Jeremy Roberts | 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 Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!

This week …. oh, who knows?

Episode 1.12 “Deadline”

(Dir by Michael Lange, originally aired on January 29th, 1989)

This week’s first story is about Peter (Aaron Harnick), whose father owns the local Springwood paper and who is given a job for the summer. He’s assigned to write the obits so that he can hang out around the newspaper office and learn from the veteran writers. Peter would rather be in Europe. That’s especially true when he starts to visualize the obits that he’s writing and somehow comes to realize that he’ll die unless he meets his deadline.

This story was the epitome of a good premise that was sloppily executed. Peter hates writing obits but if he doesn’t write the obits, he’ll die in the same way as the person that he’s writing about. He has visions. He has dreams. Unfortunately, both his boss and his girlfriend tell him to stop working on his current obit and to get some rest. But if Peter stop writing, he’ll die! Uhmm …. how long does it take to type up an obituary? I mean, doesn’t he just have to type up whatever dead person’s loved ones sent to the paper?

There’s a clever moment where Peter deletes an old article about Freddy Krueger from the newspaper’s computer system. The episode implies that maybe Peter’s visions are in some way Freddy’s revenge but, as was so often the case with this show, it doesn’t really do much to explore the idea.

The first story ends with Peter dead. The episode’s second story deals with Emily (Page Hannah), a friend of Peter’s girlfriend. Emily has been dating an older college student (Timothy Brantley) and she continually has dreams where her friends — including Peter’s girlfriend — get mad at her for not spending more time with her. In her dreams, her friends all die in a car accident. At the end of the story, it turns out that Emily was just daydreaming. Seriously, that’s the entire story.

What a terrible episode. I usually try to be positive about even the lesser episodes but I have to admit that I’m kind of ticked off that I wasted 50 minutes watching this week’s episode of Freddy’s Nightmares. It felt as the show’s writers didn’t even try this week. Instead, they just came up with some weird scenes and then dismissed them by shrugging and saying, “Hey, it was all a dream. Nothing means anything!”

This episode was just lazy.

Carl (Bruce Campbell) is serving a ten-year prison sentence but he gets out in five. He’s met outside the prison by his old criminal partner. Patrick (Jeremy Roberts). After Carl makes up for lost time with a prostitute named Janie (Anita Barone), he and Patrick try to rob the prison’s laundry system. Carl’s spent most of his time in prison carefully plotting out the heist but he didn’t take into account that his old criminal crew is made up of incompetents.

Running Time is only 70 minutes long and the film’s story plays out in real-time. The movie itself is edited in such a way to create the impression that it was all shot in one continuous take. It’s gimmicky but, like the film’s noir-style black-and-white cinematography, it works, creating a narrative the feels relentless. It also makes it clear that Campbell’s Carl is a true career criminal. He’s not out of prison for more than a handful of minutes before he’s trying to pull his next heist. Crime is all that Carl really know, which makes his dilemma at the end of the movie (Janie or the money?) very effective.

Running Time is basically a showcase for Bruce Campbell. Director Josh Becker was a longtime friend and associate of Sam Raimi’s and started his feature career as a production assistant on The Evil Dead. Running Time feels like it was made with Campbell in mind and Carl is a character who plays to all of Campbell’s strengths. It’s the perfect film for Campbell’s style of acting and Campbell is just as good when he’s planning the heist as when he’s arguing with Janie about the way that he treated her when they were both in high school together. (His scenes with the excellent Anita Barone are some of the best in the movie.) Running Time features Bruce Campbell at his best.