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 rather predictable story is saved and elevated by one truly impressive monster!
Episode 1.19 “Rain Dance”
(Dir by Richard Friedman, originally aired on April 22nd, 1989)
Tonight’s episode of Monsters deals with a couple living in a shack in the middle of the desert. Tom Solo (Kent McCord) is a self-styled treasure hunter who thinks that he can get rich by swindling the indigenous people out of their valuable artifacts. His wife, Vanessa (Teri Copley), is sick of living in the desert and just wants to return to civilization. Vanessa is extremely vain. Tom is extremely smug. It’s easy to imagine how they got together but it’s bit more difficult to understand why they’re still together.
When an angry old woman (Betty Carvalho) shows up at the shack, she spends a few minutes yelling at Tom for trying to take advantage of her people and then complains about the drought that is destroying their land. She says that her people found and tamed the land and that some day, the land will again belong to them. She also gives Tom an artifact, a statue of what Tom assumes he’ll be able to get a few bucks for. Myself, I would probably turn down the statue because it is seriously creepy.
Yikes!
Of course, it turns out that Tom is wrong about having any chance of making money of the statue. The statue is a rain idol, one that comes to life in the middle of the night to stalk both Tom and his wife. When confronted by the statue, both Vanessa and Tom are transformed into statues that crumble into dust. The next morning, the old woman comes by to retrieve her idol and happily says that the rains will now come to wash away the dusty particles that were once the Solos.
Again, yikes!
Seriously, this was not a particularly complicated episode of Monsters. From the start, it was obvious that Tom and Vanessa were going to pay for their exploitation of the natives and it was also obvious that, since neither one of them had any redeeming qualities, neither would survive the night. And, as soon as the old woman showed up with that statue, it was pretty obvious what the instrument of their doom would be. Vanessa was established early on as being obsessed with keeping her skin from drying out in the desert heat so I wasn’t surprised when she eventually started turning into sand.
It wasn’t surprising but it still worked because the monster was scary!
Seriously!
The end result was an effective morality take about the perils of greed and assuming you’re more clever than you actually are. In many ways, this could have been a particularly macabre episode of The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery. Monsters is at its best when it offers a scary monster and a dark ending and this episode certainly did that.
Through the Shattered Lens 