Jack Perkins | 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 Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee!

It’s a Halloween episode!

Episode 2.6 “Trick or Treat”

(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on October 21st, 1978)

It’s Halloween in Los Angeles! That means that people will be asking for treats and playing tricks and getting into all sorts of trouble. But, for the California Highway Patrol, it’s just another day and night of trying to keep everyone safe.

Ponch’s day gets off to a bad start when he and Baker chase a van onto a movie lot. The van’s driver, it turns out, was speeding because he was transporting thirteen black cats to a film set. When Ponch and Baker finally pull over the van, the cats get loose and all 13 of them march past Ponch. Later, at headquarters, Ponch is forced by a narrow hallway to walk under a ladder. *GASP* Ponch insists that he’s not superstitious but he also won’t stop talking about his encounter with the black cats.

Ponch is in for some bad luck and it shows up in the form of an 8 year-old named Tommy who squirts Ponch with perfume while Ponch is patrolling the neighborhood. Ponch tells Tommy that playing tricks like that could lead to him getting arrested and hauled off to jail. Tommy panics and runs away from home. Guess who gets the blame for that?

That’s not all that’s going on this Halloween night. (Since this episode aired in 1978, it’s also the night that He came home.) Eddie (Bobby Van) and his girlfriend, Susan (Elaine Joyce), are holding up convenience stores. (Susan distracts the cashiers by wearing a translucent ghost costume.) An older woman (Fran Ryan) is stealing bags of candy from young trick-or-treaters. Paula (Barbara Leigh) and Karen (Jenny Sherman) are stealing speed limit signs as part of a superfun scavenger hunt. And Sgt. Getraer is determined to figure out the identity of the Hobgoblin, a member of the highway patrol who reads macabre poetry over the police radio throughout the night.

Fear not, though …. everything works out in the end. Tommy is not only found hiding out in an abandoned house but Ponch is the one who finds and rescues him. Eddie and Susan get chased and arrested after trying to pull one robbery too many. (Their van crashes as a result of two teenagers throwing eggs on the windshield. Some tricks are good, apparently.) The old woman turns out to be a distraught suburbanite who lost her engagement ring and who thinks that she may have tossed it in some kid’s trick-or-treat bag. (Fortunately, the ring is found in her candy bowl and no one presses charges.) Paula and Karen lose the scavenger hunt but they win future dates with Ponch and Baker. And Getraer figures out that Artie Grossman is the Hobgoblin. In the end, everyone smiles and laugh and that’s the important thing.

For a Halloween episode, Trick or Treat was rather low-key but that’s okay. I liked the day-in-the-life approach that the episode took and it was fun to see that even the members of the fearsome highway patrol were capable of enjoying the holiday. We should have as good a Halloween as Ponch and Baker.

The 1977 film, Ruby, opens with a scene set in 1935. The Great Depression is still raging and the only people making money are industrialists like Joseph P. Kennedy and gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. In the Florida swamps, gangster Nicky Rocco (Sal Vecchio) is betrayed by both his gang and his pregnant girlfriend, Ruby (Piper Laurie). As Nicky’s bullet-ridden body sinks into the bayou, Ruby goes into labor and gives birth to Leslie.

16 years later, Ruby owns her own drive-in. The theater employs several members of the old gang and Ruby is herself married to one of Nicky’s former partners, the crippled and blinded Jake Miller (Fred Kohler, Jr.). Ruby’s lover is another former member of the gang, Vince Kemper (Stuart Whitman). Leslie, meanwhile, is now 16 years old and has never spoken a word in her life. Ruby laments that she never made it as a lounge singer but she does a good job running the theater and it seems to be a popular place to see movies. She’s even able to show Attack of the 50 Feet Woman, even though that film came out in 1958 and Ruby is set in 1951. That’s the power of having mob-connections, I guess.

When strange things start to happen at the theater, it could just be a case of Ruby having bad luck and the former gangsters that she’s hired not being particularly good at their jobs. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Nicky swore to get revenge on everyone with his dying breath. One employee is found hanging in a projection booth. Another is found hanging from a tree. Another is left in a cold drink machine and the lady who puts in a quarter to get a cup of tea instead gets a cup of blood. While Ruby might be in denial about the fact that her business is obviously cursed, Vince realizes that something has to be done so he brings a psychic/exorcist named Paul Keller (Roger Davis, who also provides some narration at the start of the film).

Of course, it’s not just ghosts that Ruby and the gang have to worry about. Leslie is acting strange as well! At one point, Leslie even speaks but it’s not with her voice. It’s with Nicky’s voice! Leslie has been possessed and soon, Nicky himself is appearing on the drive-in’s screens and repeating, “I love you, I love you.”

Ruby is a real mess of a film, one that attempts to rip-off The Exorcist while tossing a bit of Carrie in as well. Director Curtis Harrington plays up the campier aspects of the story and Piper Laurie gives a scenery-chewing performance that suggests that she realized it was pointless to try to take anything about Ruby seriously. Stuart Whitman plays Vince as being the most well-meaning but also the most clueless man in Florida while poor Roger Davis is stuck with the most earnest role in the film and, as such, gets the unenviable task of trying to explain what’s going on in a rational manner. There’s nothing rational about Ruby, which goes from being a film about gangsters to being a film about ghosts to being a film about possession without even stopping to catch its breath. It’s a deeply silly film but one gets the feeling that it was made to be silly. Ruby works as long as you just accept the weirdness of what you’re watching while you’re watching it and you don’t give it too much thought afterwards.