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 Tubi! I’ll be there co-hosting 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!

Manhattan Baby (1982, dir by Lucio Fulci, DP: Guglielmo Mancori)

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.24 “The Family Man”

Posted on November 27, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, the second season of Monsters reaches its conclusion!

Episode 2.24 “The Family Man”

(Dir by Michael Warren Powell, originally aired on June 3rd, 1990)

Neil (Calvin Armitage) is not happy. The young son of Angie (Annie Corley), Neil is upset that she is dating a condescending psychologist named Warren (Michael O’Gorman). Making things even worse is that Neil seems to be the only person who dislikes Warren. Even Neil’s older sister, Terri (Kelli Rabke), thinks that Warren is a great guy and would be a wonderful stepfather.

Adding to Neil’s problems is his terrible eyesight. He’s recently gotten new glasses, which he cannot stand. He would rather wear the glasses that once belonged to his late father. When Neil puts those old glasses on and looks at Warren, he is shocked to see that Warren is actually a lizard-like alien with sharp teeth. It doesn’t take long for Warren to figure out that Neil has seen through his human disguise but, as Warren explains it, no one is going to believe Neil. Instead, Warren is just going to drain the life forces of Angie, Neil, and Terri, killing them as he’s killed so many other humans.

At first, it looks like Warren is correct. Angie refuses to listen to Neil and she also refuses to put on the glasses. As for the glasses themselves, they are eventually shattered by Warren. What can Neil possibly do!? Luckily, the glasses were not the only thing that Neil’s father left behind….

The second season finale of Monsters owes a great deal to They Live, with the exception being that, instead of seeing how he’s being manipulated by the media, Neil uses his glasses to discovers that his potential stepfather is actually a murderous lizard person. I think that anyone who has ever watched in horror as their divorced or widowed mother dated a new weirdo will be able to relate to this episode. I remember, immediately after my parents got divorced, I tended to view almost every guy that my mom talked to as being a potential lizard person. Eventually, of course, I came to accept that not all strangers were alien beings. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met an actual alien or an actual lizard person. That’s good luck on my part, I suppose.

As for this episode, the lizard person makeup was effective and Michael O’Gorman certain gave a good performance as the manipulative Warren. Probably the most disturbing thing about Warren was the he didn’t seem to be particularly worried about Neil discovering his true identity because he knew there was no way anyone was going to believe a word that Neil said. That said, the episode really was a bit too much of a rip-off to be totally successful. Still, if you’re going to rip someone off, you might as well rip off the best.

The second season of Monsters ends on an above average note. The season itself was, overall, uneven. There was some very good episode and, unfortunately, there were also some very bad ones. I guess that’s to be expected with anthology shows.

Next week, we’ll begin the third and final season of Monsters!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Baywatch Nights 2.20 “Hot Winds”

Posted on November 26, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, the world goes mad!

Episode 2.20 “Hot Winds”

(Dir by Parker Stevenson, originally aired on May 3rd, 1997)

A hot wind is blowing down from the hills and into Los Angeles.

People are going crazy in the streets. Strangers are attacking each other for no reason. Riots are breaking out. The world seems like it’s gone off its axis and no one knows how to react. Is the heat driving everyone mad or is it something else? Diamont Teague tells Mitch and Ryan that he suspects that something supernatural is happening. Mitch, as usual, argues that people in Los Angeles have always been crazy. Not like this! Diamont says.

Is Diamont correct? As he, Mitch, and Ryan leave the office, they run into an aggravated man who proceeds to beat on a brick wall until his hands are covered in blood. Mitch assumes that the man must be on drugs. Diamont says that they need to drive out to the desert so that they can find the source of the wind. Mitch is skeptical until he starts seeing a ghostly image of a robed man carrying a scythe.

It’s a long trip out to the desert, made even longer by the rioting and the madness all around. Mitch stops long enough to keep a woman from throwing her baby over a ledge. But, as soon as Mitch grabs away her baby, the woman jumps anyway. It’s quite a fall and somehow, the woman survives. Luckily, Mitch is there to render CPR while the crazed crowd watches. The world may going mad but Mitch is still a lifeguard, dammit.

Driving through the desert, Ryan wonders why she, Mitch, and Diamont aren’t going crazy like everyone else. It’s a good question. Seriously, last week was a lot of fun because it gave us a chance to watch the Hoff got possessed by a demon. It’s hard not to regret that he didn’t get a chance to go crazy in this episode.

