Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!
This week’s episode of Friday the 13th is all about magic, blood, and costumes!
Episode 1.6 “The Great Montarro”
(Dir by Richard Friedman, originally aired on November 2nd, 1987)
This week’s episode opens with a magician named Fahteem (August Schellenberg) performing his signature trick. He steps into the Cabinet of Doom and, once he’s sealed inside, several sword blades are driven through the cabinet. Somehow, Fahteem always survives without a scratch and the audience is always amazed. What the audience doesn’t know is that the Cabinet is a cursed antique. Before each performance, Fahteem drugs a woman and locks her in another cabinet. The blades kills whoever is in that cabinet while leaving Fahteem untouched. Of course, if no one is in the other cabinet than the blades will kill whoever is in the Cabinet of Doom. That is something that Fahteem discovers when an unknown perpetrator decides to take the cabinet away from him.
After Fahteem is murdered, Jack, a former musician who was an unfriendly acquaintance of Fahteem, discovers that the Cabinet of Doom was actually purchased from the antique store. Jack decides to return to the world of magic and magicians so that he can track down the cabinet. Helping him, and getting to wear a cute assistant’s uniform, is Micki. Ryan also helps but he doesn’t get anything cute to wear.
It turns out that the cabinet is now in the possession of the Great Montarro (Graeme Campbell) and his wife, Lylah (Lesleh Donaldson). Realizing that Jack is trying to take away the cabinet, Montarro and Lylah are soon targeting him and trying to make his signature trick into a fatal one. Seeing as how that trick involves Jack being tied up in a sack that is then set on fire, that might be an easier task than it sounds.
This is the bloodiest episode of the show yet, with the camera focusing on the gory results of every failed trick. Blood drips from cabinets. Blood spreads across stages. Watching the show, you really do find yourself watching why there’s so many spikes and blades just lying around. Apparently, audiences for magic shows are not satisfied unless there’s a chance that they might see someone die in a terrible fashion. In the role of Jack, Chris Wiggins appears to be having a ball performing magic tricks and, as a result, both Micki and Ryan spend most of the show standing off to the side. Fortunately, Wiggins is a lot of fun to watch in this episode. The joy that he takes from pulling off the perfect trick is contagious. The overall episode is a bit too slowly paced but at least almost everyone gets to wear a nice costume.
Next week, Jack, Ryan, and Micki try to recover a cursed scalpel!