Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 2.20 “Mesmer’s Bauble”

Posted on December 6, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, things get dark.

Episode 2.20 “Mesmer’s Bauble”

(Dir by Armand Mastroianni, originally aired by May 1st, 1989)

Howard Moore (Martin Neufeld) is the latest in a long line of nerdy Friday the 13th villains. With his long hair, unwashed appearance, and crazy eyes, Howard is an easy target for some of the less compassionate citizens of Canada. Of course, Howard doesn’t help things by having a totally creepy personality. He works in a vinyl record store, where he offers up unsolicited music advice to the teenage customers, the majority of whom giggle awkwardly whenever he’s nearby. Howard is obsessed with a singer named Angelica (Vanity) but there’s no way Howard could ever actually meet her.

Or at least, that’s the case until he finds Mesmer’s Bauble. Having once belonged to the inventor of hypnotism, this crystal pendant grants Howard anything that he asks for, as long as he first uses it to hypnotize people and then kill them. (It turns out that merely looking at the pendant is enough to send someone into a hypnotic trance.) As with so many Friday the 13th villains, Howard quickly comes to love having the power to kill people. I’ve always felt that the majority of this show’s villains are basically addicts. Instead of being addicted to drugs, they’re addicted to the rush of power that comes with using a cursed antique to get what they want. That’s certainly the case with Howard.

At first, Howard thinks that he wants Angelia to love him. He kills both her publicist and her manager in order to get closer to her. But, once he’s finally close to her, Howard apparently realizes that he actually wants to be Angelica. In an effectively nightmarish sequence, Howard and Angelica’s body appear to merge into one. Howard literally turns into Angelia while Angelica presumably withers away into nothingness. Howard is now Angelica, which will undoubtedly upset Ryan, who has bought two tickets for Angelica’s latest show.

It’s up to Micki and Ryan to recover the pendant and they manage to do so in the most anticlimactic way possible. They go to Angelica/Howard’s concert and Micki grabs the pendant while Angelica/Howard is singing. Without the pendant, Angelica dissolves into Howard and then a panicked Howard is promptly electrocuted on stage.

Howard’s dead but so are a lot of other people. At the shop, Micki and Ryan confess to Jack that they feel that they failed because so many people died before they got the pendant. Jack shrugs and basically tells them “that’s life.” What a dark ending! Actually, it was rare that Friday the 13th didn’t end on a dark note.

This was an effectively creepy episode, one that worked because of just how dark it allowed things to get. Even Jack pointed out that the pendant’s powers didn’t always make sense, which made it even more dangerous in the hands of someone like Howard. There were a few loose ends. I found it a bit odd that there wasn’t a bigger public reaction to a famous black woman turning into an ugly white guy and then dying in front of a crowded club. In fact, the show left it a bit unclear as to what actually happened to Angelica after Howard transformed into her but I’m going to guess it was nothing good. In the end, though, this episode was effectively macabre.

Retro Television Reviews: T. and T. 1.17 “The Game” and 1.18 “A Victim of Fashion”

Posted on October 6, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to 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 T. and T., a Canadian show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on Tubi!

This week, Mr. T plays the game!

Episode 1.17 “The Game”

(Dir by Robert Malenfant, originally aired on May 2nd, 1988)

“In this episode,” Mr. T explains, “Amy and I disagree on tactics as I try to bring an end to a very dangerous game.”

Pam Richards (Cynthia Preston) and her boyfriend Nash Weaver (David Orth) are two spoiled rich kids, playing a dangerous game. Nash steals some expensive dishes and silverwear from the home of his father (who is judge, no less) and, with Pam’s help, puts it in the locker of one of their shy classmates, Greg Walker (Victor Erdos). Nash then calls the police, gives them an anonymous tip, and Greg is arrested. Greg is only 14 but it appears that he’s going to be tried as an adult! Canada is going to make an example out of him!

Fortunately, Greg’s attorney is Amy Taler and that means that T.S. Turner is on the case! It doesn’t take T.S. long to figure out what happened.

“The way I see it,” he tells Amy, “the girl played decoy so they could plant stuff in Greg’s locker! These are the type of games these kids are into. I’m going to see if I can play too.”

T.S. stakes out Pam’s house. Nash orders a pizza for him. “I don’t eat while on duty,” T.S. growls.

That night, Nash and Pamela leave Nash’s house and break into a neighbor’s house. T.S. follows them, just to discover that they’ve already left the house. In the kitchen, T.S. finds a balloon that looks like an eyeball. The balloon pops, revealing a note that reads, “We’re watching you too.” Suddenly, the cops show up and arrest T.S!

Waiting outside the house, Nash tells T.S. to “give my regards to the boys in blue.”

“Give it to them yourself,” T.S. replies.

Nash and Pam claim that they were just going in the house to water the plants and T.S. is not charged with breaking and entering. Detective Jones assures T.S. that he doesn’t like Nash much either, saying that the kid has been in trouble before but he’s never been charged.

“Why?” T.S. snarls, “Because his father’s a judge?”

T.S. returns to staking out Nash’s house. (He’s eventually joined by Greg, who simply cannot believe that Pam would frame him.) “These kids are not playing kid games!” T.S. says. Eventually, Nash and Pam drive off to small warehouse. When T.S. follows them, Nash pulls a gun on them.

