I love the Freddys, part 2.

So, like I said last time, time for the TV series...


So, yeah, "Freddy's Nightmares"...

Okay, up front, I'll level with ya, you really oooonly want to check this series out if you're a total Fred-head that's compulsive about completeness.

And even then, watch 'em through the rosey lens of 80's nostalgia, or you're gonna be a little nauseous in spots.

And even then...

But, okay, here we go...


Season 1


No more Mr. Nice Guy.


This is the premiere, and a prequel to the first movie.
I mentioned finding a VHS copy, and being unable to see it in the first entry.

Directed by Toby Hooper, and, eh, pretty good for TV.
For 80's TV.
It'd get its ass handed to it by "Breaking Bad", or something, but shows like that are the beneficiary of everyone pushing at the edges through the 80's/90's/00's so..

Contradicts wildly in some spots with the prequel stuff in "Freddy's Dead", but...that's Michael DeLuca's fault.

He wrote "Freddy's Dead", and "No more Mr. Nice Guy".
He put the contradictions there with his own little typing fingers.

Eh, ah well, parallel universe.
Have to do that with the comics too.
Which reminds me, I gotta do a third chapter about those...

So, anyway, yeah, the show is off to a good start with this one.
Prequel Freddy, creepy tone to it, even through the cheap 80's cheese of the budget and censorship.

Freddy does a dental death in this one, turning his glove into an arsenal of tools out of the "I am your dentist!", scene in "Little Shop Of Horrors", and kills the protagonist of the episode that way.

So, yeah, the show got to fill in all the little death ideas they didn't get to do in the movies like that.
They saved all the BIG stuff for the flicks, of course.

Anyway, Robert England in both "Never Sleep Again", and his autobiography says how Toby Hooper is one of his favorite people in Hollywood, and one of his closest friends.

Rob, Toby is your BEST friend, face it.
The man directed "Night Terrors", for you.
That's a best friend favor.
You gotta play poker or go bowling with him more.
Seriously.


It's a miserable life.


Okay, so, after the hour (well, a TV hour, 45 minutes, really) premiere, this is where the formula of two smaller interconnected stories comes in, that will be the standard of the rest of the series.
It's also where we kick off with Freddy as the Twilight Zone-y host rather than a participant.
Although, there would be some Freddy-centric ones later on

The only thing this show really has to do with Freddy besides him hosting, is that all the stories take place in Springwood.

Apparently, Springwood is a fucked up town like Twin Peaks, or Springfield, and Freddy is just one of the many things wrong with it.

Okay, so on to the plot...

A kid hates working at his father's fast food joint, and dreams of getting out of his shitty life, and shitty town, and, then a maniac shoots at him at the drive-in window, then, there's a bunch of crazy dream-within-dream transitions, and finally, it all turns out to be what goes through the kid's head before the bullet smacks into his brain.

This one's mentioned in "Never Sleep Again".

Not bad, kinda old-school Twilight Zone stuff.

Second half is just miserable, the girlfriend of the dead kid in the first half got wounded by the maniac, now she's in the hospital, and there's 20 minutes of dream-within-dream shit of her thinking the doctors are trying to kill her, and it ends with that her parents died, and she's been projecting it onto the outside world in her dream world or..something...
It more or less ends with her being crazy.

Okay, so yeah, this sets the pattern of the whole show, for better, and worse.

A looot of these, are dream-within-dream, and the dream-in-dreams you can tell are the writer trying out every possible crappy ending like "choose your own adventure", and the real ending is just an ending, the writer just stops when he/she runs out of shitty fake endings.

The better ones actually have good twists, but 9 times out of 10, it just stops like that.
Like, okay, I get it, making a show is a grind, but damn...

So, anyway, that's that complaint, but the other pattern that's set for the whole show...is it being about whiny white people with white people problems.

Which, on some level is unavoidable, cuz Springwood represents suburbia, and Hollywood writers fucking hate suburbia, but...it grates when you marathon these fuckers out.

I guess if you had to wait a week in between, and had other shows to wash last week off..but yeah, internet age, I glutted these down.

Oh, man, do white people suck.
Ohhh!!
Ohh-ho-ho-hoo!!

If there weren't a Freddy to unleash hell on these characters, I'd go nuts reviewing this shit.

Ain't "Desperate Housewives", pretty much that?
White upper-middle-class scum that DON'T get killed by Freddy?
Yeah, no thanks to that fucking trainwreck....


Killer instinct.


Directed by Mick Garris, who would go on to do the miniseries versions of "The Stand", and "The Shining", and would become Tim Burton to Stephen King's Johnny Depp.
Or, if you will, Toby Hooper to Stephen King's Robert Englund.

He discusses this one in "Never Sleep Again", and he's totally ashamed of it.
As you should be, Mick.

Okay, Lori Petty is a high school track chick, who gets a magic amulet that can kill people by wishing for it, and she bumps off her enemies with it, and there's also some deal where it gives you super powers in return, and that's how she wins races, and you see the amulet corrupt her.
Then, her opponent steals it, and makes her get decapitated by the finish line.
Budump-ching "Tales From The Crypt", ending.

You get a vague hint that Freddy had something to do with the amulet, where in a hosting segment, he kisses and sucks on it.
Eeew.

But anyway, hey, Lori Petty!
And she has a couple steamy make-out scenes.
Heehee!
So, yeah, New Line had a thing of bringing back people who did anything for them, so, this must be how she got "Tank Girl".

Anyway, on to the second half, which again, isn't as good, more dream-in-dream shit with the girl who killed Lori Petty, and there's a bunch of fake-out where you're lead to think Lori's boyfriend is going to kill her, but she beats him to death with a running trophy, and he's innocent, and one assumes she's arrested.
PPT!


Freddy's tricks and treats.


Another Freddy-centric one already.

Mariska Hargitay is in this one.

Um...I barely remember it, I'm not going back to re-watch it, I just remember a lot of whining, and whimpering, and anti-Nancy behavior, and being glad when she was finally fucking dead.


Judy Miller, come on down.


A bitch obsessed with game shows, dream-within-dream shit of a creepy psycho gameshow, her husband starts hating her, someone dies, whiny white people shit.


Saturday night special


A weasel-y guy lies on a video dating tape, and ends up with a psycho bitch, and a plain chick cuts herself all up to look like a typical Barbie Doll, and sees her old self in the mirror with Frankenstein scars, and goes crazy.

Whiny white people shit.

Saving grace, all the panties, lingerie, and bikini-bottoms in the late-80's still had that high-cut "V", thing going on.
Yuuuum!!
*Evil laugh*


Sister's keeper


Mentioned this one in the last entry, I caught the veeery end of this one, where Freddy separates two mannequins conjoined at the arm, and blood comes out, and he says "twins...*slice* now you can tell 'em apart, ahahahaa!!".

Anyway, it's a sequel to the pilot, and he's after the twin daughters of the cop who torched him, and who he killed "Marathon Man", style in the pilot.

They put up a good fight, one of 'em ends up dead, the other probably in a loony bin, blamed for her sister's death.

Meh, s'okay, if you make this a double-feature with the pilot, you have an almost passable Freddy movie.

Better story going on than 5, anyway.


Mother's day


First half, fucking awful.
A kid hates his stepdad, and there's a bunch of dream-within-dream shit of him killing him, but not really, then, he really kills him...I think.
I can't remember.
Who cares?

Second half, a straw-man redhead version of Dr. Laura gives horrible advice to what turns out to be her own daughter, some dream-within-dream shit, and...I think..Dr. Laura is scared straight, or something.

Slightly better than the first half, but still a lame whiny-white-people episode overall.


Rebel without a car.


A grease-monkey kid finds a wrecked car in a ditch that turns out to be haunted, he fixes it up, there's some dream-in-dream shit, he dies.

I got to fantasize he was one of the boring assholes on The Speed Channel.
So, that was fun.
I think that's how you really get to enjoy this show.
Project your fucking contempts and hatreds, and let Freddy cleanse the filth away.
Very cathartic.

And on that note, the second half.

Some mean sorority cunts put this girl with lower-class roots than them through hell, all the way up to dressing her as a whore, pushing her out onto the streets, and letting her get raped in an alleyway.

Then, they tell her they had no intention of letting her in anyway.

So, she fucking kills them all, and burns the place down.

Hooray!
Possibly the best episode of the series!
*Laughs*


The bride wore read


A husband-to-be has some repetitive dream-in-dream dream shit of evil hookers seducing then killing him, and it seems to scare him into fidelity.

Second half, now married, his wife goes fucking bonkers when after keeping the secret of her father's whore-mastering since she was a tiny little girl, her parents split anyway, and the mother reveals she always new about the cheating.

Some dream-in-dream shit, and she goes loony bin crazy.

Whiny white people shit.
Fucking terrible.


Do dreams bleed?


A high school football star has repeated precognitive dreams about "The Springwood Chopper", there's a lot of blatant beat-you-over-the-head foreshadowing that the coach is the chopper, but the first half ends with the kid implicated.

Second half, the girlfriend of the kid has some stupid dreams, finally, we officially find out it was the coach, the kid breaks out of the loony bin, and kills him, saving the girlfriend, but the stupid bitch doesn't quite know what she saw in the struggle, and the kid is still implicated.

No justice, the end.
Just like life.

Overall, bland episode, the ending is telegraphed in the first 10 minutes, then you have to suffer 35 minutes of stretching.
And the stretching is just everyone being fucking stupid.
Utter crap.


The end of the world.


This one I actually kinda liked.

I found out after George Lazenby was the shrink.
So, that's cool.

So, this chick who's mother dies in an opening flashback turns out to have the power to time travel with her dreams, and change the past.
Which is cool, and as you'd expect in a show like this, causes worse things to happen every time she makes a change.

Second half, the government gets ahold of her, and they use her to prevent World War 3.

The Freddy hosting segments on this one are good.
We never quite figure it out in the movies, but here, we get the open implication that Freddy would be perfectly fine with nuclear war, and if he could cause it, so much the better.

Of course, it gets prevented, or else there'd be no parts 6,7, or 8 of the movies, and Freddy, riding the bomb "Dr. Strangelove", style, says "I guess I'll just have to pick you little dogies off one at a time! Yeehaww!".

So, yeah, that's the only time we get a little sniff of what Freddy on a global scale busted out of Springwood would be like.

And the whole thing overall is like a half-decent Twilight Zone.
Not bad.
Pretty good.


Deadline.


Ugh, more whiny white people!!

Um...a nerdy kid works at a newspaper writing obituaries, and he dreams himself inside their deaths.
I think he dies.
I don't care.

Second half, even worse, a girl whose stupid bimbo friends die in a fiery car crash haunt her in her dreams, and I think she dies, or goes crazy...I don't care.

Dream-within-dream shit in both until your eyes glaze over.
Writer just can't pick a fucking ending.
Neither can you, as they all suck.

No one famous, total suckitude.


Black tickets


This one has Brad Pitt back when he was nothing.
So, hey.
Thank Freddy's Nightmares for Brad Pitt, folks.

Anyway, first half is sort of interesting, Brad gets hit by a car, but magically shrugs it off, him and his girl make it to a hotel, it's run by maniacs who put them through various tortures, which all turns out to be dream-in-dream shit, but then it ends with a time loop, and they steal a van, and hit Brad in the past.

Kinda Twilight Zone-ish.

Second half is fucking awful.
Jump to the future, same couple, and they're married, and pregnant, and the wife is having all kinds of melodramatic dream-in-dreams of childbirth ruining her career, and tying her down, and it ends where she's retreated within herself, and become an adult baby, and is in a loony bin.

Whiny white people shit again.
Or, as I'll call it from now on, WWPSA.

These "two parters", are all blatantly separate stories sloppily soldered together by carrying the characters over from the first, no matter how badly their personalities have to be butchered to service the second story.

Can't throw stones too hard, done it myself back in the day.
Interesting to see you can do that, and get it on fucking TV though...

Anyway, as you'd expect, Brad's the only one who can fucking act in this whole unfortunate mess of an episode.

And, Freddy turns into a cuckoo bird in a cuckoo clock, that's kinda cute.


School daze.


The only one I saw all the way through back in the 80's, as I said in the last entry.

I think I might've purposefully bailed on it after that, I seem to remember not liking that Freddy only hosted it, and the episode was kinda lame to boot.
And...I don't remember the second half the first time, so...I might've thought it was over at the first half.

Okay, first half, a kid has dream-within-dream shit involving the teachers running the kids through an elaborate Loony Tunes meat-grinder that somehow spits them out the other end as robots.

Somehow, this scares him straight against being a non-conformist.
Booo!

Second half, his stupid friend has all kinds of failure/death dream-in-dreams over his stupid fuckin' SAT test.

Whiny white people shit extraordinaire.

The non-fake ending the writer finally goes with, is while he had all those stupid dreams, he slept through the SAT, and has to take it next year, which will fuck up his life, but, in the nick of time, a limo shows up, and the hot chick inside says they heard his audition tape, and they're taking him to LA to be a star.

Garbage.
Glad I missed it, and bailed out on the robots the first time.
Damn.


Cabin fever


Robert Englund directed this one.
S'okay.

Leslie Dean, who plays one of two survivor girls in "Freddy's Dead", pops up in a minor role in the first half, and stars in the second half.
I hear she was also in the film "976-Evil", also directed by Englund, and I'll have to see that someday.

A guy on a plane has a bunch of air-crash-y dream-in-dreams, I think he dies.
Something to do with his dad ran a crooked plane parts company that sold shitty parts, and now he's paying for his father's sins by crashing, or something.

Freddy spoofs the creature on the wing from "Twilight Zone".

The stewardess from the flight, who was the dead guy's girlfriend, has a fling with some random asshole, and in a series of dream-in-dreams he turns out to be various flavors of maniac, including a corpse taxidermist, and...I forget if he really was or not, or if the chick died or not...

A passable episode.
And I don't just say that because of Robert Englund, the material was handled well for what it was.


