Thriller - "Pigeons From Hell"

Season 1, Episode 36

Original Airdate: June 6, 1961

Writer: John Kneubuhl (adaptation), Robert E. Howard (original story)

Director: John Newland

Producers: William Frye, Maxwell Shane

Cast: Brandon De Wilde, Crahan Denton, David Whorf, Boris Karloff

“Pigeons From Hell” is a masterpiece of slow-burn horror. At first glance, its creators seem content to embrace all the usual trappings that are trotted out to achieve cheap, impact-less scares. But instead of the cheap scares, we are instead treated to slow tension building over the course of the hour, deliberately paced to get under the viewer’s skin and linger there.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Two brothers (Brandon De Wilde and David Whorf) find their car broken down on an abandoned highway in the middle of nowhere. They come upon a nearby abandoned mansion… and then the horrors begin to happen. But instead of a bunch of scares straight out of the Universal B-horrors of the 1940s, writer John Kneubuhl and director John Newland aim to create the best movie Val Lewton never produced. It is an adaptation of a great short story by Robert E. Howard (a writer who inadvertently was the cause of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career by creating “Conan the Barbarian,” but don’t hold that against him), and in his adaptation Kneubuhl makes two distinct but very smart changes.

In the original story the young men are just friends, but here they are brothers. When Whorf’s character gets an ax to the skull, there is much more emotional resonance for both the audience and De Wilde’s Timothy. The original story worked fine without it, but here it gives the death extra significance, especially considering we only have five minutes with the characters before one is murdered.

Second, the short story takes place over the course of two or three days and nights, but Kneubuhl condenses the story to a single, endless night of horrors. That way the atmosphere is relentless – the characters cannot escape the dark and neither can we.

The most overt horror in the episode comes early: The aforementioned ax murder. While his brother sleeps, Whorf’s Johnny is drawn up the stairs of the deserted mansion by ghostly singing. When Timothy goes searching, he finds Johnny’s skull cracked in two. But that doesn’t make Johnny any less mobile – his brains still bleeding all over, Johnny chases Timothy out of the mansion, waving about the ax that was used to kill him. Despite the grisliness of what I have just described, the scene is played almost entirely by suggestion. While Johnny stalks Timothy in the hallway, we never actually see the split skull or the brains… all we see are drops of blood streaming down the front of his face. Everything else is hidden by the shadows.

Timothy manages to make it a few hundred yards away from the mansion before passing out. He is brought to the nearest Sheriff (Crahan Denton) by a town hick, and when the Sheriff decides to take the boy back to the mansion to investigate, we get the single inadvertently funny moment of the episode: The hick busts out of the house they are in and rushes off into the nearby woods like the Roadrunner escaping the Coyote. De Wilde, who many will remember for saying “Shane!” a thousand times in the film classic, also has the task of attempting to explain what happened to him in the mansion while being overcome with grief for his brother, and though his line readings might come off as hackneyed in another film, his innocent looks and inability to properly articulate himself actually works in favor of the character.

The Sheriff takes Timothy back to the mansion to investigate, and instead of a bunch of boo-scares and chains rattling, Newland provides viewers with a single, indelible image. Every time the duo enter the room where Johnny died, their kerosene lantern will not stay lit. The moment they exit the room, it comes back on. Any fan of a good horror movie knows the darkness is much scarier than seeing what is in the darkness, and that is never more obvious than here. Also, because there are no silly noises or faux-climaxes in the sequence, the viewer is consistently on the edge of his seat. There is no end to the tension until they leave the house – the threat of something bad happening ensuring the viewer cannot relax.

The atmosphere is only aided by the black-and-white cinematography, shot by Lionel Lindon (who also shot the incredible “The Manchurian Candidate” and the minor noir classics “Whirlpool” and “The Blue Dahlia”). I doubt there’s a shot in the film where everything in a given set is fully lit. Lindon uses the shadows to play with our expectations of terror, especially considering a character says early that the swampland is crawling with snakes. The lighting also makes some old-man makeup that would doubtless look hackneyed in color into something downright creepy.

Kneubuhl and Newland approach the episode’s climax with the same slow-burn mentality, refusing to ratchet up the pace for no good reason. As a result, Timothy’s slow, zombie-like walk up that decrepit staircase toward his destiny becomes excruciatingly suspenseful.

It's all about those eyebrows.

