Twilight Tales from the Outer Limits of the Darkside

[Trollheart]

Title: "A Chapter of Genesis"
Series: The Veil
Season: 1
Year: 1958
Writer(s): Sidney Morse
Storyline: A man is dying and his family gather around; one of the sons has stayed while the other comes back from his adventures, and there is tension between the two men. There doesn't seem to be any love lost there. Jamie, the younger one has come home to see if he can get his hands on his father's money when he dies, and is not ashamed to admit it, being something of a prodigal it seems. But the will leaves everything to John, the older brother, who then produces a will of his own. Oh joy. Which will is the correct one? Jamie's copy of the will is the most recent, so it's acceptable in legal terms.

Jamie reveals that he intends selling the farm and putting his mother into a home, but Johnny is not having that. Jamie, however, seems not quite to understand the situation, saying the house is his (surely not till his father is dead) and kicks John out. John promises he will challenge the will, and when he sees the ghost of his father, who advises him "Look in Genesis: Chapter 27" he finds that it says... nothing. He's kicked out of the house by Jamie, who rather histrionically pulls a gun on him. John then realises that the Bible he has is not the family one, which his mother says is in the attic.

But Jamie has the same idea, and is searching the attic when his brother encounters him. They struggle and John is knocked down, but he realises that Jamie has found the Bible, inside of which is another will, which leaves the house and all assets to John, and post-dates Jamie's one, foiling his plans.

Comments: Yeah not bad. A bit obvious but decent enough I guess. Better than some I've seen recently.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "The Cuckoo Clock of Doom"
Series: Goosebumps
Season: 1
Year: 1995
Writer(s): Billy Brown, Dan Angel
Storyline: When his father buys a new cuckoo clock and warns both his children never to touch it, a boy sees a chance for revenge on his annoying little sister, who is always making his life miserable. But when he snaps the head of the cuckoo he gets a shock, as it seems he has been thrown backwards in time. His father had told them that the clock was rumoured to have been built by a mysterious old man a century ago, and carries a curse which will be enacted on anyone who messes with it.

Okay that's pretty good. I thought it was going to be a Groundhog Day thing, that he'd keep reliving the same day over, but no: he's now six years in the past. Which leaves him with another big problem. Six years ago his dad had not bought the cuckoo clock, so it's not there for him to fix. And if he goes six more years back by tomorrow morning, he'll be, well, a baby at best, maybe an embryo. Then he remembers the antique shop where his father bought the clock, so sets off for there. But when he gets there it's closed for holidays.

On the way there, a strange man asks him pointedly if he "has the time"? (Trollheart's Theory: this is him from the future, trying to sort out his past). His father comes for him and brings him home. The next morning he's a baby, but his father seems interested in going to the antique store. That suits Mikey, who manages - somehow, though he's a baby; well, more a toddler I guess, as he can walk unaided after a fashion - to reset the cuckoo and thereby reset time. He returns to his own age, but as he climbed up the clock as a baby he knocked off one of the plates on the side of the clock, which represent years. It was 88 he dislodged, and as his sister was born in 1988 when he returns to his own life she has never been born. Score!

Comments: A decent enough story, with one major flaw. If Mikey broke the cuckoo in his own time, then it should not have been broken back when he was a child, assuming all of time reset and not just for him. Which it did, as his parents get progressively younger and his birthdays play out at the proper ages. Also, his sister disappears once he hits six, so how could the cuckoo be broken if he, um, hasn't broken it yet? Nice to see the little annoying sister get her comeuppance.

