All of this quarter’s television was watched on the exercise bike (:muscle:)
Still purportedly watching The Curse (not on bike) and I’ve started Lodge 49 s2 and Painting With John s3.
I’m a Virgo season 1 (2023)
Giant boy Jharrel Jerome (young André Holland in the middle section of Moonlight) is awkward because he has never socialized or even left the house, but after his first public appearance everyone is interested in him: an agent, a fashion company, a burger girl, a cult, a superhero, the teens. Burger girl becomes his girlfriend, has super speed powers. His friend with a car’s superpower is having a car. Their buddy Scat dies for a stupid reason, getting injured on his bike then turned away from the hospital for not having insurance, and this enflames the community, led by activist Jones. Meanwhile Cootie’s hero (“The Hero”) Walt Goggins is out busting protesters during evictions. Apparently lo-fi photography pulls out crazy technique when desired. Music by Tune-Yards. Showstopping didactic anti-capitalist rants and general anti-authoritarian vibe mix with The Hero’s identity crisis and random superhero stuff (Cootie’s parents have prepped a supervillain lair, some of the neighbors wake up fun-sized). Created by Boots Riley, who shared a list of further viewing/reading with Vulture:
One that is very inspiring is Matewan by John Sayles. There’s a book called Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns that just came out. A History of America in Ten Strikes by Erik Loomis. There’s a movie called Seeing Red, it’s a 1983 film by Jim Klein and Julia Reichert.
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The Twilight Zone, Vol. 3 (1959)
106. Escape Clause
A basic deal-with-the-devil scenario, not even as interesting a concept as the pitchman from episode 2, but our lead idiot is good (David Wayne, the killer in Losey’s M). A hypochondriac who takes an offer from the devil (Thomas Gomez of Force of Evil, Key Largo) to be immortal, all he can think to do with his new vitality is throw himself in front of trains for kicks (and settlement money from the city). After only a week of this, the kicks aren’t enough, and when his wife (Virginia Christine of The Killers) falls off their apartment building trying to stop him from jumping, he takes responsibility so he can defeat the electric chair. But his lawyer gets him life in the pen, haha. I guess if he’d been good at thinking through consequences he wouldn’t have dealt with the devil in the first place, but Americans couldn’t be expected to know how to live immortally before Highlander came out.
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107. The Lonely
Jack Warden (best known for the Hubleys’ Dig) is losing his marbles alone on an asteroid, serving a prison sentence in solitary. Back home there’s political pressure to pardon Jack, who of course claims innocence, and/or abolish the asteroid prisons, possibly as much for its cruel-and-unusual nature as the difficulty of keeping the prisoners fed via rocketship deliveries. Space-warden John Dehner (killed by Gary Cooper the previous year in Man of the West) drops off a gift for Jack: an AI woman named Alicia (Jean Marsh, queen of Willow). It’s not implied that her womanness is a factor here, Jack just wants somebody to play chess with. He bonds with Alicia, then the captain brings a pardon for Jack on his next visit, and shoots Alicia in the face since she’ll be too heavy for the ship. New director Minnesotan Jack Smight would later make the post-apocalyptic Paul Winfield movie Damnation Alley.
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108. Time Enough at Last
Two man-alone-in-the-world episodes in a row? The one where banker Burgess “The Penguin” Meredith just wants some time to read but his horrid wife and boring boss (Vaughn Taylor, also the boss in Psycho) won’t let him. Time enough (and food enough, ammo enough) at last when he’s the sole survivor of a nuclear blast, but his glasses break on day two. Some nice-looking wreckage in the final stretch. Director John Brahm had made films in the 1940s, including a remake of The Lodger.