Love stinks


First half is shit, second half, pretty good.

First half, some bullshit with a dude who's juggling two girlfriends, but only because the second is a stalker-y whore who forces herself on him, and into his life, and he doesn't have the balls to tell her to go fuck off, and that the first girlfriend is who he's serious with.
I forget how it ends, and I don't care.

WWPSA

Second half, Jeffrey Combs (Herbert West in "re-animator", Weyoun in DS9, Shran in Enterprise) plays a creepy step-uncle who manages a pizza place, and gets the teen protagonist a job.

Dream-in-dream shit makes fuzzy as to whether Combs is really making cannibal pizzas out of cheerleaders or not.

In any case, the kid kills him.
Two ways, and you're not sure which way is the dream or not, but he ends up dead in some reality.

I prefer him being shoved into the pizza oven, I'm going with that one.

Combs essentially re-doing his West persona elevates this one to flat out fun.
It'd suck otherwise.

Oh, and this is a hoot, the pizza joint is shown to have moved into the former burger joint from "it's a miserable life".
Now, that one had the kid dreaming that his leaving would ruin his parents financially without him there to help, and them guilt tripping him about it to shrill cartoonish extremes...and lo and behold, the place folded, it all came true.
Ha haa!
Kinda sick...the writer obviously had an impulse along the lines of "no, let's really beat it home that these people are ruined".
But, that touches on the raving misanthropy that runs through this show that I ranted about in the the last entry.


The art of death.


Horrible.

Except...the kid in it is short, and scrawny, and has black poofy hair in a sorta-pompadour, and looks amazingly like Harry Hembock.

And..he wears a denim jacket, like I did in high school, and is a cartoonist, like I was in high school.

Weird eerie fusion there.

The similarities end there, as he starts dreaming up his cartoon superhero to life, and his cartoons of killing his rivals come true, and his villain/hero kidnaps the object of his affections, and he "kills", the villain/hero to save her, then, he's suddenly wearing the mask and cloak of his character, and he's locked up by the cops.

Predictable.
And, the acting on the wrestler-type who plays the comic-hero is fucking atrocious.

Second half, the chick who was kidnapped by comic-book-kid has a bunch of dream-in-dream stuff about her claustrophobia, and it finally just-plain-ends with her being in a closet the whole time, and catatonic, presumably forever.

The end, ppt!


Missing persons


Utter shit.

First half is a total muddled mess where this girl babysits these two horrible brats, and somehow, they can read her mind, and taunt her with being a fat little girl, which we see several flashbacks to. At one point, she sees foods talking to her, and the effects for this are horrible, (we see a clip of this in "Never Sleep Again") then, some dream-in-dream bullshit, then she binges, and turns into a green pig monster with tusks, and devours the children.
Then, the whole episode is a dream, and she's really still the little fat girl from the flashbacks.
So, the whole thing fucking meant nothing.

Second half, the dad of the fat girl hates his stifling yuppie life, and magic/dream swaps into the life of what turns out to be a crime boss of some kind, and ends up gunned down, but swaps back into himself in the nick of time, and this scares him straight into being grateful for his stifling yuppie life.

I'm like..wait, your job still sucks, and your wife is still a striving pushy bitch, that didn't fucking go away...

Ugh...
WWPSA.



Freddysomething


A.K.A "the light at the end of the tunnel".

This one has two titles, because we're faked out at the beginning; Freddy in the opening hosting segment is watching a shitty "leave it to Beaver", knockoff, and Freddy puts a hex on it, and turns it into "Freddysomething", and the dopey sitcom parents are killed, leaving the kid, and then the kid goes down some creepy tunnels, then it's all a semi-flashback dream of the adult protagonist, and then the real story starts.

That being, the guy is claustrophobic (again already?) and takes a job in the paper that turns out to be down in the sewers.

He gets repeatedly scared by "monsters", that turn out to be dream-in-dreams, or pranks by his boss.

He ends up dead somehow.
We get the drift that the boss has "pranked", several people to death, and the ones that die "just don't have the stuff".

Dick Miller (Mr. Futterman from "Gremlins") plays the sewer boss.

Second half, a guy who runs a porno video store pisses off a vendor who has some kind of powers or something, he dies probably.
Who cares?

Overall, meh.


Identity crisis


The late Jeff Conaway is in this one.

This one tears right into the whole baby boomer thing I've ranted about.

Conaway is a former-hippie sellout, and his son is becoming Alex P. Keaton meets Patrick Bateman.

And, he has a bunch of dream-in-dream stuff involving the kid becoming a homicidal Nazi.

Then, he dies from being stabbed by a mugger in a parking lot, and all the dreams were his dying thoughts.
And, the kid cries, and we're left to assume he's scared straight somehow.

