After the absolute mess of a psychological fake-out that was Part V: A New Beginning, the fans were ready to riot. Paramount originally wanted to transition the franchise into a new trilogy with a completely different killer, hinting that a traumatized Tommy Jarvis would inherit the hockey mask. Thankfully, audiences hated that idea so much that the studio had to do a hard pivot.
Directed by Tom McLoughlin, a veteran of plenty of made-for-TV movies and Sometimes They Come Back, as well as playing the robot S.T.A.R. in The Black Holeand Katahdin in Prophecy, did his best to right the ship. This is the film where Jason fully became supernatural, and it’s also one of the few films in the series to get good reviews, probably due to the humor throughout.
The original plan was for Tommy Jarvis to become Jason, but audiences were pretty unhappy with that hint at the end of the last film. So this one begins with Tommy (Thom Matthews, Return of the Living Dead) heading to Jason’s grave to destroy his body so that he can never come back. But of course, as soon as he stabs the murderer with a metal fence post, lightning strikes him, and he’s back from the dead — and kills Tommy’s friend Alan (Ron Palillo, Horshack from TV’sWelcome Back, Kotter) right away.
Tommy loses his mind, sprints to the local police station, and meets Sheriff Garris (David Kagen). Of course, the lawman thinks Tommy is just a lunatic off his meds and locks him up. Meanwhile, the town of Crystal Lake has rebranded itself as “Forest Green” to distance itself from the body count, and actual kids are finally back at the camp. Tommy escapes with the help of the Sheriff’s rebellious daughter, Megan (Jennifer Cooke from V: The Original Series), but they’re fighting an uphill battle. To the new crop of camp counselors, Jason Voorhees is just an urban legend.
By the time the climax rolls around, Jason is an unstoppable juggernaut, cutting through deputies and counselors alike. Tommy finally lures the monster out to the center of the lake, wraps a heavy chain around its neck, and anchors it to a massive boulder at the bottom of Crystal Lake. Megan finishes the job by chewing up Jason’s face with an outboard motor propeller. But as the camera drifts underwater at the final frame, those dead eyes pop wide open. He’s home, and he’s waiting.
Again, this movie was a major big deal in my teenage years, particularly because it had a music video! “He’s Back (the Man Behind the Mask)” by Alice Cooper announced that Jason had survived the final chapter.
The working title for this installment was Aladdin Sane. I really enjoyed this installment, which even has a nod to James Bond in the beginning. In our movie basement, we have several versions of the poster for this one, which speaks to my love of this film.
You can watch this either in-person or virtually at the Chattanooga Film Festival. For more info, visit the official site.
“The Circus” is directed by Michael Gornick and penned by the master himself, George A. Romero. A cynical, muckraking journalist named Bragg (Kevin O’Connor) happens upon a ramshackle traveling freak show after a car wreck. He’s looking for his next big headline, and he thinks he’s found it in Dr. Nis (William Hickey), the eccentric proprietor of this nomadic carnival. Nis is only too happy to pull back the curtain, treating Bragg to a private tour of his performers, a collection of creatures that seem a little too real to be simple sideshow illusions.
Let’s talk about the creature design, because it’s the real star here. Forget suave, cape-swishing Lugosi. This vampire—brought to life with some gnarly, creature-feature practical effects—is all Nosferatu nightmare fuel. It’s animalistic, twitchy and genuinely unsettling, especially when it decides to make a snack out of a lamb right in front of our disgusted protagonist.
Then there’s the cast. Watching William Hickey and Kevin O’Connor go toe-to-toe is like watching a masterclass in genre acting. Hickey, in particular, carries a gravitas that grounds the ridiculous premise. The chemistry between the two is palpable; they are two sides of the same coin, each driven by their own rigid moral code, even if that puts them on a collision course.
The atmosphere here is thick with decay—that smell of sawdust, old canvas, and bad decisions. It’s a perfect example of what Romero could do when he was given a constrained set and a handful of talented character actors. It’s violent, it’s short andit’s devoid of a traditional villain ,which gives the whole affair a weirdly noble, melancholic edge that sticks with you long after the credits roll.
It’s not just a vampire episode; it’s a love letter to the dying art of the traveling freak show, wrapped in the dark, cynical bow of an 80s anthology classic.
