The Scare Salon

At long last, I’m returning to my breakdowns of Night Gallery episodes, so let’s get right into this next half-dozen from season two.

Episode 7
“Midnight Never Ends”

This one starts out fantastically creepy and evocative, but can’t quite stick the landing, sadly. Like some of the previous episodes I discussed, it was directed by Jeannot Szwarc (of Jaws 2 fame).

A woman named Ruth (Susan Strasberg from The Manitou, which I discussed here) is driving down a long, lonely road at night, with no other cars, signs, lights, or towns in evidence. She happens to pass a hitchhiker, a young man named Vincent (Robert F. Lyons from Dark Night of the Scarecrow), who is clad in a US Marines uniform and holding a sign reading “Pendleton.” After a moment of indecision, Ruth reverses the car and lets him get in.

He asks her a bunch of questions, such as whether she’s going to L.A., but she seems hesitant to reply, almost as if she doesn’t know the answers. Vincent whistles part of a tune, and Ruth asks him what it is because it’s the same tune she’s had stuck in her head the whole drive. He claims that’s impossible because he wrote it; he has a guitar with him and tells her that he likes to write songs. It’s what he wants to do after he “gets out,” he says, although when Ruth asks him what he’s going to get out of, he can’t quite remember that either.

As the drive progresses, the pair pass no other cars and see nothing on either side of the road. They also start to realize that they already know each other’s names, and already have a good idea of what’s going to happen next, even though they’ve ostensibly never met before.

For instance, both of them foresee that there’s going to be a diner on the side of the road coming up where they’ll stop for coffee, and they both know that the place will already be closed but that the proprietor will let them in anyway, even though he won’t be happy about it. Indeed, this is exactly what happens; the diner is called The Blue Danube, and the crotchety owner lets them inside after a clock that inexplicably vanishes and reappears again demonstrates that there are still ten minutes until the diner’s midnight closing time.

Once inside, Ruth and Vincent get accused of being freaks and hippies because of their weird and seemingly psychic pronouncements, but it comes to pass that the diner owner can’t remember shit about himself either, not even his own military record, or how many people he served at the diner that day.

Vincent foretells that a sheriff will come by, see the diner’s open door, and come in to check what’s going on. And again, this also comes to pass, though just like before, the cop can’t recall details about himself or what he was doing before he arrived. There’s also the small matter of a strange and just barely recognizable sound emanating from somewhere above their heads.

At some stage, the cop shoots Vincent in the stomach just as he and Ruth appear to figure out what’s going on. It’s then that the “twist,” if you want to call it that, is revealed.

Modern viewers will probably guess the outcome of this segment, as it’s been done before, most notably in the 1961 Twilight Zone episode called “Five Characters in Search of an Exit.” Yep, all these people are characters in a story, and the frustrated writer (played by the same actor who plays Vincent) is having trouble figuring out what he wants to do with them, hence them being foggy about the details of their lives. Turns out he’s used these characters in other stories before, and can’t quite decide how they’ll all fit into the present narrative or what’s going to happen to them. The sound they were all hearing was the incessant clicking of the writer’s typewriter keys.

At the end of the segment, the story starts over again, with Ruth driving a slightly different car along the highway and picking Vincent up again; the implication being that these characters are caught in a kind of limbo that won’t be resolved until the writer sorts his shit out.

This started out great; it was really eerie and effective, and the mystery of how the characters knew what was going to happen beforehand was intriguing. Unfortunately, the ending is kind of a letdown, and as soon as I heard the noise in the diner I could tell what the reveal was going to be. Still a good segment, but maybe needed a weirder twist and a punchier ending.

“Brenda”

Based on a short story by Margaret St. Clair and directed by Allen Reisner, I can’t say I was that big a fan of this one; the main protagonist was an insufferable brat even though the audience is supposed to feel sympathy for her, and though I liked the premise, I felt as though it took too long to get where it was going, and again ended in a pretty anticlimactic fashion.

Laurie Prange plays the title character, a tween-age girl who is staying on an island with her family for the summer. At the beginning of the story, Brenda spies another girl her age playing on the beach next to a rad sand castle she built, and Brenda very deliberately stomps over there and crushes the castle underfoot, seemingly just to be an asshole. The girl who built the sand castle is understandably heartbroken and super upset, and at some stage, it’s revealed that Brenda has alienated every other kid on the island because she’s such a horrid little shit. Brenda doesn’t seem to care at all, though, drifting through life laughing gratingly and acting like a loner sociopath.

While frittering about in the woods that same day, Brenda comes across some kind of creature that looks like someone in a ghillie suit had a baby with Sigmund the sea monster by way of Swamp Thing. The critter chases her around, and I was hoping it was going to eat her, but no such luck. She successfully hides from it, but then decides to be her shitty self by causing it to fall into a quarry that it can’t get out of. This amuses her no end, and though she seems interested in the monster, asking how it got to the island and so forth, she decides she’s just going to leave the poor thing stuck down in this craggy ravine. Get fucked, Brenda.

Later, Brenda’s dad (played by Glenn Corbett, who I recognized as Zefram Cochrane from the original Star Trek series) yells at her for being such a douche and makes her go apologize to the parents of the girl whose sand castle she destroyed. She does it, grudgingly, and even tries to get the girl to come to the ravine to see the monster, but the girl wisely blows her off, claiming she’d rather do housework. Harsh, but fair.

Brenda goes back to visit the monster and asks it more questions about its origins, which of course it doesn’t answer because sentient piles of seaweed generally can’t talk. At last, she seems to feel a little bit bad about trapping the creature down there and sort of tries to help it out, but when it starts to climb out on its own, she wigs out and hauls ass away from there.

Later on, while she’s in bed, she overhears her parents talking about her, and after they’ve retired for the night, she goes downstairs and leaves the front door cracked open, presumably so the monster can come in and fuck them up. The monster does indeed come inside, and Brenda’s mom and dad try to hold it off while calling their neighbors to come with their shotgun. The neighbor says he already shot at the thing, though, and it didn’t have any effect.

The adults must have found some way to subdue the creature, though, because the next morning, Brenda finds a huge pile of rocks like a cairn at the bottom of the ravine, which we’re led to assume houses the remains of the monster. Brenda now feels really bad, vowing that she’ll be back again next summer, that he’s her only friend, and that she loves him. Sorry, what?

Anyway, the following summer, she returns with her family to the island. The rock pile is still there and she is led to believe that her monster friend is still alive underneath it. She hugs the rocks and talks to him, telling him she’s going to let him out. And that’s it.

