Tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond deals with that classic horror theme, the curse of a dying witch. In this case, a woman burned at the stake in Scotland curses the family of her wealthy persecutor, saying that the eldest son will be destined to always die before his father.
I swear, witch’s curses are always so complicated!
The episode aired on October 13th, 1959.
In the words of Criswell, “Can you prove it didn’t happen?”
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Malibu CA, which aired in Syndication in 1998 and 1999. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!
This week, Jason and Scott’s mom returns to America and quickly decides to leave again.
Episode 1.13 “Mom Returns”
(Dir by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on January 17th, 1999)
With their Dad stuck in San Diego on his birthday, Jason and Scott decide to throw a wild party at the house. The music is loud. The house is crowded. Murray jumps off the second floor balcony. The police show up and start dancing. Oddly enough, Stads shows up and there’s absolutely no awkwardness between her and Jason, despite the fact that they just broke up.
Everything is going great until Michele (Carol Huston) shows up.
Michele is Jason and Scott’s mother, the one who sent them to Malibu so that she could take a job in Saudi Arabia. She’s returned home and Jason and Scott panic that she’s going to order them to return to New York. When they overhear Michele talking to their Dad about getting married again, Jason and Scott are convinced that their parents are getting back together.
Of course, this being a Peter Engel-produced show, it’s all a big misunderstanding. Michele is getting married again but she’s marrying a guy that she met in Saudi Arabia. In fact, she’s planning on spending another year in Saudi Arabia. I guess she likes not being allowed to drive and having to cover herself from head to toe while living in the middle of the desert. Still, when Jason and Scott start wearing suits and behaving like perfect angels in an attempt to convince their mom to let them stay in Malibu, their Dad decides to play a trick on them and basically allows them to believe that he and Michele are getting back together….
Wow, what a fucking asshole.
Seriously, it’s rare that I curse but this is one of the worst things that I’ve ever seen a television father do. I’m a child of divorce. I know exactly how it feels to fool yourself into thinking that your parents are going to get back together. That’s not something joke about.
Their father also jokes about sending his sons to Saudi Arabia. He even gives them some keffiyehs to wear. The audience laughs. Today, of course, Scott and Jason would just look like a typical Ivy Leaguer.
Anyway, after this episode, I understand why Michele got a divorce and couldn’t wait to get away from the kids. She probably could have escaped to a less misogynistic country but I guess she was desperate.
While all of this was going on, Sam and Stads competed to see who could raise the most money for charity. Stads really got over Sam kissing her boyfriend quickly! Both of them recruit Tracy to help them raise money. Tracy walks around the beach in a bikini and says, “Who wants to give me money?” It works.
This was a dumb episode.
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 series is streaming on YouTube.
This week, Jerry Stiller is a werewolf!
Episode 2.17 “One Wolf’s Family”
(Dir by Alex Zamm, originally aired on February 11th, 1990)
In this rather heavy-handed episode of Monsters, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara star as Victor and Greta, two immigrants who have built a successful life for themselves in America. Victor is very proud of his heritage and his success. He’s even more proud of the fact that he and Greta are pure-bred werewolves. He expects his daughter, Anya (Amy Stiller), to marry a purebred werewolf.
(Ben was apparently busy when they shot this episode.)
So, how will Victor react when he discovers that Amy’s fiancé, Stanley (Robert Clohessy), is a were-hyena!?
*sigh*
Okay, I will give some credit here. The scene where Victor meets Stanley and they all gather around the kitchen table for dinner does have some funny moments. Stanley, being a hyena in human form, cannot stop laughing, even when he’s being insulted. And when Jerry Stiller launches into a rant about how no daughter of his is going to hang out on the roadside and eat trash, I did laugh. This was largely due to Jerry Stiller’s delivery of the line. Jerry Stiller was always funny whenever he started to rant.
Otherwise, this episode was pretty disappointing. There’s a subplot about a nosey neighbor named Agnes (Karen Shallo). Agnes is upset to discover that her neighbors are werewolves that keep dead bodies in their refrigerator so that they’ll have something to snack on. “It’s bad enough that they’re immigrants!” Agnes says. And yes, I get it. Agnes is supposed to be a small-minded suburbanite who doesn’t understand that America is a country of immigrants and all the rest. The problem is that, regardless of how Agnes feels about immigrants, she has every right to be concerned about living next door to a werewolf who keeps a dead body in his refrigerator. When she sees Victor eating a foot, it totally makes sense that she would be upset about it. The show’s satire would have worked if Agnes’s sole objection to them had been that they were immigrants. (It would have been even funnier if Agnes has absolutely no problem living next door to werewolves as long as they were born in America.) But by making them werewolves and having Agnes be upset by the fact that they were werewolves, the show instead suggests that Agnes might have a point.