Lot of 'em use the "occurrence at owl creek bridge", twist, it gets fucking old fucking fast.

Second half...a girl starts wondering whether she's adopted..and the dream-in-dream shit is so thick, I don't even know or care what happened.

I'll give this one a passing grade, only because of my personal reaction to the boomer shit, and my sneaking suspicion that the yuppie characters may have inspired "American Psycho".


Safe sex.


Freddy-centric.

A guy falls for a goth chick who's more into Freddy than any living guy.

Freddy kills the guy.

Second half, pretty sure he kills the girl too.

The goth girl is hot.
Ogling her skimpy 80's outfits, and creamy flesh, saves the whole episode.

Written by David J. Schow.
...can't find anything really decent that he's laid his mitts on...
I do know he wrote a shitty draft for "Freddy vs. Jason", that made the wait for it a couple years longer, and I loathed him for that back then.

And guess what his draft involved?
A goth chick trying to bring back Freddy!

Jesus fucking Christ!

So..that was season 1.

Let's count up good vs. shit...

Tallied up, 9 good, 13 bad.
Of those 9, a good chunk are only just passable.
A decent chunk of the 13 bad are because of WWPSA.

I'd have to say, the pilot, the second half of "Rebel without a car", and "the end of the world", are probably the absolute best of this lot.

On to...


Season 2


I seem to recall this one having more gems, let's see if I'm right....


Dream come true


Freddy-centric, the premiers and finales generally were.

A kid has Freddy dreams, an obnoxious shrink with TV camera in tow tries and fails to cure the kid, dies himself.

Second half, the cameraman from the first half sees Freddy popping up everywhere, Freddy frames him for some crimes.

Meh, passable because of Freddy.



Heartbreak hotel


First half, a tabloid reporter's fake stories start to come true, and he's killed in the end by his own bad grammar.

Second half, an amnesia victim starts remembering that he killed someone, and his alleged wife and daughter turn out to be the wife and daughter of his victim, waiting for him to get his memory back, so they can hear his confession, and kill him.

Both of these have nice twists, and are handled well.
Good episode!


Welcome to Springwood


A couple moves to Springwood, and while the husband is at work, the wife unpacks, and finds bloody swords, and knives, and has nightmares of the maniac who's stuff they've swapped with.

Turns out to be the husband, and she kills him in self defense.
Lame.

Second half, a chick finds 100 year old love letters that escalate to a violent love triangle.
She dreams herself into them so deeply, she time warps herself into a reenactment of the wife being blown away by the husband and mistress, and really dies.

Lame.

Okay, rather than whiny white people, this one has sappy white people.
Sappy yuppie white people also dogged the 80's version of "Twilight Zone", and inundated "Amazing Stories".
I think some of those hacks migrated to Freddy this season.
I'll abbreviate this down to SYWP for "sappy yuppie white people".
Cuz, you don't see blue-collar people do the sappy "la de da", bubble-headed shit these people do.


Photo finish


Freddy-centric, and a decent one.

First half, a female SYWP photographer has a "big break", to get out of her crappy family photography gig by shooting some Halloween-y shit with some models for a magazine.

Course, the photos are awful, and the agent is a sap to say this shit is groundbreaking, but TV is fake as shit, so whatever.

Anyway, Freddy starts fucking with the models, which gives them genuine fear for the pictures, and makes them "better".

Freddy finally kills one of them, photographer bitch hides the body, thus becomes corrupted by her meager success, and Freddy pokes her eyes out, so when her stuff is published, she can't see it.

That bit is weak, second half is better.

Three FBI agents investigate a Freddy-based murder of an entire family.

The protagonist, a mockery (or is it a sloppy homage?) of the Graham character from "Red Dragon", gradually sorts out that the father was the killer, and that Freddy made the wife and daughter look like him, so in some sleepwalking state, the father would shoot them, thinking it was him, then, Freddy slit his throat.

Then, Freddy pulls the same routine on the agents, and their bodies end up in the chalk outlines of the first 3 corpses.

This bit is very well done, and more than makes up for the weak first half.
One of the best episodes of both seasons.

Oh, and Jason Wingreen (Harry the bartender in "All In The Family") stars as one of the FBI agents.
A cool character actor who's been in everything.
The ones with cool guest stars tend to be the good ones.
The ones where nobodies carry the whole thing tend to be miserable.
A pattern I noticed.


Memory overload


I was hoping this one would be good, but...no.

A drunken theater teacher tries to protect a student from his abusive drill sergeant dad.

Then, inexplicably, the guy becomes sober, and the kid becomes drunk, then, the kid vanishes, and their personalities merge, and you find out the kid was a dream, and was really the professor as a kid, and the drill sergeant is his dad, and has been dead for years.