I got the “Thriller” boxed set for Christmas this year and have been consistently surprised at the quality of the episodes. It’s the only hourlong anthology series I’ve seen thus far that makes good use of its entire running time (unfortunately, “The Outer Limits” often feels like a half-hour show stretched to its breaking point to fill its hour) on a regular basis. I’ve watched about half the series (the first season is 37 episodes, so it’s not like I’m being lazy) and find that even the lesser episodes are still of legitimate quality, and Jerry Goldsmith’s musical scores are feature-film worthy, even eclipsing Bernard Herrmann’s scores for “The Twilight Zone.” The show pays homage to the Universal classic horrors of the 30s, especially with its use of host Boris Karloff (whose eyebrows here are epic, matched only perhaps by Larry Hagman’s in the “Dallas” reboot), but takes most of its inspiration from Lewton’s horror films of the 40s. Still, every now and then you can see the viciousness of the 50s Hammer films sneaking in. Since I love all those eras of fright, I feel like a kid in a candy shop every time I insert a new disc. “Pigeons From Hell” is my favorite, but I could have easily chosen “The Grim Reaper,” “Parasite Mansion,” “Late Date” “The Hungry Glass” or “The Purple Room”…and that’s just from the first season. It’s such a shame this show doesn’t exist in the public consciousness in the same way “The Twilight Zone” or “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” does, because it certainly deserves to be.

“Pigeons From Hell” is available on DVD and YouTube.

Route 66 – “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing”

Season 3, Episode 6

Original Airdate: October 26, 1962

Writer: Stirling Silliphant

Director: Robert Gist

Producer: Mort Abrahams, Leo Davis

Cast: Martin Milner, George Maharis, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney Jr.

“Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing” is a fantastic, wrapped present to fans of 1930s and 1940s horror classics. I hesitated for a while to write up an article about this episode because I don’t really think that it fits the definition of “great television” in the way the other shows I have written about here do. The writing here isn’t the best and it’s tonally different than the other “Route 66” installments I’ve seen. But that’s before you insert what I like to call the “awesomeness” factor at play here. I’m just a tad obsessed with those old classic horror movies I mentioned earlier, so to get to see Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney Jr. not only interact with one another, but don some of the most iconic film make-up of all time makes me happy in ways I can’t begin to articulate.

The episode opens with a young boy asleep in his bed when what appears to be a hunchback walks in. Turns out it’s just Lon Chaney Jr. (“The Wolf Man” himself, “The Son of Dracula”) wanting to tuck his grandson in, and he’s wearing his father’s get-up from the silent version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” At this point I checked my DVR to make sure this was really “Route 66” and it told me it was. Then we cut to a three-way phone conversation between Chaney, Peter Lorre (perhaps history’s greatest character actor, but know for golden age of horror roles like “Mad Love”) and (cue the Angel chorus) Boris Karloff (“Frankenstein,” “Bride of Frankenstein,” “The Mummy,” “The Old Dark House,” “The Black Cat,” “Isle of the Dead” and so many others, but most horrifyingly the “Mr. Wong, Detective” series for Monogram). At this point I figured I must have accidentally DVR’ed the wrong show.  This must have been writer Stirling Silliphant’s idea for a tricky, surprising teaser, and fifty years later it still works like a charm. In fact, this type of fake-out teaser has been copied many times since in horror series – just think of the “Humbug” episode of “The X-Files.”

The plotlines for the episode are light as a feather and done with an ample amount of good dialogue. Tod (Martin Milner) and Buzz (George Maharis) get a gig at a fancy hotel outside Chicago. Karloff, Chaney and Lorre (playing themselves) have come to discuss a possible television series they would star in and argue about whether they should stick to the old ways (Universal horror) or go the new route (Hammer horror), and Tod must act as their liaison to the hotel…or something. Buzz is in charge of a women’s lib convention and immediately falls head over heels with one of the secretaries there, who is depressed after her boss left her for his fiancé. Seriously. Though the A and B stories couldn’t seem more dissimilar, Silliphant finds ingenious crossovers between them. To prove the old scares are still viable, Chaney dresses up in Wolf Man garb and causes every woman in sight to faint in horror, and Karloff has a surprisingly sweet scene with the depressed secretary where he gives her love advice.

The real attraction here is getting to see the three legends interact with one another, with “the normal people” and dress up as the old favorites. Also, a quick shout-out to Lorre’s suitcase, which is alligator skin, has an actual alligator head as its handle (I’m not kidding) and almost steals the show. It’s always a thrill to see Karloff play a nice guy since his image is so synonymous with grotesquery, and here, playing a version of himself, he has a surprising amount of comedic timing, landing every punchline thrown at him. Lorre had long perfected his depressed-annoyed persona and seems to be having a horrible (meaning wonderful) time onscreen. Chaney is rarely out of make-up here, but I’m sad to report that when he is, he looks absolutely miserable. He can barely land any line other than grunting and seems to have trouble doing, well, anything. I have no idea whether it was his rumored alcoholism or what, but someone definitely needed to give him a Red Bull or something.

Chaney does do a decent job seeming very tortured while dressed up as the aforementioned Hunchback, the Mummy (though Karloff originated the role, Chaney played it in one of the sequels) and, of course, the Wolf Man. I got goosebumps when I saw Karloff in full-on make-up as Frankenstein’s monster, and how can you not? Since “Mad Love” was an MGM vehicle, Lorre must do his best with an evening jacket and evil glare. What makes it even more exciting is that it is the classic Jack Pierce make-up and not some second-rate knockoff.