In the desert, the robed man with the scythe dances. The scythe apparently is what sends down the hot air. If Mitch can get the scythe away from the man, the violence can stop. Who is the man? Apparently, he’s a devil worshipper. Ryan suspects that there might be hundreds of similar people out there. Maybe they’re the ones who are responsible for all the madness in the world! Has Ryan already forgotten that, a few episodes ago, it was established that the Knights Templar secretly controlled the world?

This episode was actually not bad. The scenes of people suddenly going mad were effective and the man in the desert was actually a pretty ominous image. Even the show’s overreliance on Dutch angles felt effective for once, drawing the audience into a world that was permanently off-balance. I enjoyed this episode and I’ll remember it the next time I see a stranger yelling on a street corner.

Monday Live Tweet Alert: Join Us For Raiders of the Living Dead!

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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

Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1986’s Raiders of the Living Dead! I picked it so you know it’ll be good.

It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, find the movie on YouTube, hit play at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! The live tweet community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Live Tweet Alert: Join #ScarySocial for Black Friday!

Posted on November 23, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight, at 9 pm et, Tim Buntley will be hosting #ScarySocial! The movie? Black Friday!

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.

Black Friday is available on Prime!

See you there

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 2.19 “The Butcher”

Posted on November 22, 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, it’s all about Jack!

Episode 2.19 “The Butcher”

(Dir by Francis Delia, originally aired on April 24th, 1989)

Horst Mueller (Colin Fox), a Nazi scientist, uses a magic amulet to bring back to life the fearsome Col. Rausch (Nigel Bennett), a Nazi war criminal who was infamous for using barb wire as a garotte whenever he was carrying out executions. Rausch was killed during the war by a squad of soldiers led by a young lieutenant named Jack Marshak. Once Rausch is brought back to life, he not only sets himself up as a radio talk show host but he also seeks revenge on the men who killed him. One-by-one, he kills the members of the squad until eventually, only three are left alive, Simpson (Julius Harris), Shaw (John Gilbert), and Jack.

There were many episodes of Friday the 13th in which Jack was absent and described as being out-of-town while Micki and Ryan dealt with the latest cursed antique. This, however, is the first episode to feature Jack on his own. He mentions that Micki and Ryan are out-of-town, presumably because they’re tracking something down. This leads Jack to face Rausch with only the help of Simpson and Shaw. Watching this episode, one gets the feeling that Jack wouldn’t have it any other way. While this episode features all of the usual blood and melodrama that we’ve come to expect from this show, it also serves as a tribute to the friendship between Jack and his comrades-in-arms. Jack relates to Simpson and Shaw in a way that he can’t relate to the much-younger Micki and Ryan. If Jack is usually cast as a fatherly figure, this episode finds him working with equals and fighting against a monster with whom he has a personal connection. This is the rare episode to not feature any of Lewis’s cursed antiques. Instead, the magic amulet is one of the many artifacts for which Heinrich Himmler and the SS spent much of the war searching.

It’s a change-of-pace episode that gives Chris Wiggins a chance to show off his considerable talents an actor. Rarely has Jack been as haunted as he is in the episode and Wiggins’s sad eyes allow us to see what a lifetime of dealing with unbelievable evil would do to a person. In this episode, Jack is not just aware of the evil in the world but he’s also aware that he and his comrades-in-arms, the members of the so-called “Greatest Generation,” are aging and their time is passing. Jack and his friends are at an age where they should be enjoying their retirement. Instead. they’re still fighting against the legacy of Hitler’s evil.

This was a good and melancholy episode of Friday the 13th. This show could be uneven but episodes like this were good enough to make one mourn that the series did not last longer than just three seasons.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.23 “The Bargain”

Posted on November 20, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, a woman gets more than she bargained for when she gives it all up for love.

Episode 2.23 “The Bargain”

(Dir by Tom Noonan, originally aired on May 27th, 1990)

Sarah (Kim Greist) is a lonely woman who owns a used bookstore and who is in love with the man who appears to be her only customer, Joe (Kevin Geer). Joe is a TV repairman and he presents himself as being a typical blue collar guy, except for the fact that he’s always buying books of romantic poetry. He claims that they’re for a friend. Sarah recites a French poem for him. “I don’t speak French,” Joe replies.