Wow, you have no idea how excited I am about this.
I saw VHS art for the movie Urban Warriors and saw something I have never seen before: the Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater line.
If you’ve spent any time looking at the history of the Cannon Group, you know that the company was essentially a house of cards held together by Menahem Golan’s ambition and a lot of pre-sold tape rights. They didn’t even bother starting their own domestic home video label until 1989. By that point, the wheels were already coming off the Go-Go Boys’ wagon and they were slashing their production budgets to the bone.
They needed product to fill the shelves of that new home video arm and they needed it cheap. That’s how they ended up dumpster diving into the international market, picking up some oddball productions.
I went to the source of all things Cannon, Austin Trunick, who already covered this four years ago on the Cannon Film Guide Facebook page, saying “In the late ’80s, Cannon tried to squeeze some money out of several of their older distro titles that hadn’t been fully exploited on the video market. Their idea was to have modern stars introduce the films, which resulted in the “Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater” line of tapes.”
Much like the 22-26 action adventure films that bear the title Sybil Danning’s Adventure Video for the USA Home Video company, this was a way to use an action star to make some money with no risk.
There are only four of these, so why don’t we get into them?
The Bronx Executioner (1989): Welcome to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where humanoids and androids are locked in a nonsensical war for supremacy. These androids bleed human blood, look like guys in leather jackets and apparently spent their entire R&D budget at a RadioShack clearance sale. If one of them had an Italian name, it would be Roberto Batty.
The film follows our rookie deputy, James (Gabriele Gori, Attrazione Pericolosa), who arrives in the Bronx to replace the legendary Sheriff Warren. And here is where the fun begins: Warren is played by the iconic Woody Strode, but every single frame of him is shamelessly recycled from the 1984 movie The Final Executioner.
As for the Bronx itself? It’s a series of mounds of dirt and a derelict country villa that has never seen a New York City zip code in its life. James, fresh from a police academy that apparently consists solely of doing chin-ups on a metal pole, is tasked with policing this chaos. But the movie quickly gets bored with him, and shifts focus to Dakar (Alex Vitale, Jakoda from Strike Commando!), a humanoid leader who spends the better part of the runtime screaming into a walkie-talkie while driving a jeep through the Italian countryside.
When a cyborg goes on a killing spree, you’d expect some stakes, right? Forget it. You won’t get an explanation of who, why or what the hell is happening. The narrative is a patchwork quilt of stock footage, recycled scenes and incoherent voice-overs. As for the big bad, Margie is the quintessential evil android, strutting around in a dog collar and proclaiming, “Violence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” She’s the heart and soul of this mess. And she’s played by Margie Newton, who got all painted up in Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead and was Aphrodite in Cozzi’s The Adventures of Hercules.
Director Vanio Amici is an equal-opportunity recycler. Why film a new action scene when you can just use the one you already shot five minutes ago? It saves time and prevents you from having to rewind to watch the faceless extras get blasted again. For a long time, people thought he was Umberto Lenzi, as the name on the credits is Bob Collins. Amici only directed one other movie, Detective Malone, which remixes two of Lenzi’s Black Cobra movies, further muddying the movie waters and making nerds like me wonder who really made it. As for the rest of his credits, he mainly worked as an editor with a resume that includes Black Demons, Karate Warrior 6, Aenigma and many adult films. Perhaps his toughest challenge was being the editor for Troll 2. I wonder how he was able to make it make as much sense as it does.
This has it all and by all, I mean perms, leather jackets, headbands and a finale so dramatically deep that it tries to mimic Blade Runner before hitting a hard freeze-frame.
Dakar: James, can I tell you something?
James: Sure. What?
Dakar: I always envied you. I wanted to be like you.
James: You mean human?
Dakar: It was just… a dream.
It’s a total mess. I loved it!
Cross Mission (1988): Leave it to Alfonso Brescia—working under his Al Bradley alias—to decide that what the jungle combat — Rambsoploitation — genre really needed wasn’t just more stock footage of explosions, but literal demons. What else can we expect from the director of Murder In Blue Light, Iron Warrior, The Beast In Space and an entire series of Star Wars rip-offs?
Cross Mission starts off as your standard, run-of-the-mill exploitation flick. General Romero, played by Antonio Poli, is the iron-fisted ruler of a small Latin American nation. He’s got the whole “I’m a good guy” routine down to a science, publicly torching marijuana fields to impress the U.N. inspectors. Of course, once the inspectors pack up their clipboards and head for the airport, it’s back to the narco-trafficking business as usual.
When a marine named William (Richard Randall, whose only other role is in a TV movie version of A Christmas Carol) decides to investigate the racket alongside a crusading reporter named Helen (Brigitte Porsche, her only role, and no, she’s not an adult star), things spiral into the usual jungle chaos. Do huts explode? Do some of the good guys die and need revenge? Does the hero get ready for the last battle in a montage, putting on a special outfit to show the audience he’s finally done playing nice? Yes to all of these things.
But here is where the movie veers off the tracks and into the territory of the sublime. Just when you think you’ve seen every trope in the book, Brescia hits you with the supernatural. General Romero isn’t just a drug lord; he’s a practitioner of the dark arts. He’s got the ability to summon a diabolical small demon named Astaroth, played by Nelson De La Rosa (the mini Brando of The Island of Dr. Moreau and the titular Rat Man), at will. When he’s shooting blue lightning at people, the movie suddenly shifts from a generic war film to an Italian bit of magic.
Brescia would go on to direct Miami Cops the following year, but Cross Mission remains a singular, bizarre experiment. It doesn’t fully succeed as a war movie, and it doesn’t fully succeed as a supernatural thriller, but for the sheer audacity of blending the two? It’s a more than decent one-time watch. You come for the jungle action, but you stay because you need to see how a magic little guy fits into an exploding helicopter subplot.
Lt. Bill Rogers (Andy Forrest, also in Massimo Pirri’s The Kiss of the Cobra, Tonino Valerii’s Sicilian Connection, Lenzi’s The House of Witchcraft, Hunt for the Gold Scorpion and, oddly, the Giandomenico Curi-directed Italian Lambada movie and yes, there were two movies with this title in the same year), Sgt. Mario Pazilbo Esposito (Carlo Mucari, Snuff Killer and Obsession: A Taste for Fear) and Blitz (Paki Valente) have broken out of a POV camp. Rogers is an American pilot who trades a POW camp for the Yugoslavian wilderness after getting shot down. Espozi has the nickname Spaghetti because he’s Italian — in an Italian movie — and Blinz is an Austrian deserter who realized his side was losing.
Our motley crew of POWs managed to link up with some partisans and a local Orthodox priest. The partisans are desperate, looking for pilots to take their last two functioning planes and turn those German-held hillsides into a fireworks display. But while they’re busy flying for the resistance, the boys get wind of some serious loot. Vanya (Francesca Ferrè), a nun who traded her habit for a submachine gun, tips them off about a haul of priceless gold chalices stashed away at the St. Basil convent.
According to Andy J. Forrest, Ferrè was functionally blind without her glasses and ended one take by walking directly into a tree.
After pulling off two successful bombing runs, the POWs stop caring about the war effort and start plotting a heist. They leverage their pilot skills to score some hardware, then convince Vanya to lead them to the chapel. She thinks they’re on the level, but these guys are just mercenaries in disguise, ready to double-cross everyone for the gold.
There’s a Fabio Frizzi score, which is nice, and Luigi Ciccarese as cinematographer. He shot plenty of Bruno Mattei’s later movies, especially his SOV 2000s efforts, as well as tons of adult. Along the way, Lenzi stole battle scenes from The Battle of Sutjeska and Partizanska eskadrila.
It’s not the most exciting war movie you’ve seen, but it does have a genuinely impressive train explosion and watching our guys lean out of a biplane to drop bombs by hand is the kind of practical, low-budget ingenuity that makes these films so charming.
Urban Warriors (1987): You know you’re in for a wild ride when the opening act consists of a montage of mushroom clouds followed immediately by stock footage of volcanoes erupting. Then, we meet Brad (Bruno Bilotta), our hero, and his buddies, Maury (Bjorn Hammer) and Stan (Maurice Poli), who are hanging out in an underground lab when the power goes out. When they finally decide to crawl out of their bunker, they discover that the world has ended. And apparently, the end of the world is synonymous with an immediate, city-wide explosion in the local population of leather-clad biker gangs.