Then, the kid walks in again, it all starts all over again, and the whole thing is a loop that plays in the guy's head when he drinks.

Meh, okay, but the second half ruins it.

A bitch at the credit bureau fixes stuff for her friends, messes up shit for people who displease her, and punishes/rats-out people who do the same, so, we hate her.

Her dream-in-dream shit involves her getting sucked into her computer to retrieve the files of a guy she wiped out because she thinks he stood her up, but didn't.

Tron, it ain't.

Anyway, whole thing is a dream, and the whole thing was a hacker trick played on her by the co-worker she screwed over.

She gets hauled off to the nuthouse for beating up her computer in a frothing meltdown.
PPT.


Lucky stiff


Awful.

Well...David L. Lander (Squiggy from "Laverne and Shirly") is in this one, and I like him, but this one is weak, so there goes that rule...

Well, anyway, Squiggy is a nerdy guy who's wife is fucking the plumber, and then he dies of a heart attack, and leaves behind a winning lottery ticket, and the wife and plumber furiously look for it, and think it might have been buried with him, so they open his crypt, but it ain't there, and the greedy wife decides she doesn't want to share with the plumber, so she seals him in the crypt.

Then, Tracy Walter (Bob from "Batman", Malak from "Conan the Destroyer", Miller from "Repo Man") as the grave digger shows up, and blackmails her into marrying him to keep his mouth shut.

Meh...*wavey hand* okay, this would be a standard "Tales From The Crypt", which is better than the WWPSA shit from the first season..so, I'll give it a passing grade.


Silence is golden


A DJ who's a straw-man of Howard Stern mixed with Don Imus punches a mime, and is then haunted by him, until he ends up with a steel rake in his throat that renders him mute.

Silent mime, silent DJ, get it?
*Groan*

Yep, it fit with the times, liberal-America hypocritically decided the answer to Howard Stern was censorship.

Extra hypocritical putting this on the Freddy show, considering the censorship stuff New Line always fought and won over Freddy.

But, whatever.

Second half, another bad soldering job between the two stories, the mime turns out to be a cat burglar, and we never hear of his mime work again.

So, the mime/burglar robs from a house, and then on the news, he hears the people were killed, and he's innocent, but is getting the blame.

Some bullshit later, and it was all a setup by his shitty greedy wife, and she kills him, and the pawn guy who unloads the stolen goods, and gets to claim self defense, cuz of the frame-up stuff.

Man, women don't come out too good in this show, do they?

You can kinda use this show to dissect the flaws in the whole horror genre.

Flaws Wes Craven fought against in the very first "Nightmare on Elm Street", by having a strong female hero.

But, there's a rant for another time...

Hmm, anyway this episode overall...well, damn...it's acted well for a change, the character stuff is written well for a change, it's all executed well..and there's no WWPSA, or SYWP, but...I gotta take big points off for the attack on free speech, and the creeping misogyny.

Yep, flunks with a D minus.


Bloodlines


Another one elevated by a good guest star.

Marc Alaimo (Gul Dukat from DS9) plays a creepy bank robber busted out of jail and looking for his hidden ill gotten gains, and butts up against his angry revengeful son.

I'll spoil it, the sons kills him.
And you're glad.

Second half, jump ahead to the future, the son has married, and the couple has adopted a little girl.
The wife turns out to be a SYWP who suspects the girl of being a demon seed based on nothing but her weird dreams, and proceeds to treat her like shit because of these suspicions, including repeatedly openly speculating on her genetic lineage where the girl can hear, and be scarred.

Finally, the dumb bitch falls through a railing, and dies via tripping over a rollerskate, that the episode hints that the girl may have set to rolling on purpose.

Hey, I don't care if she did, the dumb idiot rolls on the thing for a good three to four seconds, and could have stopped by just putting her right foot down.

SYWP.
And more subliminal horror misogyny to boot.

Lame.

First half was good, second half dragged it down.
C minus.


Monkey dreams


The second one directed by Robert Englund.

Meh....

First half, is a sequel to "memory overload", only in that the guy who had his credit destroyed by the bitch in that one is the scientist in this one.

I dunno, he's got some debts with the mob, and he needs grant money to pay them off, and he can only get that money by success in his research, which is far-fetched, because he's listening for aliens.

He thinks he's picking up alien codes, and it turns out to be from an intelligent monkey in the lab down the hallway.

The mob sharks shoot him, the end.

Second half, Sherman Howard (Lex Luther in "Superboy the series") plays Dr. Lynch, an expert in..well...monkey torture, I guess.
His female assistant is another SYWP who doesn't like what he's doing to the monkey, so, falls in with PETA nuts, but they weren't called PETA nuts, they had some other name, but anyway, he uncovers her plot, and some stuff happens, and...the monkey can talk..and...it just sorta peters out.