Sarah feels that she’s too shy and plain to ever catch Joe’s eye. But then, while looking through an old magazine, she comes across an advertisement for a mask that will make all of her dreams come true. On a lark, Sarah calls the number. Soon, a horribly scarred woman named Carmen (Sharon Sharth) comes to the store. Carmen gives Sarah a mask but she says that there’s a price. First off, by putting on the mask, Sarah will be agreeing to give up all of her books to Carmen. Secondly, Sarah must never remove the mask. Sarah agrees.

The mask does make Sarah beautiful. Now going by the name of Mandy, she turns her empty bookstore into a video store. When Joe comes in, Mandy flirts with him but it turns out that Joe is angry about the bookstore going away and also, he was in love with Sarah. Mandy protests that she is Sarah, just for Carmen to show up with Sarah’s old face. Carmen has assumed Sarah’s identity and Joe is now in love with her. Desperate to prove her actual identity, the real Sarah rips off her mask, leaving her face just as disfigured as Carmen’s used to be.

As Sarah cries, Carmen tells her that the only she can ever fix her face is by selling the mask to someone else….

Featuring three strong performances and a storyline that’s a bit more nuanced than usual for this show, this is a pretty good episode of Monsters. Interestingly enough, it was directed by actor Tom Noonan, who has played a number of villains over the course of his career, including the memorable killer from Manhunter, in which he co-starred with Kim Greist. (Kevin Geer actually looks enough like Noonan that, at first, I thought Tom Noonan was pulling double duty as both director and star.) Noonan directs the episode like a particularly fast-paced play, emphasizing character and location over easy shocks. Not only do the characters seem real but so does Sarah’s beloved bookstore. The twist at the end is effective, even if it is a bit predictable.

Next week, we finish up season 2 of Monsters!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Baywatch Nights 2.19 “The Eighth Seal”

Posted on November 19, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Mitch gets possessed!

Episode 2.19 “The Eighth Seal”

(Dir by Jon Cassar, originally aired on April 26th, 1997)

Twice, Mitch saves a young girl named Jenny (Esme Ganz) from jumping off a bridge. When Mitch discovers the Jenny’s adoptive parents don’t seem to care whether she lives or dies, he brings her back to his house and lets her stay the night while he tries to figure out what to do about her.

What Mitch doesn’t know is that Jenny is possessed by a demon named Teddy. When Mitch does discover that Jenny is housing a denizen of the damned, he does the worst possible thing that one can do in that situation. He pulls a Karras and allows the demon to enter him. Now, Mitch is possessed. Can Daimont and Ryan get the demon out of Mitch or will Mitch have to run in front of truck in order to knock Teddy out of him?

Believe it or not, Mitch does the latter. He runs in front of a truck! The truck hits him and sends Mitch falling backwards. Mitch is out cold. While Ryan and Daimont try to revive him, Mitch’s spirit is visited by Stephanie Holden (Alexandra Paul). Though this was Stephanie’s first (and only) appearance on Baywatch Nights, she was a prominent member of the Baywatch ensemble for several seasons. Her character, who was always implied to have feelings for Mitch, was eventually killed off. Stephanie’s spirit appears and yes, she is wearing the red Baywatch swimsuit. And while it’s actually a pretty sweet scene as Stephanie tells Mitch that it’s not his time to die, it’s hard not to smile at the fact that Stephanie is apparently still a lifeguard in the afterlife. It’s like she went to Heaven and said, “Give me the reddest and tightest one-piece that you have.”

Things end happily. Mitch is no longer possessed. Jenny is no longer possessed. Jenny’s adoptive parents are consumed in Hellfire but that’s okay because they sucked. And, for once, the viewer is happy as well because this is actually a pretty good episode of Baywatch Nights. Seriously, you have not lived until you’ve seen David Hasselhoff pretend to be possessed by a demon. Beyond that, though, his reunion with Stephanie was actually pretty poignant, red swimsuit and all. If nothing else, it gave Mitch a chance to say goodbye to Stephanie, which was something he never really got to do in Baywatch.

Speaking of Baywatch, do you think Mitch went to his day job and told all the lifeguards, “Hey, you won’t believe what happened to me this weekend!” Probably not. I don’t know if I’d want to work with someone who had a history of getting possessed by demons. That may just be me, though.