“You want to go to prison?” T.S. demands, “You know what prison’s like? Being locked up in the small cell, 24 hours! After you shoot me, who is next? Is it Pam? How about your father …. BECAUSE HE’S A JUDGE!”

(T.S. is really hung up on that.)

Nash points the gun at his own head.

“It’s not worth it, brother!” T.S. shouts.

A sobbing Nash surrenders himself.

Later, T.S. tells Amy, “Nash was just a little frightened kid, reaching out for love and attention.”

Here’s the thing — this all happened over the course of 30 minutes running time. As a result, Nash’s surrender seemed to come out of nowhere. This is an episode that would have benefitted from a full hour. As it is, this episode ends on a jarringly abrupt note and therefore, Nash’s surrender is neither as effective nor satisfying as it should have been.

Episode 1.18 “A Victim of Fashion”

(Dir by Don McCutcheon, originally aired on May 9th, 1988)

“In this episode,” Mr. T tells us, “the world of fashion loses its glamour as threats and murder come into play.”

“I’m not going to hire no tux and go to no bourgeois fashion show and that’s that!” T.S. Turner tells Amy when she informs him that he has no choice but to accompany her to an uptown fashion show. This leads to a genuinely amusing scene in which Amy leads T.S. onto an elevator, where T.S. is suddenly grabbed by two men who proceed to …. get his measurements so they can rent him a tuxedo.

Fashion designer John Merrick (Richard Monette) has hired Amy and T.S. because he was mailed a slashed up picture of his top model, Anita (Tonya Williams). Anita doesn’t know that she’s being stalked and Merrick wants T.S. to be her bodyguard without explaining why. Tonya, for her part, is just happy to be famous enough to require a bodyguard.

“Please,” T.S. tells her, “call me T.S.”

“Okay,” Anita replies, “if you’ll tell me what it stands for.”

“Tree Surgeon.”

Who could the stalker be? Could it be the long-haired man wandering around with a camera? Of course it is! This is only a 30 minute show so it’s not like there’s time to develop a lot of suspects. However, it turns out that Lonzo (Patrick Brymer) was not really stalking Anita as much as he was demanding that Merrick admit to stealing Lonzo’s designs. When Merrick tries to murder Lonzo, T.S. is there to save the day! Yay!

Again, just as with the other episode I looked at this week, this is an episode that would have been considerably more effective with a 60-minute running time. With only 30 minutes to tell the story, it felt rushed. There was a lot of comedic potential to the idea letting Mr. T loose in the fashion world but sadly, there was enough time to get to any of it.

Next week — T.S. quips his way through another case! Evildoers beware!

Shattered Politics #48: The Kidnapping of the President (dir by George Mendeluk)

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Agency was not the only Canadian film to be made about American politics in 1980. There was also The Kidnapping of the President, a low-budget political thriller that, because it has since slipped into the public domain, can currently be found in a few dozen DVD box sets. In fact, you may very well own a copy of The Kidnapping of the President without even realizing it!

Don’t worry if you do. The Kidnapping of the President is a fairly harmless little film.

U.S. President Adam Scott (Hal Holbrook) is visiting Toronto when he gets handcuffed to a South American revolutionary named Roberto Assanti (Miguel Fernandes). Assanti locks President Scott in an armored car that is wired with explosives and then demands a hundred million in diamonds and two planes. (Though the film never explicitly states it, I imagine that Assanti was primarily motivated by jealousy over the fact that Che is on a million t-shirts while Assanti remains fairly unknown.) It’s up to secret service agent Jerry O’Connor (William Shatner) to negotiate with Assanti and rescue the President! Meanwhile, the ethically compromised Vice President (Van Johnson) is left as acting President in Washington and struggles to keep things calm while his ambitious wife (Ava Gardner) plots for a brighter future.

Overall, the Kidnapping of the President is okay for what it is. It’s neither exceptionally good nor memorably bad. It just sort of is. Hal Holbrook is always well-cast as a President and William Shatner gives a typical Shatner performance, which is either a good or a bad thing depending on how you feel about William Shatner. And, for that matter, Miguel Fernandes is a properly unlikable villain though he never really seems to have the charisma necessary to make him believable as the dynamic leader that he’s supposed to be.

Probably the most interesting thing about The Kidnapping of the President is that it doesn’t try to pass Montreal off for being a location in the United States. Instead, the film was not only filmed in but is actually set in Toronto as well. When Jerry attempts to deal with the local authorities, that means that he ends up talking to a bunch of very polite men in red uniforms.

But what’s strange about this is that the people of Toronto are so excited about the arrival of the President. You half expect to hear one extra say, “I never thought I’d live long enough to see the day that a leader that I can’t vote for and who has next to nothing to do with my everyday life would come to visit Toronto.”

Don’t get me wrong. If you follow me on twitter, then you know that I am unashamed to declare my love for all things Canadian. And obviously, as neighbors, Canada and the United States do have a close relationship. But would people in Toronto really be that excited to see the President?

If so, I think we really owe the people of Canada an apology for not knowing more about their government. At the very least, we should definitely invite Stephen Harper over for lunch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqyWEPkdxn4