A hardboiled 1940s noir pastiche about a pair of down-on-their-luck divorcés, a bottle of cheap hooch and a homicide-happy department store dummy? Sometimes, this show can surprise you. Directed and written by John Harrison and based on a story by Robert Bloch, this episode operates on a completely different frequency than your average creature-feature segment.
Set against a grimy mid-century backdrop, the story follows Roberts (Jerry Orbach) and Curtis (Richard Portnow), two miserable ex-husbands drowning their romantic failures at Benny’s Lounge. Convinced that flesh-and-blood dames are more trouble than they’re worth, Curtis decides to cut out the middleman entirely. He smuggles Estelle, a life-sized department store mannequin, out of the store he works at and drags her back to his apartment, treating her like the love of his life.
Naturally, Roberts thinks his buddy has completely lost it. What starts as a pathetic coping mechanism for loneliness quickly goes wrong, as Curtis steals department store jewels and a brand-new television set to deck out his silent partner.
Does Estelle begin subtly shifting positions when nobody’s looking?
For most of the runtime, we think Roberts is just narrating his buddy’s tragic descent directly to us, only for the rug to be violently yanked out when we realize he’s bleeding from a head wound in an interrogation room, trying to convince the cops that a piece of plastic framed him for murder. Philip Lenkowsky and Don Peoples, as the investigating lawmen, treat Roberts’ wild claims with maximum deadpan exhaustion. And let’s talk about the psychological toll: Roberts’ nightmare sequence—where the roles invert and Curtis becomes the inanimate object while Estelle towers over him as a flesh-and-blood terror—is brilliantly unsettling.
The real magic? Orbach’s performance. Playing a world-weary cynic trapped in a supernatural joke he never signed up for, he elevates the pulpy material with his trademark gravelly delivery. By the end, we see that Estelle is flesh and blood, getting a cigarette in the police station while Roberts screams and no one hears him. Well done.