It’s odd that I’ve come this far in the article with barely a mention of the two main characters, but they are ancillary to the episode at best. Maharis does a good job at being handsome (harder than it seems, I’m told) and has a neat little bit of physical comedy involving a pool. Milner interacts with the horror stars the most, but does the smartest thing possible here: He gets out of their way. The dialogue between the guys is smooth and well-written, and though they both are excellent actors who showcase their talents in other episodes, this isn’t one of them.

Silliphant was a co-creator of “Route 66” and also a show called “Naked City,” which I’m looking forward to sampling soon. Looking at his IMDB page, the diversity of his work and his output is almost staggering. This man wrote for “The Mickey Mouse Club,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and also penned the features “Village of the Damned” and “The Towering Inferno.” In what universe are those works related? Oh, and he was BFF’s with Bruce Lee! This is a writer I need to know more about, and pronto.

I love road trips. When I moved out to Los Angeles to attend the AFI Conservatory, I decided to try and travel down Route 66. I quickly found out that most of the highway is either very out of shape or just gone now, abandoned or paved over by the freeway. It’s a sad state of affairs when gas station attendants don’t actually know that their station is located on Route 66. And yet that time traveling out west remains one I will always remember fondly. I’ll always wonder what that highway, what that world, was like in its heyday, and feel lucky to get a little picture of what it might have been through this series.

“Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing” is available on DVD and YouTube.

The Outer Limits - "Demon With a Glass Hand"

Season 2, Episode 5

Original Airdate: October 17, 1964

Writer: Harlan Ellison

Director: Byron Haskin

Producer: Ben Brady, Leslie Stevens

Cast: Robert Culp, Arline Martel

“Demon With a Glass Hand” is a wonderful, complex science fiction story hidden underneath a beautifully shot film noir. It was “Blade Runner” long before that huge Geisha appeared on the skyscraper…and has better voice-over to boot. Writer Harlan Ellison sued the studio behind “TheTerminator” for plagiarizing his other (lesser) “Outer Limits” episode “Soldier” in a move that, to this writer, seems like quite a stretch. But though the mythology here is much different than “Blade Runner,” it’s impossible to not see all the inspirations, from the emotionless hero to the final twist.

Despite my obsession with all things “Twilight Zone” and love for anthology series in general, I’ve never before watched “The Outer Limits,” despite having the original series on DVD for a few years now. After finally digging in and watching several of the most popular episodes (“The Zanti Misfits,” “The Chameleon” and “Soldier,” among others), I was very much let down. Despite gorgeous cinematography and some good acting, the one-hour format stretched most of these science-fiction stories to their breaking point, despite very good ideas at their core. When half of your episodes feel like filler, you have a problem – the same one that “The Twilight Zone” dealt with when it expanded to an hour in its fourth season.

That’s one of the reasons why “Demon With a Glass Hand” (whose name doesn’t really make sense in retrospect) feels like such a breath of fresh air. Instead of filler scenes placed upon other filler scenes, writer Ellison provides us with an ever-changing Rubik’s cube of mythology, often so dense that the viewer is playing catch-up. It begins with a man named Trent (Robert Culp, purposely wooden) lost in modern times with a partially-constructed glass hand and several alien killers on his tail who are recognizable because they wear panty hose (not kidding) on their faces. Trent has no idea who he is, only that he supposed to be humanity’s savior, and he must retrieve the three missing fingers for the glass hand to understand entirely what has happened to him and what he must do to save the humanity of the future. And trust me, I’m just scratching the surface here. There’s more, lots more.

The first ten minutes of the episode feel like an exposition bomb has gone off. First Trent gets a boatload of information from the mysterious panty hose aliens, then more exposition from his hand, then he meets up with a woman and explains even more to her. It’s difficult to keep everything straight and would usually signal very clunky writing, but because Trent is almost as confused as we are, the exposition dump actually works to the episode’s advantage. We go along for the ride, waiting for pay-offs to mysteries we only half understood to begin with, and when those pay-offs come they are both surprising and fascinating.

Everything speeds up once Trent gets to an office building where the aliens are headquartered. Though director Byron Haskin and his fantastic cinematographer Kenneth Peach employed the shadows of noir from the first frame of the episode, the noir look goes into overdrive in this beautifully rendered building, filled with fantastic architecture and maze-like hallways. It reminds me a lot of the office in Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity,” and I wasn’t surprised to read that Ridley Scott used the sameplace to film the third act of “Blade Runner” (there’s that movie again).

Trent runs into a woman named Consuelo (Arline Martel) who was working late and turns her into his companion, not by choice, but because the aliens have put an invisible barrier around the building. Together they move up the several floors of the building, ultimately to the roof, before Trent descends back into the danger below as Dante did into the inferno.

"Cowabunga, dude!"

