Twilight Tales from the Outer Limits of the Darkside

[Trollheart]

Title: "Bad Writer"
Series: Bloodride
Season: 1
Year: 2020
Writer(s): Kjetil Indregard
Storyline: A rich girl who's an aspiring writer and seems to think all her friends love her ends up eavesdropping on a conversation between her housemates where they badmouth her and decide to kill her. Yup, that's where we are. Already. This is Bloodride, after all. Still, this is a bit intense and surely unlikely so Trollheart's Theory is that it's in her head, she's writing it, and somehow it's all going to end up going pear-shaped and maybe she will kill the girls? I guess we'll see; it's never easy to try to predict where this show will go, but the idea of three girls suddenly and off the cuff deciding to commit murder is, well, odd, even for Bloodride. I reckon there's more to it. Add into that the advice she got at the writing class - "pick someone you hate and put them into your story and kill them" - maybe deep down she hates herself? Enough trying to figure out the ending: let's go on.

The flatmates invite her to the picnic on Saturday, and she agrees. She pretends she has not been in the house long enough to have heard their discussion, and so they believe her to be completely unaware that they are planning to do away with her. She tries to get out of the room, but as her boyfriend enters she sees one of the girls pick up a knife from the block and throws boiling water at them all, legging it out to her car. There her boyfriend tries to calm her down, but she believes he too is in on it and stabs him with her car keys, then runs off down the road. Coincidentally (surely not) the car she flags down is being driven by Alex, a guy she met at the writing class. Maybe it's his story? He had said he had written something, but wouldn't let her see; said it was crap.

Okay, revision on the theory. This guy Alex has been maybe stalking her, or trying to get to know her, but she has been ignoring him.  As a result, he has taken the advice of the teacher and put her in a story to kill her, one he's written. Or she doesn't even exist, only as a character in his story. Right (write?) that's it. No more guesses from me. Let the chips fall where they may. He drops her at the  police station, but before she can report the attempt on her life the girls are there, one still holding a knife, clearly looking for her. She runs out and hides in the car park and luckily they don't find her. Then she falls.

All right, I think I guessed correctly, because as she falls we see fingers typing on a keyboard and she sees Alex's van. Now she realises she accidentally picked up his story and she's about to read it, and though I have the video paused I would bet a month's wages that she is about to read something like "the girl falls on the ground as the other girls move off" or something. Let's see.

Yeah, I got it. Now she does too. She realises Alex is writing about her and making all these horrible things happen to her. But you know what? She's a writer too, and two can  play at that game. She gets her laptop  out and begins to write. Goes a little overboard though, and has his laptop eat his hand. Right. Then she calls him, tells him who she is and what she's doing, but when he admits that he had intended to save her at the end of the story, she relents, rewrites his hand back on, and they begin to write together.

But then it turns out someone else is writing the story, and both get killed; it turns out to be the teacher who was holding the writing classes, Alex is her husband, then Olivia and Marcus turn up, it gets very confusing. The writer, Anneslise, stabs Olivia but then goes to delete the scene and finds she can't, it won't delete, and that's the end.

Things I thought would happen, but didn't: The whole thing was a little hard to predict, but I could have seen something like maybe the two of them in the bar suddenly beginning to vanish from the waist up, screaming, and as they pop out of existence another, unseen and unknown writer shaking his or her head and saying no that's not working: have to start again. I also would have thought that if Annelise's computer had crashed, or she had spilled wine on the keys so that they stuck and the backspace or delete key would not work, might have been a better way to explain the ending.

Comments: Although the idea is good and I did suss it, this is the first Bloodride episode where I feel the story got totally lost along the way. I mean, how are you supposed to take the ending? That it was Annelise who was writing all along, and the others were just characters? But if so, how come one is now dying, her supposed daughter-in-law? And why did the delete key not work? I have to be honest, I'm confused and a little disappointed. Perhaps, despite my initial expectations, the title is appropriate?

Rating: (for the first time ever)

[Trollheart]

ROUND FIVE, PART IV: NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK, PART II

Title: "I'm Not Martin"
Series: The Haunting Hour
Season: 3
Year: 2014
Writer(s): Mitch Watson
Storyline: An annoying brother tells his younger sibling, who is in for tonsil removal, a story about another boy who was to have his foot amputated in 1952 and who  switched charts with a kid who was also to get his tonsils out. The ghost of that kid wanders the halls of the hospital, he tells his brother, looking to take someone's foot and crying "I'm not Martin!" What a cunt of a brother. The story of course stays in Sean's head, and when his mother and the prick of an older brother have gone he lies awake, listening for the limping tread of the kid who lost his foot.

And then, he hears it!

Making his way shakily to the door, he looks out and sees... nothing. So he goes back to bed. But then the sound begins again, and this time the doorknob rattles. Diving into bed and pulling the privacy curtain around him, Sean is confronted by the kid, and he does indeed have one foot. But he tells him he's not here to hurt him. He's not evil, he says, the hospital is, and beckons for Sean to follow him if he wants to keep his foot. The kid tells him that once the hospital has a part of you you can never leave, and he directs Sean to a door, through which he seems to pass into 1952. A nurse approaches him and tells him he has surgery in the morning. He tells her he's not Martin, but she won't listen. He runs off but is easily caught and strapped to the bed.

It's the fifties though I guess, and they made things crappier back then, as he's able to break the restraints He manages to get to to a phone (looking at the rotary dial in confusion asking "Where are the buttons?") and calls the police. They promise they're on the way, but they ring back and sell him out to the creepy nurse. They bring him to the operating table but then... he wakes up and it was all a dream. Sigh.

Comments: Very strange story. The behaviour of the staff made it almost cartoonish and impossible to believe, but the kid's contention that the hospital was evil is never realised or explained, which is a pity, because on the surface it's not a bad idea. A living entity disguised as a hospital building, using its doctors and nurses to harvest limbs... but it goes nowhere and ends up being the manic ravings of a child's imagination. Boo. There's a little stupid attempt at a coda at the end, but it's so ludicrous it's not worth mentioning.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "Pick Me Up"
Series: Masters of Horror
Season: 1
Year: 2006
Writer(s): David J. Schow
Storyline: A bus driver deliberately runs over a snake in the road, and kills it, but a strange wanderer appears after the bus has gone and picks up the snake, saying to it "You ain't' dead yet" and walks off with it. Meanwhile, further up the road the bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere. One of the passengers, Stacia, a girl who seems to be getting over a failed marriage, a little tough nut with a knife for protection, heads off to find the hotel which is about twenty miles in the distance. Half of the rest - a girl and a guy - take a lift from a truck coming the other way.

Walker, the wanderer, turns up and strangles the driver with the corpse of the snake, then shoots one of the two left behind; Marie, totally paranoid and wary of everyone (and in this case, she's right to be) runs off screaming. Wheeler, the truck driver, seems pretty unhinged too, trying to get the clerk at a store he stops at to use his gun on him, forcing it into his hand (with the clip removed), then telling him he's a big disappointment when he refuses the gun. Bunch of fucking psychos it would seem. Birdy, the girl who took a ride with him, is flirting with him and it appears he locks her in the back of his truck. Meanwhile Marie is being tracked by Walker through the forest.

The guy travelling with Wheeler convinces him to go back to the bus, concerned that the driver and passengers have not turned up and rendezvoused with them as they had arranged, and of course they find them dead. Wheeler seems amused. We see that Birdy is hanged in the back of the trailer. He now kills the guy, slamming the door of the luggage compartment down on his head, and when he finds the girl tied to a tree in the forest he snarls at her that she didn't think he was trustworthy (which, let's be fair, he's not - he's a fucking killer!) and wouldn't take a lift with him. He leaves her and penetrates deeper into the forest.

Stacia, the only real survivor from the bus, has found the motel. Meanwhile Walker hitches a ride with some rock biker chick and her punk boyfriend, the latter of which Wheeler finds dumped, dead at the side of the road as night falls. Not surprisingly, given it's the only accommodation for miles, everyone eventually ends up at the motel. Walker is in the room next to Stacia, torturing the girl who was in the van, Wheeler arrives and Stacia is trying to get room service to come up and fix the shower but there's no answer (possibly because Walker killed the concierge).

Now the two killers meet, and I would assume they're both after Stacia. The girl Walker was torturing has expired, so he's bored with that and about to move on. Stacia, however, is not as easy a target - remember, she has a knife too - and slips away, with the two serial killers then heading after her. Unfortunately for her, Wheeler has a cop's badge (probably taken when he killed one) and thereby convinces her he's a cop. If he is, you have to wonder why she doesn't ask what the fuck is he doing driving a truck in the arsehole of nowhere? But she accepts a lift from him; it's raining hard and it's dark and she has no idea where she is, and all I guess she knows is that one guy is definitely a killer, and probably coming after her.

Seems Wheeler is pissed at Walker because the other guy is encroaching on his territory, taking his victims. He knocks Stacia out and when she comes around she's handcuffed, so probably has sussed now that Wheeler is not a cop. A short time later they pick up Walker, and the two start discussing what sort of killer each is. Stacia tries to play one off against the other, but that doesn't work so she manages to stamp on the brake. Neither are wearing seatbelts and both go through the windscreen, smashing out onto the road, while she, harnessed in the seat, screams as the truck jackknifes and goes over on its side.

The two killers then start fighting over her as she tries to free herself. They beat each other to a standstill, then sirens sound. She loses consciousness. Next we see both killers strapped down in an ambulance, carrying on their fight till Walker says to Wheeler they could do a lot with an ambulance like this. Unfortunately for them, and for Stacia, these two paramedics are also serial killers, and kill both. As for Stacia? Well, they're saving her for later!

Things I thought would happen, but didn't: Honestly, the way it was set up at the beginning I thought Walker was going to be some sort of spirit of animals, maybe snakes, sent to avenge their deaths. I thought when he approached the bus driver with the snake and started messing, using it as a microphone, that it would suddenly come back to life and attack the driver. I was seeing a completely different direction for this.

Things I liked: Fucking every second
Things I didn't like: Nothing

Comments: That was fucking brilliant! A bit of a stuttery start, but once it got going it was pure gold all the way through. Serial killer with a great dash of dark humour; reminded me a little of Wolf Creek. Stupid, super ending, completely unlikely but fit so well in with the overall mood of the piece. Loved this.

In fairness, is this genre horror? The answer has to be no. There are no supernatural elements at all to it; it's just two serial killers fighting over their turf. So kind of not really even horror, more a slasher thing. But what makes it so much more palatable is the easy sense of dark comic relief running through it; each killer is certainly presented as deadly and violent, but there's something almost - endearing? - about them, like two boys fighting, or the bosses of two rival gangs duking it out, with everyone else in the story mere collateral damage. The ending is as stupidly unlikely as it can be - FOUR serial killers all in the one area? - but the charm of the story is so compelling that you can forgive that.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "My Valentine"
Series: Into the Dark
Season: 2
Year: 2020
Writer(s): Maggie Levin
Storyline: In the world of female pop divas, it seems there's a question about two of them who look, sing and act the same (and sing the same songs) - which is the original? The supporters of one, Trezzure (pronounced "treasure"), come to heckle at the debut concert of the other, Valentine, then the manager who apparently stole her songs and made this Trezzure a star arrives and starts giving his side of the story. He of course maintains that Valentine wasn't good enough and they split up, and later he met Trezzure and "created" her. Things take a turn for the worse when Trezzure turns up herself at the gig, which has now become a lock-in. Kind of literally, as the manager guy has jammed the exit door. There's also another couple sitting in a car arguing; they're the support band, but right now I'm not clear on what they have to do with the story.

Manager guy seems to have admitted to Valentine that she is the original, as he, rather insultingly, asks her to work with him on Trezzure's second album - presumably, he's used up all the songs she, Valentine, had, and now he needs new material, which would indicate that his new star can't write for shit. From what I can see from the flashbacks, both her and her producer, Royal Brigguns (seriously? Hey, there's a girl named Trezzure, remember!) were both pretty much broke and it was his manipulating her to the top that made them both rich. Then she left him but his fortune was made. She bowed out for a few years - I feel the guy may be abusive and controlling? - and he moved on to his next target, making this Trezzure girl into a copy of Valentine. Ironically, of course, everyone now thinks she is the original and that Valentine is copying her.

Okay clearly he is a psycho, and the worst type of manipulating pig there is: he hurts Valentine and threatens her, then whines for forgiveness when he thinks he's gone too far, making himself the victim. And like most girls in that situation, she falls for it. That's all when they were together, but there's no reason to think the same isn't happening with Trezzure. Now the mask slips, back in the present, and he threatens Valentine: if she doesn't stop playing "his" music, there'll be trouble. But not legal trouble - this is more violent, as he pulls a knife on her and her bandmate. He's a total narcissist, and there's no reason to believe he hasn't done this sort of thing many times in the past, using women and then dumping them (or being dumped by them, in Valentine's case) and starting again with a fresh innocent victim, copy and paste.

Valentine's friend goes at him, and he stabs her. Rather than let Trezzure call an ambulance though, he stands and watches her die: "I'm kinda curious," he says, his eyes cold as the gulf between stars, "to see what it's like when someone dies." Proving either how scared she is of him or that she's totally braindead, Trezzure does not take this as any sort of sign that she's dealing with a psychopath. When he snarls as the girl dies that he wishes he had recorded her last breath, I think maybe she's getting an inkling of who she's with, the depths of his depravity. I really hope he gets what's coming to him. Meanwhile outside it seems the other couple are just there to provide a sort of frustration level; with the door locked and them, um, otherwise engaged, nobody can hear Valentine's frantic screams for help. I mean, if that's all they're there for, I have to wonder why they're in the story at all? Unless they do something later, there might as well be nobody there to hear.

While Royal goes to sort out the bartender, who had the temerity to ring 911, Valentine tries to show Trezzure how alike they are, how he's using them both, and you can see she's wavering. Valentine tells her they should call a truce and get out of there before he destroys them both. I'm thinking the end scene is going to be the two of them performing together - Valentine's Trezzure? Anyway we'll see. But right now any hatred Valentine had for the other girl has turned into both pity and sympathy, as she can see where Trezzure's life is going: it's the same path she was forced along, after all. Surely now, when Trezzure sees Royal has killed the other guy (and this time he does record his final breath, the sick bastard!) she can finally understand this was no accident, as he tried to make out the killing of the girl was? Surely it's beginning to sink in now that the guy is a narcissistic killer and enjoys this shit? Surely her eyes are going to be opened?

Yeah, finally. Though fucking Royal pain in the arse goes into victim mode, saying she made him kill the guy, he did it for her, but I think maybe there's some backbone emerging here? The clouds are clearing and perhaps an alliance is about to be forged between the two women? I fucking hope so, because if she swallows any more of his self-serving bullshit it'll be me who'll choke. Okay Valentine now tricks Royal into showing he doesn't care about Trezzure, wants to get back with her, that she wrote all the songs and Trezzure almost knifes him but just then the useless couple for some reason arrive in the hall and of course Royal don't like that, and he attacks the guy. Now, for the love of all that is holy, while his attention is occupied and his back is turned to you will one of you fucking women ACT???!!

Yes! Finally, Trezzure snaps and bashes the fucker's head in with a microphone stand. My god I could not have stood another fucking word from that smug, self-satisfied cunt! Right but rather than be a two-person sisterhood now that fucking Royal is dead, it seems Trezzure intends to continue using Valentine's songs, and has threatened her with legal action. So now what? Duel to the death to see who's the real diva? Last pop star standing? Bitchmatch? Ah, no: seems Valentine just caused Trezzure to get electrocuted (something to do with the wet floor, wet from all the blood I guess, and a microphone) and now I guess she's going to say she's Trezzure and the woman lying dead on the floor is Valentine? That's how I see it anyway. Minutes to go. Yeah that's what happens. She takes on Trezzure's identity and nobody is any the wiser.

Comments: well I really enjoyed that. This series started off badly but overall it's been better than I had been expecting. This tackles the way bright young things can be manipulated, used, even created and destroyed by unscrupulous record executives, producers and starmakers. I'm sure there's a lot more fact than fiction in this. It does somewhat treat all the dead people a little lightly - we had, what, four murders? No, five. I imagine they were all blamed on "Valentine", who was also killed, and so the cops would have been satisfied. But still, the real Valentine's best friend was brutally killed and she seems to have forgotten about her pretty quickly once she had the chance to take back her fame and live the kind of life she wanted, and had been cheated out of.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Witness"
Series: Love, Death and Robots
Season: 1
Year: 2019
Writer(s): Alberto Mielgo
Storyline: A woman who has witnessed (heard) a murder in the apartment opposite her hotel goes on the run when she realises the killer has seen her. What's really odd here is that the dead woman looks exactly like her, right down to the smeared lipstick. (Trollheart's Theory: somewhat like the opening episode of The Veil, this is going to be a precog thing, where she is the one to be killed, but it hasn't happened yet? She's seen it in the future?) She phones the police but when she does not leave her name it seems unlikely they will investigate. She takes a taxi, unaware that the killer has taken one too and is following her.

She ends up at the brothel where she works, but is terrified to see the killer has been brought into it too by one of her co-workers or maybe bosses. She runs off the stage and back into her dressing room, then to the office of her boyfriend (or boss) who is totally out of it. She takes his gun and as she leaves runs into the killer. She legs it with him after her. She ends up in the apartment as he comes up the stairs, she takes out her gun and... yep I was... oh wait. SHE kills him, and then looking out the window sees another him, having witnessed her killing the guy. Okay. That was clever.

Comments: Played at a frenetic pace, really gives you the idea of the woman in a panic, but you can tell there's something not quite right; he's not pursuing her as a killer but as if he has to explain something. And then it all turns one-eighty. Liked that a lot.
Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "Newark, New Jersey"
Series: Monsterland
Season: 1
Year: 2020
Writer(s): Mary Laws, based on the short story by Nathan Ballingrud
Storyline: It's Christmas, and a father buys a doll for his daughter, but all is not well. He avoids accompanying his wife to some sort of counselling session for people who have lost their children, though he says their daughter is not dead. Maybe in a coma? Maybe taken away by Social Services? Guess we'll find out. Okay we just found out: she went missing. Brian took his eyes off her when they were in a shop, when the cashier dropped his change, and when he looked up  she was gone. She's been missing for a year and half now. Through therapy he remembers the licence plate of a car that was nearby, and brings it to the police. They all know him there, as they've been investigating his case for sixteen months without any leads, but they're dubious about the provenance of this new information.