I get what the story was going for; here’s a girl who’s lonely and has a hard time making friends, so she lashes out at others, which makes it even more difficult for people to relate to her. We’re meant to sympathize with her loneliness and find poignancy in the fact that she’s befriended another misfit, a strange monster who wandered onto the island.

A story like this could absolutely work, but as I mentioned, Brenda is not likable or sympathetic at all, and just comes across like a cruel jerk, so you don’t entirely buy it when she suddenly tells the monster she loves him at the end. The monster itself was pretty cool, but honestly, I was just kind of hoping he would tear her limb from limb and then go about his monsterly way. I’m sure the original story is much better; if you’ve read it, let me know.

Episode 8
“The Diary”

Written by Rod Serling and directed by William Hale, this one was actually pretty decent, despite the flowery, overly expositional dialogue (which most of Serling’s scripts had, honestly, so it’s not like it’s different in that regard). It also had a satisfying twist ending that I admit I didn’t see coming.

Patty Duke plays a bitchy TV entertainment journalist named Holly Schaeffer, and at the beginning of the story, she’s on her show, really laying into an aging, has-been actress by the name of Carrie Crane (Virginia Mayo), who just got arrested again for drunk and disorderly. Seriously, Holly’s rant about the poor woman is brutal, and it’s later implied that there’s been something of a personal rivalry going on with these two for some time, since the younger Holly at one point “stole” Carrie’s man (although Holly’s take on this was: “Men aren’t stolen, they’re relinquished.”)

Anyway, it’s New Year’s Eve, and Holly is throwing a huge party at her swanky penthouse apartment. Carrie shows up uninvited with a gold-wrapped gift under one arm; the guard at the building’s front desk isn’t supposed to let anyone in, but he was a fan of Carrie Crane back in the day and agrees to allow her inside.

Holly is just as cunty as expected when the fur-coated actress slinks into her place, but she agrees to speak with her away from the other guests, making jokes about them killing one another. Carrie sadly tells her that she doesn’t want to hurt Holly; she just came to give her a present. Holly doesn’t open it, but Carrie tells her that it’s a diary she bought at a “funny little shop” filled with all kinds of unusual (read: cursed and supernatural) items, and that she paid out the wazoo for it. Holly’s all like, “Whatever, you boozed up old bat,” and tells the elder woman to GTFO.

After Carrie leaves, though, Holly gets curious and opens the package. Inside, there’s a diary, just like Carrie said, but the weird thing about it is there’s an entry already written there, dated January 1st. Weirder still, the entry is in Holly’s handwriting and laments what a bummer it was that Carrie committed suicide during the party and brought the whole mood down.

Sure enough, minutes later, the party guests scream, and Holly rushes out to look from the balcony, seeing Carrie dead as Vaudeville on the street below. At first I thought she had jumped from the balcony, but it’s established later that she deliberately threw herself in front of a car. Tomato, tomahto.

As the story progresses, new entries start appearing in the diary that Holly insists she didn’t write, and every one of the things written comes true, such as the phone in her apartment breaking, and having to cancel one of her shows. Her boyfriend suggests she go to a shrink because she’s starting to believe the diary really is paranormal, and she eventually relents, visiting a man named Dr. Mill (David Wayne).

Dr. Mill seems to think that Holly is writing the stuff in the diary herself while in some sort of a fugue state, and that she’s filled with guilt due to being such a nasty twat. In true nasty twat fashion, Holly rejects this idea, resenting the doctor’s attempts to psychoanalyze her.

However, while she’s in the doctor’s office, a new entry appears in the diary that makes it clear that her boyfriend is going to die, and that Holly feels responsible for it. She rushes to his office to check on him, but his secretary tells her that he left for the airport more than an hour before; he was flying out to San Francisco to check on some of Holly’s investments.

Unsurprisingly, the boyfriend is killed in a car wreck, and subsequently, a new entry in the diary says something to the effect of “not being able to live with myself.” After that, the pages remain stubbornly blank, leading Holly to assume that means she’s going to take her own life.

Before that can happen, though, she tells Dr. Mill to lock her in a sanitarium and keep anything that might serve as a weapon away from her so the diary’s prediction can’t come true, though she notes that it’s entirely possible she could die of natural causes nonetheless. One night, she’s yelling for Dr. Mill to come, and when he approaches her cell, she says she’s figured out how to break the diary’s curse. She needs a pen, she says, but the nurse won’t give her one (said nurse being played by Lindsay Wagner of Bionic Woman fame). All she has to do, she excitedly (and somewhat crazily) tells Dr. Mill, is write something, anything, on that blank page, which will negate the whole “prophesied suicide” thing.

Dr. Mill makes a show of not wanting to give her the pen, fearing she’ll harm herself with it, but he finally relents. As he’s getting the pen from the nurse’s station, the nurse is all, “You’re gonna give it to her?” And Dr. Mill is all, “You new here?” The nurse says she is. And then there’s the kicker: Dr. Mill says they’ve been giving Holly a pen every night to write in her diary…for five years, because that’s how long she’s been there, seemingly staving off death one day at a time.

As I said, the dialogue in this one was a bit unrealistic and overly theatrical, and the story did lag a little, but I have to admit I dug it; it was cool to see Patty Duke playing such a deliciously shitty person, and getting her comeuppance in the end. Though Virginia Mayo wasn’t in the story much, she was also great and sympathetic as the aging actress being hounded by her younger rival. Plus the twist was excellent and unexpected, kind of a hard trick to pull off in this context.

“A Matter of Semantics”

Ugh, another one of those comic relief vignettes. Don’t get me wrong, Cesar Romero is delightful here, but come on; the idea of Count Dracula showing up at a blood bank, thinking he can make a withdrawal rather than a deposit, was an old joke decades before this was made.

“Big Surprise”

This segment is also on the one-joke, “gotcha” side, but is at least more successful and entertaining because it builds up a nice feeling of suspense.

Based on a short story by Richard Matheson and directed by Jeannot Szwarc, the story stars the ever-elderly John Carradine as a creepy old man (smart casting, that) named Mr. Hawkins. One day, three boys are walking home from school past his house and Mr. Hawkins calls out to them, wanting to speak with the one named Chris (Vincent Van Patten) in particular.

Before you can say “stranger danger,” Chris approaches Mr. Hawkins, who tells him that in the nearby woods, there’s a big oak tree, and if Chris goes to that oak tree, walks out ten paces (whether we’re talking about adult paces or child paces isn’t established), and digs down four feet, he’ll get a “big surprise.”

Now, the skin-crawling way he conveys this information would have any intelligent child high-tailing it back home to call the authorities, but Chris thinks maybe the guy hid a bunch of treasure down there or something. His two friends are more skeptical, but are finally persuaded to borrow some shovels and go along to find out what’s buried there.

Because this is a horror story, you know whatever it is won’t be good, but I admit I wasn’t sure what the kid was going to find down there. The question is prolonged quite a bit, since the three boys dig and dig to a depth that seems like four feet, but don’t initially find anything, which causes the two boys who aren’t Chris to theorize that Mr. Hawkins was probably just fucking with them. They piss off home, but a determined Chris stays and keeps digging, yelling after his loser friends that they’re forfeiting their share of the treasure he’s certain is at the bottom of this hole.

At last, his shovel hits a big wooden box that could be either a treasure chest or a coffin. Care to guess which one it is? When the lid of the box starts raising by itself, much to Chris’s terror, I wondered if this was going to be another vampire story. But no…turns out John Carradine himself is in the box (!!!), and he sits up and grins that creepy-ass grin, saying “Surprise!” to the kid.

Well played, segment, well played. I’m gonna have to figure out how I can do this trick on somebody one of these days, though I guess I’d have to look as terrifying as John Carradine for it to really work effectively.

“Professor Peabody’s Last Lecture”

This last segment of episode eight is a very overt, on-the-nose Lovecraft homage, written by Jack Laird and directed by Jerrold Freedman.

Carl Reiner plays the titular Professor Peabody, a teacher of ancient superstitions and cult beliefs who thinks every single myth dreamed up by mankind is a load of hogwash that wasted precious time that would have been better spent on making practical progress.

The story takes place entirely in one classroom, and is almost a one-man show. The professor is reiterating a litany of all the superstitions they’ve discussed in the curriculum so far, but astute viewers will notice the names of several of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones written on the chalkboard. Peabody tells them he’s going to show them that all of this superstitious nonsense isn’t a thing of the past, as the worship of these Great Old Ones started only about fifty years ago, in Arkham, Massachusetts.

He then goes down the list of the gods, talking about each one, and as he speaks, a storm begins brewing up outside the classroom windows. A student whose last name is Derleth (nice touch) stands up and asks a question, and if that wasn’t obvious enough, another student stands up to make a comment, and Peabody calls him “Mr. Lovecraft.” This particular student is a stuttering, spluttering dork, which I found pretty odd; sure, H.P. Lovecraft was a weird dude, but not an over-the-top nerd stereotype like he’s portrayed here.

Anyway, the professor keeps talking, and reveals he has a copy of the Necronomicon, which he starts reading from with ever-heightening intensity as the storm worsens outside. At the very end, as a sort of lame punchline, the professor turns into another seaweedy-looking creature with one eye bulging out of the green mass of his face (a lot of seaweed monsters turning up this season). He calmly asks if there are any more questions, and the students look at him with mild consternation.

This segment just seemed kind of there; it was basically just made as a weak gag aimed at Lovecraft fans. There wasn’t any particular tension or suspense, as you knew exactly what was going to happen (well, not exactly; I admit I didn’t foresee the professor turning into a heap of boiled kale with eyes), and the whole thing felt very forced. Not terrible, but not great, though I still love Carl Reiner.

Episode 9
“House – With Ghost”

Written and directed by Gene Kearney, this segment concerns a man named Ellis (played by Bob Crane) and his wife Iris (played by Jo Anne Worley), who are spending some time in London. At the beginning, Ellis is complaining that they got the shit end of the deal in this whole real estate swap they did with another couple called the Twitchells: apparently the Twitchells got Ellis and Iris’s big huge house in the US, while they got stuck with the Twitchells’ dinky, three-room apartment in London that isn’t even big enough to have a proper party in, fer cryin’ out loud.

Iris is less concerned, having held a couple of successful séances in the flat, but Ellis finally convinces her that they should rent a bigger place. He comes across an ad offering houses for rent outside the city that can be had with ghost or without, and Iris loves the idea of living in a haunted house, if only for a month.

Ellis goes to a dusty old real estate office and pores through the books of properties while the old man who runs the place, Mr. Chichester (Eric Christmas), gives him information about what kinds of ghosts are available in the houses. He advises that it’s better to have a haunted house close to the city, because the ghosts tend to only make noise during reasonable hours, as opposed to country ghosts, who’ll wake up very early and start causing a racket. Ellis insists he wants a country house, though, because Iris has dizzy spells and health problems, and would do better out in the sticks.

Ellis finally chooses a house in the Cotswolds, being particularly taken with the home’s grand staircase, for reasons which will soon become clear. The ghost in residence is a relatively new spirit by the name of Mr. Canby; the reason the house is up for rent is because Mrs. Canby had enough trouble getting along with her husband while he was alive, and especially can’t deal with him in his semi-transparent, incorporeal form.

Once Ellis and Iris move into the house, there are a few ghostly happenings, and it’s also revealed that Ellis has been seeing a hot British blonde named Sherry (Trisha Noble) on the side. Though he’s promised Sherry he’s in the process of divorcing his wife, he’s actually planning on having Iris “accidentally” fall down the marble staircase. He convinces Iris to see a local doctor so her dizzy spells will be on record, but this doctor actually informs Ellis that his wife’s ailment is much more serious, and that she probably won’t live much longer.

Overjoyed because he figures he won’t have to go through the trouble of murdering his wife after all, Ellis calls up his mistress to tell her the good news. Unfortunately for him, though, Sherry (who it’s implied had lots of men on the go, not just him, though he obviously didn’t know this) has gotten sick of waiting for him to make good on his promises, and is moving away with one of her other sugar daddies.

Ellis is crestfallen, but as he hangs up the phone, Iris appears at the top of the staircase, asking him what he’s up to. At this point, a ghostly hand pushes her, and she tumbles to the bottom of the staircase, dying instantly.

Moments later, the ghost of Mr. Canby appears with a sort of invoice for Ellis. See, Canby (being dead and therefore privy to such information) knew that Ellis was planning to do away with Iris, and thought he’d help matters along. The ghost then basically threatens to kill Ellis too unless he agrees to rent the house in perpetuity, and pay the rent of two thousand pounds a month to Canby’s own mistress, who he had promised to take care of before he died.

