Late Night Retro Television Review: Freddy’s Nightmares 1.15 “School Daze”

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 Tubi!

Earlier today, Robert Englund received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame! Let’s get this episode of Freddy’s Nightmares out of the way so that we can celebrate!

Episode 1.15 “School Daze”

(Dir by Michael Klein, originally aired on February 12th, 1989)

Stupid episode this week.

Two high school friends worry about their future. One of them hallucinates all of the adult authority figures in his life trying to brainwash him. The other keeps having visions of how much his life is going to suck if he doesn’t get a good score on his SATs. The premise really isn’t that bad but, as so often with Freddy’s Nightmares, it appears that the writers didn’t really dig into it. Instead, they just wrote a very shallow episode in which both stories relied on the same overused twist that seems to show up in every episode. Hey, it was all just a dream! The biggest compliment that I can give this episode is that the second story did manage to capture some of the anxiety that comes along with college testing. Some teachers really do overboard with that whole “This will determine the rest of your life” spiel. Seriously, blow off the tests, go to a party school, and make friends with someone has money. That’s really all you have to do.

Instead of fixating on a bad episode of Freddy’s Nightmares, let’s watch Robert Englund get his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This happened earlier today and, by most accounts, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Robert Englund is living proof that you don’t have to a bad guy to play a monster. Congratulations, Mr. Englund!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Freddy’s Nightmares 1.14 “Black Tickets”

Posted on October 24, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, a future Oscar winner shows up in Springwood.

Episode 1.14 “Black Tickets”

(Dir by George Kaczender, originally aired on February 5th, 1989)

Brad Pitt appears in this week’s episode, playing Rick. Rick is a rebellious teenager who elopes with his girlfriend, Miranda (Kerry Wall). Even on a low-budget show like this, Pitt’s screen presence was undeniable. From the minute he shows up onscreen, it’s impossible to look away from him. He had that movie star charisma from the start. It’s a shame that the episode itself isn’t that good.

It’s a typical Freddy’s Nightmares scenario. The first 20 minutes feature Rick having an extended dream sequence after he gets hit by a car. Rick apparently dreams about staying at a creepy hotel with Miranda and then being forced to kill two cops that show up and attempt to arrest him. But, at the end of the story, he sees himself lying in the middle of the road and realizes that everything that has happened since he got hit by the car has only been happening in his head.

The second 20 minutes features Miranda married to Rick. Rick has no settled down but Miranda is worried that she might be pregnant. While she waits for the results of her pregnancy test, she sees herself trapped in the house as a mother while Rick goes from being a rebel to being a police officer. Finally, Miranda snaps out of her dream and discovers that she’s not pregnant. She jumps for joy on her bed but then she slips, hits her head, and ends up with the mind of a child.

This was a pretty bland episode, even with Brad Pitt in the cast. The main problem was that it was all so predictable. The dreams were obviously dreams so there wasn’t really any suspense or tension while they were playing out. Freddy’s Nightmares used the “Its all just a dream” format so often that, by this point in the first season, it had gotten fairly boring. That was certainly the case here.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The Fifth Floor (dir by Howard Avedis)

Posted on October 22, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1977’s The Fifth Floor, Dianne Hull plays Kelly McIntyre.

Kelly is a college student by day and a disco dancer by night! Unfortunately, after someone spikes her drink at the discotheque and she suffers an overdose, she becomes a full-time patient at a mental asylum. Neither the head doctor (Mel Ferrer) nor the head nurse (Julia Adams, who once swam with The Creature From The Black Lagoon) believes her claim that her drink was spiked. Judged to be suicidal and delusional, Kelly is sent to the Fifth Floor!

While her boyfriend (John David Carson) tries to convince the authorities that she’s not insane, Kelly adjusts to life on the Fifth Floor. She befriend Cathy (Patti D’Arbanville). She encourages her fellow patients to dance and enjoy themselves. She tries to escape on multiple occasions. She draws the unwanted attention of a male orderly named Carl (Bo Hopkins, giving a wonderfully sinister performance). A sadist equipped with down-home country charm, Carl has got all of his co-workers convinced that he’s a great guy. The patients, though, know that Carl is a petty authoritarian who enjoys showing off his power. (“I’m just doing my job,” is the excuse whenever he’s challenged.) Carl takes an obsessive interest in Kelly and soon, Kelly is not only trying to get her life back but also trying to escape from Carl’s cruel intentions.

Most film directories list The Fifth Floor as being a horror film and certainly, there are elements of the horror genre to be found in the film. The smooth-talking and nonchalantly cruel Carl is certainly a horrific character and Kelly’s attempts to escape from the asylum capture the very primal fear of not having any control over one’s life. That said, The Fifth Floor owes greater debt to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest than to the typical slasher film. Kelly is a rebel who brings the patients in the ward together. Much as in Cuckoo’s Nest, the nurses and the orderlies use the threat of electro-shock treatment to keep the patients under control.

It’s not a bad film, though it definitely has its slow spots and I do wish the film had embraced its own sordidness with a bit more style. I’m a history nerd so I appreciated the fact that The Fifth Floor was so obviously a product of its time. Any film that features the heroine showing off her disco moves before being taken to a mental hospital is going to hold my interest. That said, the most interesting thing about the film are some of the familiar faces in the cast. For instance, Earl Boen — who played so many authority figures over the course of his career and appeared as a psychiatrist in the early Terminator films — plays a patient who wears a NASA jacket. The always intimidating Anthony James plays the most violent patient. Michael Berryman and Tracey Walter appear as background patients.

And then you’ve got Robert Englund, cast here as Benny. Benny is the most gentle of the patients, a prankster who befriends Kelly. It’s always so interesting to see the type of roles that Englund played before he was cast as Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare On Elm Street. In this film, Englund is so goofy and friendly that you actually find yourself worrying about something happening to him. Englund’s role is small but his amiable nerdiness definitely makes an impression.

The Fifth Floor opens and ends with a title card telling us that the film is based on a true story. Sure, it was.

Brad’s Scene of the Day: Jeff Goldblum and Robert Englund attack Charles Bronson in ST. IVES (1976)!

Posted on October 22, 2025 by Bradley Crain

Happy 73rd Birthday, Jeff Goldblum! 🎂🎉

I’ve been a fan of Jeff Goldblum for most of my life. The man has had an amazingly successful career, starring in some of the most financially profitable films ever made, like JURASSIC PARK and INDEPENDENCE DAY!! One of the main reasons that Goldblum is extra special to me, however, is because of his small roles as bad guys in two different Charles Bronson movies in the 1970’s. First, he played one of the thugs who breaks into Paul Kersey’s apartment and assaults his wife and daughter in the original DEATH WISH (1974). Second, he plays a thug who, along with Robert Englund and another less famous guy, tries to rob and assault Raymond St. Ives in the film ST. IVES (1976). I’ve loved telling people about his appearances in these two films for decades, and I don’t see any reason to stop now.

To celebrate Jeff Goldblum’s birthday on the Shattered Lens, I’ve included an “overly edited” video of his appearance in ST. IVES, if nothing else so you could also see the young Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger). I wish I could share the full scene, but this is all I could find on YouTube. Anyway, happy birthday, Jeff! I hope it’s been a great one!

Horror Song of the Day: Electronic Battle Weapon 7 (Acid Children) by The Chemical Brothers

Posted on October 19, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“You are all my children now.”

Hey, does that voice sound familiar? Who would have thought you could dance to Freddy Krueger?

Some people have told me that they find the clown in this video to even scarier than Freddy.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Freddy’s Nightmares 1.12 “Deadline”

Posted on October 17, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week …. oh, who knows?

Episode 1.12 “Deadline”

(Dir by Michael Lange, originally aired on January 29th, 1989)

This week’s first story is about Peter (Aaron Harnick), whose father owns the local Springwood paper and who is given a job for the summer. He’s assigned to write the obits so that he can hang out around the newspaper office and learn from the veteran writers. Peter would rather be in Europe. That’s especially true when he starts to visualize the obits that he’s writing and somehow comes to realize that he’ll die unless he meets his deadline.

