Jennifer Cornish | Through the Shattered Lens

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, things get dark.

Episode 2.20 “Mesmer’s Bauble”

(Dir by Armand Mastroianni, originally aired by May 1st, 1989)

Howard Moore (Martin Neufeld) is the latest in a long line of nerdy Friday the 13th villains. With his long hair, unwashed appearance, and crazy eyes, Howard is an easy target for some of the less compassionate citizens of Canada. Of course, Howard doesn’t help things by having a totally creepy personality. He works in a vinyl record store, where he offers up unsolicited music advice to the teenage customers, the majority of whom giggle awkwardly whenever he’s nearby. Howard is obsessed with a singer named Angelica (Vanity) but there’s no way Howard could ever actually meet her.

Or at least, that’s the case until he finds Mesmer’s Bauble. Having once belonged to the inventor of hypnotism, this crystal pendant grants Howard anything that he asks for, as long as he first uses it to hypnotize people and then kill them. (It turns out that merely looking at the pendant is enough to send someone into a hypnotic trance.) As with so many Friday the 13th villains, Howard quickly comes to love having the power to kill people. I’ve always felt that the majority of this show’s villains are basically addicts. Instead of being addicted to drugs, they’re addicted to the rush of power that comes with using a cursed antique to get what they want. That’s certainly the case with Howard.

At first, Howard thinks that he wants Angelia to love him. He kills both her publicist and her manager in order to get closer to her. But, once he’s finally close to her, Howard apparently realizes that he actually wants to be Angelica. In an effectively nightmarish sequence, Howard and Angelica’s body appear to merge into one. Howard literally turns into Angelia while Angelica presumably withers away into nothingness. Howard is now Angelica, which will undoubtedly upset Ryan, who has bought two tickets for Angelica’s latest show.

It’s up to Micki and Ryan to recover the pendant and they manage to do so in the most anticlimactic way possible. They go to Angelica/Howard’s concert and Micki grabs the pendant while Angelica/Howard is singing. Without the pendant, Angelica dissolves into Howard and then a panicked Howard is promptly electrocuted on stage.

Howard’s dead but so are a lot of other people. At the shop, Micki and Ryan confess to Jack that they feel that they failed because so many people died before they got the pendant. Jack shrugs and basically tells them “that’s life.” What a dark ending! Actually, it was rare that Friday the 13th didn’t end on a dark note.

This was an effectively creepy episode, one that worked because of just how dark it allowed things to get. Even Jack pointed out that the pendant’s powers didn’t always make sense, which made it even more dangerous in the hands of someone like Howard. There were a few loose ends. I found it a bit odd that there wasn’t a bigger public reaction to a famous black woman turning into an ugly white guy and then dying in front of a crowded club. In fact, the show left it a bit unclear as to what actually happened to Angelica after Howard transformed into her but I’m going to guess it was nothing good. In the end, though, this episode was effectively macabre.

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.