Leaving her group that night, Brian's wife Amy thinks she sees a little girl in a tutu running along and pursues her, believing her to be her daughter. All she finds though is some junkie sleeping rough with a mannequin head in a pram, into which seems to be pushed a knife? Amy is now convinced her daughter is dead. The relationship is fracturing like stage glass, as one parent tries to face reality while the other is determined to keep hope alive. Amy tells Brian she is having an affair with her grief counsellor.

Brian goes out to a bar and meets a young waitress who tells him she abandoned her child, and pretends she is dead, revelling in the sympathy. They dance, and almost kiss, but when she goes to get change for the jukebox and drops it, something clicks in him and he runs out. On the way home he too sees what appears to be his daughter, and runs after her. This leads him to a dumpster where he finds a naked alien? Ah, he takes it with him back to his house where he and his wife look after it. The creature can only speak in a sort of clicking tone, somewhat like the sound a pigeon makes. They seem to think it's an angel, and are surprisingly sanguine about its existence.

The creature feeds them both some of its blood, and they start to feel very odd. This kind of ties in with a story the waitress told Brian, where she was given a drug called "angel's blood", which, when she took it, altered her perceptions until eventually she got so disoriented she just threw up. Brian goes to punch out the grief counsellor, and on his return he and Amy make love for the first time in ages. The creature comes down, observing them, and slits its throat, showering them with its blood for some reason and suddenly they're in an empty auditorium where they watch their child dance on the stage. Which I guess helps them come to terms with the loss of their daughter. Or something. Fucked if I know.

Comments: Right. The synopsis on Wiki says there was an event called "The Fall" (there's a child's voice doing narration, which may have mentioned this at the beginning, but it's hard to make out) where several creatures, believed to be angels, fell to earth, nobody knows why. So I guess this one Brian and Amy encounter is one of them, and I can see how it's a kind of catharsis for them, but the mechanics of it elude me. Fucking weird story, at its heart I believe about coming to terms with grief, particularly that of the loss of a child, but damned odd.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "Fix"
Series: Two Sentence Horror Stories
Season: 2
Year: 2021
Writer(s): Kristine Huntley

First sentence: "My sister needs to talk."

Storyline: Jackson is convinced by his boyfriend to travel to see his sister Sophia, an addict who sold family heirlooms to support her habit after their parents' death. He goes to the cabin where they used to spend summers as kids, and the old animosities flair. In his sister's bedroom drawer he finds what looks to be a book of black magic. Trollheart's Theory: She's sold her soul - or possibly his - to some guy with horns and a tail in exchange for maybe getting clean? Or, she's used black magic to clean herself up. Jackson's boyfriend worries she may have joined a cult, and that night Jackson himself sees the water in the shower turn to blood, but then it changes back, so was he imagining it?

Hearing sounds from her room, screaming and a dark growly voice, Jackson breaks the door down and looking up sees a pentagram-like thing on the ceiling. He faints, and is dragged away by unseen hands as Sophia stands by. He wakes up in the kitchen, to see his sister tuck into a tasty meal of worms, and she tells him she has given her soul to Flauros, a demon they used to be told about in church (what a gay name for a demon huh? But YES! I was RIGHT!*) and who has now sorted everything for her. The commotion last night was a ritual binding her and the demon together.Sofia's full-on demon girl now, and when he tries to get her out of the house she just laughs, breaks his arm and he has to lock himself in his room.

She tells him (from outside the door) that he has to confront his pain, and I'm going to assume here that it is actually him who is responsible for the car accident that took their parents, When she tricks him out of the room she pushes him down the stairs, and he awakes in the middle of the binding ritual, as she tries to get him to accept Flauros (come on now, seriously?) but he keeps his Christian faith and burns her with the cross he keeps around his neck, driving the demon out. I bet it says "Oh you're mean!" as it leaves in a huff.

Turns out our Jackson was the junkie originally, and that was how Sophia got started. He apologises, says he'll be here for her now, but it's too late. She vomits up a bunch of bugs and a moth or a black butterfly or some disgusting thing anyway, and dies. So Jackson overdoses beside her, but he doesn't die, and then it turns out the demon stuff was all in his mind; Sofia was dead when he arrived, having overdosed before he got there.

* Ah, no. I wasn't.

Second sentence: "She's been so angry since she died."

Comments: Great little story. Didn't expect the twist at the end, though I thought the parents' car crash was a bit of a red herring, was sure that was going to figure in to the reason why they had lost touch, that one or the other was to blame. A bit weak really, that Jackson cut her off because she sold their dad's watch, but I guess really it was guilt that did it, guilt that his sister had turned to drugs because of him.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

23 Tales of Tomorrow (Down 1)
22 Creeped Out (Down 1)
21 The Haunting Hour (Down 4)
20 Tales from the Crypt (Down 14)
19 Tales from the Darkside (Up 4)
18 Monsterland (Down 8  )
17 Creepshow (Up 2)
16 Goosebumps (No change)
15 Night Gallery (No change)
14 Amazing Stories (Down 1)
13 Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Up 7)
12 Monsters (Up 6)
11 The Veil (Up 3)
10 Room 104 (Down 5)
9 Bloodride (Down 7)
8 Two Sentence Horror Stories (Up 1)
7 Into the Dark (Up 4)
6 Love Death and Robots (Up 1)
5 The Outer Limits (Up 3)
4 The Twilight Zone (No change)
3 Black Mirror (Down 2)
2 Masters of Horror (Up 10)
1 Dimension 404 (Up 2)

We have a new number one, as for the first time Black Mirror fails to get top points and slides to number 3 - for now - while Dimension 404 keeps up its perfect record and takes that top spot. Screaming in at number 2 to replace Bloodride, which also slips for the first time, this round to 9, is Masters of Horror, making a leap of 10 places. Room 104 has a bad showing and falls all the way to 10th place, while Tales from the Darkside is finally off the final position, moving slowly in the right direction. Going the other way, the biggest faller is Tales from the Crypt, dropping a massive 14 places.

[Trollheart]

Before I go further, a short commentary on what I think of the various shows I've watched.
Obviously, two of these I know quite well, so

The Twilight Zone certainly has its poor episodes, and I've come across one or two of them here, but I know it has mostly gems that are just waiting to be unearthed, so I have no problems continuing with it in the expectation that I will come across more good than bad. I've written plenty about this show already in its own journal, so there's not much more to say. Let's have a look at the episodes I've seen so far though.

We kicked off with "Shades of Guilt", which was all right, if a pretty heavy-handed racism story involving some sort of vague notion of time travel or something. This was from the 2002 reboot, and although not the most stellar way to open the whole project, not that bad. Off we went then, back into the sixties for the decent but not totally remarkable "The Self-improvement of Salvadore Ross", a little predictable but decent fun. Again no explanation was offered, and I guess none was needed. Stayed in the sixties then for two more, the first a major disappointment to me, especially considering it was written by a science fiction icon, but I didn't think much of "Little Girl Lost" at all. But then the series showed its pedigree with a stone cold classic, the wonderful "It's a Good Life", about which nothing more need be said. If nothing else, this proves that, while there are of course bad episodes, The Twilight Zone can do good, often excellent in the sixties as easily as in the 2000s and later, sometimes better in the former than the latter.

We then came forward in time, to 2020, for the last (so far) take on the series, where "Meet in the Middle" was much better. Like most TZ episodes, this one offered no explanation for the ability of the two characters to mentally contact each other, but it was a good episode with a fine, unexpected twist.

The Outer Limits gives me more of a pause. The original ones from the 1960s seem very long-winded, complicated and overly serious. From what I've seen so far anyway, the writers did not seem to tap into the same vein of easy relaxed sometimes even comic relief that those on the older show did. They concentrate more on explaining all the fun out of everything, being scientifically accurate and use for too many concepts people back then - and even now - are not at all familiar with. As a result a lot of their stories come across as dry, dull and often predictable. They also went for the one-hour format, which in their case seems to have been a mistake. I know I said a half hour is often insufficient for a Twilight Zone episode, but this just proves how little I know. If one of these Outer Limits episodes was cut to thirty or even forty minutes, it might be snappier and more attractive. As it is, they seem to drag on and on unnecessarily. So maybe Serling got it right.

There is some improvement when we get to the reboots. The episodes from the 1980s and 1990s tend to lean a little more on the side of storytelling rather than exposition or explanation; in The Twilight Zone, events are rarely explained. Things just happen. A wizard, so to speak, did it. And while that may leave us with a feeling of frustration and lack of closure, we live with it because the stories are so good. So Salvadore wotsit can give years of his life to people? How? We don't know. It's not explained, not even a hint, not an attempt. But the story doesn't suffer for that (unless, like me, you're a rabid nitpicker) - we know what to expect and we shrug. In ways, we'd probably be happier if The Outer Limits adapted the same line, but they don't. They have to go on and on with the explanations till you really just want to say "look dude, I don't care. Maybe a wizard did it, yeah?" To which the hypothetical writer would frown "What wizard?" Mind you, so would Serling, as these are both long before The Simpsons, but Serling would understand the concept of everything not needing a solid and believable explanation. After all, these are flights of fantasy.

