And indeed, heads do roll in this video!
The werewolf pays homage to Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. Ironically, Jackson died just a few days before this video was released. Director Richard Ayoade is the same Richard Ayoade who starred in The IT Crowd and The Watch. (Remember The Watch? It wasn’t that bad.)
By the way, this video is a part of a Halloween playlist put together by our own Patrick!
Enjoy!
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing the Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!
This week, Viker needs help!
Episode 2.16 “The Oddest Couple”
(Dir by Alan Erlich, originally aired on February 8th, 1987)
Viker has been kicked out by his wife, Mrs. Viker (Laura Henry). Mrs. Viker apparently doesn’t have a first name. Even Viker calls her “Mrs. Viker” whenever he talks to her. Because he has been kicked out of his house, Viker has started sleeping on Howard’s couch.
Howard tells Viker that he can’t sleep on his couch, which just leaves Viker with one other option. He moves in with Howard! Normally, I’d wonder how Edna would feel about this but Edna is not in this episode. In fact, there’s no mention of Howard being involved and his apartment suddenly looks like a tacky bachelor pad. He even has a round bed in the living room.
As you can guess by the episode’s title, Howard and Viker make for an odd couple. It’s not a case of one of them being a neat freak and one of them being a slob. In fact, they’re both pretty neat. It’s just that Viker can be a little weird. He gargles extremely loudly. He takes everything that he hears literally. He spends a lot of time talking about his bunions.
Howard attempts to bring Viker and Mrs. Viker together but, when Mrs. Viker catches Viker teaching Marlene how to dance (more about that in a minute) in the store’s aisles, she declares that she can’t trust Viker. But then Howard invites Mrs. Viker to his apartment, where he has prepared a romantic dinner for the Vikers. That’s all it takes for the Vikers to fall back in love and apparently have sex in Howard’s living room bed while Howard waits in the hallway outside.
Why is Viker teaching Marlene how to dance? Because a good-looking customer named Philip (Richard Hardacre) has asked Marlene to come to his country club! Marlene gets all dressed up, does her hair nicely, and looks forward to her date. But then Richard shows up looking like he’s the bassist in Sex Pistols cover band. Richard says that it’s “punk night” at the country club and he wanted to impress his friends by bringing “an actual punk.” Realizing that she was being used, Marlene tells Richard to get lost and then she, Murray, and Christian go out for pizza. Awww! Since this show usually features those three characters at odds, it’s kind of nice to see them all going out as friends in this episode.
(In real life, Kathleen Laskey, who plays Marlene, is married to Jeff Pustil, who played Christian. Even though their characters are usually rivals, the chemistry between the two performers is obvious.)
This was an okay episode. It made me chuckle a few times. It’s obvious that, after the first half of the second season, the showrunners realized that Don Adams and Gordon Clapp made a great comic team. Check It Out is a show that works best when it embraces absurdity and few characters are more absurd than Gordon Clapp’s Viker.
I watched a lot of horror movies this week but I didn’t watch much television. Starting on November 1st, I’m going to have a lot of shows to get caught up on.
I caught the latest installment of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. Like a lot of Ryan Murphy’s recent miniseries, American Sports Story started out strong but the last few episodes have felt like padding. It’s not that the episodes aren’t contributing to the story. This week, we watched as Aaron committed what was apparently his first murder and as he started to show signs of CTE. But it’s still hard not to feel as if each episode is basically 20 minutes worth of story stretched out to 50 minutes. We’re halfway through this series and it has yet to really give us a reason why we should care about Aaron Hernandez. He just comes across as being an idiot, regardless of his athletic skills, his terrible childhood, or his status as a self-hating gay man trying to survive in a homophobic culture. He doesn’t seem to be worth all of this trouble.
I watched Hell’s Kitchen. The chefs continue to compete at a high level and they continue to have disastrous dinner services. Hell’s Kitchen is one of the few reality shows not to have massively changed its format over the past four years. The producers know there’s no need to fix something that’s already working. If only the producers of Big Brother and Survivor understood that!
I watched an old episode of Night Flight on Friday. It featured Elvis snarling at the camera.
I watched the episode of Dr. Phil in which Phil and cult expert Rick Ross confronted a guy who said he wasn’t a cult leader despite the fact that he clearly was. There’s a lot negative things that can be said about Dr. Phil’s show but the episodes where he exposed cults and their leaders were always entertaining and worth watching.
I watched and reviewed Homicide, Miami Vice, and The Love Boat! I also watched and shared several episodes of One Step Beyond.
And that’s it!
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Welcome Back Kotter, which ran on ABC from 1975 to 1979. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!
This week, Arnold Horshack gets to be a hero!
Episode 4.4 “Once Upon A Ledge”
(Dir by Norman Abbott, originally aired on October 2nd, 1978)
Seriously, what is going on at Buchanan High?
Gabe is vice principal but he’s away at a teacher’s conference. Horshack and Washington are once again running the student store. Epstien is once again working for the audio visual department. Barbarino is nowhere to be seen. This new Sweathog, Beau, is apparently the most popular guy in school, even though this is only his second episode. Perhaps the strangest development is that Julie is now working as Mr. Woodman’s administrative assistant. When did this happen? I can’t even remember what Julie’s previous profession was but I don’t think it had anything to do with education in general or Buchanan High in specific.
Mary Johnson (Irene Arranga) is a shy student who feels that she doesn’t have any sort of identity in the school. She’s one of three Mary Johnsons at Buchanan High. She’s not Mary Johnson the Jock. She’s not Mary Johnson the Cheerleader. She’s Mary Johnson, the one with the perfect teeth. When she tells Woodman that she wants to transfer into the remedial classes so that she can be a Sweathog, Woodman tells her that her C-average makes her ineligible. She can’t even succeed at being a bad student.
Feeling lost, Mary climbs out on a ledge and threatens to jump. Woodman, Julie, and each of the Sweathogs tries to talk her in but it’s only Horshack who is able to get through to her. Horshack actually walks out onto the ledge himself so that he can talk to Mary about what’s it’s like to feel like an outsider. Horshack gets Mary to come in, though he nearly falls off the ledge himself.
While binging and reviewing this show, it’s occasionally been easy to criticize Ron Pallilo’s performance as Arnold Horshack, though I think the real culprits were the show’s writers, who tended to make Horshack into such a strange character that I don’t think anyone could play him without being annoying. But, to give credit where credit is due, Pallilo gives a really good performance in this episode. Indeed, in some ways, this episode feels like a throw back to season one, when the Sweathogs still had a bit of grit and angst to them.
This was a simple but effective episode, even if the absences of both Gabe Kaplan and John Travolta were definitely felt. (Nothing against Stephen Shortridge — who I’ve seen give good performances on The Love Boat and Fantasy island — but Beau was no substitute for Vinnie Barbarino.) Still, it was nice to see Pallilo get a chance to once again play Horshack as a human being as opposed to a walking punchline. And, for once, Woodman got to show his nice side, as he tried to help Mary feel better about her place in the school. This was a surprisingly well-done episode.
Since I earlier shared the theme song from The New York Ripper, it only seems appropriate to share another 70s-style Italian horror theme song. From the infamous House On The Edge of the Park, here is Riz Ortolani’s Do It To Me.
Seriously, this is a song that gets stuck in my head every time that I hear it.
Ever since the birth of film, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been a popular subject for adaptation. Not only does the classic story of a good doctor who unleashes his evil instinct via potion serve as a potent metaphor for everything from sexual repression to drug addiction, but the dual role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has provides an excellent opportunity for an actor to show off.
The first film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is believed to have been made in 1908. Two more version followed in 1912 and 1913 and then, suddenly, 1920 saw three different film versions.
The best known of the 1920 version is our film for today. This version is best remembered for John Barrymore’s powerful performance in the title role but it also holds up remarkably well as a work of cinematic horror.
Tonight’s horror song of the day is perhaps not as well-known as some of the other songs that I’ve shared. It appeared in Lucio Fulci’s controversial (to put it mildly) giallo, The New York Ripper. That film is so infamous for its violence, nihilism, and killer who quacks like a duck that it is something overlooked that it features a great score from Francesco De Masi.
This is the main theme from The New York Ripper and it captures the movie’s mix of horror and police procedural. It’s the 70s cop show theme from Hell.
This was actually released in May but it still has a good Halloween feel to it.
Enjoy!
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!
It’s sequel time!
Episode 2.14 “Face of Evil”
(Dir by William Fruet, originally aired on February 6th, 1989)
In this sequel to the first season episode Vanity’s Mirror, Joanne Mackey (Gwendoline Pacey) returns to Curious Goods for the first time since the death of her younger sister, Helen. Joanne reveals that she’s the one who stole the cursed gold compact at the end of Vanity’s Mirror, explaining that she simply had to have something that belonged to her sister. Jack is not amused, telling her that she should have turned it over so that it could be stored in the vault.
Calm down, Jack. Joanne knows she did something wrong and she’s trying to make amends. She is especially concerned because the compact is now in the hands of an aging supermodel named Tabitha Robbins (Laura Robinson). Tabitha is upset that her career is struggling and she’s been told that not even plastic surgery can reverse the fact that she’s just not as young as her competition. Tabitha has figured out that anyone whose face is caught in the reflection of the mirror will either die or, at the very least, suffer a terrible disfigurement. Apparently, in this case, the antique’s curse changes depending on who owns it.
I have mixed feelings about this episode. On the one hand, I could relate to Tabitha’s feelings about aging. No one wants to age and that’s doubly true when you’re working in an industry where youth is the most valuable commodity. I also enjoyed the very 80s fashion shoots that were featured in this episode. On the other hand, there were a lot of rather silly scenes of Tabitha trying to catch Ryan and Micki’s reflection in the mirror while Mick and Ryan ducked around with their hands over their faces. There’s no other way to put it other than to say it all looked really goofy.
The biggest problem with this episode is that the majority of it was taken up with clips from Vanity’s Mirror. Every few minutes, Joanne would think about Helen and we would get a flashback. Unfortunately, a lot of the flashbacks didn’t even feature Joanne so you have to wonder how exactly she was able to remember them. The constant flashbacks made this episode feel like a clip show and you know how much I hate those.
In the end, Tabitha accidentally catches her own face in the mirror’s reflection and she immediately starts aging. I guess that’s the risk you take when you try to use a mirror as a weapon. Micki and Ryan finally retrieve the compact and Jack mentions that Joanne could have saved a lot of lives by not stealing the compact in the first place. Look, Jack — she feels bad enough already! I’m sorry everyone isn’t beating down the doors of the antique shop to give you their cursed items. Get off Joanne’s back!
Oh well. At least the evil compact will hurt no one else….
Tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond originally aired on March 22nd, 1960. The title of this episode?
The Clown.
Scared yet?
You should be. Clowns are creepy!
Watch the episode below and find out just how creepy!
Enjoy!
Through the Shattered Lens 