This was an okay segment; I liked Bob Crane and Jo Anne Worley in it, and the scene in the real estate office, with all the talk of “romper room ghosts,” was quite amusing. A lot of these stories seem to be aiming more toward funny than scary, but in this instance it didn’t really bother me all that much, as the story and the acting kept me entertained.

“A Midnight Visit to the Neighborhood Blood Bank”

Damn, yet another “vampire at a blood bank” story? Well, not exactly. This one stars Victor Buono as the stereotypically blue-skinned, cape-wearing bloodsucker, who enters the window of a sleeping young woman one night. He bends down to drink her blood, she calmly says, “I gave at the office,” and he apologizes and marks another name off his list. Man, these creaky old jokes are really starting to get to me. I’m surprised the vampire in this one didn’t say anything about vindow viping, y’know?

“Dr. Stringfellow’s Rejuvenator”

Finally, a serious, atmospheric story that isn’t trying to be funny! Written by Rod Serling and directed by Jerrold Freedman, the tale follows a snake oil salesman named Dr. Ernest Stringfellow (Forrest Tucker), who, along with his supposedly simple-minded assistant Rolpho (Don Pedro Colley), has parked his wagon in the latest in a series of small Old West towns and is in the process of fleecing the locals out of their hard-earned cash with his “miraculous” medicine, which supposedly cures every damn disease known to man.

From inside his wagon, the doctor spots one man asking Rolpho some questions with a really intense expression on his face, and he starts getting a bit nervous, afraid they’re about to be run out of town on a rail. But the man comes to the wagon’s door, and simply asks the doctor to come have a look at his daughter, who is deathly ill. The poor man has lost his wife and other child, and there aren’t any doctors in town, so he’s getting pretty desperate.

Initially reluctant, the doctor changes his tune when the man offers his meager life savings, and Stringfellow then agrees to go outside to have a look at the girl, who is lying out in the street on a wagon. The child is in terrible pain and looks pretty gray, but the doctor, chipper as you please, sells the father a bottle of his amazing Rejuvenator, which will have her fixed up in no time.

After the father takes his daughter back home, we meet another doctor, Dr. Snyder (Murray Hamilton, otherwise known as the sleazy mayor of Amity from Jaws), who actually used to practice in the town but lost his medical license because he’s a terrible drunk. Snyder informs Stringfellow that the girl clearly has peritonitis and will be dead within a week, and excoriates him for taking the father’s money and giving him false hope.

Stringfellow seems to feel kind of bad about the whole situation, but not really, and he justifies his line of work by saying that he’s not selling the actual “medicine” (which consists of nothing but some caramel coloring and wood alcohol), but is in fact selling faith. As he drinks with Rolpho in the local saloon, he gets a wee bit full of himself and says that with faith, he could actually bring the girl back from the dead. At first I thought that was the way the story was going to go, that it would turn out that his Rejuvenator actually had powers of resurrection he didn’t know about, but nope…this one takes a much more somber turn, which I really appreciated.

Anyway, the father comes to the bar and confronts Stringfellow, telling him that his daughter’s pain is getting worse and she’s pretty much at death’s door. Stringfellow bloviates that he’s going to fix everything and bring her back from the brink, but in the very next scene, we discover that the girl has died, just as Snyder foretold. Stringfellow is all, “Eh, can’t win ’em all,” and makes plans to skedaddle to the next town full of suckers.

But as he goes outside the saloon, he sees the girl, clearly alive, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the funeral home across the way. It’s sort of dark, so he can’t quite see her properly, but he gets closer, asking if she really did come back from the dead or if she’s just a ghost sent to torment him. Once he gets close enough, the girl vanishes, and the funeral home’s sign, which has been blowing around in the stiff wind, breaks off and seemingly comes crashing down on him.

In the next scene, though, the undertaker tells Rolpho that the sign missed him by quite a bit, but he died anyway when his heart gave out. Rolpho looks dispassionately down at his former boss, telling him that even though Stringfellow always thought he was the smart one, he was actually the dumbest of them all. Rolpho then tosses a lantern into the medicine wagon outside, setting it on fire, and when Snyder asks why he did it, he says, “Why not? Nothing in there worth anything.” The fire then spreads to the funeral home housing Stringfellow, to which Rolpho remarks, “Nothing in there worth anything either.” Yikes, Rolpho is one cold motherfucker. He is right, though, to be fair.

This was a really good segment, spooky and downbeat, with excellent acting and a great atmosphere. Definitely one of the best stories I’ve seen in this batch of episodes by far.

“Hell’s Bells”

Another goofy installment that’s somewhat redeemed by the presence of John Astin (of the original Addams Family show), this one was written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, and based on a short story by Harry Turner.

An unnamed hippie, clad in black velvet pants and super groovy patchwork knee-high boots, accidentally drives his car off the road at night, causing the car to explode spectacularly and the hippie to go into another dimension briefly before sliding into a generic-looking waiting room. There’s no one else around, though when he drops a cigarette wrapper on the floor, a chubby housekeeper woman appears to pick it up, nagging at him for littering.

The hippie asks the woman, who introduces herself as “Fat Lady,” if this is Hell, and she says this is just the waiting room. After a few minutes of nattering on about how many people have been coming to Hell, she vanishes again.

The hippie hangs about for a bit, but then a red sign above a door starts flashing, “Next,” and the door begins to open by itself. The hippie wonders what Hell is going to be like, and he seems pretty chill, thinking about all the whips and chains and snakes and whatnot.

But when he passes through the door, he’s in a slightly dowdy-looking parlor, complete with tacky wallpaper and some actually rather nice Victorian furniture. Figuring this is yet another waiting room, the hippie then spots an enormous stack of albums and a record player on a sideboard across the way, and he excitedly starts sorting through them, hoping to find some by the Beatles.

Just then, however, the record player starts playing some Lawrence Welk-sounding shit on its own, and the hippie can’t get it to stop. He deliberately drops a piece of garbage on the ground to get the Fat Lady to appear again, asking her if she can turn the music off, but she tells him tough titty.

An old farmer man then appears in one of the chairs, and the hippie is initially happy to see him since he now has someone to talk to, but the old fart just drones on and on about boring bullshit, and then to make matters worse, a middle-aged touristy couple also appears with over 8,000 slides of their trip to Mexico that they’d like to show him.

