Friday the 13th - The Series: Hellowe'en

For this year's Halloween post, let us return to the world of Friday the 13th: the Series (aka Friday's Curse). Today's excursion:

Season 1, Episode 5.

"Watchin' horror movies, right there on my TV! A horror movie, right there on my TV! Horror movie, right there on my TV, and it's shocking me right out of my brain! (waa-aaa!)"

That Skyhooks song doesn't appear in "Hellowe'en" anywhere. I just felt like starting things off with it. Nor does the episode contain any music from the band Helloween - apologies to any fans who found their way to this post under false pretenses.

What does this episode have? For starters, a little something I'll call -

So, so much Robey insanity in this episode. It's been almost a year since I last looked at a Friday the 13th - the Series episode, so just a reminder of Robey's modus operandi: one part Shatner, one part alien-in-human-form-forever-experiencing-feelings-for-first-time, and one part J-Lo. 

Things kick off with Robey getting her costume ready and checking herself out in the mirror.

She hears something in the corner and thinks Ryan is in there spying on her. She's close - it's Ryan's random buddy, who Ryan has stashed in there to watch her get dressed. It's all part of the Halloween prank tradition, he explains.

"It's all right," he says, "he's pre-med. Come on, let's get to the party."

Jack has thrown open the doors to Curious Goods and invited everyone in the neighborhood to a Halloween party. 

He flirts it up and makes boob-jokes and performs magic tricks for the ladies.

But what about all the haunted items the Curious Goods gang has in the vault? Isn't this asking for trouble? Not to worry - Ryan hung up a sign.

Unsurprisingly, a couple of partygoers (one of them is the aforementioned pre-med student) find a way past this formidable obstacle and head into the basement.

This didn't screencap too well, but they simply move the sign and head down into the basement. It's tough to see, I know, but Ryan has hung the sign from a string that is apparently tied to the (open) door. I guess closing the door (maybe even locking it) and then hanging the sign was too much to expect from Ryan.

It takes about ten seconds for them to invoke The Evil.

When Jack's magic act is interrupted by supernatural shenanigans, he first admonishes ("Those friends of yours threw out a psychic line and hooked something. There are people who think that Halloween is a kid's game- it isn't. It's the one night of the year the spirits of the dead can roam the earth with freedom!" In other words: perfectly cromulent night to throw a party in a haunted antiques shop...) then slips into action:

"In the name of Melchesidek, Belerephon and Set, I command you, spirit, to be gone! From the depths of hell to the halls of darkness to the black pit, I command you to be gone!"

From here on out, things move pretty quickly. Jack warns Ryan and Robey to stay alert and then wanders out into the street. 

He meets an unchaperoned little girl and volunteers to safely escort her home.

But turns out - she's a demon.

Oops.

While Jack works to free himself from the demon's trap, Ryan and Robey are visited by the ghost of Uncle Lewis, the former proprietor of Curious Goods, whose disbursement of the haunted items before the devil pulled him into Hell is the show's reason for being. I suppose you could call this one of the show's mythology episodes for that reason. 

He reveals a hidden room behind a bookcase and convinces them he's returned not to spread more evil but to atone for his lifetime of strenuous devil worship. All he asks is for one of them to retrieve the Amulet of Zohar from the vault and give it to him. This will allow him to free the soul of his wife, cursed to wander between the worlds like some eyeless Comanche. 

Naturally, it's all a ploy just to get the amulet.

Oops.

Uncle Lewis and the little demon ("Greta") make their escape. Robey and Ryan spend some time bemoaning their gullibility then escape the secret room behind the bookcase via an old fireplace. (I guess it's somewhat possible that no one would have known this room existed, as they're all relatively new tenants, but you'd figure Jack would have done some mapping of the place. There has to be a spell for that, no? Anyway.) They look up the amulet in one of Jack's books and discover that it's primarily used in a ritual where spirits can come back from the dead into the body of someone who died peacefully. 

Reasoning that this means a mortuary and that he'd choose the closest one (since the ritual has to be performed before sun-up), they race off in pursuit.

Leaving a note for Jack, of course. This is even funnier when you consider that neither Robey nor Ryan have communicated the re-appearance of the very dead Uncle Lewis to Jack.

Sure enough:

Uncle Lewis dispatches Greta to deal with them, since he has to concentrate on his spell. ("Toth-Agremmon, hear me!" yadda yadda.) 

Greta rounds them both up with little difficulty.

She stashes them in coffins on a conveyer belt, bound (slowly) towards the incinerator. Luckily, Jack arrives (having freed himself from Greta's earlier trap with the unknowing help of some street hooligans) in time to free them.

Jack has some impressive Doctor Strange / Ronnie James Dio mojo in this episode.

Normally he relies only on the power of his inspirational speeches.

Back to the abyss with you, Uncle Lewis.

Rather than engage them with the hypnosis and paralysis spells that have worked so effectively throughout the episode, Greta chooses to try and physically take them out. Maybe she's like a D-and-D magic-user and can only cast certain spells once or twice a day. Whatever the reason, she manages to trip over something and impale herself. 

Adios, bruja.

Back at Curious Goods (presumably after telling someone about the mortuary break-in) Jack muses about the hidden room he never suspected. Robey asks how much of Uncle Lewis's story was true. "Oh, some of it," Jack says. "He was married, and his wife was called Grace. She's not in there. She never was. She died and was buried, and we all lost a great friend. She was a wonderful woman, Micki *, beautiful like a sunrise. She had the kind of beauty that shone out of her like a beacon."

* What Jack insists on calling Robey.

Jack's reverie leads Robey to ask him how well he knew her.  

"Better than I ought to, perhaps. But not as much as I'd have dearly wished."

The End.

It's a surprisingly touching ending, actually, mainly because Jack manages to sell the somewhat flowery dialogue. It's kind of an odd coda for all the events we've seen. But, on this show, they almost all are.

Happy Halloween 2015!

~

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The TV Tomb of Mystery is an ongoing attempt to stave off  acquisition of any more impulse-buy DVDs by taking better inventory of the ones already in hand.

Friday the 13th the Series: And Now the News

Superman has his Fortress of Solitude; I have the TV Tomb of Mystery. Dare you join me in crossing its threshold? Speak, friend, and enter. You are not imagining this.

Today's excursion:

The third episode of the second season of:

When this aired in the late 80s, it was the 2nd most popular syndicated show behind Star Trek: The Next Generation. Here's the voice-over prologue that opened the early episodes:

"Lewis Vendredi * made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques. But he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul. Now, his niece Micki and her cousin Ryan have inherited the store... and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back and the real terror begins."

* For those non-French speakers in the audience, "Vendredi" is French for "Friday."

Not mentioned or pictured above is Chris Wiggins as Jack Marshak:

He's not featured in "And Now the News," so he won't factor into any of the below, but he was the scholarly father-figure of the bunch. (Think Niles from Buffy or Artie Nielson from Warehouse 13.) Eventually, Ryan (John D. LeMay) left the show and was replaced by a character named Johnny Ventura (Steve Monarque.) But that's an excursion for another afternoon.

In case you want to look at the show's imdb page, it was re-named Friday's Curse at some point, and that's how it's listed over there. It will always be Friday the 13th: The Series to me, and for what it's worth that's the name under which it's re-run on Me-TV Saturday afternoons, so someone should tell them. 

The show had no connection to the Friday the 13th film franchise, though fans of the show have a few theories as to how they tie together. (My personal favorite is that Jason's hockey mask was one of the haunted items from the store, let loose into the world for the spread of evil by Satan, Inc. Hell, it makes as much sense as anything else in the movies; considerably more, in fact.)

Each episode sank or swam according to the strength of its haunted object -

an antique radio in the case of "And Now the News" -

and the performances of its guest stars. This one does well on both counts.

Kate Trotter plays Dr. Avril Carter, caretaker of the haunted radio, and

plays Dr. Kevin Finch, head of the insane asylum / her doomed colleague.

Kate's performance is both severe and over-the-top. Which are exactly the right notes to strike when guest-starring on this series. Subtlety should be left at the door.

Other characters include the sort of folks you'd imagine in an insane asylum: the cynical orderly, the nurse who barges into a room and yells "DOCTOR!" only to be told that "DAMN IT, I'M WITH A PATIENT!" and a few different inmates, including one listed amusingly as "Hulk Maniac" in the credits. 

The way the haunted radio (which, we see ominously, has a frayed cord i.e. it's powered exclusively by Satan) works is like this: first, it broadcasts future-news related to Dr. Carter's career advancement i.e. "Dr. Carter received the Nobel Prize for her pioneering work at the insane asylum, etc." This is followed by different news related to the death of a patient at the asylum, which she then must make happen. She places the radio in the identified patient's room, where it then narrates some horrifying chain of events designed to make the patient take his or her own life rather than face them. i.e. one of the patients is afraid of fire, so the radio "breaks" the story of an out of control fire that has trapped everyone at the insane asylum, causing the patient to leap from the window in terror. Dr. Carter then collects the radio, goes back to her office, and receives an 'attagirl from Radio Satan.

Micki and Ryan get wind of the haunted radio being the property of a deceased mental patient at the asylum and go to investigate. 