Not that it matters. Stanley turns into a hyena and rips off Agnes’s head and brings it to Victor and Greta as a gift. Stanley is accepted into the family while Jerry Stiller howls a the moon.
Political satire is always hit-and-miss and this episode was definitely a mess. It’s a shame because Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were definitely funny people. (If you’ve ever seen the documentary Have A Good Trip, there’s a scene where Ben Stiller tells a story about accidentally taking several tabs of LSD in college and, in a panic, calling his father for help. “I know what you’re going through,” Jerry told him, “I once smoked an entire Pall Mall cigarette.” “My father was Jerry Stiller, not Jerry Rubin,” Ben explains.) This is one of those episodes that I was really hoping would be good but it just didn’t work.
On tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond.…
A young woman (Suzanne Pleshette) desperately needs a blood transfusion. Fortunately, the police have managed to track down one of the only people to share her blood type, an accountant named Harold Stern (Norman Lloyd). Harold seems like a nice, rather mild-mannered guy and he has a long history of donating blood. However, when the police approach him, Harold refuses to donate.
“What type of crumb are you!?” the police demand.
Harold explains that, whenever he gives someone blood, he develops a psychic connection with that person. He can see their future. And that’s simply a burden that he can no longer shoulder….
This episode of One Step Beyond originally aired on September 15th, 1959. Norman Lloyd, who plays Harold, got his start as a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater and he also played the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur. (Speaking of Hitchcock, Suzanne Pleshette played the doomed school teacher in The Birds.) When Lloyd appeared in this episode of One Step Beyond, he was 44 years old. He would go on to live for another 62 years, making his final film appearance at the age of 101!
Welcome to 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 the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986! The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!
This week, a baby is abandoned, an aunt visits, and for some reason, Joe Namath is on the boat.
Episode 4.27 “Maid for Each Other/Lost and Found/Then There Were Two”
(Dir by Howard Morris, originally aired on May 9th, 1981)
Ted Harper (Joe Namath) boards the boat with his best friend, Richard Henderson (Fred Willard). Ted and Richard were fraternity brothers. While in college, the members of the frat decided that, whenever one of them got married, some money would be contributed to a pot. The last single member of the frat would end up getting all of the cash, which is now up to $60,000. Ted and Richard are the last two single members of the frat and they’re competing to see who can hold out the longest.
(Can we just agree that guys are weird?)
Ted has a plan to get the money. He’s gotten his ex-girlfriend, Paula (Karen Grassle), to agree to trick Richard into falling in love with and marrying her, in exchange for some of the money. However, Richard is smarter than Ted realizes and instead offers Paula even more of the money to get Ted to marry her. However, Karen falls for Ted for real. Karen and Ted do get married when the ship docks in Mexico. When Richard announces that he paid Karen to marry Ted, Ted is hurt at first but then he realizes that he was willing to do the same thing to Richard and nothing matters more than love. Awwww!
Now, it may seem strange to cast Joe Namath and Fred Willard as friends. To me, it’s even stranger that this was not the first time that Joe Namath, who was not much of actor, appeared on The Love Boat. Just as he did the last time he was on the boat (and also just as he did when he last visited Fantasy Island), Namath wanders through the story with a goofy grin on his face.
Speaking of goofy, Gopher is super-excited when his wealthy aunt Loretta (Jane Powell) boards the boat. Loretta, however, is scared to tell Gopher that she has lost all of her money and is now working as a maid. Loretta need not have worried. I mean, it’s not as if Gopher has a particularly glamorous job. Plus, Loretta’s not going to be poor for long, not after she meets and falls in love with wealthy Duncan Harlow (Howard Keel).
Finally, Eddie Martin (Gary Burghoff) is a mechanic on the Love Boat who decides to abandon his baby with the captain. The captain, who apparently doesn’t know much about the people who work for him, has no idea who the baby’s father is. But when the baby is taken ill and needs a transfusion of super-rare AB blood, Eddie is forced to stand up and accept the responsibility of being a father. Good for him, I guess. Personally, I like fathers who don’t abandon their babies in the first place.
This was a fairly bland episode. The fourth season is nearly over and, with this cruise, everyone seemed to mostly be going through the motions. This episode seemed like a collection of stories that the show had already handled (and handled better) in the past.
Next week …. season 4 comes to an end!
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, a detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!
This week, Mitch and Ryan play a deadly game!
Episode 2.13 “Nights to Dragon One”
(Dir by Richard Friedman, originally aired on February 16th, 1997)
Mitch and Ryan are hired to discover what has happened to a father and his daughter. When last seen, they were entering a mysterious building. The father was a lifelong adventurer and he had apparently heard that the building was home to “the ultimate game.” Along with daughter, he had to play. Now, they’re both missing.
So, of course, Mitch and Ryan enter the building and soon find themselves in a computer-simulated dungeon, complete with traps, deadly archers, random flames, and a cackling Game Master (Vincent Schiavelli) who occasionally materializes so he can taunt Mitch and Ryan about their lack of progress in the game.
Ryan is actually excited about playing the game, explaining the she played an earlier version of it when she was in college. All Mitch cares about is saving the man and his daughter. Mitch doesn’t get the point of computer simulations and virtual reality and all that sort of thing. Mitch probably thinks that email is just a fad as well. Mitch is the guy who goes to an escape room and, instead of reading the clues, just tries to break the door down.
And yet, it’s Mitch who ends up entering and winning the final confrontation with the Game Master, even though Ryan points out that it would make more sense for her to do it because she’s actually played the game before. Sorry, Ryan. The Hoff is here to save the day so just stand back and be quiet, I guess.
Vincent Schiavelli is a welcome presence as the Game Mater and he at least seems to be having fun with his role. That said, this is the worst episode of Baywatch Nights that I’ve seen so far and that includes out of the episodes from the non-supernatural first season as well. A huge problem is that the game itself is just boring. Mitch and Ryan have to make their way through a corridor of laser beams. Mitch and Ryan have to avoid the arrows being shot at them by a mysterious archer. Considering that this is a computer simulation where, in theory, anything could happen, this episode is a huge missed opportunity. Things should have been a lot stranger than they were.
Finally, this is one of those episodes where the camera never stops moving. As opposed to being disorientating or frightening, the constant movement just becomes annoying. There’s only so many Dutch angles that can be used in one scene before they lose their effectiveness.
This game could have been a lot of fun but instead, it’s just kind of dull. The Hoff wins but honestly, I feel like I could have won it as well. The Hoff/Angie chemistry is still strong but it’s not enough to save this middling episode.
On tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond, a couple moves into a house on the coast. Everyone tells them that the house is haunted but the couple refuses to believe them. After all, everyone knows how superstitious people are in New England. Everyone’s heard the story of the haunted mudroom, right?
However, after moving into the house, the couple starts to realize that they are not alone….
According to the show’s host, John Newland, this is based on a true story (maybe)!
This episode originally aired on May 26th, 1959. The husband is played by Robert Webber, who also played Juror #12 in Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men.
Enjoy!
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1984. Unfortunately, the show has been removed from most streaming sites. Fortunately, I’ve got nearly every episode on my DVR.
This week’s episode presents your erstwhile reviewer with a bit of an ethical quandary.
Episode 5.12 “The Magic Camera/Mata Hari/Valerie”
(Dir by Don Chaffey and Don Weis, originally aired on January 16th, 1982)
I don’t feel completely comfortable about reviewing this episode of Fantasy Island and I’ll tell you why.
Occasionally, Fantasy Island would broadcast an extra-long episode. These episodes would typically feature three fantasies as opposed to the usual two. Unfortunately, when these long episodes were syndicated, one of the fantasies would be edited out so the episode would fit into an hour-long slot. Usually, the editing was not particularly smooth, either. The end result would usually be an episode that seemed oddly paced and the performances of Ricardo Montalban and Herve Villechaize would often seem uneven as well. As such, it’s neither easy nor particularly fair to review those edited episodes. When it comes to reviewing, I always want to see the complete episode.
And yet, now that the original Fantasy Island is no longer streaming anywhere (seriously, what the Hell, Tubi?), I’m stuck using the episodes that I have on my DVR. And that means reviewing the edited, syndicated versions of these episodes.
As you can probably guess, this is one of those edited episodes. The Valerie fantasy was removed for syndication. That’s a shame because Valerie featured the final televised performance of actor Christopher George, a charismatic B-movie veteran who is pretty popular around the Shattered Lens offices. It also featured Michelle Phillips, though apparently she did not return as the mermaid who she played earlier on the show. I’d love to review Valerie but I can’t. And that sucks,
As for the other two fantasies, one is basically a remake of the Lillian Russell fantasy, except this time Martha Harris (Phyllis Davis) goes into the past and finds herself transformed into her great-grandmother, Mata Hari. She gets to dance. She gets to spy. She gets thrown in prison and sentenced to death but, fortunately, her life is spared when the firing squad’s rifles are filled with blanks and she’s given a drug by one of the men who is in love with that makes her appear to be dead. This was a enjoyable fantasy, mostly because of the costumes and the melodrama.
The other fantasy features Bob Denver, coming to the Island for the second week in a row. This time, he’s a photographer who wants to take the type of pictures that the world’s greatest photographers couldn’t. Because of the awkward way the fantasy was stated, the photographer ends up with a camera that takes pictures of the future. At first, the photographer is really happy and uses his camera to commit a little insider trading. But then he takes a picture of a newspaper and sees a headline announcing his death in a fiery auto accident. Uh-oh!
Again, neither of the two fantasies is bad (though the second one does require a certain tolerance for Bob Denver that some people may not have) but it was hard for me to enjoy them knowing that I was missing out on a third fantasy. For that reason, I assigning this episode a grade of incomplete. If I ever get a chance to watch the complete episode, uncut, I’ll revisit this review but until then, I really can’t give an overall grade to this episode.
Finally, for those keeping track, both Julie and Tattoo join Roarke when it’s time to greet the guests. That’s only second time that’s happened this season.
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee!
This episode was a tough one.
Episode 2.5 “MAIT Team”
(Dir by John Florea, originally aired on January 13th, 1979)
On a desolate stretch of highway, several cars sit totaled. At least two are in flames. A truck sits stalled in the middle of the road, the bloody body of the driver still behind the steering wheels. A woman screams that her father is having a heart attack. Sitting off the road, in a ditch, is an overturned police car. Officer Sindy Cahill is unconscious in the wreckage.
This hardly a typical episode of CHiPs. This show has featured many spectacular crashes but this episode is the first to feature fatalities. And its not just one person who dies in the crash. Eleven people die, including the driver of the truck and the man having a heart attack. The sight of Ponch looking at the dead bodies is jarring because it’s not what we expect from a show like CHiPs.
And, I have to admit, it was jarring for me on a personal level. In May, my Dad was in a serious car accident, one that ultimately involved four vehicles. He broke his shoulder and, afterwards, had to learn how to walk again. He spent a week in a hospital. (That was the week that we didn’t have any power due to the storms so I couldn’t even call to get an update on his condition.) He spent a month in a rehab facility, staying there until his insurance company kicked him out. Severely weakened by the stress and Parkinson’s, he came home and died a month later. I still find myself thinking about how, if he just hadn’t gone to the store that Sunday, he never would have been in that accident and he would still be alive today. Did I say that I merely think about it? It’s actually something that I’ve been obsessing on, even since the hospital first called me to tell me what had happened. I had a hard time watching this episode of CHiPs and I’m having a hard time writing about it right now.
It’s a good episode, even if it is very different from the episodes that came before it. Ponch, Jon, and a group of experts (known as the MAIT Team) attempt to determine what caused the accident. With a lefty state senator (played by Victor Newman himself, Eric Braeden) and an insurance investigator (Michael Bell) both eager to put the blame on Cahill, it falls to the MAIT Team to figure out what caused the accident and to assign blame. In the end, just as with my Dad’s accident, they discover that no one was truly at fault. The setting sun reflected off a distant mirror and temporarily blinded the driver. Cahill ended up in a ditch after she swerved to avoid him. The other drivers were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life is like that sometimes.
The emphasis here was on everyone working together to get to the truth. Even the state senator and the insurance investigator played an important role in discovering what happened. By being skeptical, they forced the MAIT Team to question everything and truly uncover the facts of the accident. As this episode made clear, the MAIT Team wasn’t formed just to exonerate Cahill. Instead, the MAIT Team was all about getting to truth, no matter what that truth might be.
Though this episode was not an easy one for me to watch, it was a good one.
The 16th episode of One Step Beyond was called The Burning Girl and it dealt with a teenage girl (Luana Anders, who would later star in Dementia 13 and appear as a hippie in Easy Rider) who, whenever she got upset, could apparently cause fires to spontaneously erupt. It was written by Catherine Turney and directed by host John Newland himself.
It was originally broadcast on May 5th, 1959 — presumably long before Stephen King even had the idea to write about a girl named Carrie.
Can you prove this didn’t happen!?
Through the Shattered Lens 