The hippie is riding a major bummer, man, and demands for the Devil to show himself. A man in a classic Devil Halloween costume obligingly appears, and the hippie asks when he’s gonna get to go to Hell where all the cool Boschian shit is, but as you might have guessed, it turns out that this room with these boring-ass people and terrible music is the hippie’s Hell, and he has to be here forever. Hell is very personalized, you see, and the Devil tells the hippie quite calmly that this very room that he will spend eternity in is someone else’s idea of Heaven. Devil’s food for thought. (Sorry.)

Like I said, I’ll watch anything with John Astin in it because I love him, even though in this segment they put him in a ridiculous hippie getup and made him use every clichéd hippie phrase in the book. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would be able to see the joke coming from a mile away, so while this was cute, it was kind of a letdown after the previous, more serious segment.

Episode 10
“The Dark Boy”

Thank goodness, another solemn and sort of creepy segment, this one directed by John Astin and based on a story by August Derleth. Though it doesn’t hold any surprises and is essentially just a straightforward ghost story, I appreciated the eerie tone and lack of goofiness.

Elizabeth Hartman plays Judith Timm, a woman who arrives in a small town back in Little House on the Prairie days to be the new schoolteacher. She rooms in a house with two meddling old biddies who seem nice enough, but are clearly hiding something from her.

When Judith meets her students, she notices that there are seventeen of them; sixteen blonde kids and one dark-haired boy with a scar on his forehead (and no, it’s not Harry Potter). The two biddies say this is impossible; there are only sixteen students. Judith shrugs it off, saying she must have miscounted. She also informs the biddies that she’s going to be doing some work in the schoolhouse at night so she can get everything organized, an idea the biddies do not like one bit.

While Judith is working in the dimmed schoolhouse one night, she sees the face of the dark-haired boy peering in through the window. She tries to get him to come inside, but he runs off. Whenever she asks the biddies about him, they clam up and kinda change the subject, but Judith surmises that the boy must be kin to farmer Tom Robb (Michael Baseleon) because they look similar. Tom brings his other kid to school grudgingly and particularly admonishes Judith to keep the boy away from ladders. Hmm.

So Judith does some digging back through the records and discovers that the mysterious boy’s name is indeed Joel Robb and that he repeated fourth grade twice. When she’s next working at night and sees the child looking in at her, she goes outside to talk to him, telling him she knows who he is and asking if he would like her to teach him at night. He doesn’t speak but agrees to do this, and then runs off again.

It’s not clear at this point whether Judith knows that Joel is a ghost (because of course he is), but I guess not, because she goes to the Robb house and asks Tom about his “other son,” and Tom just about loses his shit on her, asking why she’s tormenting him. After he has a slight nervous breakdown, she finally gets him to tell her that Joel was indeed his son, but that he died two years ago after falling off a ladder at the school and busting his head open. Tom then says that he often sees the ghost too, but that the boy won’t approach him, which Judith attributes to Tom being afraid of him.

Judith later asks the biddies why they didn’t tell her the schoolhouse was haunted. They admit that they weren’t actually sure; the previous teacher complained of seeing Joel and they didn’t believe her, sending her packing because they thought she was crazy. In hindsight, they feel kind of guilty about it. It turns out that this previous teacher was probably also the person who sent a terse letter to Judith, telling her not to take the teaching job.

Anyway, Judith starts teaching the ghostly Joel in the schoolhouse at night, and one night Tom comes there, putting his fear aside and holding his hand out to the boy. In the interim, Judith and Tom have started up a bit of a romance, so they tell the boy to come home with them. Joel follows them for a while, but when they get back to the Robb house, the boy is gone, presumably having settled whatever matter was keeping him earthbound and gone into the light.

This was also a decent segment; it didn’t have any twists (even though I was expecting some at a few points), and it’s more sad than scary, but I liked that it was sort of melancholy and low-key without any attempts at levity. The acting was pretty great too.

“Keep in Touch — We’ll Think of Something”

This one was a bit strange, but I admit I sorta liked it. Written and directed by Gene Kearney, the story begins with a pianist named Erik Sutton (Alex Cord) reporting to police that his car was stolen by a female hitchhiker he picked up while driving around late at night.

The main cop in charge, Sergeant Brice (Richard O’Brien, and no, not the one from The Rocky Horror Picture Show) is gruff and suspicious and doesn’t seem to care one iota about the crime; he states outright that he’s not even going to look for the woman, which makes Sutton get (understandably) outraged. The cop is all, “Well, it would be different if she used the car in a bank heist or pistol-whipped you or something, but since she didn’t, meh. We’ll just look for the car.” So apparently boosting a car is perfectly cromulent in this town, provided you don’t utilize violence. Good to know.

They eventually find Sutton’s car and everything seems to be fine, but a short time later, Sutton returns to the police station and tells them that the same woman stole his car a second time, and this time she bashed him over the head with a gun butt before she did it. Sutton presumes she got his address from the registration and is now stalking him for some reason. Sergeant Brice wonders if this mystery woman had anything to do with why Sutton separated from his wife, but he insists the two things are unrelated.

Since the woman allegedly assaulted Sutton in the course of the theft this time around, the cops decide to haul themselves off their fat asses and put out an APB on her. To that end, they bring in a sketch artist so Sutton can give a description, and the drawing comes out so nice that Brice tells the artist it belongs in the “Louver.” He also crassly says he now understands why Sutton picked up the woman in the first place because hubba hubba.

We then see the woman (Joanna Pettet, who I recognized from the excellent and underrated 1978 haunted house film The Evil) coming out of a department store and being asked to come down to the station after a beat cop recognizes her from the drawing. Sutton comes in and looks at five women in a lineup, one of whom is the woman (whose name is Claire Foster, as it turns out). When Claire steps forward, Sutton clearly recognizes her, but then he oddly tells the cops that the woman who stole his car isn’t there before hot-footing it outta the room.

Claire, who seems just as confused as the cops, says neither she nor her husband plans to press charges against Sutton for all the shit he put her through; in fact, she wants to go talk to him and see if all of this nonsense can be sorted out. She meets up with him in a bar, they drink some martinis, and Sutton tells the whole convoluted story.

First of all, Sutton’s car was never stolen at all; that was just a story he told the cops, which seems like a drastic waste of police resources that would absolutely get you charged, so there’s that. Basically, Sutton has been having dreams about a woman who he’s sure is Claire, and the intense way he talks about it makes it obvious that he thinks this dream woman is trying to contact him psychically so they can be together.