This story was the epitome of a good premise that was sloppily executed. Peter hates writing obits but if he doesn’t write the obits, he’ll die in the same way as the person that he’s writing about. He has visions. He has dreams. Unfortunately, both his boss and his girlfriend tell him to stop working on his current obit and to get some rest. But if Peter stop writing, he’ll die! Uhmm …. how long does it take to type up an obituary? I mean, doesn’t he just have to type up whatever dead person’s loved ones sent to the paper?

There’s a clever moment where Peter deletes an old article about Freddy Krueger from the newspaper’s computer system. The episode implies that maybe Peter’s visions are in some way Freddy’s revenge but, as was so often the case with this show, it doesn’t really do much to explore the idea.

The first story ends with Peter dead. The episode’s second story deals with Emily (Page Hannah), a friend of Peter’s girlfriend. Emily has been dating an older college student (Timothy Brantley) and she continually has dreams where her friends — including Peter’s girlfriend — get mad at her for not spending more time with her. In her dreams, her friends all die in a car accident. At the end of the story, it turns out that Emily was just daydreaming. Seriously, that’s the entire story.

What a terrible episode. I usually try to be positive about even the lesser episodes but I have to admit that I’m kind of ticked off that I wasted 50 minutes watching this week’s episode of Freddy’s Nightmares. It felt as the show’s writers didn’t even try this week. Instead, they just came up with some weird scenes and then dismissed them by shrugging and saying, “Hey, it was all a dream. Nothing means anything!”

This episode was just lazy.

Made-For-TV Horror Review: Mind Over Murder (dir by Ivan Nagy)

Posted on October 13, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1979 made-for-TV movie, Mind over Murder, Deborah Raffin stars as Suzy.

Suzy is a model and an actress. She has a nice apartment, which she shares with her football-loving boyfriend, Ben (Bruce Davison). She has a best friend (Penelope Willis), who is constantly looking to get laid. Her latest job requires her to dance with a man who is dressed up like a giant hamburger. It would seem that, by the standards of 1979, Suzy has the perfect life.

However, her life is turned upside down when she suddenly starts having visions. All of the action around her will either switch to slow motion or stop altogether while Suzy has a vision of a scary-looking bald man (Andrew Prine) stalking her. Her most disturbing vision involves Suzy hearing the sound of a pilot begging for help while his airplane crashes. Ben tells her that she’s probably just working too hard but, the next morning, Suzy looks at a newspaper and immediately sees a headline about a plane crash.

With Ben dismissing her concerns, Suzy takes it upon herself to meet with the two detectives (David Ackroyd and Robert Englund — yes, Robert Englund!) investigating the plane crash. They are surprisingly sympathetic to Suzy’s story of hearing the plane crash before it happened. They arrange for her to meet a psychic researcher, who explains that Suzy must have some sort of mental connection to whoever was responsible for the crash. While Ben continues to be skeptical and jealous of all the time that she’s spending with one of the detectives, Suzy keeping having disturbing visions of the bald man….

Considering its origins as a made-for-TV movie, Mind Over Murder is a surprisingly frightening film. This is a film that proves that slow motion can make just about anything creepy and Deborah Raffin does a good job of showing us just how much Suzy dreads those moments when everything starts to slow down and she realizes that she’s about to get hit with another vision. That said, what truly makes this film frightening is the performance of Andrew Prine, who plays the bald man as being every woman’s nightmare. He’s a misogynist, the type who is convinced that every woman should be in love with him and that those who aren’t should be punished. Whether he’s appearing in Suzy’s visions or stepping into her reality, Andrew Prine is never less than terrifying.

Along with featuring a scary performance from Prine, this film also features a genuinely likable one from Robert Englund. Englund is playing a nice guy here. In fact, before he made horror history in A Nightmare in Elm Street, Englund almost always played nice guys. It’s interesting to watch him here, with his friendly manner and his polite style, and to imagine the roles Englund would have ended up playing if he hadn’t gotten typecast as a horribly scarred serial killer.

The first hour of Mind over Murder is brilliant. The final 30 minutes, unfortunately, find the film turning into a far more conventional thriller, as Suzy’s visions are replaced by the Bald Man actually coming after her. That said, this is still an effective horror thriller and one that deserves to be rediscovered this Halloween season.