Sorry, Robert, it stunk.
*Shrugs*


Do you know where your kids are?


Sequel to "bloodlines".
What little bit I liked that one, this one ruins it.

So, the the guy from the end of part 2 of "bloodlines", has remarried, and as a couple, they're even worse assholes, and have locked the "bad seed", daughter down in the cellar, and she's a teenager now.
A babysitter comes over, and with all such cellar-kid stories, they deem it perfectly fit to leave a stranger there with nothing but a weak half-hearted verbal warning.

So, of course, the babysitter gets nosey, goes down to the cellar, opens the dungeon door, and gets captured by the crazy girl, who steals her clothes, and escapes pretending to be her.

Second half is extra retarded.

The mother of the captured girl is so distraught, she goes a little crazy, and the crazy girl comes home, pretends to be the daughter, and the twitchy mother goes along with it, like Seymor Skinner's mother in "the principal and the pauper", in what has to be the ultimate fucking display of SYWP.

The captured babysitter escapes, comes home, and the batshit mom with the crazy girl whispering in her ear like Grima Wormtongue shoots her own daughter down in cold blood.

The mother is carted off either to jail, or the loony bin, and the crazy girl scurries off to further misadventures.

The SYWP quotient is off the charts, it needs a new scientific measure.
Words truly fail me.


Dreams that kill


Freddy-centric.

Sequel to "dream come true".

A character who's a straw-man of Morton Downy Jr. is going to do an episode called "dreams that kill", about Freddy, picking up from the events of "dream come true", but Freddy starts threatening him in dreams not to do it, while his producers relentlessly pressure him to do it.

He's forced into it, and Freddy kills him.

Later, a patient receives an illegal experimental brain tissue graft from the dead talk show host, and inherits his Freddy dreams.

Eh, mediocre, only elevated to a passing grade by Freddy.


What you don't know can kill you


A pervert shrink rapes his patients with hypnotic suggestion (a timely topic then, given that rapist shrinks and dentists were all over the news and talk shows at the time) and gets caught in the act by a colleague, and hatches a plot to have him killed.

The twist, the hypnotized patient he sends to kill him is dyslexic, and reads the office door numbers backwards, and kills the pervert-hypnotist instead.

Second half, the hypnotized dyslexic goes to a plastic surgeon to change his face to avoid the cops, but he accidentally gets the face of a mobster who turned state evidence, and gets whacked.

Both of these had nice little "Twilight Zone", twists, nicely done.


Easy come, easy go


Sequel to "lucky stiff".

The Black Widow from "Lucky stiff", tries to kill off her new husband (Tracy Walter) and figures out he's not after her money, but he really loves her, and then she falls in love with him...and accidentally poisons him anyway.

Second half, her sister, and her creepy husband show up, and the husband is an old ex-boyfriend of hers that wants revenge.

She seduces and kills him.

The sister walks in, and reveals that "it must run in the family...I killed our parents", then she shoots her.

With a mouthfull of blood, she utters her last words "easy come, easy go..".

Again, nice little twists, worthy of being lesser "Twilight Zones", or "Alfred Hitchcocks".

Passable.


Prime cut


I really dug this one.

Guest star is Sandahl Bergman (Valeria in "Conan the Barbarian").

Her hair is butched off, but she's still a hottie, and we get to see her in those 80's "V", bikini panties I mentioned were all the rage at the time.

Sss, yow!

Anyway, fist half, she's camping with a bunch of guys, and they all start thinking she's a vampire.

Then, that's all a dream, and the second half, it turns out they had a plane crash, and the main guy and her are the only survivors, and they have to eat the rest of the guys to survive.

Damn, but Sandahl is sexy in this, and where it's a story of cannibalism, that's really saying something.

Up there with my favorite episodes of the whole series.


Interior loft


Oh, these ones are stupid...

Okay, a husband persuades his writer wife to do a sexy 976 number recording.

Then, one of the callers starts killing, and she starts to have a breakdown.
The crappy twist, the investigating cop is the killer.
The husband kills him in self defense.
The end.
Until..

Second half, the husband reads the wife's novel, and thinks she may be taking on the personality of her homicidal character.

She is, and she kills him.

Lame.


Interior loft, later


A sequel to "interior loft"? Really? We needed that?

Well, it's a "sequel", only in that new people move into the same apartment...and redecorated it drastically, so you barely recognize it.

Lesseee, an asshole artist fakes his death to increase the value of his shitty sculptures...of course, he dies.
Do the details really matter?

And then, a just plain asshole plays two bimbos for suckers with elaborate bullshit stories, and then it backfires when a real robber shows up, and they (the bimbos) shoot them both (the burglar and the asshole) with that they think is a fake gun, and let them die.

Lame.


Funhouse


Sequel to "welcome to Springwood".

Unh, I can barely remember...a bitch is cheating, she gets killed with a spiky bed or something...

Then...yet another couple moves into the house, the wife starts screwing around with the moving man from "welcome to Springwood", her husband is a wheelchair-bound old fart who doesn't mind her cheating, and likes to watch, then...it goes off the rails, the guy kills the wife, goes to kill the old man, the bullets turn out to be fake, the wife is alive, the old man takes off his mask, and is the guy who killed the bitch in the last one, this whole setup is their twisted version of performance art that gets them off, then he kills the moving guy with the spiky bed from the last one.

Stupid.


A family affair


Holy shit, BLACK PEOPLE!!!

So, this one is sort of Huxtables meet "fatal attraction".

Second half, "Theo", takes up a smack habit.

Freddy, with serious face on, says "drugs are the real nightmare".

Really?
Really, Freddy?
Preachy Freddy on my damned boob tube?
Are you fuckin' kiddin?

Well, he made up for it with the "let's trip out", scene in "Freddy's Dead".

But don't do that again, Freddy.
Only thing worse than PSA Freddy...is PSA Pee-Wee.


Dust to dust


Sequel to "prime cut".

A lot goofier than that one, but I kinda like it.

First half, the dude, his fiancee, and Sandahl are recovering cannibals complete with a support group after their last adventure.

A lunatic smashes into their shared trailer, and they eat him.

Then, they hear on the news he was patient zero for a horrible disease.

Second half, the government has them in quarantine lock down.
It's revealed the lunatic was crazy from the virus, and he was an astronaut who caught the disease in space, so it's alien.

Everyone infected with it eventually goes cuckoo, does a bad impression from a movie, and turns into blue powder with a crappy ripoff Trek transporter effect.

Soon, it gets down to just Sandahl.

Tim Russ (Tuvok from ST: Voyager") guest stars, and tries to bust her out, and infects the other crooked scientists by putting the blue powder in their protein shakes.

Everyone dies but Tuvok and Sandahl, and at the last minute, they discover that sexual desire is the trigger for the disintegration, just as they start to make out.

Sandahl dies, Tuvok is left alone.

I liked it.

Very Outer Limits-y.

And I lust after Sandahl Bergman.


Prisoner of love


Utter crap.

Dull story, dull acting.

A priest falls in lust with a female prisoner, and tries to fake her execution, and bust her out, but it backfires, resulting in her death.

Her cellmate blackmails him into trying the same escape with her, and he betrays her.

Bland, bland, bland.


Life sentence


More boring prison shit on the same sets as the last one.

A guy is getting released early from prison for testifying against a bigger fish, but his counselor is the daughter of the cop he killed, and has the guy he had locked up out looking for him, and he'll get killed if he gets let out, so he stabs the counselor to death so he'll be locked up again, and safe.

But, the cops caught the guy who was out for him, and puts them in a cell together.

Second half, they do medical experiments on him with a hallucinogenic truth serum, to get him to give up the whereabouts of the stolen money he has hidden on the outside, so the warden can solve the case, to get re-elected.

It backfires of course.

Glynn Turman (black science teacher from "Gremlins") is the doctor doing the experiments.


It's my party and you''l die if I want you to


A Freddy episode, and finally, the last one of this damned series.

Sequel to "photo finish".
And the weaker half to boot.
Yeah, that's what we were all clamoring for as Freddy fans...

A fake psychic gets possessed by Freddy.
It's bad.

But, before she gets possessed, she makes fun of SYWP, the typical victims of psychics, so, that was fun.

Second half, Freddy goes to his high school reunion, and kills the chick who stood him up for the senior prom.

Well, geez, you think for a serial killer, that would be the FIRST order of business.

But, whatever.

Eh, mediocre, even with Freddy in it.

Okay, there, phew...let's do the fuckin' tally...

10 good, 12 bad.

And, of the 10, a lot were mediocre, to passable.

"Heartbreak hotel", the second half of "photo finish", "what you don't know can kill you", "prime cut", and its sequel "dust to dust", are the champs of this season.

Yeah, I was right, this one had more gems than the first by about twice as much.

Not too shabby.

Lotta horrible insufferable shit though...

Bob Shaye in "Never Sleep Again", nailed it by calling it "truly miserable television", but Robert Englund was right that there are some good ones that hold up, and stand the test of time.

A shame there isn't an official DVD release, Freddy fans deserve to see it.

I suffered marathon-ing the whole thing, and going over it for this review, but in both cases, worth it.

Now, one can sift out the good ones if one wishes.

I hope this retrospective did that much, anyway.

(Update: here's all the Freddy hosting segments!)

Now...onto the comic books...