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, a brave troll defends its treasure!

Episode 1.12 “Fools’ Gold”

(Dir by Greg Cannom, originally aired on January 21st, 1989)

Two constructions workers, Phil (Jeff Conaway) and Joe (T.J. Castronova), and their boss, Sherrie (Mary Cadorette), climb down into an underground tunnel.  They’re expecting to find another construction worker who they believe is hiding in the tunnel.  Instead, they discover the worker’s dead body and a gold coin.

Phil is super-excited about the gold and insists on exploring more of the tunnel.  Joe and Sherrie stay behind while Phil explores.  Joe talks about how, “in the old country,” his parents would tell him stories about faeries and goblins and trolls.  Sherrie laughs and says that there’s no way Joe could actually believe in any of that.

Well, it’s actually a pretty good thing that Joe knows about trolls because there’s one in the tunnel!  The troll (played, under a lot of makeup, by Debbie Lee Carrington) has hoarded all of the gold that it can find.  According to Joe, trolls do this to trick people into entering their lair.  Because trolls have a boiling hot blood, they can burn people just by touching them.  Trolls are also vulnerable to sunlight and iron.  That’s all Phil has to hear to decide that they should defeat the troll and try to steal the treasure for themselves.

The troll, however, is a bit more clever than the three of them realize.  Not only is the troll a viscous attacker who can burn with one touch but the troll also has the ability to start an earthquake.  When the troll does just that, Sherrie, Phil, and Joe find themselves trapped and fighting for their lives.

This episode featured three distinct human characters.  Joe was good-hearted.  Phil was greedy.  Sherrie was somewhere in between.  While Jeff Conaway overacted, both Mary Cadorette and T.J. Castronova gave adequate performances as Sherrie and Joe.  That said, the definite star of this episode was the troll.  Wisely, director Greg Cannom largely kept the troll in the shadows, which made it even more creepy as it ran around the tunnel.  When the troll did attack, it was a genuinely frightening monster.  What I liked is that the troll always moved quickly and ruthlessly.  The troll wasn’t one of those slow monsters who show up in so many horror films.  Instead, this troll was a predator, one that attacked quickly and showed no mercy.  Seriously, no one watching this episode would want to run into that thing in a basement or anywhere else!

That said, this episode’s script was a bit underwhelming.  The 20-minute runtime really doesn’t do Monsters any favors.  This is an episode that would have benefitted from a longer run time and perhaps a somewhat darker ending.  The humans were so unlikable that it was hard not to feel that they hadn’t earned a happy ending.  I was Team Troll all the way.