Music Video of the Day: Are You Ready For Freddy? by the Fat Boys (1988, directed by Harvey Keith)

Posted on October 11, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

I always assumed that this song was specifically written for one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies but actually, the Fat Boys were just fans of the movies and they decided to put a song about them on one of their albums. The song was included in The Freddy Krueger Special, which aired on CBS in 1988.

This video, which features several of Freddy’s victims and Robert Englund himself, was written by Wes Craven and directed by Harvey Keith. Keith directed a few films, including 1988’s Mondo New York and 1990’s Jezebel’s Kiss.

Enjoy!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Freddy’s Nightmares 1.12 “The End of the World”

Posted on October 10, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, dreaming saves the world.

Episode 1.12 “The End of the World”

(Dir by Jonathan R. Betuel, originally aired on January 15th, 1989)

Weird episode.

The first half of the episode featured Mary Kohnert as Amy Collins, a young woman who starts to have dreams about the past and discovers that she can change reality depending on what she does in her dream. Most of the dreams center around the accidental death of her mother. Amy sets about to save her mother’s life but she discovers that changing the past will always lead to unforeseen consequences.

Unfortunately, her psychiatrist (George Lazenby) rats her out to the CIA and Amy is soon being forced to work for the U.S. military. When she senses that a soldier is planning on launching a nuclear attack and plunging the world into war, Amy is forced to do a mind-meld of sorts with him. She watches as the army manages to break into his bunker and gun him down right before he launches the nukes.

I can’t complain about a show trying something different and I actually found it interesting how the two stories were totally different in style and tone. The second story featured a dream about a nuclear war that was pretty disturbing. On TV, Gumby and his horse melted from the atomic heat. That said, this episode suffered from the same flaw as many of the episode of Freddy’s Nightmares, in that it really didn’t have the budget necessary to achieve what it was hoping to accomplish.

Still, who can forget the image of Freddy Krueger riding a nuclear missile in the style of Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove?

Along with having an interesting premise, this one also had some interesting guest stars. Along with George Lazenby and Gumby, Walter Gotell, Andrew Prine, and Albert Hall all made appearances. I guess when Freddy Krueger invites you, you don’t say no.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Freddy’s Nightmares 1.11 “Do Dreams Bleed?”

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, there’s a new threat in town!

Episode 1.11 “Do Dreams Bleed?”

(Dir by Dwight H. Little, originally aired on January 8th, 1989)

There’s a new serial killer in Springwood!

We don’t really learn much about the Chopper, other than he attacks people with an axe. When the episode begins, high school football star John Warring (Damon Martin) is dealing with dual trauma of having not only found the Chopper’s latest victim but also being the number one suspect. His grades start to slip. (As was so often the case on this show, his parents are conveniently out-of-town.) He fears that he’s going to lose his girlfriend, Roni (Sarah Buxton). Not even John’s coach, Coach Gacey (Jeff McCarthy), is much help. That’s probably because Coach Gacey actually is the Chopper, not that anyone figures that out. Driven mad by his dreams, John finds himself being taken away to an asylum.

(Really? Coach Gacey? He should have been the number one suspect based on his name alone.)

The second half of the episode follows Ronni as she now starts to have nightmares. She wants to believe that John is innocent but her dreams indicate that she has her doubts. Eventually, John escapes from prison and is able to save Ronni from Coach Gacey. However, when the police arrive, they just assume that Coach Gacey was trying to save Ronni and that John is the Chopper. Ronni is so shaken by the entire experience that she no longer knows what’s true and what’s not.

Wow, that’s dark!

This was actually a pretty good episode. For once the two stories had coherent plots, with Ronni’s story logically building off of John’s. The dream sequences were effectively creepy, director Dwight Little kept the action moving at a good pace, and even the dark ending felt earned as opposed to forced on the narrative. I would have liked to have heard Freddy’s thoughts on Springwood having a new serial killer (instead, during the host segments, Freddy just did his usual bad jokes) but otherwise, this was a surprisingly good episode.