Many of the more sci-fi elements of the episode are almost laughable, and this is true of the show in general. The killer ants in “Zanti Misfits” had cute teddy bear faces and were obviously horrible models swung on strings during the final siege. The aquatic monster in “Tourist Attraction” would have fit better as one of Ariel’s pets in “The Little Mermaid” than on “The Outer Limits.” Here Trent’s glass hand isn’t the most impressive prop (and, for a long period of time, is stuck in a “Cowabunga, dude!” position). The aliens all wear a big necklace that, when torn off of them kills them and sends their bodies back to the future – and yet none of them think they might be safer if they just tuck it into their shirt. And I did mention the panty-hose faces, right?

I’m willing to forgive many of these in part because of the show’s budget, time period and that, yes, “The Twilight Zone” had many shoddy effects too. But what really saves the more eye-rolling parts of the production are the film noir elements. Even the most laughable costumes look awesome when shot in shadow, and the kookiest villains look menacing when you can barely get a good look at them. It’s inspired that Trent and the aliens use guns, actual guns, to do their battle. Ellison apparently was horribly unhappy with that decision, but seriously, what adaptation of his work has he not all-but-disowned after the fact, and here the guns bring a unique level of urgency to the storytelling missing from other science fiction (the guns used here are infinitely scarier than, say, the ray gun from Ellison’s other episode “Soldier”).

The twist at the end of the episode is a genuinely surprising one that hits the viewer on both an emotional and intellectual level, and fits perfectly in the world of noir. It is also darker and self-defeating than one would expect from an anthology, a trait that seems to be repeated throughout almost every “The Outer Limits” episode I’ve seen. Humanity always sucks, things never get better, and our heroes must consistently suffer for little reward. It’s a very dire notion for stories whose imagination is supposed to reach from the inner mind to the outer limits, and perhaps that’s another reason why I haven’t become fully invested in the series. The ending worked beautifully here, that’s for sure, but in the other episodes I’ve seen it just felt tacked-on, as if it was trying to prove a point. Ah well, the show still has many great qualities and I’m looking forward to diving into the remainder of the episodes. I will say one thing about it: the opening credits are much cooler than any of those in “The Twilight Zone’s” history. So that’s, uh, something.

“Demon With a Glass Hand” is available on DVD, AmazonInstant Video, Hulu, iTunes and YouTube.

'Way Out - "Death Wish"

Season 1, Episode 9

Original Airdate: June 9, 1961

Writer: Irving Gaynor Neiman

Director: Boris Sagal

Producer: Jacqueline Babbin, Roald Dahl

Cast: Don Keefer, Charlotte Rae, Heywood Hale Broun

Okay, let’s get to the elephant in the room. I cannot, for the life of me, comprehend why there is an apostrophe before the word “Way” in “’Way Out.” Though when I first heard the title I assumed it was an anthology focused on folk trying to find a “way out” of their problems, horrifying situations or lives, I discovered that the real meaning is that the stories themselves are “way out.” As in, “that’s way out, dude!” Were the creators and producers trying to be hip? The psychedelic intro where host Roald Dahl (yes, THAT Roald Dahl) has three heads seems to underline this theory. But still, what the hell is up with that floating apostrophe? Ah well, like the last third of “Mulholland Drive” and where Jimmy Hoffa is hidden, there are some things we are never meant to know.

“’Way Out” is a little seen, barely-available anthology series that was paired with “The Twilight Zone” for half a season before being cancelled. I had never heard of it until recently and sought it out because I simply had to see what the author of “The Witches” and “Matilda” (two books that really screwed me up when I was younger) did as a “presenter,” writer and producer on a television series. And I’m so happy I did. I’ve genuinely seen anything quite like this before – its tone is utterly different than “Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” or any other anthology I’ve ever seen. The storytelling is like a Rubik’s Cube, transitioning tonally from dark comedy to horror to mystery, all the while keeping its viewers on their toes because we genuinely don’t understand where its authors are taking us. I was never bored, always entertained and, by the end, picking my jaw up off the floor.

“Death Wish” opens with an introduction by Dahl, who rambles on for minutes in a rant that both fascinates the viewer and serves as a pretty damn good pitch for “Six Feet Under.”

“I’ve often wondered, haven’t you, what sort of man an undertaker really is. Is he a gentle, sensitive, generous person who undercharges madly because he cannot bear to profit from misfortune? Or is he a more sinister individual, who reads the obituary columns in bed at night and broods all day about the price of caskets? One doesn’t know. And none of us are in any hurry to find out either, because we all figure, quite rightly, that we are all bound to meet up with him in the end, just once.”

The episode opens in a funeral home, with George (Don Keefer) and his wife Hazel (Charlotte Rae) attending calling hours for someone or other. Hazel is blunt, brutal and addicted to the television, but not in an adorable way like I am. She seems genuinely unable to comprehend a life outside of sitting in front of the box, memorizing actors and storylines and considering the stories proof that Native Americans got what was coming to them, among other things. This woman is so dense that she can’t even fully comprehend a commercial. And so, of course, George decides to murder her.