Have to ask though, what the fuck was the deal with the strange old man asking if he had the time? If you're going to put something like that into your story, Mr. R.L. Stine - and assuming they didn't just ignore it for the TV version or hadn't enough time to explain it - then it needs to mean something. You can't just throw in red herrings like that for the fucking fun of it.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "Rottefella/Lab Rats"
Series: Bloodride
Season: 1
Year: 2021
Writer(s):
Storyline: Having invented a new wonder antidepressant, the owner of a big pharmaceutical company is incensed when he finds that the prototype is missing from the safe where he put it. Frisking all his close employees, with whom he has been celebrating, Edmund vows nobody shall leave until the prototype is found. Frisks are negative, so the rooms must be searched next. While that's being done, Edmund locks everyone in the lab, telling them they can easily free themselves if the one who opened the safe uses the same combination to open this door. That will of course prove their guilt, but until someone owns up and uses the code nobody is getting out.

And so begins a sort of Twelve Angry Men situation, where paranoia reigns as accusations are spat and secrets spilled, and everyone suspects everyone else. It's a little The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street too, with nobody trusting anyone else. One girl is suspected of sleeping with Edmund, while his wife, who makes the accusation, is told that if she suspects him of cheating on her, that's a good motive to steal his life's work. Violence, naturally enough, quickly erupts as the only two men - three women and two men - in the cage come to blows, the one accusing the other of making the breakthrough discovery by piggybacking on his years of research, the other sneering at him and saying he had to start all over, that the other guy's work was useless.

Abdi, the guy who broke the code, is laid out by Philip, and Edmund, watching on the CCTV, seems not to care that he might die. He makes his security chief recheck the credentials of all five, including his wife, who is among them. Philip suffers from a facial tic when  under pressure, which gives the whole thing quite a horrific aspect. Meanwhile, a cage of lab mice gets knocked over and they're roaming the cubicle. Turns out Edmund is no squeaky-clean altar boy either: he induced his staff to invest in the company just as he was about to file for bankruptcy. Two of them later committed suicide. He's revealed as a heartless greedy man, who can't even remember his own wife's birthday, or be bothered to buy her a present - the secretary does that. So nobody is under any illusions that he is not prepared to let them all stay there till they run out of air or food, rather than lose his meal ticket.

Now he ups the ante, filling the cubicle with gas. With the added threat, one of the girls comes up with a plan. Everyone writes down a combination, and they mix them up. Whoever wrote the correct combination - and is therefore the thief - will remain anonymous, but they'll be able to get out by trying all the combinations, one of which will be the correct one. But Edmund intensifies the gas flow, so they have less time, and eventually the girl who came up with the plan has to go for it, putting in the correct code, revealing herself as the thief. (Trollheart's Theory: they're all now going to push him into the cage and leave him to die). Oddly enough, he doesn't report her to the cops or anything, probably has to do with the fact that he's riding her I guess. She turns out to be the daughter of one of the employees who took their own lives due to Edmund's treachery.

She actually has the prototype on her, having used a little sleight-of-hand during the search to plant it on him, and then take it back, but he susses it at the end and takes it. On returning to his lab his wife is waiting with a gun, and forces him into the cage! Yes! The rest of them come behind her and now the gas is turned on. (Trollheart's Theory II: She's changed the combination to her birthday, which he won't know). He tries to plead with them, but she tells him she's changed the combination. Eight digits. Her birthday. Yes! Again. Of course he doesn't know it, and that's the end of him.


Comments: Damn good little story. Not only does it shine a light on the questionable practices of big pharma, it also gets in the old "hell hath no fury" idea at the end. Nice.
Rating:

[Trollheart]

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

Title: "The Perfect Brother"
Series: The Haunting Hour
Season: 1
Year: 2011
Writer(s): Erik Paterson and Jessica Scott
Storyline: Two brothers are pushed to the limit by their demanding parents, especially their mother, who seems to think nothing less than perfect every time is acceptable. When the older of the two, Matt, falls in the bedroom he seems to start slurring and having problems walking, then that night Josh, the other brother, wakes to find him staring silently at him, as if frozen. (Trollheart's Theory: one of the brothers is an android/replica/robot, made so that he'll push the other to greatness?)  Matt falls again, this time in school, and though it's recommended by the nurse that he be taken to hospital, his mother refuses, taking him home instead.

At home, the parents discuss "the experiment", and that it is a failure, and time to abandon it. Matt's father says he's taking the boy to the hospital, but wont' let Josh go. Josh redials a phone he saw his mother use, expecting it to call the hospital, but instead a voice asks for username and password, and when he can't supply them, hangs up. He talks to his mother but she shuts him out - literally. She is removing the clothes from Matt's bedroom and pushes him out of the room without any explanation, saying what's done is done. Josh traces the phone number and goes to the location, which is decidedly not a hospital. It's some sort of warehouse or factory, where experiments appear to be going on.

Demonstrating if nothing else that this place doesn't exactly give much consideration to security, he's able to explore and he hears a woman scream, sees figures restraining her behind a curtain, runs. He comes across a line of people (patients?) on trolleys being fed some sort of yellow liquid through a drip, and here he finds his brother. He also finds his parents, apparently signing away all their parental rights to Matt. But even when he discovers his brother is a robot (yay!) he declares he's still his brother and he will not leave him. Of course he fails, and Matt is taken away. Then the kicker: it turns out that his parents, and everyone else, are robots too. They only wanted a human around the house to do the chores, and even Josh was just an experiment. Now he's being sent back in a box marked "defective- return".

Comments: Fair enough. I had it sussed early, but not completely. The coldness of the mother gave her away. So are they on an alien planet? Or has Earth been taken over by robots?

Things I thought might have happened, but didn't: I kind of thought both brothers were going to turn out to be robots, the one (Matt) supposed to be training the other.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "The V Word"
Series: Masters of Horror
Season: 2
Year: 2006
Writer(s): Mick Garris
Storyline: So here we are again. Well, the last - being the first - of these I tried was horrible, disgusting, disturbing and completely incomprehensible. Let's hope this is better. Kerry and Justin, two bored kids, head to a funeral home where the cousin of one of them works, hoping to see dead bodies. Entering - the door not being locked - they look for the cousin but can't find him. On the way back, as they decide to leave, somewhat spooked by the eerie atmosphere, they find one of the coffins open, and empty. Could have sworn it was closed when they came in! Now the door is locked and they can't get out!

They hear music, and despite their reservations decide to track it to its source, which turns out to be an ipod hooked to speakers in a room. This one, though, has blood all over it. They also find a dead old lady. Backing out of the room, they come across a door marked EXIT and find a collection of dead bodies on trolleys, blood on the floor, blood on the walls. Then they come across the body of the cousin, freshly dead. A moment later one of the covered corpses rises, and hey presto, it's a vampire. He kills Kerry but Justin escapes by smashing the window and leaping from the ledge. For whatever reason, even though it's night, the vampire does not follow him outside.

The police won't help him duh - 911 think he's crank calling them - and his useless father is, well, useless, so there's nothing much he can do. He falls asleep, and wakes up some time later to find Kerry knocking at the door. Considering how much these two are into horror you would think he would have sussed his buddy is now a vampire, but no, he lets him in. So now we have two vampires. And an extremely unobservant mother, who doesn't seem to see anything odd about the way her son is falling half asleep on his feet, looks pale and exhibits all the signs of being a vampire. She doesn't even call the doctor when she finds him cold as ice, just sends him to bed. The dog, of course, knows something's up and growls at him, but both she and her daughter ignore it.

He tries to kill his sister but can't, so he heads to the house of his no-good dad, but finds himself unable to even kill this scumbag. Kerry then appears to tell him he has to kill, and if he does, it may as well be the man who cares nothing for him or his mother or sister. Justin still resists, so his friend slashes his father's throat and tells him to drink. But he can't, and runs off instead. He meets the master vampire (the one that was in the funeral home) who it turns out is a disgraced former teacher who was fired for paedophilia. He tries to get him to feed on his little sister - he wants him to be like his dad - but possibly doesn't realise he's nothing like him.