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109. Perchance to Dream
Nearly an it-was-all-a-dream episode. The title clues us in, and from a childhood watching Nightmare on Elm Street sequels I’m attuned to characters “just closing their eyes for a few seconds.” This one’s more of a narrated dream-flashback inside of a dream, as a nervous imaginative man with a heart condition explains to a psychiatrist that his subconscious has mixed up his sex/death drives and now a hot cat lady is trying to kill him with kicks (the Ann-Margret Kitten With a Whip kicks, not the Michelle Yeoh Executioners kicks). If he falls asleep he’ll fall off a rollercoaster / jump out the window, which he does. From the psych’s POV a guy he’s never seen before came into the office, lied down and promptly stopped living. Starting to think Serling created the show just so he could see every working actor play desperation in closeup. But this is the first one he didn’t write – Charles Beaumont (The Intruder) would become a regular on the series. Director Robert Florey had a long career, from the great silent short Life and Death of 9413 to the Marx Brothers, then 1930s and 40s crime movies. The psych later played Dirty Harry’s boss, lead dreamer Richard Conte was a noir regular.
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110. Judgment Night
Man onboard a British ship in dangerous waters during WWII has got an extreme combination of amnesia and deja vu. Carl (Nehemiah Persoff, father Mousekewitz in An American Tail) seems to have specific knowledge about German submarines stalking the ship, and when he goes down with the ship it’s revealed that Carl was that sub’s commander, and he’s in hell, nightly reliving the fate of his victims. A panic-stricken half-hour with a comforting message (the nazis that killed our family members are experiencing endless torment in the afterlife). His fellow doomed Brits include Patrick Macnee (originator of the Ralph Fiennes role in The Avengers, later in The Howling), Disney voice actor (and Sound of Music nazi) Ben Wright, and Cat o’ Nine Tails star James Franciscus.
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111. And When the Sky Was Opened
Two astronauts in recovery after a flight crash-landed, but Rod Taylor (The Birds) is in a complete panic because he claims there were three astronauts and that their friend Charles Aidman (narrator of the 1980s ‘Zone reboot) vanished and nobody remembers him ever existing except himself. We see them together in flashback then Aidman feels strange and says maybe we weren’t supposed to come back, and disappears from a phone booth, his beer magically gone with him and the headlines rewritten. Taylor responds the way people do in most Twilight Zones (and in all British horror), by blubbering and yelling and repeating himself. When he vanishes too, the remaining hospital-bound astronaut Jim Hutton (of Major Dundee, Timothy’s dad) knows he’s next. Director Douglas Heyes made Kitten With a Whip, and I didn’t know about him when I referenced that movie two episodes ago.
Taylor (right) with spaced-out Aidman:
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112. What You Need
There are plenty of salesmen in the Zone. This would seem to be an inspiration for King’s Needful Things, but our aged salesman (Ernest Truex of Christmas in July) isn’t malevolent, hands out humble objects that he predicts will help people in the future: a bus ticket for Read Morgan (a former baseballer playing a former baseballer) to get to his next gig, something for a lonely pretty girl (Arlene Martel, Spock’s fiancee) that gives her an excuse to meet a hunky (drunky) former baseballer. The salesman (whose character shares a name with the inventor of the Chia Pet) doesn’t want to deal with loser shithead Steve Cochran (White Heat) but the guy smells money and pesters then threatens the old man until he gets what he needs (a lifesaving tool, a bunch of money, an early grave). Based on a short story from the writers of The Twonky. Director Alvin Ganzer assisted on The Great McGinty and other 1940’s flicks then moved permanently to television.
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113. The Four of Us are Dying
A guy who the voiceover tells us is a real lowlife loser has the supernatural ability to face-shift and be other people. Apparently he’s pretty good at doing voices and knowing personal details about the people he imitates too, fooling friends and enemies. His default identity is Archie Hammer (Harry Townes), then he picks up the hot girlfriend (Corman/MST3K regular Beverly Garland) of late musician Ross Martin, then becomes late gangster Phillip Pine (loud and annoying in Murder by Contract) and runs off with a pocket full of dirty money, then to escape the gangsters he gets the face of Don Gordon off a boxing poster. Boxer Don (Bullitt, The Mack, gold miner in The Last Movie) was apparently such a lowlife that his dad shoots him (them) dead. A nice bluesy New York episode, features some fancy trick photography in the identity shifts, and some lazy edits when they didn’t need to be fancy. From George Johnson, story writer of Logan’s Run and Ocean’s Eleven.
Archie “Armie” Hammer:
