John Cameron Mitchell | 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 Plex!

Let’s see what’s happening in Springwood!

Episode 1.2 “It’s A Miserable Life”

(Dir by Tom McLoughlin, originally aired on October 16th, 1988)

Bryan Ross (a young John Cameron Mitchell, giving a performance that really can’t be described as being anything less than lousy) is the son of the owner of the Beefy Boy hamburger joint in Springwood, Ohio. Bryan wants to go to college. His dad (Peter Iacangelo) and his mom (Annie O’Donnell) want him to take over the family business and join them in singing “Chew me, eat me, you can’t beat me.”

Bryan is working the overnight shift alone when a scruffy man (Michael Melvin) pulls up to the drive-through on his motorcycle and threatens to kill him. Bryan passes out but, when he wakes up, he’s got a throbbing headache and he keeps seeing blood dripping on the floor. Bryan’s girlfriend, Karyn (Lar Park Lincoln, giving a good performance), takes Bryan home. At his house, Bryan discovers his mom and dad are acting weird. Bryan tries to convince his parents to let him leave home. Dad tries to stick his head in the oven. Mom tries to seduce her son and then climbs into the refrigerator. On the radio, there’s a news story about “another” drive-by shooting. What could it all mean!?

Oh, you know what it all means. Even if you haven’t watched the episode, you know that the motorcycle man obviously shot Bryan in the head and everything that happens after Bryan leaves Beefy Boy is just his dying vision. It’s not a bad idea but it’s ineffectively executed. We don’t really know enough about Bryan or his parents for Bryan’s hallucination to carry any impact and, from what we do see, they all appear to be broadly-drawn caricatures. This episode also commits the sin of introducing a memorable character — the man on the motorcycle — and then not exploring just who or what he was meant to be.

Bryan’s story was wrapped up in 20 minutes. The second half of the episode dealt with Karyn. Shot in the same drive-by attack that killed Bryan, Karyn ended up at the hospital and …. well, I guess her story was another collection of hallucinations that really didn’t add up to much. The story was effective because hospitals are scary and Lar Park Lincoln gave a better performance than John Cameron Mitchell did in his story. That said, the entire story was basically Karyn getting upset because everyone kept saying that her parents were on their way. Finally, Karyn finally revealed that — you guessed it! — her parents were dead and that they died at the same hospital where she was taken after getting shot. As the episode ended, Karyn saw her parents standing in the doorway and screamed and thrashed around in bed while the doctor and nurse tried to calm her. And …. that was it. I mean, is Karyn dead? Is that why her parents showed up? Is Karyn hallucinating again? Much like a drunk frat boy, this story didn’t reach a climax as much as it just stopped.

As for Freddy, he showed up to introduce each story. There was a cool moment where he emerged from the restaurant’s fry cooker. For the hospital scene, he put on scrubs. He didn’t actually interact with either Bryan or Karyn but he still took credit for their suffering. I think Freddy was just bragging on himself.

This episode was pretty uneven. For the most part, I’m just glad I don’t live in Springwood.

This place is Florida. The time is the 80s. Five juvenile delinquents have been given a chance to earn their freedom. All they have to do is go down to the Everglades and train with Indian Joe (Stephen Lang), a no-nonsense Vietnam veteran who is determined to teach them not only survival sills but also how to work together as a team. But Joe is interested in more than just reforming a group of youthful troublemakers. He wants to turn them into a crime-fighting team who can help clean up the most dangerous neighborhood in Miami. When Joe and delinquents move into and refurbish a previously condemned building, they get the attention of both the local drug kingpin (James Remar) and his main enforcer (Laurence Fishburne).

Band of the Hand is very much a film of its time, not only in its fashion and music choices but also in its full-on embrace of the war on drugs and the idea that the best way to clean up the streets is for vigilantes to do it on their own. The film was produced by Michael Mann and, as directed by former Starsky and Hutch star Paul Michael Glaser, the film has the look of an episode of Miami Vice. That might be because the film itself was originally meant to be a pilot for a television show. When the networks passed on it, it was released to theaters instead and advertised as being “from the maker of Miami Vice.” The movie never escapes its television origins. Things start strong in the Everglades, with Lang proving himself to be a master of glowering and the young delinquents struggling to not only survive Lang’s training but also resist the temptation to kill each other. It’s less interesting once the action moves to Miami and it becomes Death Wish 3 without the blood or Charles Bronson. The scenes with the young men goofing around are an awkward fit with the scenes of Remar and Fishburne terrorizing the neighborhood.

Band of the Hand is still worth watching if you want to see some familiar faces early in their careers. John Cameron Mitchell and Leon both score early roles as two of the delinquents-turned-crime fighters and Lauren Holly plays the romantic interest who is inevitably ends up with the bag guys. James Remar was always a good villain and Laurence Fishburne channels both his previous performance in Death Wish II and his future performance in King of New York. It’s a good cast, even if no one really breaks free from the production’s television origins.

The idea of creating a show about a special unit of young crime fighters who battle drug pushers was one that Mann didn’t abandon. The final episode of Miami Vice was essentially an unsold pilot that followed many of the same plot beats as Band Of the Hand. (It also didn’t lead to a television series, though some might argue that 21 Jump Street took the same idea and ran with it.) As for director Paul Michael Glaser, he would later do a much better job with The Running Man.