I think the reboots make the stories more human, concentrating more on the characters than the mechanisms of the plot. In some ways, obviously, the new writers (who may even have written for the other show) have looked not to the old series but to its elder sister, and thought that's how we want to tell our stories. And mostly, it works. There's - so far, anyway - a marked difference between original Outer Limits and 80s/90s Outer Limits. The time has been cut somewhat to around the forty-minute mark, and that works too. In a lot of ways, you could say that 80s or 90s Outer Limits is almost an amalgamation of 60s Twilight Zone and 80s Twilight Zone, with little, other than the voiceover and the "controller" left of the original series. I suppose the producers are looking back not to see how it was done and emulate it, but to see how it was done then and trying to avoid making the same mistakes.

For all that though, these are the two elder statesmen (if not the actual oldest, the most well-known and venerated) of the speculative fiction anthology series, and each deserves their place here. It did not start well, though, with the incredibly boring and annoying "Beyond the Veil", from the 1990s reboot, then things dipped even further with "The Brain of Colonel Barham" - just bloody awful, and a pretty poor ending. That was from the sixties original, and things continued to disimprove with another from the same era, the supposedly-Macbeth-inspired "The Bellero Shield", which only for me served to reinforce the contention that this series did not have a strong grasp on its audience, and did not know what they wanted. The godawful "Re-generation" just, well, sucked. Finally we got a decent, nay, brilliant episode in "Relativity Theory", though we had to travel to the 1990s again to get it.

Tales from the Crypt: Being an adaptation of the original comic book series, this survives on a few factors. One is the always hilarious and pun-filled introductions by the Crypt Keeper, as well as his parting shot after the episode has finished; the animated turning of the pages of the comic book which then become real figures (this process reversing at the end) and the mostly horror-tinged aspect of the stories. Some are silly, but I haven't really been able to discount them for this. Tales from the Crypt does not pretend to be the successor, or even child of the Big Two: in some ways, it is perhaps the bastard child, or the problem child. It goes its own way with no respect paid to the traditions of its forebears. It is, as I say, grown from comic stock, whereas the other two are purely television fare, though they might look back to the old pulp magazines, but that's only in passing. All of the episodes here have been already published in the comics, so it's a television outing for a story that has already been in print.

Perhaps because of this, or perhaps despite it, Tales from the Crypt is able to take more of an irreverent look at its subject matter. Although the episodes were being tried out for the first time on TV, they had already been read and accepted by the comic-book world, so to the fans of those they weren't saying anything new. As you might expect from a show so titled, Tales from the Crypt tends to shy from science fiction (though there may be some episodes; I've only watched a few) and remain mostly rooted in the present, telling tales of horror and gore, possibly fantasy, that need little if any justification or explanation. Rather than being "a wizard did it", this show goes for the idea that "a demon/ghost/vampire/werewolf/insert as appropriate did it", and that's enough for its fans.

Another thing Tales from the Crypt does is nudity and sex. In general, few of the main shows tend to involve that at all, but this one gleefully portrays naked bodies and sexual acts - where and when appropriate - perhaps harking then back to its original comic book foundations, where just about anything went once the Comics Code was abandoned. In general, I've found the stories vary between  good and very good - rarely have I come across a really terrible one, so far anyway, and it's hard to call one meh, again so far. The show can be a bit visceral - it is basically a horror anthology after all - but somehow it's all done in a fun way, with quite a sense of humour, even if that is gallows humour. Sorry.

This was exactly what drove our opening episode, "On a Deadman's Chest", which, despite my initial expectation given the title, had not a single pirate in it. It was damn stupid, but it was great fun, and the rumpy-pumpy added to the sense of cheeky enjoyment. Overall, then, a good enough start. But it kept going with "Showdown", a pretty excellent pastiche of western and ghost story, with a healthy dose of retribution and even redemption thrown in, then "Two for the Show" was clever and funny, which are not two things that usually go together when you're talking not only of murder, but dismemberment. A loose misogynism in the story, true, but you had to laugh, and it ended well, even if there was a big enough plot hole to drive a Mack truck though, as I once said.
There was a blip then in the truly awful "Til Death", which got totally tangled up and, like one of its main characters at the start, fell into a swamp but, unlike her, was unable to rise again and just sort of flailed about looking for some way to end the story.
Finished up then with the hilarious "Judy, You're Not Yourself Today", pulling in magic and witches and bodyswaps, poking fun at gun ownership but ending with a surprisingly bleak denouement, like a shower of ice cold water after being at the beach. Still, four out of four really.

Tales from the Darkside: I have never liked this show. I found the opening a real case of ham (voice) acting, and most of the time it roundly fails to deliver what it promises. With a title like that, you would think it would be like Tales from the Crypt, a horror series, but it's really not. I feel it tries to do Twilight Zone and fails miserably, takes bits from Tales from the Crypt but doesn't know what to do with them, and probably looks enviously at other shows like Monsters and Two Sentence Horror Stories and wishes it could be them. I've found the writing mostly poor, often laughable, and of the episodes I've watched here (five so far), although there was a surprisingly good start with "Red Leader", with a quirky mix of damnation, scandal and comedy,  it quickly plummeted to the depths I expected with "Barter" - quite possibly one of the worst episodes of ANY of the series I've watched here yet - stumbled on into "Snip Snip", which wasn't much better, felt queasy and vomited out "If the Shoes Fit" all over the new carpet and finally fell over its own feet and collapsed in the heap that was "A New lease on Life", which to be fair was not awful, but only because the two before it were so very much worse. This show is for me, as more or less expected, floundering and really has yet to recover. Perhaps it will, but I'm not holding my breath. Pun intended.

One thing I will give it - two actually: the simple idea of reversing the colours at the start to make the picture negative actually works, and makes a creepy effect, and the door then opening from there back into the real world as the episode begins is good too, although shouldn't that be the other way around? A door leading from the real world into that of the Darkside? And what a pity they didn't take a leaf from both Tales from the Crypt and Creepshow by repeating the process at the end. How cool would it be if in the last frame a door opened in the episode, a door leading from the Darkside back to our world?

Other than that though, it's been a poor crop and I don't see it getting any better. Frankly, I fail to see how this show was even commissioned, other than as one of a slew of series desperately trying to cash in on the popularity of perhaps the re-runs and then rebirths of both The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. "We can do that!" said the executives at whoever the damn hell makes Tales from the Darkside - what is it, Tribune Broadcasting? Well no, actually, sorry guys, you can't. Not even close. Even stranger that horror supremo George A. Romero was at the helm for this. Night of the Living Dead, indeed. Dead boring.

Black Mirror: What more need I write about this superlative series? Here is a perfect example of how to look at how the old masters did it, and not only do it as well, but better. More staggering that the mastermind behind it is a comedian, Charlie Brooker, and even perhaps more amazing that it's a British show, a show which trounces almost all the competition off the screen. Yeah, even the Big Two. I've yet to come across an episode that has disappointed, and Brooker seems to have not only his finger but his entire hand on the pulse of modern life, correctly - it would seem - predicting how humanity is going to evolve towards an even more selfish, self-obsessed, materialistic way of living, and how computers and the internet are going to not only be central to, but perhaps even run our lives.

His stories are almost invariably dark, teach some kind of moral if you want to look for it and learn (or ignore) it, and give the very definite impression that he's laughing like some deaths-head over all of us, perhaps a figure like Eddie from Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast, controlling the Devil himself while the world burns. I feel his attitude is a sort of acerbic, sardonic ennui and fatalism with the world; he knows what's happening and he knows there's nothing he or anyone else can do to stop it (would YOU give up Facebook or your smartphone?) but it sure provides him with fuel for his bleak tales of humanity on the edge. If there's a twenty-first century successor to Rod Serling, it has to be this man. I almost just assume each new episode I watch is going to be brilliant, and so far I have not been disappointed, leading to its being top of the chart for most of the run of this project so far.

Kicking off with the glorious "Nosedive", pairing his acerbic humour with a wry nudge of the shoulder to show where we could be, and maybe are, going, it very quickly for me reached its zenith with the powerful and heartbreaking "Metalhead", then powered on into the incredible "Hated in the Nation", still earning top marks. A slight break (but still top spot maintained) as we reached
"Crocodile" and then something of a blip as we ended in the rather sickly sweet but still acceptable "San Junipero." Even though one or two of those episodes is less than perfect, they still run rings around almost all from any of the other series. I'll be surprised if I come across a bad one.

Tales of Tomorrow: I suppose we have to make some allowances for it being so old (1952), possibly the oldest of these type of anthology shows, with some ideas predating those of even the venerable Twilight Zone, but even so, this is poor. The format is annoying, with about five of the twenty-odd minutes of each episode being taken up with advertisements and demonstrations for the products of the sponsor, one of which comes right in the middle of the episode, which really breaks the mood up. The stories, thus far, are poor. The acting is so-so, with a few faces we would come to remember, the dialogue is generally stilted, as you might expect from a fifties show, and over all hovers the ever-present shadow of religion; at this point in at least America, and probably most other places, few if any television writers would dare question the existence of God, the American God, the Christian God, so we get a lot of sort of propaganda for the Church here, which I could do without.