Up until this point, “Death Wish” could fit into any anthology series easily, but that is when the really interesting stuff happens. An unseen narrator tells us that George is deciding what way to murder Hazel, but then stops at the problem of how to dispose of the body. At that moment, a wonderful twist of fate, he is passing the funeral home he was at earlier, and the Mortician (Heywood Hale Broun) is putting out a sign that reads: “Let Us Dispose of the Body.”

George can’t help himself. He goes inside to see the Mortician has a special sale on pine boxes and a “Do-It-Yourself Burial Kit.” It’s here that the audience is thrown for a loop. How serious exactly are we supposed to be taking the situation? Is this just a really dark comedy with no connection to logic? Or is writer Irving Gaynor Neiman just teasing us to throw us off balance?

The rest of the episode continues to toe that line beautifully, with the viewer unable to take any of it very seriously, but still remaining oddly invested in the goings on. The final twist is a doozy: George finally signs some forms to allow the Mortician and his assistant to “take care” of his wife, only to discover that he was literally signing his life away. His wife came in earlier and ordered the same package for him.

The dialogue has such ingenuity it almost feels like the characters are dancing around one another more than communicating. And the actors (none of which I’m familiar with) are well cast and fill their characters beautifully without turning into caricature (with the exception of Rae, who is purposely over-the-top). This is what makes the episode work, because it certainly isn’t anything else.

To call the sets cardboard would be an insult to cardboard. As far as I can see, the funeral home doesn’t even have walls. There are some creepy horror series candelabras in the funeral home that were obviously borrowed from the next set over, and the science lab is laughable. This entire production probably cost $50 in total. The camerawork makes soap operas seem creative in their storytelling.

But because the story is there, “Death Wish” works beautifully. There are only four episodes available on YouTube for view, and I can’t wait to try the others. I can fully understand why the series was cancelled after so few episodes – the humor is too adult for kids but the series was too much of a farce for adults. I’m pretty shocked that it has not gained the same cult reputation that shows like “Thriller” have managed to, because if this episode is any indication of the writing quality, it deserves to be.

The “Death Wish” episode of “’Way Out” is only available on YouTube.

Masters of Horror - "John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns"

Season 1, Episode 8

Original Airdate: December 16, 2005

Writers: Drew McWeeny, Scott Swan

Director: John Carpenter

Executive Producers: Mick Garris, Keith Addis, Morris Berger, Steve Brown, Andrew Deane, John W. Hyde

Cast: Norman Reedus, Udo Kier, Zara Taylor

“Film in the right hands is a weapon.”

A character intones this in “Cigarette Burns,” and after watching the violence caused by “The Innocence of Muslims” and the domino effect that continues, my mind kept drifting back to this episode of “Masters of Horror,” in which an evil film becomes a cause for pain, torture and riots. Here is an episode of television with gigantic, far-reaching ambitions that just exceed the grasp of the filmmakers creating it – but watching them try to pull it off is some kind of wonderful.

When I say the movie in “Cigarette Burns” is evil, I don’t mean it in the same manner I do the inept and disgusting “The Innocence of Muslims.” The film in question, “La Fin Absolue du Monde” (translated to “The Absolute End of the World”) is actually evil. It depicts, among other atrocities, an angel having its wings savagely torn from its body. We learn that there was only one screening, at a festival in the ‘60s, where the audience rioted and attacked one another until the aisles were slicked with blood. After that, it seemingly disappeared into the ether.

Kirby (Norman Reedus), a film historian who has a reputation for being able to find any lost film, is hired by a rich man named Bellinger (Udo Kier doing a great Peter Lorre impersonation) to track it down. Bellinger is obsessed with “La Fin Absolue du Monde” and has several props from the film: The pair of wings torn from the Angel framed on his wall…and the Angel trapped in chains in his basement. Kirby is a recovering junkie who recently lost his love Annie (Zara Taylor) and takes the job because he owes a lot of money to Annie’s father (Gary Hetherington). He’s already emotionally fragile from his loss – and from the moment he begins his pursuit we can tell he is going to fall into the same cycle of obsession Bellinger cannot escape from.

Kirby seeks out to find information about “La Fin Absolue du Monde” from several people, and we make the quick realization that any person even slightly associated with the missing film has been mentally (or, in some cases, physically) destroyed. Hell, the director, Hans Bakovic, has also seemed to disappear completely. Most memorable among those Kirby can track down is an audience member (Chris Britton) from the first screening who has spent decades attempting to pen a worthy review of the film, writing tens of thousands of pages in the process. Surrounded by the pages, he speaks in a horrifyingly calm tone to Kirby:

“We trust filmmakers. We sit in the dark, daring them to affect us, secure in the knowledge that they won’t go too far…Hans Bakovic is a terrorist. He abused that trust we place in filmmakers. He didn’t want to hurt his audience – he wanted to destroy them completely.”

