Friday the 13th: The Series - Vanity's Mirror

"I often think if mirrors could give up their dead how wonderful it would be."

-  Bessie Parkes Belloc

Let's continue our look at

with the 15th episode of the 1st season of Friday the 13th: The Series -

I didn't think of this episode when I made my original list of shows to look at for this TV Proms series. I'm not sure why. It's true that the word "prom" is never actually used in "Vanity's Mirror," making it more of a "TV Dance" episode, but that's not why I initially excluded it. Just didn't think of it, I guess. I'm trying to stick only to proms; if I open the door to homecoming dance episodes, I'd be exploring the topic more than I actually sat down to do. 

Luckily as the junior VP of the Dog Star Omnibus board, I have certain influence with the Senior Partners. And here we all are today.

For those of you who aren't regular TV Tomb of Mystery subscribers, a) what's wrong with you? You're missing out on all sorts of crazy write-ups! Don't delay - subscribe today and receive these bonus reviews of "And Now the News" and "The Playhouse," and b) you may not be familiar with the show. Friday the 13th: The Series was a Canadian-produced show from the 80s centered round a haunted antiques shop. 

The store is inherited by Micki (Robey) and her cousin by marriage Ryan (John D. LeMay). With the help of paranormal academic and part-time spellcaster Jack (Chris Wiggins), the trio track down the haunted items that were sold from the store's vault by the store's previous owner, Uncle Lewis. (Who's in Hell now.) 

Robey sometimes wears odd hats and berets.

Jack, too, I guess.

The haunted artifact of "Vanity's Mirror" is a gold compact. They see the item listed as "sold to Sylvia" in the manifest but other than that, have no clue as to anything else about it. The audience does, though, as the cold open of the episode shows a flower seller who uses the compact on one of her customers. After haranguing him about not looking at her as a woman "full of love and needs", she opens it and directs light into his face.

Whereupon he falls instantly and obsessively in love with her. Then she kills him.

Have I ever mentioned a rack focus is one of my favorite things? Because it is.

Sylvia is then struck down by a car when she runs out from the alley and into the street. The compact is picked up by Helen, a pimply-faced local with a nasty disposition. 

Played by Ingrid Veninger.

Helen is ostracized at school but is protected somewhat by her older sister Joanne's popularity.

She lusts after Scott, Joanne's boyfriend.

Scott sticks up for her when she's catcalled by these classic 80s-jerk-looking guys.

More on all of these guys later. But it leads to Helen discovering the power of the compact.

When one of them (Greg) won't leave it alone, she accidentally reflects light at his face.
Leading him to fall instantly into the same sort of obsession with her that we saw in the opening with Sylvia.

It's actually a pretty good example of show-don't-tell writing and structure. It's not until much later in the episode that Micki and Jack discuss what the compact does ("If someone gets love-struck by the compact then they have to be killed") and I don't know if Ryan ever even finds out. He seems to really not understand the way it works, actually, as we'll see in a bit. 

And for her part, Helen never explicates the compact's powers with some "Hear Me, X-Men!" sort of speech. We see it gradually working on her mind instead, ultimately dragging her to an inevitable doom.

We're taking the long way round before we get to the prom, I know. The two plotlines intersect when Ryan shows Jack the newspaper story announcing Sylvia's death. Jack sees something funny in the corner of the accompanying photo and calls for his glass: 

Man! You've got to love this show. I think there's probably something to the theory that too much bad food corrupts the palette into only wanting bad food. Same for bad TV. When I see something like this, I tend to find it adorable rather than scoff at the lazy writing. Then I find myself passing up re-watching Breaking Bad or Thirty Rock in order to screencap Friday the 13th: The Series or something. Anyway:

As aforementioned, Greg has been lovestruck and won't leave Helen's side.

At first she parades him smugly around school.

Greg is played by Zack Ward, by the way, aka Zone from Dollhouse. His constant attentions prove wearying, and when he repeats "I'll love you til the day I die" one too many times, she decides to hurry that process along by maneuvering him into the trash compactor. 

This is the catalyst for all her subsequent behavior in the episode. I suppose once you cross the get-rid-of-this-guy-in-the-trash-compactor line, it's pointless to restrain yourself.

Everyone is distraught over the death of Greg, most especially his best buddy Russel:

Russel (spelled apparently only with one 'l' - is that a Canadian thing?) confronts Helen while they're readying the gym for the dance. 

You can probably figure out how that goes.

   

Nice knowing you, Russel.

The Curious Goods gang sends in Ryan to suss out the situation. Which is never a good idea. 

Even for an era of TV that was particularly undemanding of its male protagonists, Ryan's inability to perform simple tasks or reason out uncomplicated problems is remarkable.

Ryan follows Helen into the basement (where she used the table saw in the wood shop to dispose of Russel) and she quickly tries to get him with the compact.

Granted, Ryan has no real idea of what the compact does; he only knows it's cursed. But his reactions are still kind of funny. After getting himself trapped in a stairwell, he goes into a full panic. Rather than using the backpack to block the penetrating gaze of the compact and overpower the much-smaller teenage girl, he hurls it at her. This doesn't manage to knock her out, and as if to add the final punctuation to his incompetence, he crashes through the railing and falls to the ground several flights below.

The story proceeds apace, but the episode cuts back to Ryan a few times, to remind us he's knocked out down there in the basement, I guess. Each time the pools of blood are a little bigger.

And each time, a rat is added.

Those rats didn't screencap too well, but that detail really amuses me. None of the rats bother Ryan or anything, they just come and sit on him and crawl around. Kudos to Robey - when she arrives to save him, she clears his body of the rats. I thought they were props of some kind, but nope, they are actually live rats. I assumed Robey would balk at handling live vermin - not just because most people would, I bet, understandably, but because she's Robey. She strikes me as someone who'd hold most things at arm's length with an unspoken "Ewww."

Helen eventually goes over the deep end on the night of the dance.

She keeps insisting her date will show up any minute, delaying Joanne and Scott's departure.

There is no date, of course, and when Joanne and Scott finally decide to leave, out comes the compact.

"Let's fix it so she never bothers us again... lover!"

Scott ties Joanne to the ceiling fan, and he and Helen leave for the dance.

Robey rescues Ryan as described above, and Ryan lets out a dance-disrupting, furious "HEL-E-N-N!" when they get to the auditorium. 

Despite being unconscious from a serious head wound, he's pretty lucid. But shrugging off concussions is hardly unique to Friday the 13th: The Series.

Helen takes Scott to the roof, where she tells him how much she died inside everytime he came over the house to take out her sister. She urges him to dance with her on the ledge.

Meanwhile, Jack saves Joanne and bring her to the school.

Just in time to see:

"I want you so much, but the only way I can have you -

"is in death...!"

"This time," Jack muses back at the shop, "we just failed."

Robey doesn't want to hear it. She's pissed. And sad. Both, actually, right on top of one another. Robey's mood swings are as notorious as the Witch of November.

And the episode ends with an unidentified person finding the compact beneath a bush.

Fun stuff. Did I overdo it? Likely yes, but so it sometimes goes. What TV-prom lessons are re-enforced by all of the above?

1. DON'T STEAL YOUR SISTER'S BOYFRIEND

2. THERE'S NO POINT BEING NICE TO THE UGLY DUCKLING; SHE'S JUST GOING TO TRY AND KILL YOU. AND/OR EVERYONE/ HERSELF.  

3. BEWARE THE MARGINALIZED WHEN GIVEN A CAPTIVE, GAWKING AUDIENCE.

Before we go, I tip my cap across time and space to Ingrid Veninger, who is pitch perfect as Helen. She goes for broke throughout the episode: the way she snarls "lov-er!" in a few spots, her slow head turns, her grimaces and facial contortions, everything.

They may have overdone her slovenliness just a tad, though.

Then again, I think this show is impervious to any charge of over-exaggeration; it was part and parcel to the proceedings from the get-go.

~

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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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