"The Miraculous Serum", the first episode we tried, was just awful; a terrible story that really put women down, with a horrible message about keeping the distaff in their place, and what will result if they are set free. "Past Tense" was better, with a time-travelling backdrop and a half-decent premise, a bleak ending and a sly dig at the pharmaceutical industry too. "Flight Overdue" was just awful; a stupid story with some very worrying elements, as I outlined in the comments to the episode, and yet again a bleak ending. "The Duplicates" was a slightly better story but with a very disturbing idea. Finally, the turd on top of the shit cake, "Bitter Storm". What can I say that I haven't already? So that's Tales of Tomorrow: not a good start and I fail to see how it can get any better. Add to this the fact that despite the fact that I'm supposed to have downloaded both seasons I only have less than half, so some of them are not available to me, and it's not a good picture going forward.

Monsters: I'm very familiar with this show, having watched it on the TV years ago, and I see it as a sort of combination of the best elements from Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone, with a bit of Creepshow thrown in for good measure. Monsters does not limit itself to horror, tackling science fiction and fantasy stories in equal measure, and while the episodes here vary wildly in quality, I know there's enough good stuff in there that if I keep plugging away I will unearth it eventually.

The opening sequence always gets me, with the monster family groaning about there being nothing on TV, and then Monsters starting and they say "Oh great! Our favourite show!" It's a nice disruption of the happy, cosy American nuclear family, and it works well. Unfortunately that's it for the monster family; they're not back at the end to talk about the episode or even just walk up to the TV and switch it off, which I think would have been a good touch. Nevertheless, the stories I've seen so far have not, to be fair, imbued me with confidence, even though I know it's only a matter of time. "Mother Instinct" started us off, and it's a decent take on a kind of Little Shop of Horrors idea; it does at least put both the women in the story in the positions of power, reversing the trend which usually saw the man being the hero and the woman either saved or badly dealt with, as in some of the episodes from Tales from the Crypt and The Outer Limits.

Then we got the godawful "The Vampire Hunter", which still annoys me so much I don't even want to talk about it, followed by "Half as Old as Time", which at least had Nils Lofgren in it, while "Museum Hearts" was, to be honest, not a lot better; at least in this one there was again a sense of girl power, and a philandering man got his just desserts. And we finished on "Hostile Takeover", which was a lot of fun, with some surprisingly gory bits at the end. Always a good sign when the Devil shows up!

[Trollheart]

Amazing Stories: I'm surprised by this. I seem to remember watching and enjoying these on TV, but so far the ones I've randomly selected have been a huge disappointment. Maybe I was just easier to please back then, or maybe I've just been unlucky and got the really crap ones. Whatever the case, the opening sequence is well put together, in a way that practically screams Spielberg! Stories are a different matter. The first episode I got, "Gershwin's Trunk", was not without its charm but was without much of a plot. Pretty poor and its setting in 1940s Hollywood didn't sit well with me. Mind you, it was a modern classic compared to "Welcome to My Nightmare", which was just, well, awful in every conceivable way. The only really decent one so far has been one from the 21st century reboot, "Dynoman and the Volt!" while silly, explored some deep questions and had a lot to say. Despite actually being written by the Big S himself, "Vanessa in the Garden" I found to be boring and predictable, and a little too sugary sweet, while "Mirror Mirror" was, well, just stupid to the max. I sure hope they pick up soon. Assuming something better is waiting in there.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?: I can't see the appeal with this show. The idea of the kids all sitting around telling ghost stories around a campfire wears thin very very quickly, and you start to really hate them. The stories, luckily, make up for that. Not. So far we've had "The Tale of the (they're all called that so I'm going to leave it off the next titles, because I'm lazy. And yes I realise that I've now written more explaining how I'm going to save time than I would had I just written the full titles out!) Vacant Lot", which was a kind of genie/wish-fulfilment sort of deal, with a relatively okay message but nothing special, then "Renegade Virus", which was truly awful, so much so in fact that I felt insulted. They just plundered the idea of the white woman story for "The Prom Queen", and "The Hatching" wasn't much better, but at least it had a certain sense of fun about it. The one episode that made a valiant effort to save this series was "The Night Nurse", which was truly excellent. It was also the last in the series, so perhaps that's a sign. Anyway, in general I'm not expecting much from future episodes, but we'll see.


Night Gallery: Despite the impeccable pedigree of having Rod Serling present it, I've been disappointed with this so far. I like the premise, that every story is represented in a painting in the gallery, which can only be seen at night. Probably. Serling presents well, as he always did, but he seems a little lost and out of place here. The opening episode I looked at was "Last Rites for a Dead Druid", which to me belonged more in the likes of Tales of the Unexpected or Armchair Thriller, very poor. "The Painted Mirror" was just unbelievably awful, not even possible for Zsa Zsa to save this piece of tripe, while "Pamela's Voice" was just annoying. I did enjoy, on one level, "Satisfaction Guaranteed", though it's hard to be really comfortable laughing at the idea of cannibalism. "The Dark Boy" was too long and too Little House-like, as I said, and generally, that one aside, I think Night Gallery suffered from a case of trying to cram too much into each episode, or segment, with some of them a mere ten minutes long. What can you do with ten minutes? How has Serling not learned his lesson from his time on The Twilight Zone? Of course, I may just have been given the worst episodes, or segments of episodes, but I wonder.

Creepshow: Despite its link to Stephen King and the comic of the same name, I also have failed to be impressed with this show. The first episode I watched did not go down well. "Drug Traffic" was horribly violent and gory, and like many of the series here, the two women came to a sticky end. It had a relatively nice twist on right-wing versus left, but really it was just a splatter flick condensed into thirty-odd minutes. Very odd minutes. "Times is Tough in Musky Holler" attempted to profit off the boom in zombie action drama, but mostly failed, leaving the actual zombies right to the end, and it had a poor message of revenge and the abused becoming the abusers, while "Pesticide" was just, weird really. Mind you, "By the Silver Waters of  Lake Champlain" was just stupid. "Time Out" attempted a decent take on time travel, which mostly worked, but the ending was too unremittingly bleak for me, and it left a bad taste. Overall this series has been another disappointment, but I guess we'll see as we go on.

Dimension 404: One of the few new series that really bore watching, a worthy student of the Big Two and maybe even Black Mirror to some extent. They were able to secure the services of Mark Hammill as the narrator, which I feel was quite a coup, but sadly the show lasted only one season, and even that was only six episodes. The opening sequence is quite Twilight Zone/Outer Limits, and I believe it's based on an old radio programme, Dimension X, but the stories are well-written and clever, most needing only two or three characters. The first episode we looked at was "Cinethrax", involving the invasion of an alien species via the movie screen, and somewhat like Brooker's masterpiece had a dark, dismal ending, while "Impulse" looked to the far future, creating a post-apocalyptic world linked in with overzealous gamers, and was a story with a very core moral of taking responsibility. It was only one of the few series to feature strong female leads, as did the next one, "Chronos", though this was very much played for laughs. Another time-travel story, this time connected via the world of a Saturday morning TV cartoon show, "Bob" told a Christmas story with a difference, while "The Matchmaker" was really pure Black Mirror, envisioning a time when the perfect mate could be not only found, but constructed, and how that fed into the idea of slavery.

It's a pity Charlie Brooker and the writers for Dimension 404 never got together: imagine what they could have come up with. But there is only one episode left now, so while Dimension 404 swapped the top spot with Black Mirror, it will be hard to see it maintain this performance when the episodes run out. Still, it's proven a powerful contender, easily knocking the big guns aside while still paying its dues to them.

Room 104: While seeming at its heart to be a shoo-in, as I noted, I found out quickly that, good though the stories are in this series, they only occasionally feature SFFH elements, with some of them simple human interest stories. The first episode, "Itchy", , with its theme of a man unknowingly carrying an alien baby inside him, caught my attention right away, while the next one, "The Internet", has no such genre credits, dealing entirely with a guy's attempt to have his mother send him on his unpublished novel and in the process ending up with it deleted. Cute, but not genre in any way. "Phoenix" does at least qualify, with its ambiguous tale of the lone survivor of a plane crash being visited, I think, by an angel, but even less genre than "The Internet" is "My Love", a simple story of two people growing old together and how one copes with the sudden death of their partner. The last one I watched so far, "Fur", was, not to be too unfair to it, bloody awful. And animated, into the bargain.

Nevertheless, despite an initial thought of dropping it, I've decided to keep going with it and see what sort of stories are to come from this strangest of hotel rooms. Time will tell.

