Kim Johnston Ulrich | 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire show is streaming on Tubi.

This week, Billy Drago learns an important lesson about cheating, greed, and cocoons.

Episode 1.20 “The Cocoon”

(Dir by John Gray, originally aired on April 29th, 1989)

A woman (Kim Ulrich) is involved in a serious traffic accident, one that should have killed her. Instead, she survives the accident with hardly a scratch but also without her memory (or so she claims). A greedy police detective named Richard (Billy Drago) is called in when it is discovered that the woman has a good deal of money but no identification on her. When the woman says that she knows that she’s wealthy, Richard becomes very interested in helping her regain her memory.

Richard’s girlfriend, Sarah (Silvana Gallardo), is a psychic. Richard brings her to see the woman, hoping that Sarah will have a vision. When she handles the woman’s comb, Sarah has a vision of the woman in the 1920s, seducing a man who has been missing for over 60 years. But the woman appears to be in her 20s in both the present and in Sarah’s vision. Richard suggests that Sarah might be seeing the woman’s grandmother.

Of course, the truth is a bit more complex. The woman has been alive for centuries, surviving by wrapping her lovers in a cocoon and then feasting off their life force. The woman is hoping to make Richard her next lover and Richard, being a bit of a sleazeball, is prepared to go along with it. However, Sarah has a few tricks of her own….

This was an interesting and ambitious episode, one that attempted to tell a very complex story in just 21 minutes and on a very limited budget. Unfortunately, the show didn’t really have the resources to do this particular story justice but it’s still hard not to admire the imagination involved. Throughout the episode there are moments that work really well, like a sequence where Sarah has a vision of all of the different costumes that the woman has worn through the centuries. The episode also ends with an entertaining little twist. It’s effective, even if the scenes involving the actual spinning of the cocoon fall victim to the show’s low budget.

Billy Drago was a veteran screen bad guy, one who almost always cast as an evil henchman. (In Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, Kevin Costner memorably threw him off of a roof.) This episode gives Drago a rare leading role, though Richard is just as amoral and sleazy as the characters for which Drago was best known. Drago does a good job in the lead, playing Richard as being a not particularly smart guy who is undone by his own cockiness. If nothing else, it’s impossible not to enjoy seeing him get his comeuppance.

Next week on Monsters …. Adrienne Barbeau dabbles in the magical arts!

Give Charles Band a castle and a D-List celebrity and he’ll give you a movie!

In Spellcaster, which Band produced in 1988 but didn’t release until 1992, the castle is in Italy and there’s not one but three D-list celebrities. British DJ Richard Blade plays Rex, who is a VJ on R-TV, a cable station that only shows music videos. (A music station that actually plays music? Imagine that!) Bunty Bailey, who was the hot girl in Aha’s Take Me On video, is Cassandra, an alcoholic rock star. Finally, Adam Ant is Signor Diablo, who owns the castle.

The plot of the movie is that R-TV is hosting a contest where the winners get to go to Diablo’s castle and not only meet Rex and Cassandra but also search for a million dollar check. The contest winners are a snooty British woman, a sex-obsessed Italian, a sexy French woman, an overweight New Yorker, a blonde vegan, and a brother and a sister who could really use the money. They are a collection of clichés and none of them are very interesting, sympathetic, or smart. Not even the Italian notices that their host is named Mr. Devil.

The search for the money is a bust because the guests keep dying. For instance, the overweight New Yorker eats a stuffed pig, turns into a pig himself, and then gets shot by the snooty British woman, who just happened to bring a rifle with her because all snooty Brits enjoy hunting. Another person ends up getting eaten by a chair that has a lion’s head carved into it. When the lion comes to life and chomps down its jaws, the teeth are obviously foam rubber. It all has to do with Signor Diablo’s crystal ball, where he’s building a collection of souls.

With the casting Adam Ant and Bunty Bailey, Spellcaster tried to be a horror movie for the MTV generation but it came out several years too late. By the time Spellcaster was released, grunge had taken over MTV and both Adam Ant and the Take Me On video seemed like relics from another age. The film itself is a mostly dull affair, one that will be best appreciated by people who are nostalgic for the type of bad movies that used to show up on late night cable.