Tag Archives: Paul Lieber

Freddy’s Nightmares Late Night Retro Television Review: Freddy’s Nightmares 1.6 “Saturday Night Special”

Posted on by casewright

GUEST REVIEWER ALERT!!! Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Plex! 

This episode was really two storylines that had very little to do with one another; so, I’ll have to do like a story A and a story B. Story A shows Gordon (Scott Burkholder) and weird friend pining for a blonde bombshell ice skater. This entire scene is really creepy. Why? Neither of these guys went to the skating rink to skate or watch a game. They are literally just there to watch people. Yikes!

Super creepy Rob Lowe likes to go to the rec center and watch folks swim just like these guys who go to the rec center and watch people ice skate

Gordon has an OK job. He is not particularly handsome, but he’s not the worst. Anyway, he’s lonely. Gordon decides to use a dating service that has him lie on a video to get women. This could’ve been a cool plot line, if the dating service was run by the devil and he was selling his soul, but nope, it was just a dumb dating service. Then, out of nowhere, he was dead the whole time. So, huh?

Story B has an unattractive woman named Mary who gets convinced by her pretty coworker to get bizarre plastic surgery to be beautiful, but she’s actually not beautiful. It was so convoluted that it was really hard to follow.

The story B also had a sub plot that the real estate place where Mary worked was hiring pretty women to sleep with the clients to close deals. After Mary beautifies herself, she agrees to prostitute herself to close a real estate deal, but then the client thinks she’s ugly and she dies. Yep, the plot was schizophrenic. I was going to use a flow chart to follow it, but I can’t spend more time on story than the writers did.

Retro Television Review: St. Elsewhere 1.5 “Samuels and the Kid”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988.  The show can be found on Hulu!

This week’s episode of St. Elsewhere featured Dr. Craig winning an award.  Good for him!

Episode 1.5 “Samuels and the Kid”

(Dir by Thomas Carter, originally aired on November 30th, 1982)

This week’s episode of St. Elsewhere was kind of boring,  It wasn’t a bad episode because the show was well-acted and even the boring subplots felt as is they were part of a bigger whole but, especially when compared to last week’s episode, Samuels and the Kid just wasn’t as compelling.

The Kid of the title is Robbie Durant (Jeremy Licht), a young patient who needs to have some minor surgery done on his ankle.  Dr. Samuels take a really intense interest in the kid, bonding with him and even offering him tickets to a Patriots football game.  At first, it seems like Samuels is just trying to be nice to a kid who is in a scary situation.  (When I was growing up, I spent a few nights in the hospital because of my asthma and it always scared me to death.)  But, at the end of the episode, it is revealed that Samuels had a son who was Robbie’s age who died in a freak accident.  As for Robbie, the operation is a success but he still dies as the result of an embolism.  It was sad but, at the same time, I knew Robbie was going to die as soon as he showed up in the hospital.  I’ve seen enough medical shows to know.

Dr. Cavanero was at a bed-and-breakfast when she learned that one of her patients had gone into labor and was at her apartment alone.  Cavenro had to beg people for change so that she could use a pay phone to call the patient’s neighbors so that she could talk them through delivering the baby.  Seen today, the most interesting thing about this storyline is that it takes place at a time when people had to carry around quarters so that they could call each other in case of an emergency.  (There is a very dusty old payphone a few blocks away from my house.  I assume it doesn’t work and I don’t think it’s been touched by human hands since the 90s — and I’m certainly not going to touch it! — but it’s always interesting to see it sitting there like some haunted beacon of the past.)

Dr. Fiscus continued to have sex with Kathy Martin.  Good for them but I really don’t know that I need to spend a good deal of time listening to Howie Mandel talk about his sex life.

Dr. Chandler (Denzel Washington) accused a nurse of being incompetent.  Nurse Rosenthal (Christina Pickles) got mad at him for yelling at the nurse in the hospital hallway.  Dr. Westphall mediated and agreed to move the nurse to another floor.  Denzel Washington is always fun when he’s yelling at people.

There was one very funny scene.  Dr. Craig won an award for surgeon of the year and gave an extremely long, pompous, and rather bitter acceptance speech.  (The award was a plaster cast of his own hands.)  William Daniels played the scene perfectly and I have a feeling that Dr. Craig is going to end up becoming my favorite character.  As a bonus, Daniels’s wife, Bonnie Bartlett, appeared as Craig’s wife.  By the middle of Craig’s speech, even she had stoppled listening and lit a cigarette.

As I said, this was a little bit of a boring episode.   Still, I look forward to the future of the show!

Speaking of the future, this is my last St. Elsewhere review of 2024.  My next review of this show will post on January 3rd!

 

Robotic Vengeance: Steel and Lace (1991, directed by Ernest Farino)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

On trial for raping concert pianist Gally Morton (Clare Wren), evil businessman Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris) gets four of his sleazy buddies to provide a fake alibi for him.  After Emerson is acquitted, Gally goes to the roof of the courthouse and leaps to her death.

Five years later, Daniel and his four friends have made a fortune by illegally foreclosing on people’s houses.  They may think that they’ve gotten away with their crimes but what they don’t know is that Gally’s brother, Albert (Bruce Davison), has been building a robot version of his sister.  Soon, Robot Gally is killing off all of Emerson’s friends while a courtroom sketch artist named Alison (Stacy Haiduk) and a detective named Dunn (David Naughton) attempt to figure out what’s going on.

A mix of The Terminator and I Spit On Your Grave, Steel and Lace is a classic of its kind.  While the deaths are inventive and, considering who Robot Gally is killing, deserved, what really sets the film apart is the strong cast and the inventive direction.  Director Ernest Farino wastes no time getting down to business and he inventively opens the film by cutting back and forth between Emerson assaulting Gally and the jury acquitting him of the crime that we just saw him commit.  Davison is not in the film as much as you might expect but he still makes an impression as the fanatical Albert and Naughton and Haiduk are likable even if their scenes sometimes feel like padding.  Best of all is Clare Wren, an actress who deserved to be a bigger star and who is convincing both as the fragile Gally and as the vengeance-driven robot.  Robot Gally eventually comes to question whether justice is truly be served by all of the killings and Wren sells it.  Also be sure to keep an eye out for David L. Lander, playing the prerequisite eccentric coronor.  (Has there ever been a movie coroner who wasn’t an eccentric?)  Finally, Brian Backer — who will be forever known for playing nice guy Mark Ratner in Fast Times At Ridgemont High — is effectively cast against type as one of Emerson’s stooges.

Steel and Lace is one of the best low-budget films to come out of the early 90s, a deeply satisfying tale of robotics and vengeance.