Creeped Out: There's really nothing about this that creeps me out, and the idea of having some kid wear a Halloween mask and wander around whistling as some sort of device intended to scare does not work. I think they call him The Curious. I don't care. I'm not. Curious that is, except as to how someone thought this would be a chiling way to introduce each episode. In fairness, they do follow it up at the end, having him take some sort of trophy, something pertaining to the story, and then wander off, probably for tea and some evening telly. Anyway, it's pretty clearly aimed at kids, as the first episode I looked at, "The Takedown", shows. Being set in the world of wrestling, this was on a bad footing with me from the beginning. It was okay I guess but nothing terribly special. After that we had "Kindlesticks", which tried harder, but really went nowhere. Good twist at the end I guess, then "A Boy Called Red" was another Back to the Future style thing, reasonably well written, while "Splinta Claws" was just silly, but good fun. A demonic robotic Santa: what's not to like? A lot not to like though about "Shed No Fear", which was dire to the max, and promised so much.

Overall though I wasn't scared once (not a prerequisite of this project I know, but when you have a show called Creeped Out you'd think there might be some chance that you'd be, you know, creeped out, and I wasn't). Maybe later, though I doubt it.

The Veil: This is interesting, in that it's a show that was never aired, which is a pity as it's not terrible. Boris Karloff does a good job introducing the stories in a kind of Roald Dahl way, before there was a Roald Dahl way, and though the stories themselves are nothing to write home about, they beat the likes of Tales of Tomorrow, which comes from a similar era, into a cocked hat. Or any hat. The first one I tried, "Summer Heat", had a good idea, about a man who can see things before they happen, and was essentially a kind of one-character deal, while "A Chapter of Genesis" took the age-old idea of the family feud after the funeral as the dearly departed's will was contested to new heights (or depths) and threw in a ghost to liven things up. "Food on the Table" was just stupid and went nowhere, while "Whatever Happened to Peggy" might reasonably have been titled "Whatever Happened to the Story?" It finished (so far) strongly with "Girl on the Road", which seems to have inspired the later Twilight Zone episode. But for all its failings, and allowing that it was made on the cusp of the 1960s, just as The Twilight Zone was about to burst onto the scene, it could have done well had it been released.

Goosebumps: Another one for the kids, based on the books of R.L. Stine, it started well with "The Girl Who Cried Monster", which had a lot of humour in it and a good twist at the end (did not see that one coming), and to be fair it kept up well, with "The Cuckoo Clock of Doom" once again retreading the old Back to the Future idea, though adding in an interesting twist too, and I quite enjoyed "Shocker on Shock Street", with its own shocking (sorry) twist. And then another one. But it all kind of fell down then with "The Werewolf of Fever Swamp", which more or less did exactly what it said on the tin, and didn't leave room for any twist. Well, none you couldn't see coming a mile off anyway. It then blatantly ripped off one of its earlier stories (or the ending, anyway) with the lump of crap that is "Vampire Breath".

Bloodride: This was a pleasant surprise (well, not really pleasant, but you know what I mean). The first show in the project - the only show in the project indeed - not in English, Bloodride is produced in Norway, and has an interesting premise. A bus driver gets on a bus at the beginning of each episode, looks around and the bus is empty. He starts up the engine, adjusts his mirror and suddenly the bus is full. One of the passengers is then the focus of the story. It's quite dark (well, did you ever know a light-hearted Norwegian drama? Lilyhammer doesn't count) and again pretty much stays in the horror sphere, as you might expect from the title.

The first one I looked at really whet my appetite for more, as "The Ultimate Sacrifice" (I'm not going to bother with the Norwegian title; it's in the original review) blended pagan rituals with human greed and family ties, and ends darkly, as does the next one, "Lab Rats", featuring a very paranoid scientist and with a good twist at the end, while "The Old School" is perhaps the creepiest of them so far, possibly one of the creepiest of all the series, a real ghost story with a very bleak twist and a powerful, unexpected ending. Rounding it off then with "Three Sick Brothers", perhaps they've saved the best to last. Or maybe they're all going to be this good. But the idea here of one man seeing two brothers who don't exist as a way to absolve himself of the crimes he commits is a masterstroke, and not something I could have seen coming. The last episode I checked out, leaving only one, sadly let the series down slightly, as "Bad Writer" unfortunately lived up to its title, and was frustratingly confusing, with too many false endings.

It's sad that again this is, so far anyway, only one season of six episodes, but if you don't have a problem reading subtitles (mostly they're clearly legible though on occasion it can get frustrating when the subtitler obviously hasn't given any thought to how they'll be read against all backdrops) this is a series that is well worth tracking down. Hopefully they'll make a second season.

The Haunting Hour: Another from the mind of R.L. Stine (he of Goosebumps) and I find I'm getting mixed results with it. The first episode I came across, "The Perfect Brother", tried an interesting take on humans vs androids",  and the next one, "Long Live Rock'n'Roll", had a certain charm about its tale of a deal with the devil, kind of echoing the legend about Robert Johnson, but as with Goosebumps this comes across very much as a "scary show for kids", which I guess is its target audience. "Night of the Mummy" though was just bad, although it did have a decent twist at the end, while "The Weeping Woman" was okay but essentially an old Mexican or Cuban or something legend used in the tale. Another kind of "White Woman" style of thing. Like I say, mixed results. The most recent, "I'm Not Martin", was just a complete shambles, and that's being kind to it.

Into the Dark: I almost abandoned this after the first episode, but have decided, like Room 104, to stick with it and see where it goes. Since that first one, it's been a mixed bag, with the first one being nothing more than a slasher movie, so after "Midnight Kiss" I was ready to dump it, but went on cautiously and found "Treehouse" to be much better, with its tale of witches who weren't witches, then things took a bit of a nosedive (no pun intended, Charlie!) for "Good Boy", as we followed the murderous adventures of a girl and her devil dog, and on into "I'm Only Fucking with You", which I still haven't quite made my mind up about. As the tour guide said in The Simpsons, almost, lots of murders in that one! We've so far completed the run with "My Valentine", which was a very enjoyable look at the darker side of being a pop star and how women are used. One thing that has come through quite strongly here is that in general, this series seems to be mostly about female empowerment, so perhaps if that's the case the title was a bit poorly chosen? At any rate, it's paying some dividends.

Masters of Horror: Now this is a different kettle of disembodied eyes! First of all, the stories are mostly mini-movies, mostly an hour long (though some are longer), written by, as the title suggests, masters in the field. The first one I tried almost turned me off the series it was so gory and terrifying, not to mention incomprehensible, but I got past "Imprint" and found "The V Word", while not anything that great - standard vampire story really - a lot more enjoyable, and with some humour, which was totally absent in the previous episode. "Haeckel's Tale" was a kind of nineteenth century retelling of something I think I read once by Byron maybe? Essentially a tale of ghouls and necrophilia, quite disturbing and again with not a hint of humour about it. The last one, so far, "Sick Girl", was just terrible, and involved my least favourite creatures, insects. Ugh. Supposed (it says here) to be a comedy but I didn't find it that funny. The series finally came up trumps though with the darkly hilarious tale of two feuding killers in "Pick Me Up".

Love, Death & Robots: You have to admire some of the animation here, but of course that shouldn't be the sole metric. If the stories aren't good, it really doesn't matter how they dress them up. The first, "Ice", was not the greatest to be honest, and other than its setting on an alien planet and the augmentation of humanity, was basically a story about two brothers trying to outdo each other. It was ok, but "Lucky 13" was better, even if it was also a pretty simple story based on a military pilot and her ship. "Beyond the Aquila Rift" had some of the best animation I've seen in this series so far; it was so good that for a moment I thought they were mixing in live action. The story was a little loose, a ship getting lost in deep space while some alien caretaker looks after it and all the others drawn there, but the randomiser saved the best for last for me in the hilarious, cutting and very clever "Automated Customer Service", which just had me nodding and smiling all the time. "The Witness" had an intriguing premise, is all I'll say.

It's interesting that this is the only one, other than Masters of Horror, of the series where the format can be completely different from episode to episode, which perhaps keeps it fresh. I'm happy to check out further episodes.

Monsterland: I was quite impressed with this. The first episode, "Iron River, Michigan", was very well written and diverged from what seemed to be a standard murder story into something much more bizarre and frightening, with a sense of revenge and an unexpected ending. I didn't like "New Orleans, Louisiana" at all, not least for the annoying jazz trumpeter, but I kind of didn't quite get it. I mean, I did, I just did not understand the ending. The episode dealt with a difficult subject, not only child abuse but ignored or unseen child abuse, perhaps even tacitly approved? "Palacios, Texas" saw a rather silly tale about a mermaid, though there was a more realistic - and somewhat shocking - ending, while "Plainfield, Illinois" was just ridiculous: one of them dies and yet doesn't and won't die, and the other keeps her alive in the cellar? Yeah. The last one I've done, "Newark, New Jersey", just confused me.

Two Sentence Horror Stories: I wondered how a show would manage to stick to this format, but there is a slight cheat in that the first sentence is written, then the episode unfolds, and the second sentence is the final word, as it were, encapsulating in one sentence what happened in the episode. I enjoyed "Essence", the tale of an unscrupulous salon owner literally using her staff to stay young and beautiful, while "Elliot" did not appeal to me so much; the idea of the devil giving them a tool with which to take their revenge, and the kids hanging in the lockers - just didn't really sit right with me, though it was a decent story. "The Killer Inside", once it revealed its twist fairly early in the episode, had little to offer though and as for "Erased"? I just found that sad. What sort of message was the writer trying to send here? Much better was "The Fix", with its misleading conclusion and huge twist at the end.