Vari’s vision of the future looks suspiciously like a gravel pit and a single abandoned factory. That’s the kind of set design that makes a Cirio Santiago movie look like a Cecil B. DeMille epic.
The mutants here are a special breed. According to Brad—who, again, as you may remember, was just working at a power station and doesn’t seem like a scientist—these guys suffer from a mutation that apparently destroys their inner ear whenever the sun goes down. Before you can say uno, due, tre, quattordici, all these bad ass post-apocalyptic warriors have vertigo.
The aesthetic is exactly what you’d expect if a group of guys raided a discount S&M shop and then realized they needed to re-qualify for their motorcycle licenses. Watching Brad’s buddy Maury emerge from a shack wearing a full-on studded leather helmet and a white scarf—while manning a bike with mounted weapons—is reason enough for the world to end.
Brad’s journey is a masterclass in survival priorities. After watching his buddy Maury get killed—a tragedy clearly caused by failing to stick to a strict vehicle maintenance schedule—Brad doesn’t weep. He gets himself some leather, finds a woman (Rosenda Scharschmidt, Dark Bar) to get busy with and promptly gets attacked because she wants his spinal marrow. At least he defeats the leader of the mutants, played by Alex Vitale, who will always be Jakoda from Strike Commando. Oh yeah — Malisa Longo from Cat In the Brain and the titular star of Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg –– is in this barterdown bootleg too.
This was Giuseppe Vari’s return to the director’s chair after a decade away, and spoiler alert: it was also his final film.
Much like another Michael Dudikoff Presents film, The Bronx Executioner, this takes scenes from The Final Executioner. Even stranger, I have heard Paolo Rustichelli’s theme described as either a cover of “White Lines” or the Art of Noise cover of “Dragnet.”
Jessica visits a convent to see a former sorority sister and winds up searching for a nun’s killer.
Season 4, Episode 4: Old Habits Die Hard (October 11, 1987)
Jessica arrives at a convent to visit an old college friend who is now a nun. As you’d expect, they soon discover that the convent’s unofficial record keeper has killed herself. At her friend’s request, Jessica promises to figure out how this death is connected to a young woman who sought refuge at the convent years ago, her dying father and the city’s mayor and his wife.
Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?
Eileen Brennan (Marian Simpson): You know her as Captain Lewis in Private Benjamin and Mrs. Peacock in Clue. Perhaps you always know her for her uncredited turn in The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking.
Cindy Fisher (Nancy Bates): Best known as Rebecca Miller on The Waltons, but she scored her permanent genre pass by starring in the 1982 killer-computer exploitation classic The Hideous Sun Demon reimagining, Hideous Sun Demon: The Special Edition and the sci-fi horror flick The Outing (aka The Lamp).
Evelyn Keyes (Sister Emily): Golden Age royalty who played Suellen O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. But she cemented her place in our hearts decades later as Mrs. Gordon in Larry Cohen’s A Return to Salem’s Lot.
Mark Keyloun (Mike Phelps): Best known for playing physical roles in 80s dramas like Mike’s Murder and Sudden Impact. He also popped up in the cult favorite TV movie The Midnight Hour, which is basically the ultimate 80s Halloween party captured on film.
Ed Nelson (Mayor Albert Simpson): The ultimate B-movie workhorse. He was the lead in Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood, battled giant leeches in Attack of the Giant Leeches and popped up in The Brain Eaters. If a movie had rubber monsters or cheap corn syrup in the 1950s, Ed was usually there trying to shoot it.
Scott Paulin (Dr. Marshall): He was Deke Slayton in The Right Stuff, but comic book geeks know him as the villainous Red Skull in Albert Pyun’s wonderfully unhinged 1990 Captain America. He also brought the creepiness to the 80s psychological horror-thriller The Unholy.
Jane Powell (Rev. Mother Claire): A massive MGM musical star from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. She was mostly way above the movies we like, but she did step into the world of TV-terror for the mystery-horror movie The Letters.
Robert Prosky (Bishop Patrick Shea): An incredible character actor from Thief, Mrs. Doubtfire and Broadcast News. Horror freaks know him best as Will Darnell, the cranky garage owner who gets crushed to death by a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury in John Carpenter’s Christine.
Audrey Totter (Sister Paul): A legendary film noir femme fatale from The Set-Up and High Wall. She spent her later years doing TV, but she did her time in the psychological thriller trenches with William Castle’s The Chunky and The Carpetbaggers.
Sherri Stoner (Sarah Martino): She was the literal physical animation model for Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Belle in Beauty and the Beast. But before she became Disney royalty, she was in Reform School Girls.
Wendy Brainard (Amy): A steady 80s TV face seen on Family Ties. Her major contribution to cult was playing one of the teenagers in The MidnightHour.
Fay DeWitt (Sister Mary-Margaret): A comedy legend from the theater scene who later popped up on Mork & Mindy. She also lent her comedic timing to the weirdo 1970s sex comedy The Great Sex War.
Carol Swarbrick (Sister Margaret-Marie): A regular procedural guest star who showed up in The Jeffersons and Matlock.
M’el Dowd (Sister Margaret-Mary): A Broadway powerhouse who played Guenevere in Camelot. Genre fans know her as the classy but sinister presence in the psychological thriller The Wrong Man and the oddball 70s drama The Third Cry.
Hunter Mackenzie Austin (Sister Anne): Credited here as Caroline Gilshian. She mostly did high-octane 80s television guest spots, appearing in The A-Team and Riptide.
Len Felber (Garden Party Guest): Keep your eyes peeled for Len in the background. He is a legendary uncredited Hollywood background staple who has put on a tuxedo for everything from Die Hard to Ghostbusters.
Linda Harmon (Nun): An uncredited background sister who also popped up doing vocal work and background scenes across a dozen 80s sitcoms.
What happens?
Jessica takes a break from the mean streets of Cabot Cove to visit her old Kappa Delta sorority sister, Claire, who has traded college mixers for a habit, now serving as the Reverend Mother at the Immaculate Heart Convent. Where is this convent, you ask? Well, the script says Bergen Falls, Louisiana, which doesn’t exist. The character’s name-drop Shreveport, Blanchard and Grand Bayou, pinning it to the northwest corner of the state. But then the Mother Superior complains about having the scrawniest tomatoes east of the Mississippi, which means the writers completely forgot how geography works, or they accidentally set the episode in a tiny, swampy slice of southeastern Louisiana. Either way, it was actually filmed at the Ramona Convent Secondary School in Alhambra, California, which was tragically wrecked by the Whittier Narrows earthquake just ten days before this episode aired.
Naturally, because J.B. is a walking harbinger of doom, she barely gets her bags unpacked before a young novice named Sarah (Sherri Stoner, the actual physical model for Disney’s Ariel!) finds elderly Sister Emily dead in her room. Novice Sarah didn’t just get the calling. She’s hiding from a pathologically obsessed ex-boyfriend who stalks the perimeter daily and even stole her Celtic cross.
She’s safe, or as safe as someone on Murder She Wrote can be. The convent locks down tighter than a maximum-security prison from 6:00 PM until morning. No one could get in. Or could they? Jessica spots the psycho boyfriend wearing Sarah’s stolen cross and realizes there’s a secret, unmapped entrance into the cloister. Jessica and the local Bishop walk in on Dr. Marshall aggressively tossing Sister Emily’s filing cabinet. Turns out he’s not a ghoul; he just knew her raised pill dosage couldn’t have killed her and was looking for the bottle to prove it wasn’t a suicide.
The twist? Enter the local political machine. Mayor Albert Simpson and his high-speed, mile-a-minute-talking wife, Marian, get involved. She seems more invested in her husband’s career than he is. But the second a sleazy private eye starts snooping around, asking about a mysterious girl named Linda Stone, Marian completely shuts up. It turns out Linda Stone had a son she claimed was fathered by a soldier killed in Vietnam. Well, that kid was actually the product of a secret affair with the mayor 15 years ago. Sister Emily knew the truth and knew where the mother was hiding. If that gets out, Simpson’s political future is headed for the garbage disposal.
Who did it?
When the cops try to write it off as a tragic suicide, Jessica knows that the water pitcher in Sister Emily’s room was completely full. If the poor nun had swallowed a fatal dose of Metholityl (side effects include sudden-onset 80s hair expansion, fictional organ failure, swelling of the perenium, wimple lust, knee pain, throat pain and pain), she would have needed a glass of water to wash it down. Sister Emily didn’t drink a thing. She was held down and given a lethal injection.
