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, a show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990.  The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, a cursed teacup wreck havoc and destroys lives!

Episode 1.4 “A Cup In Time”

(Dir by Harvey Frost, originally aired on October 19th, 1987)

Someone is killing the homeless.  Every morning, young homeless people are being found dead on the street, apparently strangled.  The police don’t really care about the victims and therefore, they aren’t really all that concerned with solving the case.  In fact, only a social worker named Birdie (Maxine Miller) really seems to care.

Of course, that’s not all that Birdie cares about.  Because she has a crush on Jack, she often drops by the Antique Shop in an attempt to visit with him.  Since Jack doesn’t know how to deal with her, Mickey and and Ryan end up talking to her instead.  Birdie tells them about the murders and she also mentions that her friend, the elderly Sarah Berrell, is missing.

When Jack hears about the homeless being murdered, he says that it might have something to do with one of the shop’s cursed antiques.  Searching through the ledger, he comes across a teacup that was sold to Sarah Berrell’s brother!

Indeed, it does turn out that Sarah is involved with the murders.  She approaches homeless people at night and offers them a warm drink in a tea cup that is illustrated with a picture of a vine.  Whenever anyone drinks from the cup, the vine comes to life and strangles them.  Their youth is then transferred over to the owner of the cup.  Sarah has committed so many murders that she now appears to be in her 20s.  Using the name Lady Di (and played by Hilary Shepard), she is now the hottest rock star in America!  Ryan loves her music and, in fact, Lady Di is planning on throwing a free benefit concert for the homeless!

What a mess!

This is actually a pretty good episode, one that is reasonably well-acted and scripted, though I do have to wonder just how long Sarah had been missing for her to have time to create an entirely new life for herself as Lady Di.  The episode’s true star was Maxine Miller, who gave a sweet and rather poignant performance as Birdie.  Eventually, she discovers what the cup is capable of doing and, in the episode’s best scene, she is tempted to do the same thing that Sarah has been doing.  And really, you can’t blame her.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to stay forever young?  As well, there’s a neat auditory moment, towards the end of the episode, when a crowd of concertgoers start to chant “We Want Di” and it sounds like they’re all saying, “We Want To Die!”  It’s an effective effect, whether it was deliberate or not.

All in all, this was a good episode of Friday the 13th.  That said, I have to wonder about Birdie.  I mean, she knows the teacup was cursed.  Is she curious about any of the other stuff in the shop?  Will her character ever appear again?  I guess I’ll have to keep watching to find out.