So that's what I thought of the series I've selected, having seen at this point five episodes from each. Some will need to be replaced soon - Dimension 404 and Bloodride - so I'll have to find other series, but that won't be till after the next round.

[Trollheart]

And, speaking of that...

ROUND SIX, PART I: THE CLASSICS

Title: "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Series: The Twilight Zone
Season: 5
Year: 1964
Writer(s): Ambrose Bierce
Storyline: It's 1862 and a man is being hanged from a bridge by the US Army. The rope they use is so long though that he plunges right into the river and sinks to the bottom, and is able to free himself. When he surfaces he seems to hear everything more clearly; insects on leaves, water in the river, the voices of the soldiers on the bridge (speaking in a kind of slow, guttural manner). Seeing he has survived (duh) the soldiers begin shooting at him in the water, but for professional soldiers they're crap shots and miss him. They even try hitting him with a cannon. And miss. Eventually he gets pulled into rapids, which take him away from the soldiers.

Finally he gets to shore and is elated to find he's alive and has escaped the noose and the subsequent attempts by the army to shoot him. I have no idea where this is going, but look, unless he now encounters giant insects, finds he's gone back/forwards in time, meets his doppelganger or ends up living inside some giant's bottle, I don't know how this is going to be seen as a Twilight Zone episode at all. They're going to have to pull off something really spectacular in order to get me onside here, and you know, I don't think they're going to manage it. Now he's off and running through the forest, and we have four minutes to go in the episode. WTF, as they say, is going on here?

Finally it seems he reaches his own house and his wife comes out to meet him as he runs towards her. Now, the only thing I can imagine here, in the few minutes left to this fucking endurance test disguised as a Twilight Zone episode, is that he never made it out, he's dead or dying and is imagining all this while he swings from a rope on the bridge? If not, you got me. Or, to be more precise, you lost me. Yeah right, that was it. He's just died, hanged on the bridge, and all that was in his mind. Jesus fucking Christ. Or perhaps I should say, zut alors! Total shite, or le merde complait.


Things I thought would happen, but didn't: There might actually be a story here.

Things I liked: Fuck all

Things I didn't like: The stupid idiot who hanged the guy with about ninety feet of rope! How did they expect to hang him if the rope was long enough to drop him into the river?

Also, the really annoying jazz music when he surfaces. The Twilight Zone is not known for its music (unless it's creepy incidental music) and a song seems completely out of place here, out of step with the ethos of the show.

The fact that the guy, having surfaced and (slowly) realised that the soldiers are now aiming at him in the water, doesn't think to dive back below and waits for the first shot before he swims off.

The interminable wait to see if something - anything - was going to happen.

The lack of almost any dialogue. Did not contribute to the story and in fact made it seem far longer than it was.

Comments: This is very atmospheric and very eerie. There is literally not a word spoken for about the first five minutes of the episode; an almost ambient feeling pervades the opening scenes, almost peaceful. Quite surreal. Overall though this is one of the slowest, most boring episodes of this show I've watched to date. I mean, it's stretched to infinity. We're halfway through and the first scene is still playing out, with even now very little in terms of dialogue. Very annoying. Fucking song is back. Shut the smeg up.

The idea to have no dialogue, or hardly any, for me backfires here. It makes scenes such as his supposedly swimming the river and running through the forest interminably long and boring. Serling introduces this as having been produced in France by a French director and crew, adn man does it show. And yet, he also says it won the Cannes Film Festival for 1962. For Most Boring Piece of Crap, maybe.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Guests"
Series: The Outer Limits
Season: 1
Year: 1961
Writer(s): Donald S. Sandford
Storyline: A man runs away from something that looks like a pair of upturned buttocks, and collapses. A young man driving by finds him lying in the road and goes to seek help, but the buttock-thing turns into a big house and the man vanishes, collapsing into a pile of dust with a despairing expression. The young man finds a pocket watch, with a picture of a young girl in it, then sees the "house" and goes there to see if he can get help. The door spookily opens by itself, and inside appears to be deserted. He does however find a half-smoked cigarette, still burning, and then a young woman asleep in a chair by the fire, and it's clearly the one whose picture is in the locket, but she jumps up once she sees him (or the watch) and runs off.

He then sees a door which appears to  give off some sort of ominous vibes and looks out of place with the rest of the house, kind of like a door in a hospital or something. Suddenly three more people appear - two elderly, a man and a woman, and a young woman, not the same as the one who ran away. But when he tries to solicit their help they seem unwilling, not even bothered, and when he asks to use the  phone he's told there is none. They all act very strangely - one of the main questions being was the old man very old? Randolph, the elderly man, tries to say it's nothing to do with them, but the oldish woman (his wife?) dismisses this. Flora, the younger woman, seems agitated and asks him again if the old man was very old. He shakes her off, angrily going to see what help he can obtain for the old man who, so far as he knows, is still lying in the road back there.

Then Tess, the first young woman he met, the one in the picture, the one who jumped out of the chair, returns and says he's very kind but he will not find kindness here. She confirms the picture in the watch/locket is her, but says the old man is dead, and has been for some time. When he tries to leave the house though, he is suddenly gripped by some powerful force and dragged against his will up the stairs, towards some sort of alien thing, like a flower or something which appears to be at the top of the stairs. The others watch, in a sort of mixture of horror and acceptance, as he is forced up the steps.

The thing speaks to him, saying this is its universe and it needs to know if he knows the missing factor in the equation. (Trollheart's Theory: the house is a crashed spaceship and this alien needs some sort of code to get it moving again, though I have to say this guy doesn't exactly look like a rocket scientist). Okay well instantly I'm wrong, as it seems this dude is trying to reduce the human experience into one simple equation, but is missing the part of it he needs to solve the thing. Or something. It says there are positive and negative sides of the human condition to be balanced out, but there is one important element missing. Oh crap: it's going to be love, isn't it? Don't let it be love. I bet it's love.

Anyway he tries to resist and the alien sends him back downstairs. The other people - other prisoners in the "house" - tell him it's only a matter of time; he will submit eventually. They tell him they have all been there since the 1920s, and that he, like them, will never leave. He tries to prove them wrong, but the door he came in is no longer there. To quote Roger Waters, twenty years later, "there must have been a door there in the wall when I came in!" But it's gone now.

An observation: don't know if it's relevant, but none of these people are very nice. Randolph is a smarmy git, who was about to have to face charges of corruption in his company when he was trapped here. Flora is an actress who lost her livelihood when talkies came along, and the other woman (who is Randolph's wife, we discover) seems to delight in the pain and confusion of others. Only the unnamed woman who was in the chair seems out of place here, like someone who does not belong.

As if reading my mind, Wayne now points out that they're all cruel and seem to be enjoying each other's discomfort, other than the girl in the picture. He walks down long corridors, surely longer than could fit in this house, and finds rows of identical doors, each of which lead nowhere. The girl follows him, and eventually the obvious happens. After they've kissed (no, that's all they do: this is 1961 remember!) she says she will show him the door out of the house. And she does. It leads out into a garden (with a worrying amount of tombstones in it, I must say) and then he gets all weird with her, talking about "don't interrogate the wind" and shit like that. She tries to get him to leave, but he won't - she's afraid he will be trapped here. Then she runs back into the house and he, naturally, goes after her.

Next he's in front of the alien again, which tells him that the others are not trapped; each has their own door which leads out of the house. Each knows where the door is, but none of them  will use it. Wayne heads downstairs and demands to know why they're pretending they're trapped, why they don't use their doors, but they keep up the pretence, saying there is no way out of the house. Tess confirms this; she says now the alien will never let him leave. She says that here time stands still, but once anyone steps outside their true age catches up on them. This is what happened to the old man - her father - Wayne found outside. When he declares he'll stay with her here forever, she runs outside to show him that she's an old woman, and, well, basically crumbles to dust. Kind of kills the romance, don't you think? Maybe they should see other people, huh? Do nothing on the spur, you know how it is. The alien then lets him leave, having determined that the missing factor in the equation is (and who would have guessed it?) love. Jesus on a frog racer heading into pole position!


Things I thought would happen, but didn't: Like I said, I thought this was going to be a crashed spaceship, not a crashed story idea.

Things I liked: The piano music Flora was playing; it was really emotional and deep.

Things I didn't like: The "tonight on" sort of preview at the start; makes it hard to get a handle on the story and often gives away important information before you get to see the episode. I think The Outer Limits was the only one of the anthology shows to do this (though not from the very first episode), which may tell its own tale as to its effectiveness, or lack of it.

Comments: My god, if The Twilight Zone episode dragged, this one all but went backwards! Far too long, for what was in the story, and very dark and claustrophobic. Put me in mind, for the second time with this series, of "The Fall of the House of Usher". Terrible, predictable ending and just nonsense really. Once again this show makes its episodes far too cerebral, far too long and far too fucking boring. I could not wait to get to the end, and when I did, there was no real payoff. A combination of a mystery horror and a fairy tale, with the worst elements of each.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Well, it's been another shaky start - in fact, a total fucking disaster for round six so far. Let's see if the wily Crypt Keeper can liven things up a bit. Or should that be deaden things up? YAH-HAHAHAHA!