He started believing that this dream woman might really exist somewhere, so at first he tried to hire a private detective to track her down, but the detective was just like WTF, and said he was gonna charge him an arm and a leg for what he perceived as a wild goose chase. So Sutton hit on the bizarre idea to make up the story about the stolen car and the pistol-whipping so that he could get the police to find her for free. It’s a little horrifying, frankly, and I’m surprised Claire didn’t just flee in terror from the bar as soon as he started explaining this cockamamie plot to her, because it just screams “deranged stalker.” But no, she stays and hears him out, which makes her a braver (or stupider) woman than I.

She tells him she’s never had any dreams about him, and that she’s been “contentedly” married for three years. Sutton hops right on that word choice, getting in her face with, “Contentedly? Or happily?” As their conversation goes on, it comes to light that Claire’s husband also has intense dreams, but more of the nightmare variety; she tells Sutton that he has a recurring dream that an unidentified man breaks into their house and strangles him to death. Claire says that his psychiatrist speculated that he might have some unresolved guilt about something, but what that might be, she says she doesn’t know. She further states that although her husband never sees the man’s face in his dream, the assailant has a long scar on the back of his hand. She then looks at the back of Sutton’s hand, but there isn’t a scar there.

As Sutton continues to press her, she finally admits that she’s afraid of her husband and isn’t sure what he might do. He’s in Venezuela on business at the moment, but he’ll be back in a week. Sutton insists that she leave her husband and come on tour with him; he’s going to New Zealand and Australia in a few days, and her husband will never find her. Claire says she can’t, but she does seem to be leaning toward going along with it. The two of them start smooching passionately, and while they’re embracing, Claire surreptitiously takes a pair of scissors from her purse and makes a big slice across the back of Sutton’s hand, telling him that he can stay at her place for a few days until the stitches come out. So I guess since Sutton is such a big believer in dreams and fate, he’s now obligated to kill her husband.

As I said, this one was sort of odd; the whole idea of making a false report to the police just so you can find a hot woman from your dreams is a bit out there, and it’s even more out there that Claire wouldn’t have immediately filed a restraining order against Sutton after he told her what he was up to. I also wasn’t sure if Claire had actually had dreams about Sutton too and just told him she hadn’t; I mean, it seems a bit coincidental that Sutton found this random woman from his dreams who just happened to want someone to kill her husband, who had just happened to have dreams about being strangled by an unidentified man. If you think about it too hard, it doesn’t make much sense, but oh well.

I also don’t understand the title of this story, as it doesn’t have anything to do with anything. But again, what are you gonna do? A decent segment, but a bit on the inscrutable side.

Episode 11
“Pickman’s Model”

Directed by Jack Laird and written by Alvin Sapinsley, this segment is of course adapted from the 1927 short story by H.P. Lovecraft, which has always been one of my favorite tales of his. Even though this segment added a great deal that wasn’t in the original story, I think it’s a solid adaptation, with some good acting performances and a pretty cool monster suit (although I would have liked it shown a bit less).

The beginning of the segment starts out something like the original story does, in the present day with two art connoisseurs, Larry Rand (Jock Livingston) and Eliot Blackman (Joshua Bryant) discussing a painting they’ve found in a shabby old attic loft one of them is renting. The spooky artwork, titled Ghoul Preparing To Die (unlike the painting in the original story, which was called Ghoul Feeding), was very likely painted by infamous 19th-century artist Richard Upton Pickman (Bradford Dillman), who disappeared mysteriously many years ago along with most of his canvases. Because this particular painting was found here, the connoisseurs surmise, it’s entirely possible that this very room used to be Pickman’s studio; no one knew where it was back in the day, you see.

We then go into an extended flashback and meet Pickman himself. Because of the horrific subject matter of his work, the artist has been kicked out of the Art Institute but is allowed to earn a meager living teaching well-bred young ladies to paint, provided he only teaches them to paint flowers in vases and harmless shit like that. At this particular class, one of his students, Mavis Goldsmith (Louise Sorel), paints the flowers in front of her, but makes them all wilted and dead, claiming that’s how she sees them. She also starts sketching in a face behind the flowers, which she says is supposed to be Pickman.

Pickman seems intrigued by her somewhat morbid nature that matches his own, but he sort of condescendingly tells her that when you paint what you see, you have to watch out, because you might end up looking at your own soul and not liking that shit one bit. He then sketches out his face in her drawing to look like a monstrous creature, the same one in the Ghoul Preparing to Die painting he’s brought along to show the class.

It also comes to light that Mavis has purchased one of Pickman’s older, non-scary paintings, a simple scene from the window of his studio. This will be important later.

As the women are leaving the class, an uptight old biddy, presumably a representative of whoever hired Pickman to teach this class, comes in and basically tells him he’s fired because some of the ladies’ parents have been complaining that he’s a bad influence on them. He goes to a tavern to drown his sorrows, but Mavis follows him, intrigued, and invites herself to tea with him, despite his strident protests.

After much back and forth, Mavis finally gets Pickman to tell her that he’s been working on a series of canvases based around a “legend” of horrible, half-human creatures who live in the tunnels beneath the city and periodically come out to capture women to use for breeding purposes. Mavis is suitably scandalized, but also fascinated, and asks if she can come to Pickman’s studio to see the paintings. He says hell no. She then confesses to Pickman that she’s in love with him, but Pickman blows her off, telling her he pities her feelings for him because he is way too tortured to accept the love of a woman, and also doesn’t have any need for human companionship.

Either accidentally or on purpose, Pickman leaves his Ghoul painting in the tavern after he storms off, like a one-night stand leaving a sweater in your apartment so they have an excuse to come back and see you again after you specifically told them to get lost. Mavis snags the painting and goes back home, where she has a discussion with her uncle George (Donald Moffat, also known as M.T. Garry from John Carpenter’s The Thing), who knows all about the monster legends, and thinks he knows roughly where Pickman’s studio might be based on the painting he did of the view outside his window. He tells Mavis it’s a rough part of town, but she goes down there anyway, bound and determined to offer her feminine charms to the artist whether he wants them or not.

When she gets there, not surprisingly, the place is creepy as shit, with rats scurrying about and a big, growly monster skulking around in the shadows that she doesn’t notice right away. She gets up to Pickman’s studio and is horrified to find several canvases depicting the same monster doing all kinds of terrible things, such as carrying a woman in a white dress and eating someone whose identity isn’t clear. There’s also another portrait of the woman in the white dress standing next to what appears to be her son, with the monster’s face half visible in the background. From this, the viewer is led to assume that Pickman’s mother was one of the people carried off by the monster and used for breeding; hence Pickman himself is half-monster. This is confirmed later when he takes off one of his ever-present gloves very briefly and his hand looks scaly.