More than that, the film is physically manifesting itself for Kirby the closer he gets to it. He begins seeing “cigarette burns,” those circles you see at the top of a film frame when you’re at the movies that signals it’s time to switch reels, and though he keeps telling others that he doesn’t want to see the movie, we know he won’t be able to escape it.

The co-writers, Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan, have set up an incredible concept (the horror version of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in many ways) and beautifully build suspense throughout the episode. There are many scenes where characters say some version of “This movie is fucking evil,” but McWeeny and Swan manage to find interesting variations and ways to continue the escalation. John Carpenter, who also directed the film masterpieces “Halloween” and “The Fog,” is expert in maintaining tension and his touch is apparent throughout, despite an over-reliance on gore that became both a hallmark and problem for most of the “Masters of Horror” episodes. Particularly out of place is a scene where Kirby is tied to a chair and must witness a psychopath (driven mad by the film, of course) behead a woman by repeatedly chopping into her neck with a machete. The scene feels exploitative and done because the audience expects it more than because it serves the story. It also doesn’t work on a technical level – the psychopath makes a point of talking about how powerful a murder would be if shot in a single take, but what power the moment might have is undercut by the editor’s constant snipping.

Kirby finally gets his hands on “La Fin Absolue du Monde” and here is where “Cigarette Burns” stumbles, but that’s not to say there aren’t thrilling moments in the climax. It’s just that, unfortunately, the writers did such a fantastic job of building to the moment that nothing could possibly live up to the viewer’s expectations. Carpenter unwisely made the decision to actually show sections of the “La Fin Absolue du Monde” instead of just letting our imaginations do the work, and that stops the episode dead in its tracks. One scene looks like something from “The Blob,” and the others are nothing we couldn’t see in any “Saw” or torture-porn flick. In many ways it is reminiscent of the third-act problems with Carpenter’s near-masterpiece “In the Mouth of Madness,” where he literally found himself written into a corner (those who have seen the film will get the pun).

But there is great stuff in those final moments. Bellinger’s butler has such a visceral reaction to seeing the film that he stabs both his eyes out. Bellinger falls deeper into madness and actually tears out his small intestine and begins running it through the projector, which is one of the most disturbing/amazing death scenes ever placed on film. And the final beat, with the Angel taking back the film and escaping from the destruction, is rightly moving.

By naming his show “Masters of Horror,” Mick Garris set an impossible standard for his anthology series. He did recruit some of the best names in horror: Carpenter, Joe Dante, John Landis and Dario Argento, among others, to direct the episodes but, as with most anthologies, the episodes vary widely in quality, with many way too gory for their own good (even the Masters often forget that more blood doesn’t automatically equal more horror). One episode in particular, “Imprint,” (directed by Takashi Miike) involved so much blood, gore and aborted fetuses that even Showtime found it too disgusting to air. But several, like “Cigarette Burns,” Dante’s “Homecoming” (a brilliant dark comedy where all the soldiers who died in Iraq raise from their graves…to vote against George W. Bush) and Landis’ “Family” (in which a deranged family man wants to murder his neighbors and adopt them into his home) are genuinely awesome. After two seasons on Showtime the show moved to NBC with a new title, “Fear, Itself” and leveled out in quality right before its cancellation.

I love “Cigarette Burns” for what it aspires to be, and it is one of the few modern horror works that actually got under my nerves and affected me on a visceral level. At its very best (or very worst), film and television can affect a viewer deeply in a manner no other artistic outlet can, which can be both lovely and horrifying, depending on your perspective.

“Cigarette Burns” is available as an individual episode onDVD or as part of the “Masters of Horror” season one boxed set. It’s also available on iTunes and on Hulu.

Playhouse 90 - "Requiem For a Heavyweight"

Season 1, Episode 2

Original Airdate: October 11, 1956

Writer: Rod Serling

Director: Ralph Nelson

Producer: David J. Eagle, Martin Manulis, Alvin Rakoff

Cast: Jack Palance, Keenan Wynn, Ed Wynn, Kim Hunter

This was my first experience watching one of the hundreds of live television broadcasts from the ‘50s, and I must admit I did not have the highest of expectations going in. I thought I was going to see a low-quality version of a soap opera—a filmed play with the actors talking and monologuing instead of communicating while reading off unseen cue cards. I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

“Requiem For a Heavyweight” vibrates with energy, has better direction and camerawork than any other television program I’ve seen from the period and features a trio of performances with incredible depth and nuance. This was all done live, and that just adds to my admiration for the episode.

Writer Rod Serling and director Ralph Nelson present us with a fascinating opening: in the aftermath of an especially brutal boxing match, we first see the triumphant fighter exit the ring, surrounded by his adoring fans. Moments later, Maish (Keenan Wynn) and Army (Ed Wynn) drag the barely conscious Harlan “Mountain” McClintock (Jack Palance) out and into an empty changing room. A doc comes in to investigate the damage, and the truth becomes clear immediately: Mountain cannot continue to fight without doing permanent injury to his already-damaged body.

“Just like that?” Mountain’s manager Maish asks. But of course it wasn’t “just like that.” Mountain has two cauliflower ears and Palance’s face looks more like a patchwork of broken bones pieced together oddly than a human being. This is the tipping point of Mountain’s life. He’s a heavyweight fighter who was once very good (he placed fifth in the country a few years back), recently fair and now done with fighting whether he is ready or not. He’s not.

Mountain dropped out of school in the ninth grade to become a boxer and has only known this life. For over a decade he’s depended completely on Maish and Army, his trainer, for literally everything in his life, from his bed to his next bout to his next meal. Now that is all gone. Serling implies, but does not underline, that Mountain has probably sustained brain damage during his career, another impediment for a man already stuck behind the eight-ball. I know little to nothing about boxing and the life of these fighters (beyond the fact that Rocky Balboa is the coolest one ever), but that doesn’t matter. My heart immediately and totally goes out to him. I can’t fathom someone ever taking my voice as a writer away from me, and to think that Mountain has lost everything he’s ever known (at only 33 years old!) is like an emotional sucker punch, and I’m dreadfully sorry about that accidental pun.

The show doesn’t offer up a whole lot of hope for Mountain as he tries to start over. He goes to 35 employment firms with nothing, and when a pretty young employee named Grace (Kim Hunter) at lucky number 36 calls him back for a meeting, Mountain almost begs Army to go back with him…simply because he does not know how to function without him in the room. Grace hypothesizes that Mountain might do well in teaching children, but is accidentally (and realistically) harsh when she compares Mountain’s plight with that of returning veterans who have sustained horrible injuries during the war.

We also follow Maish and learn that he had bet against Mountain in that final fight (specifically that Mountain wouldn’t last three rounds when he went seven) and has lost $3000 as a result. Instead of owning up to it, he handles the situation like the snake he is—using Mountain’s loyalty to try to get him to become a “wrestler” and play in fixed games. Army is sickened by this and tells Maish as much on multiple occasions, but in a realistic twist, when the chips fall and Mountain learns the truth, it’s Army who gets the uppercut to the jaw and not Maish. Then there’s a beautiful, quiet moment where Mountain cradles Army as his surrogate father begs him to leave and move on with his life.

Serling introduces Grace as the necessary love interest for such programs, but has a different, more interesting agenda for her. She’s curious about Mountain more than she is attracted to him. She tracks him to a boxer’s bar, where Mountain seems destined to join the other dozen former boxers who can do nothing more than get drunk and recount the glory days, and they have something like a date together. But the scene isn’t about the characters and their chemistry—Serling uses Grace as our eyes into understanding Mountain. They don’t end up together, and by treating the relationship more realistically than so many other similar shows, it is all the more impactful.

The tape used to film the show has faded somewhat, but certainly not enough to hurt your enjoyment. It’s about the equivalent of watching a movie from one of those 50-films-for-2.99 sets. I was shocked by the atmosphere Nelson was able to build on just a few sets. The way he shoots the street set in relation to the ring and the bar is especially moody and memorable. And where I expected the actors, particularly Palance, to overact because of the live television format, I was so pleasantly surprised to see them giving subtle, multi-layered performances. I’d actually dare to rank Palance’s work here equal to Marlon Brando’s washed-up fighter in “On TheWaterfront.”

And while there are long sections where you genuinely forget that this was a live television program, it is still fun to watch every inch of the frame to look for things that might not have gone according to plan. At one point Keenan Wynn seems to have misplaced a book of matches, and Ed Wynn points them out to him. In another, Palance tries to pour an empty bottle of beer. But really, isn’t that how life is? Sometimes you really do lose the damn matches, after all, and while it gives this viewer a little smile to see it, the tiny mess-ups work as a reflection of real life more than anything else.

Here and with other such live teleplays, Serling proved he was one of the greatest writers in the history of television, reinforced that statement with “The Twilight Zone” and then put an exclamation point on it with “Night Gallery.” The most shocking thing is that he worked so well in so many different genres and could write with such speed and power. Like David E.Kelley or Paddy Chayefsky, Serling has so many crowning moments it’s impossible to point a single one out as his definitive work. That must be an amazing problem to have.

Like several of these live broadcasts (including “Days ofWine and Roses” and “Marty”), “Requiem for a Heavyweight” was turned into a feature film written by Serling and directed by Nelson. The roles in that version were filled by Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason, Mickey Rooney and Julie Harris, respectively. I have not seen the film version, and don’t know if I want to. In a way, the live version says just about everything that can be said about the story in only an hour and twelve minutes. You really feel as if you are seeing four souls onscreen trying to make sense out of this unfair life.