Title: "Escape"
Series: Tales from the Crypt
Season: 7
Year: 1996
Writer(s): Al Katz, Gilbert Adler
Storyline: During the end of World War II, a German POW is happy to sell out his mates in order to gain privileges, but when he returns after having caused his fellow prisoners to be shot, the camp CO is not interested in honouring any deal made by the officer Luger  talked to, who has now been reassigned. Unaware that he's working with the British, and given that he has a reputation for having broken out of one of the most secure prisons in England, Luger is approached by other prisoners to help them escape. He goes of course to Major Nicholson with the information, but the CO is not impressed. They've seen a heavily-bandaged casualty be brought in, and now Nicholson tells Luger that this is one of the survivors of his last so-called escape, who can blow the lid on his collaboration with the British. The Major intends to use his testimony to discredit Luger.

One of the other officers, who, like Luger, realises the jig is up with the war and is more than happy to spend what remains of it in relative comfort here in the camp, prevails upon him to help him silence the returned prisoner, thereby keeping Luger's secret and allowing him to thwart future escapes. He approaches one of the nurses distributing supplies from an ambulance and intimates that Major Nicholson is breaking the rules, and she seems shocked. Luger and his confederate make their way into the hospital and suffocate the patient, but he proves harder to kill than expected. Luger cuts his throat and legs it, but the patient has enough strength to write Luger's name in his blood on the window, where everyone can see it when the alarm is raised and they're all herded outside.

In the end Luger is betrayed by the other officer, who it turns out is a British officer, and Nicholson rather cowardly shoots Luger, remarking that he has been played at his own game. What a heap of shit.


Things I thought would happen, but didn't: The Crypt Keeper would come through. Sigh.

Things I liked: Virtually nothing

Things I didn't like: The ridiculous way this was set up and the ending. And the beginning. And the middle.

Comments: There's some real star quality here: Nikolas Grace, Martin Kemp and Roy Dotrice. I must say, I'm a little confused about the CO's attitude towards the German prisoners Muller helped get shot. He calls them "three good men", but in a POW situation, and especially as the war is drawing to a close with the Nazis clearly on the losing side, I really doubt any British officer would consider Germans good men.  His vendetta against Muller makes no sense. He may hate the man, but instead of allowing him to be used as a pawn, a way to stop the prisoners escaping, he's prepared to humiliate and expose him, losing a valuable asset, simply, it seems, because what Muller is doing is not the "done thing". Unlikely, to say the least, especially for a practical army officer.

Also unlikely that an ambulance tech, told by a German officer she does not know that one of her own, a (presumably) highly-decorated and respected officer, is contravening the Geneva Convention, would suddenly want to help. I mean, for one thing, the Geneva Convention never meant anything to the Nazis, and even if he is breaching it now, so what? What's it to do with her? Why should she care? But she does, and gets involved. Again, as if.

In fact, let me break down how bad this was.
First: a British commanding officer, whose subordinate has made a deal with a German POW to stop escapees, refutes the deal.
Second: This same CO mourns and/or sympathises with and over the deaths of enemy soldiers.
Third: He goes out of his way to set up an elaborate plan to kill the German POW, ignoring all military convention (the guy is an officer, after all).
Fourth: Knowing full well the war is by now officially over, he still kills the German. It's now murder if it can ever be proved.
Fifth: He enlists ANOTHER officer to help him trick and kill the man, IN A FUCKING BRITISH PRISONER CAMP!
Sixth: He willingly puts the life of a wounded German POW at risk, just to catch Luger.

Other elements of the story went nowhere. The nurse? Nothing came of that. The patient? Killed, but nobody cared. Luger's name scrawled in blood on the window? Luger's dead now so who cares? Plans to escape? War's over, buddy.

And, most fucking damning of all, this story has NO genre credits. It's not horror, it's not fantasy. It could just as easily be an episode of Tales of the Unexpected, Ripping Yarns or any other non-genre anthology show. It's a war story, pure and (extremely) simple.

And while we're at it, although it's later revealed the other German officer is actually a British one, why, when Luger thinks he is a German, do the two escape in the coffins when both have confessed to the other that they don't want to escape? Worthy of being an episode of Tales from the Darkside. Yeah, that bad.

Rating: (I would give it a lower rating if that were possible).

[Trollheart]

Oh, crap! Speaking of that show, now it's up to it to try to turn things around. Don't hold your breath!


Title: "The Trouble with Mary Jane"
Series: Tales from the Darkside
Season: 2
Year: 1982
Writer(s): Edithe Swensen
Storyline: Okay this does not look good. The first few lines of the synopsis on Wiki (which I usually avoid in case it gives anything away but happened to catch despite myself) describes it as a "humorous take on The Exorcist." I fucking hate The Exorcist, and humorous or not, I doubt this is going to go down well. But can it be any worse than what's gone before? So we;re in the bedroom of a possessed child yadda yadda, but the mother has called in some pretty amateur exorcists, basically scammers. The wife doesn't want to take on the cse, but the lure of fifty grand has turned the husband's head.

The idea however of having the demon move from the girl to a pig - yeah, you heard right - goes astray when she prevents them getting near her, and they need to draw a pentagram on her forehead for the exorcism to work. The husband is not beaten yet though, trying to summon an even more powerful demon than the one in Mary Jane. Surprisingly he does this, and now there are two demons in the girl. But this girl ain't big enough for the both of us, as the two demons begin to bicker and argue about who gets to stay, each trying to out-demon the other, each claiming to be the more powerful.

Then they both leave the body of the girl and end up each in one of the bodies of the man and his wife. Christ almighty. Saw it coming.


Things I liked: The idea of the two demons fighting for possession of the body was good, but they didn't develop the concept the way I think it might have been done.
Things I didn't like: Everything else

Comments: The downward spiral continues. Will nobody rid me of these turbulent stories? That was pretty awful. Not a lot more to say really. I can't believe this was written by the same author who gave us the hilarious "Red Leader"! I man, I can see the general same vein of humour going through it, but she swung and missed on this one, and badly. I suppose at least there was a little thought put into it, so rather amazingly, of the four I've watched so far, this was the best. Though that's not saying much.
Rating:

[Trollheart]

God save me! Surely Black Mirror will be better. Come on, Charlie! Rescue me from this morass of mediocrity! Help me, Charlie Brooker! You're my only hope!

Title: "Be Right Back"
Series: Black Mirror
Season: 2
Year: 2017
Writer(s): Charlie Brooker
Storyline: After her husband is killed, Martha  is signed up, without her knowledge, by her friend to a new software system that can mimic the responses of people and allow them to feel like they're talking to them. Using online public information it copies the mannerisms of dead people. Though she thinks it's sick at first, when she becomes pregnant she decides to try it. She's been told that if she wants, she can give the programme access to her husband's private emails so it can get even more like him, and then when she does this Ash is able to call her (well, the software is) and talk to her and keep her company.

Then there's another level, where a blank lump of synthetic flesh can be imprinted with her husband's image and personality, to basically I guess grow a new person, a replica of him. But once he's "grown", she finds it hard to get to grips with. Well, you would, wouldn't' you? I mean, if she - as she presumably will - has sex with him, is she technically cheating on her late husband? So many ethical questions. Well, obviously not such a problem, as she's now shagging him.

Quick theory here: I think at the end, she's going to be killed, or die anyway, and he's going to order up a copy of her, leaving them as two kind of not-really-people living a new life together while the people they're based on are dead. Maybe. Anyway, her sister turns up, and you now have to wonder how she's going to explain the fact that her husband is back alive, as such. In the interim, she gets him to hide. How long's that going to work for? Now little things about Ash begin to annoy her: the way he doesn't sleep, the way he can't be cut, doesn't know to stop her drinking when she's had enough, doesn't know her sister. His unreality gets to her eventually; everything he does is based on the knowledge he has of Ash, and so there's no real way for him to surprise her or act outside of the normal behaviour exhibited by the original. Eventually she just loses it and kicks him out.

But he can't go 25 metres from his activation point - the bath - unless she is with him, and so he has to stand outside the house all night. She quickly sees, if not the funny side then certainly the futility in having put him out - where is he going to go, anyway? - and brings him back into the house. She decides to take him to the cliffs, where they had been talking before, when he was just a voice on the phone. It is, or was, a popular spot for suicides, and you can now see where this is going. She's going to push him off isn't she? She's decided she'd rather live with the memory of who Ash was than try to recreate him and live with that person.

She tells him to jump, but then we see him break down - or pretend to - and then it's years later and her daughter is bringing him cake up into the attic, where he's being kind of stored. Tres weird.

Things I thought would happen, but didn't:
Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:

Comments: Finally. Black Mirror never lets me down. Ever. A really touching little story about who we are, more than the sum of our parts, and how we deal with grief. If we could all just bring our loved ones back when they die, would we grieve at all? Would death lose its sting, would loss end up bereft of all meaning? And would we then get colder, more dismissive of grief, death and indeed life? A clever if somewhat disturbing ending, and another first-rate story from the man who never disappoints, and Black Mirror saves part one of round six in the dying stages.

Rating: