Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 3.10 “Mightier Than The Sword”

Posted on April 25, 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 Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The entire series can be found on YouTube!

Another Friday, another cursed antique….

Episode 3.10 “Mightier Than The Sword”

(Dir by Armand Mastroianni, originally aired on January 8th, 1990)

Micki’s been possessed again!

This time, it’s the result of a writer named Alex Dent (Colm Feore, who appeared in quite a few episodes of this show, always as a different villain) using his cursed pen to write about Micki becoming a serial killer. That’s how Alex makes his money. He writes about people becoming serial killers and then, when they do exactly what he has written, Alex publishes a true crime book about them.

Johnny is a huge fan of Alex’s books. Micki says that she’s seen enough death in real life without having to read about it. Johnny doesn’t seem to take her seriously, which is odd. Sometimes, Johnny seems to forget that he and Micki spend all of their time dealing with cursed antiques and battling the Devil. I mean, has Johnny forgotten about the time that he spent in prison after he was wrongly convicted of murdering his father? Johnny seems to go from being streetwise to naive rather abruptly, all depending on what the episode’s story requires of him. It’s also a bit of an odd coincidence that Johnny would just happen to be a fan of someone who has one of the cursed antiques but, then again, this wasn’t the first time this happened on Friday the 13th and I imagine it will happen a few more times as well.

This episode had an interesting premise, though I do have to wonder how Alex found out about the curse in the first place. It doesn’t seem like the most practical of curses. Alex must write, sell, and publish his books in record time. Micki always seems to be getting possessed, which usually leads to her posing in a doorway and delivering her lines like a 40s noir heroine. (In this episode, she also takes up smoking.) Fortunately, Robey always did a good job pulling off the whole suddenly possessed thing. I imagine it must have been pretty traumatic for Micki but at least Johnny learned a lesson about reading trashy true crime paperbacks.

As for this episode, Colm Feore was a good villain, there was plenty of noirish atmosphere, and the episode didn’t take itself particularly seriously. It kept me entertained! Really, what more can you ask from a show?

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th: The Series 1.22 “The Pirate’s Promise”

Posted on March 22, 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, there’s something in the fog! Can Micki and Ryan stop the horror of the thing in the fog? FOG!

Episode 1.22 “The Pirate’s Promise”

(Dir by Bill Corcoran, originally aired on June 27th, 1988)

In the 18th century, a group of pirates killed their captain, Angus McBride, and stole his treasure. They used the money to start a seaside village in New England and to become respectable citizens. Over two hundred years later, the spirit of Captain McBride is hanging out in the fog and desiring vengeance on the descendants of his crew.

Hmmm …. this sounds familiar.

This episode has more than a little in common with John Carpenter’s The Fog. This time, as opposed to it being the result of an anniversary curse, it’s a crazed lighthouse keeper named Joe Fenton (Cedric Smith) who summons the ghost of Captain McBride with a cursed foghorn but otherwise, much of the plot and the show’s imagery feels as if it was lifted directly from Carpenter’s classic horror film. Captain McBride emerges from the fog several times during the episode. He kills his victim’s with a hook and then tosses a few coins at Joe.

Micki and Ryan show up in town to retrieve the foghorn. (This is another episode in which Jack is not present.) It’s interesting how these cursed antiques often tend to end up in small towns, like the one in this episode or The Quilt of Hathor. The previous few episodes featured Ryan having to say goodbye to someone as a result of a cursed item. This time, it’s Micki whose heart is broken when the sweet proprietor of the local history museum is stabbed with a saber while trying to protect her. The episode ends with Micki sobbing while Ryan tries to comfort her, which is quite a change from how these things usually go. For once, Micki is the one who gets to show emotion while Ryan is the one who takes a more pragmatic approach to dealing with the horrors of the cured antiques.

As for the episode, it wasn’t bad. Director Bill Corcoran did a good job of creating a properly ominous atmosphere and Cedric Smith was perfectly creepy as the evil lighthouse owner. The low-budget was evident by the fact that the time itself seemed to be nearly deserted. Even though the town was described as being small, it still seems like it should have been home to more than just a handful of people and I found myself wondering if maybe the show decided to save money by not hiring extras. That minor quibble aside, this was an effective episode as long as you were willing to overlook the plot’s similarity to Carpenter’s film.

Next week, hopefully, Jack will come back and maybe Micki will have cheered up. Someone likeable dies in every episode so you would think they would be used to it by now.

Film Review: Left Behind: The Movie (dir by Vic Sarin)

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As I watched the 2000 film Left Behind: The Movie (not to be confused with the remake starring Nicolas Cage), I found myself thinking about names.

For instance, if your name is Rayford Steele, you really probably don’t have any choice but to become a pilot and maybe star in a low-budget action movie. I mean, let’s just be honest. People with names like Rayford Steele don’t end up working the night shift at 7-11. In Left Behind, Rayford Steele is played by Bad Johnson and Johnson has just the right look to play a character named Rayford Steele. He’s handsome in a somewhat old-fashioned, Gary Cooperish sort of way.

And yes, Rayford is a pilot. He had a wife who resents the fact that Rayford is always flying off and abandoning his family. She goes to church and she worries that he’s not a believer. Rayford, meanwhile, is having an affair with flight attendant Hattie Dunham (Chelsea Noble). That affair, however, may have to soon come to an end because Hattie has a new job with the UN. Poor Hattie. Nothing good ever comes from working at the UN!

Just as anyone named Rayford Steele would have to become a pilot, I imagine that anyone named Buck Williams would have to become a globe-trotting journalist. We’re told that Buck is one of the most famous and successful journalists in the world. Someone even mentions that Buck is so brave that he would have reported from Hiroshima while the first atomic bomb was being dropped. (I assume that would have been a fairly short broadcast.) Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a struggle to buy Buck Williams as a crusading journalist because he’s played by Kirk Cameron. Buck is described as being tough and cynical. There’s absolutely nothing tough about Kirk Cameron. At his best, he projects an earnest blandness. At his worst, he reminds you that he’s the guy who, years after starring in this film, would claim that a conspiracy of atheists was responsible for Saving Christmas receiving bad reviews.

Finally, if your name is Nicolae Carpathia, you’re pretty much destined to grow up to be very wealthy and also very evil. You’re not going to end up living in the suburbs, mowing your own lawn and complaining about property taxes. No, with a name like Nicolae Carpathia, you’re destined to end up using your position at the UN to take over the world. When you declare that your goal is to lead the world into “seven years of peace,” everyone knows that you’re planning on doing the exact opposite.

Or, at the very least, everyone should know. As played by Gordon Currie, Nicolae Carpathia is obviously evil from the minute he first appears. (Even if you didn’t know his name, you would think he was evil just from the way he smirks.) However, in the world of Left Behind, almost everyone loves Nicolae Carpathia. When thousands of people mysteriously vanish, all at the same time, Carpathia is the person to whom humanity turns their tear-brimmed eyes. The viewers know that it’s the Rapture and Rayford Steele and Buck Williams come to realize that it was the Rapture but Carpathia sees it as an opportunity to lead humanity into a …. dare I say it? …. new world order.

Left Behind is an odd film. For the most part, it’s a fairly ludicrous film, a low-budget and excessively preachy attempt to create a religious epic on a Wal-Mart budget. Kirk Cameron is miscast as a journalist and the film’s special effects are so obviously cheap that one can’t help but feel the filmmakers got a bit too ambitious for their own good. (Just check out the scene at the start of the film when Buck Williams reports while “bombs” explode all around him.) With a running time of one hour and 40 minutes, the film drags a bit and the characters are often frustratingly dense. (Even non-evangelicals have, at the very least, heard that there’s a thing called the Rapture.) And yet, occasionally, there will be moments when the film actually comes close to working. Brad Johnson, for instance, gives about as good a performance as anyone could as Rayford Steele. The scene where Carpathia manipulates a subordinate into committing suicide may not be terrible original but it’s still surprisingly effective.

Despite the fact that the film itself barely made a profit, Left Behind would go on to spawn two sequels. We’ll look at the first, Tribulation Force, in 15 minutes. Hope to see you then!