“Requiem for a Heavyweight” is available on as part of the Criterion Collection’s “The Golden Age of Television” DVD set.

The Twilight Zone - "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street"

Season One, Episode 22

Original Airdate: March 4, 1960

Writer: Rod Serling

Director: Ronald Winston

Producer: Buck Houghton

Cast: Claude Akins, Jack Weston, Batty Atwater, Rod Serling

I’m not sure whether or not I was in fourth or fifth grade, but one day in class we decided to have a “dramatic reading” of one of the stories in our English textbook. It was an old teleplay. This one. The boldness of the narrative and the bleak ending affected me deeply even then…even when it was only a bunch of ten-year-olds reading it aloud.

The quality and excellence of “The Twilight Zone” remain unsurpassed on television, even over half a century later. Off the top of my head I can think of a dozen episodes that would be considered masterpieces. The recurring theme for the vast majority of episodes is isolation – isolation from society, from a familial unit…from yourself. And in using that as a foundation, series creator Rod Serling (who penned most of the series along with such greats as Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont) used science fiction to create thinly veiled metaphors for what is wrong (or right) in our world.

Though other episodes matched it in darkness or dread, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” feels like Serling wrote it with a rage that comes across in every scene. The only other episode that even comes close is “Deaths-Head Revisited,” where a Nazi captain revisits a concentration camp to be haunted into madness by his victims. We barely get a shot of the idyllic Maple Street (which seems lifted directly out of “Leave It To Beaver”) before Serling’s script begins turning the screws.

There’s a noise and a flashing light over the street, and soon all the residents realize the electric doesn’t work. Neither do their cars or battery-powered gear. A group of neighbors form in the hot sunlight, and a horrible, horrible child hypothesizes that it’s aliens causing it. Not just that, but they have probably sent one of their own ahead who is now living on the street. From that moment, every person on the street is a frog in a big pot set to boil.

The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad child.

I’ve seen the episode on numerous occasions, and however many times I watch it I can never pinpoint the specific moment in the show when the tides turn toward insanity. The dialogue is so well-paced and subtly built that you actually become immersed in the moment-to-moment interactions more than looking for specific ways the script ups the stakes. Is it the moment the car turns on? Or when the group runs across the street looking like a mob? How about when a neighbor accuses another of “staring too long at the sky at night”?

Once the ball is rolling, it isn’t long before the lynch mob formed by Charlie (Jack Weston) implodes by turning on itself. It’s Charlie’s fault because he shot a guy! It’s the kid’s fault because he started the whole thing! And so on and so forth…until the street descends into violent, savage anarchy. If that were the ending, the viewer would already be picking his jaw off the floor at the lack of any (any!) redemption for any character. But what makes the episode transcendent is that Serling adds a twist which brings another level of sickening awareness to the proceedings. The entire thing was caused by aliens, who did nothing but turn on and off a few appliances, sit back and watch humanity self-destruct.

Talk about a punch to the gut.

The reasons the neighbors turn on one another is because the others are “different” in ways that are utterly trivial. This is a veiled metaphor for any number of things: racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, sexism, etc. His closing narration underlines this, and remains amazingly powerful in how blatant it is about the episode’s motives:

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. A thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own – for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone…”

Hmmm…otherwise “good” people who inhabit a normal American street turning on one another for being “different” before descending into anarchy. Sound familiar? Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” borrows heavily from Serling’s structure in his film, using a blatant illustration of the shades of racism whereas Serling uses a very thin veil. There’s no point in arguing the merits and superiority of one or the other, but I would like to point out one thing. In Lee’s film, he allows for a scene after the mob and the destruction…a hint at possible recovery. There is none in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Only more darkness.

The director of the episode is Ronald Winston, who gives the affair the feel of a film. When the intensity begins and the neighbors turn into a mob, he begins to shoot the characters from the waist down as they walk or run, inherently presenting to us that they are no longer individuals but a group of faceless horrors. When he does show the characters in these moments, it’s in harsh close-up, all in the same position in the frame. In essence, all interchangeable save for their savagery.

In 2002, UPN relaunched “The Twilight Zone,” and during its one season on air it remade several episodes from the original, including “Eye of the Beholder” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” While they left “Eye” intact, they changed the “monsters” in “Monsters” to terrorists, and the results were uneven at best. The show also produced one excellent episode called “It’s Still a Good Life,” which was a sequel to the original series’ “It’s a Good Life,” with the original cast.

Perhaps because of the veil of science fiction, but more likely because of the excellent writing, “The Twilight Zone” simply refuses to age. Sure, many of the effects are cheesy and the budget constraints are obvious in places, but that matters little when the underlying storytelling is as impactful as a sledgehammer to the chest. And that’s exactly what watching “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” still feels like today.

“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is available on the first season “Twilight Zone” DVD, as well as for free in the Amazon Prime program. You can also purchase it on iTunes.