The killer? Marian Simpson murdered to keep her husband’s skeleton in the closet. She slipped into the convent, injected the ailing nun, stole a photo of the illegitimate child’s mother to destroy the evidence and then stole an extra nun’s habit to disguise herself and sneak back out through the locked gates.
Who made it?
Welcome back, director John Llewellyn Moxey. This episode was written by Chris Manheim, who worked on Xena: Warrior Princess.
Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?
No. If this episode were a few seasons later, she’d be in the habit.
Was it any good?
Yes, even if, in the end, we have no idea what happened to anyone else.
Any trivia?
Eileen Brennan and Clu Gulager were in The Last Picture Show together.
Give me a reasonable quote:
Jessica Fletcher: Bishop Shea, we couldn’t have done it without your blessing.
Bishop Patrick Shea: Well, yes, that, that’s true, isn’t it? Oh. There’s one more thing that you can do for me before you go.
Jessica Fletcher: Oh, what’s that?
Bishop Patrick Shea: Try to impress on your dear old friend here the obligation of obedience. She is a troublemaker, you know.
Jessica Fletcher: I’m afraid that is your problem. And a delightful one you’re going to have to deal with for a long, long time.
What’s next?
A business tyrant’s sudden death puts Jessica on the trail of several of his suspicious company executives. Richard Jaekel! Joanne Pettet! Nancy Dussault!
If you were a kid glued to the UHF channels late at night, the Tales from the Darkside intro, with that ominous, synthesized Donald Rubinstein theme and those bleak, sepia-toned shots of the Pennsylvania countryside, was enough to give you chills before the episode even started. But Darksidewasn’t always trying to terrify you. Sometimes, it just wanted to tell a bizarre, EC Comics-style morality tale with a pitch-black punchline. Enter “The Floating Man.“
Corporal Marcia Smith (a pre-Simpsons Yeardley Smith, sporting her unmistakable voice and effortless comedic timing) and Sergeant Buzz Caldwell (the great Sherman Howard, whom you know as Bub the Zombie from Day of the Dead) are rotting away in a dusty, middle-of-nowhere Army recruiting office. It’s hot, it’s boring, and they haven’t seen a fresh piece of cannon fodder in three weeks.
Then walks in Arnold Barker (John Kasir, who would later become the iconic voice of the Crypt Keeper in Tales from the Crypt — talk about a small horror world!). He’s wearing lead-soled shoes and claims he’s being hunted by a circus troupe. Buzz wants to kick him out, but then Arnold takes off his shoes and literally floats to the ceiling. Buzz immediately smells a promotion. An infantryman who can defy gravity? Take that, Air Force!
Of course, because this is the Darkside, nothing is what it seems. Soon enough, a car pulls up outside, and Arnold claims his pursuers are Hugo the Fat Man and Olga the Killer Dwarf Lady. Instead, it’s just a shotgun-toting dad (Bill Nunn) and his very pregnant, very normal-sized daughter, Betty Ann. Turns out Arnold isn’t a circus performer at all. He’s a sleazy, smooth-talking pharmacist who knocked Betty Ann up and left her at the altar. Whenever he tells a massive, reality-bending lie, his guilt makes him lighter than air. When he gives a passionate, tear-filled apology and promises to marry Betty Ann, his weight returns, and he crashes to the floor. The crisis is solved, right?
Not quite. The second the family walks out to the car, the utterly slimy Arnold instantly turns on Marcia, hitting on her and ripping her shirt. He admits his whole speech was a total sham. The second the lie leaves his mouth, gravity loses its grip. Arnold starts floating upward again. Marcia, totally disgusted, tells him to float straight to hell and walks out. Buzz walks back in just in time to see his star recruit drifting toward the ceiling. Unfortunately for Arnold, they never turned off that heavy-duty, metal-bladed industrial ceiling fan.
What starts as a goofy, dialogue-heavy sitcom episode suddenly pivots into splatter, ending with Howard being absolutely drenched in gore.