They get the runaround, so Ryan decides to hop the electrified fence. "This is crazy," says Micki.

"Trust me."

He's quickly apprehended, scolded, then let loose. At which point, Micki opts for Plan B:

Which brings us to what separates Friday the 13th from the pack. Namely:

First, her name is Robey. Why civilization has not stopped everything to suss out the meaning and mystery of this is beyond me. How can we so brazenly carry on with our everyday lives while this modern-day Sphinx tasks us to solve its riddle? Second, her accent defies description; it is unlike any other accent ever recorded on television, perhaps on Planet Earth. It's inconsistent, for one. In this episode, she says "Or perhaps we could took to someone" while in others, she pronounces "talk" the way it's pronounced anywhere else in the English-speaking world. This happens every episode. Third, she carries herself as if she's a pleated trouser amongst blue jeans. Her every move and mannerism suggests such inflated self-regard that the viewer is constantly asking his or herself, "Is she, like, royalty * or something?" (With perhaps the follow-up question, "If she is... I mean, why the hell is she named "Robey?") 

* Interestingly enough, she was royalty, for a short time. She married Charles Beauclerk, Earl of Burford, in 1994; they were divorced in 2001.

It's almost as if she's an alien in human form whom we see forever experiencing human emotion for the first time. Not that she's unattractive, or that I'm writing these remarks from a "Who the hell does she think she is" perspective. It's just that after the third or fourth time you've seen her stroll across the set as if she was balancing a candle on her forehead, you find yourself yelling out questions at the tv screen.

Or at least I do. 

And fourth, as charitably as I can possibly put it, her over-acting has got to be at least half of the reason why anyone watches the show.

Both Wiggins and LeMay (and later Monarque) play to type (Wiggins very staid and proper; LeMay / Monarque, very smart-ass) Robey goes her own crazy way in every episode. Micki's actions are often unfathomable, and her reactions vary so wildly that you can't get any kind of handle on a throughline. I'm tempted to say this was a genius move on the actress' part, as it keeps the viewer glued to any scene she's in to see what crazy thing she's going to do next. Take this scene for example, where she handles the telephone as if she is trying to merge it with her face.

Was it intentional? Tough to say for sure. I'm tempted to say no, of course it wasn't, but there's little to cross-reference from her c.v. Outside of bit parts in Raw Deal and The Money Pit, Robey's acting career was pretty much limited to this show. (She is the female lead in a crazy-sounding movie entitled Play Nice (1992) but I've never seen it. It's definitely on the list, though.)

Are these Barbies?

Whatever the case, re-cast the role with just about anyone else, and you might focus on other aspects of production that are wanting (the effects, some of the plot conveniences/ silliness, etc.) But with Robey in the frame, all you can do is say "Robey? Robey?" to yourself in a stupefied tone, over and over.

Anyway, Dr. Carter is told by the radio that Dr. Finch must die, so die he does:

Shoved into "Hulk Maniac's" cell, where he's savagely beaten to death.

Micki and Ryan show up, get captured and slapped around a bit, but Dr. Carter's lack of urgency in feeding their souls to Radio Satan causes the tables to be turned.

Her attempts to reason with it elicit only her own electrocution.

Literally seconds after this radio just fried the doctor and shot both herself and Ryan across the room with lightning bolts, she approaches it and picks it up.

There's a fun little bit at the ending. Just as Micki is bemoaning the difficulties they face in tracking down all of these haunted artifacts, the radio suddenly switches on and promises a way to make everything easier for the both of them, for a price.

They hurriedly put it in the vault with the other supernatural oddities and bolt the door before it can tell them anymore. Roll credits.

The show had a great, moody theme song, easily the equal of its better-known counterpart from Tales from the Darkside. You can hear it here.

"And Now the News" was directed by Bruce Pittman and written by Richard Benner. It's a good representational example of the series: much of the plot hinges on some pretty wild coincidences, (unlocked doors, characters knowing things - like where to turn on and off the power at the insane asylum - they really shouldn't, convenient lack of security / surveillance at key points of entry, etc.) Robey acts crazy, Ryan does something stupid, and the taken-for-granted-by-everyone-in-the-cast idea of a malevolent force beyond our world that promises things to people if they perform some act of evil on its behalf but is unable to prevent Micki and Ryan from finding (and besting) its proxies. 

As well as some groovy atmosphere and memorable imagery.

Back to the shelf with you, "And Now the News." Until next time.

The Closet of Mystery is an ongoing catalog of one man's attempt to stave off the acquisition of any more impulse-buy DVDs until he can take better inventory of the ones already in his possession.