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.
I was pretty hard on Monsters last week. In retrospect, I think some of that was due to the fact that I was feeling anxious about getting my new laptop. I stand by what I said about the episode because it wasn’t a good one but I do regret the slight tone of outrage that I took in my review. Seriously, this is not a show to take seriously.
Take tonight’s episode for example….
Episode 1.17 “Taps”
(Dir by David Misch, originally aired on March 4th, 1989)
Suzy St. Claire (Mary Jo Keenan) is a professional dancer who is appearing, on Broadway, in a show that stars and is directed by an egomaniacal tap dancer, Gary Gregory (Neal Jones). Suzy wants freedom from both the show and her romantic relationship with Gary so that she can go to Hollywood and try to become a star. Gary tells her that there’s no way he’ll ever let her go. So, Suzy contacts a lawyer and he helps her got out of the contract, along with suing Gary for sexual harassment. Nah, just kidding. That’s what I would do but Suzy just decides to poison him. When Gary doesn’t die quickly enough and proves to be too big to fit in a suitcase, Suzy dismembers him.
A few years later, Suzy is in Hollywood with her agent, Sam (Dan Frazer). She demands to know why Meryl Streep is getting Oscar nominations but she’s not. Sam points out that starring in Graveyard Slasher III is not the path to getting Academy recognition. After Sam leaves, Suzy realizes that she’s not alone in her apartment. She looks over at the window and, behind the curtains, she sees a familiar red shoe. She opens the curtains and is confronted by….
…. A DISEMBODIED LEG!
Apparently, she forgot to destroy Gary’s leg and now, it has tracked her down. In a scene that has to be seen to be believed, she is chased around the apartment by the leg. When she tries to leave the apartment, the leg trips her. The leg hops up and down until she says, “You want to dance with me?” It’s a scene that is so ludicrous that it nearly works. The only problem is that a hopping leg, on its own, doesn’t really have the type of forward momentum necessary to be a real threat. If you can’t outrun one hopping leg, maybe you deserve whatever you get.
In Suzy’s case, that means using a meat carver to chop off her own leg and then somehow — it’s never shown how — attaching Gary’s leg to the stump. When we next see Suzy, she is back in New York and Sam is wondering why she’s abandoned her film career to return to dancing.
Good Lord, this was silly. To its credit, it was meant to be silly. None of the dialogue was meant to be taken seriously and the actors were all clearly in on the joke. But, ultimately, that disembodied leg was just too utterly ridiculous for the story to work. I applaud this episode for laughing at itself but I just wish it had been a little better executed. Add to that, for an episode about dancers, we didn’t get to see nearly enough dancing. Sorry, the hopping leg doesn’t count.
Next week …. Tori Spelling guest stars! We’ll see how that goes.
Through the Shattered Lens 