Pickman comes home and finds Mavis there to his chagrin; out in the hall, he tries to calm the monster down by threatening to lock him in the basement, but nothing doing. The monster busts into the studio, big as life, and tries to attack Mavis. Pickman fights the monster for a while before they both fall over a railing to the first floor below. This kills Pickman but doesn’t seem to hurt the monster at all. In the fracas, though, Mavis is able to escape. She later brings her uncle George to the studio and hires a crew to seal off the well in the basement where the monster was coming through.

Back in the present day, the two art collectors are primed to find the rest of Pickman’s lost canvases and become convinced that they were hidden in this mysterious bricked-up well down in the cellar. Cue the pickaxe hitting the brick, cue a growl and a brief shot of monster eyes, and fade to black.

This was a good Lovecraft adaptation all around. Even though it deviated quite a bit from the original tale (for example, no one was attacked by a live monster in the story; the narrator just found a photograph of the monster that Pickman had been using as a reference), the changes made were in service to making it more exciting and cinematic. I liked the addition of the female love interest character, as it allowed for more conflict and an emotional core, and while I wish the monster had been kept more in the shadows, it was a decent costume, especially for a TV show of this era and budget.

I will say that the frame story with the two art collectors probably could have been cut out, even though it was the closest aspect to the source material; it just really didn’t need to be there and didn’t add anything to the story as a whole. But overall, I liked this quite a bit, and it was somewhat more faithful than the more recent 2022 adaptation that turned up on Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (though that was also entertaining and starred the awesome Crispin Glover as Pickman).

“The Dear Departed”

This segment involved a séance, so you just know it was going to be on my wavelength because I love séance stories. Although you could tell where the story was going from miles off, it was still pretty good and kept the humor to a minimum, thankfully. The story was written by Rod Serling and directed by Jeff Corey.

Famed lounge singer and comedian Steve Lawrence plays Mark Bennett, a fraudulent medium who goes under the name Radha Ramadi. At the beginning, he’s conducting a séance at which he uses his spirit guide Running Deer to contact the deceased daughter of one of the attendees. Even though the ghostly accoutrements are very obviously fake—Running Deer’s tambourine is just flying around on a piece of thread, as is the mannequin head with streamers standing in for the supposed dead child Dorie—everyone totally falls for it, especially after the spirit of “Dorie” drops her beloved stuffed elephant onto the table in front of her grieving mother.

After the séance, said mother is so appreciative that she hands Mark a check for five hundred smackers, and even though Mark pretends he doesn’t want it, in the end he’s all, “Well, if you really want to give it to me…” Yeah, he’s pretty slick, this guy.

After everyone leaves, Mark and his two co-conspirators—prop man Joe (Harvey Lembeck) and Joe’s wife Angela (Maureen Arthur), who provides the ghostly voices—gloat about how much money they’re going to make by taking these suckers for all they’re worth. Joe seems to be having some self-confidence issues, though; both he and Mark came from the carny circuit, but Mark is way more suave and sophisticated, while Joe is a more rough, working-class type. He tells Mark that he’s not sure he’s ready for the big time, and is afraid he’s going to fuck up and ruin their gig by doing something stupid. After a long conversation, though, Mark is able to convince Joe that he’s the best damn séance prop faker out there and he wouldn’t be able to do anything without him. Mollified, Joe happily goes to set up the next day’s séance.

After he’s gone, Mark and Angela start talking (probably too loudly; I mean, Joe is just in the next room) about the affair they’re clearly having, with Angela saying she’s not sure how much longer she can stay married to Joe, because he’s constantly up her ass. She can’t even go to the hair salon without the dude sitting there in the corner watching her, and Angela’s feeling a little suffocated. Mark tells her he’s gonna make all kinds of money and then they can cut Joe loose at a later date, but Angela isn’t certain she can wait that long. She also thinks Joe might suspect that she and Mark are in love and is afraid of what he might do, though he seems like an affable enough chap, if very insecure.

Later that evening, the three of them go to dinner together; Mark and Angela planned to send Joe to the movies by himself afterward so they could have some alone time (if you know what I mean), but Joe just isn’t having it, insisting that they all go to the movies together, because what fun is it going to the movies alone? He doesn’t seem suspicious, just baffled. Because Angela complained of a headache to get out of the movie date, Joe very helpfully offers to run across the street from the restaurant to get some aspirin from the pharmacy. Mark and Angela see their romantic evening going up in a puff of smoke, but then, fate intervenes.

Seemingly mere moments after Joe steps out of the restaurant, a police officer comes in and tells Angela that Joe got creamed by a truck and is nothing more than a crimson stain on the crosswalk. Win!

At the next séance, Mark is fretting a bit because Joe isn’t there to do all his cool prop shit and Mark is afraid that he and Angela aren’t going to be able to pull off a convincing séance without his help. Angela insists everything will be fine, but after the guests arrive and the festivities begin, the props indeed malfunction somewhat, with the tambourine crashing to the table and the ghostly voices all messed up and distorted. The attendees are starting to think all of this might be fake after all (which…yeah), but then, a real ghostly voice starts calling Mark’s name, and a phantom scent of cigar smoke wafts into the room.

As everyone who is not an idiot has already guessed, Joe’s ghost showed up at the séance, because he promised he was always going to be there to help out his friend Mark. So now Mark and Angela, who had just wanted the hapless Joe out of the way so they could continue their adultery, are stuck with his spirit form forever in some twisted ménage à trois. I hope Joe likes to watch.

Anyway, I liked this one quite a bit; as I said, the “twist” wasn’t surprising at all, but I didn’t mind, because it was still a fun story and the acting (especially from Steve Lawrence) was solid. I have a soft spot for fake séance type stories, so this one kinda pushed my buttons, though it wasn’t particularly scary.

“An Act of Chivalry”

Written and directed by Jack Laird, this wordless, less-than-two-minute segment was another why-bother entry, concerning a group of business people in an elevator. A woman gets on and all the men take their hats off, as used to be the polite custom, but at the next floor, a new person gets on, a tall figure in Elizabethan dress who’s just a walking skeleton. No one in the elevator is at all alarmed that the Grim Reaper has just entered their midst, and one of the guys gestures to Grim that he needs to take his hat off because there’s a lady present. Grim nods apologetically to the woman, then proceeds to remove his entire skull. Comedy! Again, I’m not sure what the point of these little interludes was, though I admit it was funny that a tall skeleton man got on an elevator and everyone was just meh about it.

Episode 12
“Cool Air”

Yet another H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, directed by Jeannot Szwarc and with a teleplay by Rod Serling, this one is fairly faithful to the original story, and though the acting performances are good, it does seem a bit dull and inert in the middle section.

Barbara Rush plays Agatha Howard, whose father was a scientist and colleague of Dr. Juan Munos (Henry Darrow) at MIT. Agatha’s father has died, and in the course of going through his letters, she’s come across correspondence from Dr. Munos that fascinates her, so she decides to go visit him in his boarding house. The character of Agatha was not in the original story, as it was told from the point of view of a male narrator who moved into the same boarding house as the doctor, but just as in the previous adaptation of “Pickman’s Model,” I won’t quibble with the added conflict engendered by making the character a potential love interest.

Anyway, just as in the original story, Dr. Munos has been working on foregoing the finality of death, and claims that he has a condition that necessitates him keeping his apartment at a chilly fifty-odd degrees with the help of a refrigeration machine. He also insists that he cannot leave his climate-controlled abode. Agatha is initially put off by the cold, but slowly starts to fall for Dr. Munos, which makes her mind it less and less.

In the middle of the segment, there are long scenes of them having dinner together and discussing various things having to do with art and philosophy and Munos’s research, but that’s neither here nor there and doesn’t really contribute much to the story.

At some point after Agatha and Munos have gotten close, there’s a storm that knocks out the power to the boarding house, which of course interferes with the running of Munos’s refrigeration unit. Munos is banging around in his flat trying to get the thing going again at three in the morning, keeping everyone in the place awake. In a panic, he calls Agatha, who rushes over and agrees to help him find someone who will fix the machine. It so happens that a man living downstairs is a mechanic, but he looks at the machine and can’t do anything with it until the parts store opens up in the morning, so Munos is shit out of luck. Ominously, when Agatha and the mechanic are in the apartment, Munos is almost completely covered with a white hooded robe with just one eye poking out. Uh oh.

Running out of options, Munos pleads with Agatha through the closed door of his apartment that he needs ice and lots of it. She manages to arrange for three hundred pounds of the stuff to be delivered and presumably dumped in Munos’s bathtub. This seems to work for a while, but Munos can’t stop the temperature from rising above fifty degrees and he knows he’s a goner. At this point, he finally confesses to Agatha that he actually died ten years ago (in the story it was eighteen years, but whatever) and had been keeping himself alive by essentially being cryogenically preserved while still being able to walk around like a living person. As he “dies” (again), Agatha busts into the apartment and sees his withered corpse lying on the floor, and she screams her bloody head off.

Other than the gender swap of the “narrator” and the addition of the romance subplot, this was a pretty close approximation of the original story. Despite that, I felt it went on slightly too long, with too many unneeded conversations. That said, it’s still a decent Lovecraft adaptation, and at least took the material seriously.

“Camera Obscura”

This is adapted from another short story that I was already very familiar with; the tale, originally penned by Basil Copper and appearing in one of my favorite horror anthologies ever, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me, was again written for the screen by Rod Serling, but this time was directed by John Badham (who, as I’m sure I mentioned before, later directed Saturday Night Fever, the 1979 version of Dracula starring Frank Langella, and WarGames with Matthew Broderick).

The adaptation follows the source story very closely, except for being fleshed out a bit more toward the end. Ross Martin plays Mr. Gingold, a somewhat addled but lovable old man with a fantastic collection of antiques and artwork in his home. René Auberjonois plays Mr. Sharsted, an officious moneylender who comes to Gingold’s house to remind him that he’s owed three hundred pounds as repayment on a loan a few days hence.

Gingold doesn’t seem all that concerned about money matters, and while snotty Sharsted just wants to get down to business, Gingold wants to show him some of his treasures, such as an original painting by Constable. Sharsted notes that the painting would fetch a pretty penny if put up at auction, but Gingold doesn’t want to sell it, or indeed any of his valuable possessions, even to repay his loan.

One of the things that Gingold is very keen to show Sharsted is a Victorian camera obscura, which gives a panoramic view of the whole city utilizing various prisms, lenses, and mirrors. Sharsted is somewhat impressed, but is getting impatient; is Gingold going to be ready to pay up on Monday or not? Gingold evades the question, instead starting to harangue Sharsted about his usurious ways and his recent decision to kick an elderly man named Mr. Thwaite out of his home for failing to keep up with his mortgage payments. Sharsted defends his decision and tells Gingold that maybe he should be worrying about his own finances.

Gingold asks Sharsted, somewhat ominously, if he’ll reconsider giving Thwaite a break on the mortgage. Sharsted says no way, so Gingold then offers to show Sharsted one more cool thing in his house. This is also a camera obscura, but a much rarer one.

When Gingold shows Sharsted the city through this device, Sharsted is surprised to see the same city, but as it was when he was a boy; there are gas streetlamps, buildings that he knows burned down when he was a kid, and so forth. He’s starting to get a bit nervous, but scoffs nonetheless, figuring that Gingold is simply playing a trick on him. Gingold is all, “You just go on thinking that, buddy,” and Sharsted takes his leave.

When he gets back out on the street, though, he’s horrified to find that he’s been transported back in time, and not only that, but everyone he encounters is someone he wronged in some way throughout his life. Since these people have all subsequently died, they look all like creepy zombies, and all excoriate Sharsted for fucking them over. Sharsted flips out and tries to run, but he’s trapped in this hellish past forever.

This was a very good adaptation of the short story; though I don’t remember zombie people chasing Sharsted at the end of the original tale, I didn’t mind the addition, as it made the story more interesting and horrific. Other than that, it was almost identical, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

“Quoth the Raven”

Here is yet another super-short, pointless segment, this one written by Jack Laird and directed by Jeff Corey. It concerns Edgar Allan Poe (who actually misspells his own name as Edgar Allen Poe and is played by Marty Allen; maybe that’s the joke, but there’s no way to tell) working in his study on his iconic poem “The Raven.” He gets the first line set down, but then can’t think of a word that rhymes with “dreary” until the raven on the bust of Pallas above the chamber door squawks out, “Weary, dummy!” in a voice that sounds kinda like Daffy Duck. Also, apropos of nothing, it seems that Edgar has a portrait of someone I’m pretty sure is Lizzie Borden framed over his mantelpiece. Dumb and a complete waste of two minutes.

Well, that will do it for these six episodes, so keep watching this space for whenever I get around to the next half-dozen. Until then, keep it creepy, my friends.