This episode was directed by John Lewis, who did three episodes of the show. It was written by Donald Wollner and based on a story by Scott Edelman. You have to love that the IMDb goofs page has military trivia: “The uniforms of the two Army recruiters are completely out of regulation. They are wearing no name tags or insignia of any kind other than their rank, one of which isn’t even an Army rank. Also, the Corporal has her sleeves rolled up.“
Reverend Farley Bright is dead. Or, at the very least, he’s finished with his earthly tenure of shaking down the elderly for seed money in the name of the Lord to his Church of a Better Tomorrow. He’s the kind of larger-than-life charlatan that would make Jimmy Swaggart look like a wallflower.
His family — a collection of archetypes that feel like they wandered off a Tennessee Williams set and took a wrong turn into a George Romero production, which is exactly what they are — has gathered for the reading of the will. They’re all expecting a piece of the golden pie, but Grady isn’t done performing. He returns via a séance (or perhaps just some high-end spiritual stagecraft) to run one last long-con from the Great Beyond.
Between Connie Stevens (playing the sister), Carolyn Ann Clark (as the niece who exposed the con), Richard Kuhlman (as the heir to the Electronic Church) and Peter Miller (as Farley), everyone in this episode understands the assignment. It’s loud and gloriously over-the-top. The Reverend Grady is a masterpiece of grotesque charm, a man who treated faith like a financial instrument and continues to cook the books even when he doesn’t have a pulse. He was a man who spent his life selling tickets to a Heaven he didn’t believe in and warning against a Hell he didn’t fear. The twist, that neither side wants his paperwork processed, leaving him stuck in a metaphysical limbo in his own church, is the kind of justice that would make the Crypt Keeper cackle.
This was directed by Dusty Nelson, who brought us one of the best movies ever made on making movies, Effects. It was written by Edithe Swensen, a TV vet who wrote episodes for this show and Monsters. I love this episode, because it uses the short format of Tales to tell a moral story, not simply a scary one.
Dr. Philip Drawdy (Patrick Kilpatrick) is a surgeon driving through a remote rural area during a heavy storm. After a minor car accident leaves him stranded, he seeks help at a nearby, decaying mansion. He is greeted by Edmund Alcott (Harsh Nayyar), a formal and somewhat eccentric man who lives there with his wife, Marie (Marcia Cross). She has a deep wound on her leg that won’t seem to heal. As a doctor, Philip offers to help, but he quickly notices several unsettling things about the Alcotts: They are incredibly pale and sensitive to light, the wound on Marie’s leg doesn’t bleed normally, the house is filled with artifacts from a bygone era, and the duo speaks in a formal and out-of-date way.
As Philip treats Marie, he finds himself inexplicably drawn to her. Despite the eerie environment and Edmund’s protective, almost threatening demeanor, a romantic spark ignites between the doctor and his patient. Philip eventually realizes the truth: The Alcotts are vampires.
However, they aren’t the typical predatory monsters found in most horror films. They are weary, lonely immortals who have spent decades in isolation. Marie’s wound was caused by a silver-tipped cane, which is why her supernatural healing hasn’t kicked in. Edmund treats her badly, so Philip, consumed by his growing obsession and strange love for Anne, decides he doesn’t want to leave. He chooses to stay with her forever.
In the final moments, the cure for their loneliness is revealed to be a grim exchange. Philip allows Marie to bite him, fully aware that he is trading his mortal life and his career for an eternity in the shadows with her. The episode ends with the implication that Philip has now joined her secluded, nocturnal world, proving that love can indeed be a transformative—and terminal—experience.
This is another episode directed by Theodore Gershuny. It was written by Edithe Swensen, one of the ten episodes she wrote.
This time, we follow Jake Corelli (Abe Vigoda), a wealthy, ruthless and terminally ill mob boss. Faced with his imminent death, Corelli is not interested in traditional legacies or spiritual peace. Instead, he pays a massive sum to a high-end facility that offers a specialized form of cryogenic suspension.
The facility promises more than just a frozen body; they provide a dream program, which is a customized, computer-driven virtual reality that the patient’s brain will experience in a continuous loop while in stasis.
The facility’s director gives Corelli a choice: the peaceful path is a serene, idyllic dream world where he can live in comfort and tranquility forever; the Corelli path is a dream filled with power, women, expensive food and the thrill of the underworld.
Corelli passes away and is placed into the suspension tank. Initially, the dream begins exactly as he requested. He is in a luxury suite, surrounded by his favorite things. However, a glitch occurs or perhaps a manifestation of his own guilt-ridden subconscious. The dream begins to degrade as the NPCs in his dream start to transform into the victims he murdered or stepped on to get to the top.
The most terrifying aspect of the episode is the technicality of the contract. Because Corelli is technically dead and his brain is in a closed-loop system, the facility cannot wake him or change the program once it has started. The episode ends with Corelli trapped in a perpetual nightmare. Because the computer is designed to keep its brain active for centuries, it is doomed to experience the same horrific, agonizing visions of its victims’ revenge over and over again, with no possibility of escape or true death.
This episode was directed by Gerald Cotts, who was the cinematographer for Dynamite Chicken and Putney Swope; he directed episodes of this show, Saturday Night Live and Monsters. It was written by James Houghton, who wrote thousands of episodes of The Young and the Restless and appeared in movies like Purple People Eaterand Superstition.
We open on a guy — let’s call him Chester Caruso (Paul Dooley) — whining into a rotary phone to his unseen wife, Marian. He’s stuck in a blizzard, definitely not cheating (wink, wink and his car is currently being hooked up to a tow truck. Chester leaves his room to wander into the lobby and immediately starts hitting on anything with a pulse. He tells a fellow guest he’s a lingerie salesman and decides to get a room, asking for cottage 7, a place where a murder happened just last week.
Chester walks into his room and finds a woman named Carol (Kathy McLain) waiting for him. She thinks he’s Harry. Instead of leaving or calling the cops, they start dancing. He tells her his ballroom-dancing skills are why he’s called Soft Shoes, and it’s all very surreal and artsy until Chester mentions his wife. Suddenly, the mood shifts from The Twilight Zone to Fatal Attraction.
The woman pulls a gun because Harry or Chester has broken her heart for the last time. Bang! Chester runs to the owner, screaming about being shot and dames with revolvers. The owner just sighs, looks at Chester’s breath and tells him to go sleep it off.
The woman comes back, rambling about the good old days while Chester realizes he’s stuck in a narrative loop he can’t escape. We wrap up with the manager (John Fiedler) and the law (Patrick Farrelly) standing outside, basically admitting the room is cursed. Their solution? Demolish the place.
Hey, remember when you went to college and your parents turned your bedroom into a sewing room? Well, Cecilia Matthews did one better. She turned it into a psychic freakout where a spectral brat who never grows up and never talks back finally makes her happy as a mother, unlike her real-life child. In this slice of 80s psychological weirdness (based on a Pamela Sargent short story), we meet Christine (Lorna Luft), who comes home for a warm hug only to get the cold shoulder from her mother, Cecilia (Coleen Gray), who is too busy listening to a ghostly child sing “Three Blind Mice” upstairs to hear her own flesh-and-blood daughter pounding on the door.
It’s been six years. Six years since Christine had a nervous breakdown, likely caused by the very woman now offering her tea while treating her like a trespasser. Cecilia has storage in Christine’s old room, a code word for a pink-hued time capsule filled with pom-poms, horse trophies and a literal ghost of Christine’s childhood.
Enter Chrissie (Virginia Keehne). She’s the girl Christine used to be, or at least, the girl Cecilia wanted her to stay. While Christine is trying to process her trauma and navigate a broken life, Cecilia is upstairs, tucked in with a poltergeist version of her daughter, feeding the thing pure nostalgia.
The second act turns into a battle for maternal territory. We get a visit from Toni (Janet Wood), the Avon lady, who drops the bomb that Cecilia spends an unhealthy amount of time talking to the walls. Then there’s brother Chuck (Lary Gilman), who tries to play peacemaker but mostly just serves as a reminder that Christine is the only one in this family actually living in the real world.
Christine confronts Chrissie, who is basically a sentient World’s Best Daughter trophy with a mean streak. There’s shouting, a shattered mirror, and a tug-of-war for Cecilia’s soul. In the end, the power of a grown-up’s grief beats out a phantom’s playground rhymes, as you’d imagine it would. Chrissie goes poof in a flash of light, Cecilia wakes up from her nostalgic trance, and we’re left with two women holding each other in the wreckage of a childhood bedroom.
Most of Christopher T. Welch’s directing work was on TV, while he has also done ADR and production work. This was written by Julie Selbo, who wrote for this series and Monsters, as well as animation.
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