Anyway, he draws blood in a syringe from the sister and injects it into Justin, but instead of going for his sister when released Justin sticks the needle into the master vampire's eyes to blind him, and then he and Kerry cut off his head. After making Kerry promise to leave his family alone, and get as far away as possible, he has him tie him down and waits for the sun. Kerry, meanwhile, heads to New York.

Comments: Decent enough vampire story. Has a few of the tropes, and mixes in some pretty nasty human  behaviour to identify with vampires. Also kind of steals the ending of 30 Days of Night, but overall much better.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "Treehouse"
Series: Into the Dark
Season: 1
Year: 2019
Writer(s): James Rodan, Todd Harthan
Storyline: Last time I looked at this series I was very disappointed to find no genre story at all, merely gay porn masquerading as slasher horror, so let's hope this is better. My expectations are, however, quite low. Given the premise that each episode is based around a holiday, this is linked to International Women's Day, so we open on a woman sitting at the top of a mountain having a picnic, seemingly, but she's alone and more to the point, looking much the worse for wear. She is drinking what hopefully is red wine, though it looks like it might be blood (!) and picks up a knife. There are marks on her arms and a cut on her lip. Whether this means she's been attacked and has done in her attacker, or whether this is self-harm I at present do not know. Back in time we go and she seems to be working under some celebrity chef, who is - surprise, surprise! - not very nice. The link from her picking up the knife at the picnic and then cutting with it, or another one, in the kitchen under the chef is quite clever. I guess we're talking about a Gordon Ramsey deal here, though when he talks to his daughter the guy seems decent enough. Is the "bastard in the kitchen" persona just for the cameras?

Well anyway Peter goes away for the weekend and meets what can only be called a very strange guy who runs the local bait shop, on the way crossing paths with a bunch of women who look like they're in the middle of a hen party. It appears he's staying with his sister, who's the DA; whether that is important or not I don't know. Sometimes writers just seem to throw in these details for no reason. I always prefer if I write something that it has something to do with the plot, because otherwise what am I doing? Trying to fill up a word count? Anyhow this is interesting. In his sister's (possibly the family) house he sees paintings their late father produced, and one shows the scene we saw at the opening: a girl sitting cross-legged alone at a picnic. I really hope that has something to do with the plot, as does his apparent sighting of what I think might be a black goat, which then disappears. The maid is odd too, but again whether or not that will figure in the story, your guess is as good as mine.

You know, it's odd but when I caught sight of the synopsis - which I tried to avoid, as I want to approach this without any preconceptions - I got the impression this was a revenge thing, that Peter had been a bastard to women and they were going to get their own back on him, but so far he seems a nice enough guy, apart from his performance in the kitchen, which, as I say, could be all show. The guy from the bait shop, Lonnie, who is either an ex-boyfriend of his sister, or at least some friend of hers from school,  calls the house, which seems odd enough, and there's some strange reaction by Peter to knives in a drawer, possibly to tie in with that opening scene again? I don't know; I'm just guessing here. I have no theory, don't know where this is going, if anywhere. His discovery of a toilet which seems to be full of blood (and possibly human organs?) throws me further: is he seeing these things or imagining them? One of the girls from the hen party - excuse me, Americans: bachelorette party! - comes to call, looking for candles and torches as their power has gone. Something seems to pass between them, and she is damn pretty, but she walks off with the gear, dropping a hint she might however be interested.

Again, whether it has anything to do with the story or not, the maid seems to have a very long tongue, and her eyes are funny. She looks quite old but doesn't act it. Stick a pin in that for now I guess. Out running the next day Peter bumps into the bachelorettes, as he's checking out the old treehouse he and his sister used to stay in at the summer, though now it has an odd face carved on it, like one of the trees in the Godwood in Game of Thrones. Okay I don't know what that is about, but I'm ready to make a slightly informed guess about something here. He's found there are no razor blades in the bathroom, and the maid is cutting potatoes with one of those peeler deals, and looking like she's having trouble doing so, plus the knives, remember, were all put away in a drawer. Putting these facts together with the opening scene, can it be that the sister is self-harming, may even have attempted suicide? He hasn't seen her for three years, he says, and the maid seems very cold towards him, possibly angry that he wasn't there for his sister when she needed him? Meh we'll see.

He invites the girls back to the house for a meal, the talk turns to children and the pros and cons of having them. Peter must feel a bit odd; it's like being at a girls' night out without being a girl, like being an interloper who has no business being there. Okay they're very clearly a coven; they have tattoos, they're very forceful in their femininity, they talk about the sisterhood, and there's that symbol face thing on the door of the treehouse, which I bet they put there. And Agnes, the maid, is talking strangely like she's the leader or grand witch or whatever. Now Peter is stumbling, so did they drug him? The next thing I'm going to write is that he wakes up in the treehouse with the women around him. I don't know if that's what's going to happen, but I see it going that way. No, in fact he wakes up beside one of the girls. He hears music downstairs and what sounds like screeching, and finds an old-style gramophone playing old-style music while a peacock listens. Um. Right. Going back upstairs he finds the girl, Morgan, gone from his bed and then there's a thumping on the door and a weird looking creature walks in. He retreats up the stairs but can't get back into the bedroom; Morgan says she is trying to open the door but can't, and seems to be in distress, while he finds he can't move as the witch-creature advances up the staircase towards him.

Fade to black. When he wakes up he's chained to the bed, Morgan is there beside him and the creature is behind her, but she doesn't seem to be bothered and starts to taunt him, telling him he left his wife and yeah I assume now this is going revenge fantasy, though he doesn't seem any worse than most of us. I hope it turns out that he did something really bad, because otherwise this is going to seem very much overkill and disproportionate. Right, yes the creature thing is that girl he met first, the one who came knocking at his door in the night, and it seems she has a beef with him, something about her sister, whom he may have assaulted when she was young? Well, seems she developed a heroin habit - was it due to him? She then cut her wrists and it seems this girl is blaming him for that, perhaps with reason. Let's see. One of the other girls - oh it's Morgan - sets up a crossbow and loads it, aiming at his, um, nether regions. If anything was happening there, it sure ain't now!

And yes, finally, the shock revelation: they're witches. Well, duh! You'd have to think though that witches would have recourse to a more effective death than a fucking crossbow in the dick! I mean, it's hardly revenge of the sisterhood, is it? They say the fact Peter can't move is because of a spell they cast, but they could have achieved the same effect, without being witches. A simple drug dropped in his drink would have done the trick, and anyone can set up a crossbow! Surely they've more respect as witches? Now for some reason they're shaving him and cutting his finger and toenails. One of them puts a snake onto his wrist - or is it? Once it's on it turns into a metal representation of one. Now they're conducting an interview, as if one of them is him. Oh right I see now: they're re-enacting one of his interviews where obviously he made a pass at the interviewer. Okay I got it now. The head witch says they're going to castrate him, and they've painted his nails. They're going to turn him into a woman, aren't they? So he can see what it's like to be treated like shit by men. Damned if they're not.

Well that was unexpected! He broke free by goading them into using the crossbow, and shooting off target, and now he's on the run. He doesn't get far, but he does get to call Lonnie (when 911 is inexplicably busy!) so maybe the weird guy is going to come to his aid? At least there would be a point in his having met him then. Yeah here he comes, but one of the girls meets him and tells him all is okay. He doesn't quite believe her though, and pulls a gun. Now it seems Agnes is his mother, and she takes the gun from him, clearly in league with the witches, to nobody's surprise, and sends him away. In the process it is revealed that Lonnie is Peter's half-brother, the bastard son of Agnes and Peter's father. She tells the witches to finish the job.

Back inside, Peter is in a cage now and then he's dressed as a woman and the witches hunt him, the crossbow now mobile. He makes his way to the treehouse but finds there a load of clippings about him being a sexual predator; there's also bloodstains on the table and a knife. Running back out he sees his sister and jumps into her car, telling her to drive. I'm just going to guess that she's part of it and is going to bring him back to the witches. Yeah, the hard look she gives him when he tells her they're blaming him for the girl's suicide - she's in on it, deffo. Well, sort of: she was helping them but it seems she wasn't aware of how far they were going to go, and now she's being dragged out of the car along with her brother. Now he's nailed to a table with symbols being painted on him and a snake is going down his throat... then it seems he wakes up. Was it a nightmare? A premonition? Scroogelike, he's back in his own bed and seems to be unhurt, dressed in his own clothes and, most importantly, alone.

Cautiously, he advances out of the room holding the ultimate weapon - a shoe! What does he think they are? Insects? They had a crossbow, he has a shoe. But there's nobody there. The phone rings, it's the witches. They tell him his sister is okay, but if he tells her what happened she'll think he's crazy as she will have no memory of it, and they also warn him that if he ever touches another woman, they will come for him. Oh and it turns out they weren't witches after all - just drugs and pyrotechnics, and the sister was in on it fully. After such an experience, believing he has barely got away with his life, and that the "witches" will be keeping an eye on him, Peter resolves to be a changed man.

Comments: Well I'm glad I gave the series a second chance. The first episode was trash but this was fantastic. Really well-written, hard to anticipate and a great denouement in the end. And I knew I recognised Peter: that's Jimmi Simpson, William from Westworld. Yes an excellent story altogether, thoroughly enjoyed it. Almost an English version of a story I'd expect to see on Bloodride.

I will say there are aspects that were not explained. The opening scene was obviously the girl who committed suicide, the knives in the drawer then were from Peter's chef range, put there deliberately I guess to kind of goad him. I don't know what the blood in the toilet bowl was: I could have hazarded a home-made abortion but no mention was made of one. The length of Agne's tongue, which was really focused on, seemed to go nowhere and the idea that his sister was a DA made no impact whatever on the story, except I suppose to show she had done well in life. Now, if he had assaulted her, his own sister, then maybe both her participation in his
"being scared straight", so to speak, might have made sense, as would the toilet bowl blood thing, had she been pregnant, plus her being mentioned as being the DA. But none of that happened, so kind of shrug really.

The revelation about Lonnie has no impact at all on the story; he could have been her son without having to have been the son of Peter's father, too. Obviously I see now why they needed the crossbow, but they took a chance, didn't they? If they didn't intend to actually kill him, that was a real quarrel loaded into the thing, as we see when Morgan shoots it at him and it misses but buries itself in the wall of the bedroom. Anyone accidentally setting that off would have killed him. You'd think they would at least have used a prop, something off a stage or something, maybe one with a floppy rubber head? Dangerous, to say the least.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "Lucky 13"
Series: Love, Death & Robots
Season: 1
Year: 2019
Writer(s): Philip Gelatt, based on the short story by Marko Kloos
Storyline: A rookie space pilot is assigned a ship which has to date seen two crews die, but come back intact itself. Its code is 13-02313 - thirteen at the back, thirteen at the front, and the digits all add separately up to 13. So it's not exactly popular. On her first mission, landing marines on an unfriendly planet, they are ambushed and Colby takes heavy fire. However thanks to some clever flying and trickery she makes it out alive. From then on, "Lucky 13" becomes the only ship to make it back from nineteen sorties, and Colby begins to think the legend or curse is dead.

But eventually her luck runs out. They're hit by enemy fire and have to crashland on the planet. When she is forced to set the self-destruct and abandons the ship, the countdown runs but "Lucky 13" does not explode. The enemy gather around her, firing, and thens the ship explodes, taking them all with her. Colby gets promoted, a medal and a brand spanking new ship, but misses her old warhorse.

Comments: Meh. It's all right I suppose, nothing terribly special though. Animation is first class; I thought it was live-action when it started.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "New Orleans, LA"
Series: Monsterland
Season: 1
Year: 2020
Writer(s): Mary Laws
Storyline: A doctor working with children is accused of sexually abusing them, and when his wife says she will stand by him, this determination melts under his admission that he needs help. She was ready to fight the allegations but now he's said they're true, and she realises she doesn't know her husband at all. A rock comes through the wife's window and she goes to confront a jazz trumpeter who has been playing outside, but when she threatens him his eyes go black and he seems to turn into some sort of monster. She lashes out at him and he goes down. She drags  him into a nearby crypt and leaves him there. He escapes though and bites her, then goes smashing the windows with, um, the notes from his trumpet.

The next morning, her son arrives. He tells her that when he was a kid, something happened when they were at the Mardi Gras parade. She remembers it as him telling her a monster was chasing him, but he reminds her - or tries to - that he had told her it was his stepfather, who has now been accused of all the child abuse. She however was not ready to hear that. She had been plucked from poverty and obscurity by the handsome rich doctor, and the price of her new life was silent acquiescence, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear, pretending it wasn't happening. George, her son, tells her the truth is destroying him and he needs her to admit to what she has done. But she can't face it, and he runs out. She sticks an icepick into her ears to deafen herself to the trumpet music, but she can still hear it, as I guess it's in her head till she decides to look the truth in the eye.

Comments: In the end, not a bad story, quite brutal in its way, but it took a long time to get going and I had no idea where it was headed. Plus the jazz trumpeter drove me mad.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "Elliot"
Series: Two Sentence Horror Stories
Season: 2
Year: 2021
Writer(s): Stephanie Adams-Santos

First sentence: "I don't have many friends."

Storyline: Elliot, a transgender boy, is finding it hard in school. They won't even let him use the boys' toilets as he has transitioned from female to male. Hiding out in the basement he comes across a lady janitor (who is clearly the Devil, duh) who loans him a special musical instrument, which, she says, when played will make people feel what he feels. In return she takes one page of the music he has written. When the girls start annoying him, he plays it and they go crazy, covering their ears, sobbing and saying they're sorry.

The janitor tells him she will give him the instrument, the ocarina, in exchange for his entire songbook. He says his whole heart and soul is in that, but she just smiles, and he gives in. Of course, the instrument does nothing like what the "janitor" said it did; it hurts, maims and perhaps even kills people. He goes back to her to give the thing back, and finds a load of kids hanging in lockers. The janitor appears, telling him there is a hook for him; the ocarina has captured all his rage and pain, and this will be used when the next kid comes looking for salvation. Meanwhile, his body will become a husk, like those of the other kids.

He decides the ocarina has done enough damage and smashes it, while the janitor rages at him. As soon as it's destroyed, the kids in the lockers fall out of them, still breathing, and the creature vanishes. Elliot now has at least two friends who understand him.

Second sentence: "That's why I keep their bodies in the basement."


Comments: Classic sell-your-soul-to-the-devil story with a nice little twist. Liked this.

Things I thought might have happened, but didn't I thought Elliot might have turned the ocarina on the "janitor", giving her back all the pain and anger and hurt she had had stored up in it and blasting her to atoms.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

So that's round two done, and how are we looking in terms of ranking?



Black Mirror, Dimension 404, Room 104, Bloodride, Into the Dark



Tales from the Crypt, The Haunting Hour, Masters of Horror, Two Sentence Horror Stories



The Twilight Zone, Tales of Tomorrow, Creeped Out



The Outer Limits, The Veil, Goosebumps, Love Death and Robots, Monsterland





Creepshow



Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Night Gallery



Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, Amazing Stories

Before we get to the new rankings though, a quick check.

Shows at the top, sharing a rating of
remain the ones you'd expect: Black Mirror and Bloodride, but Two Sentence Horror Stories has slipped off the top with this round's episode and has been replaced by not one, but two other shows: Dimension 404 I'm not surprised about but the big shock is Into the Dark, a real resurrection. The last episode was way way down the bottom and barely rated at all, this time it's right at the top with the leaders, an incredible turnaround for this series. Also rising into the top tier is Room 104, not as huge a leap, as last time that was just outside the leaders, but now it has joined them. That then makes five shows instead of three sharing top place. The two big ones continue to fight it out, neither giving way and two new shows staking their claim.

Just below them, of the shows that at the end of round one had racked up a rating of
we have two of them having moved up, so there is room for other shows to take their place. They do, but the ones that were there and did not move up have in fact moved down, with Tales from the Darkside slipping badly and The Veil dropping (sorry) too. Replacing them are Tales from the Crypt, moving up, The Haunting Hour and Masters of Horror, the former emulating Into the Dark almost, and climbing from the very bottom, where it was not even rated last round. Joining them is the descending Two Sentence Horror Stories.

As far as the shows which, at the end of round one, were on a ranking of
each one has fallen, and one has plummeted to the bottom, with new shows therefore taking their place: The Twilight Zone, Tales of Tomorrow and Creeped Out all climb, Tales of Tomorrow in particular making a great comeback from the bottom of the pile, the other two rising from the previous level.

There's a rise for most of the shows who now occupying the ranking position of
now too, with The Outer Limits rising from the bottom, whiel The Veil, Goosebumps and Monsterland all fall down a level. Love Death and Robots moves up one level.

Further down we find Creepshow, all on its own but at least having advanced from the very lowest level to reach the rating of a not terrible


Are You Afraid of the Dark? plunges almost to the bottom, but Night Gallery rises very slightly, both now standing at a rating of


And right at the bottom, sharing the lowest possible rating of
we find Tales from the Darkside, falling from the rarefied heights of the second level, similarly with Monsters and Amazing Stories, having attained the halfway point last time, falls all the way to the basement.

Show that improved then, versus those that have fared worse since round one:

Improved:- Into the Dark, Room 104, Dimension 404, Tales from the Crypt, The Haunting Hour, Masters of Horror, The Twilight Zone, Creeped Out, Tales of Tomorrow, The Outer Limits, Creepshow, Love Death and Robots, Night Gallery.

Disimproved:- Two Sentence Horror Stories, Amazing Stories, Monsterland, Monsters, Are You Afraid of the Dark, The Veil, Goosebumps

[Trollheart]

This, then, is the new chart. I've just split it up as best I can, based on the merits of each episode from the series.


23 Tales from the Darkside
22 Amazing Stories
21 Monsters
20 Are You Afraid of the Dark?
19 Night Gallery
18 Creepshow
17 Monsterland
16 The Outer Limits
15 Love Death and Robots
14 Goosebumps
13 The Veil
12 Creeped Out
11 Tales of Tomorrow
10 The Twilight Zone
9 The Haunting Hour
8 Tales from the Crypt
7 Two Sentence Horror Stories
6 Masters of Horror
5 Dimension 404
4 Bloodride
3 Room 104
2 Into the Dark
1 Black Mirror

[Trollheart]

ROUND THREE, PART I: THE CLASSICS

I'm starting a new section, if you care. You can see it below.


Title: "Little Girl Lost"
Series: The Twilight Zone
Season: 3
Year: 1962
Writer(s): Richard Matheson
Storyline: In the dead of night, a father goes to answer the cries of his young daughter, but to his amazement and horror - and that of his wife, who joins him - though they can hear her she is nowhere in sight. When the family dog, who has been yapping outside in the garden, is let in he goes right under the bed - and vanishes too. The father calls over a friend of theirs, a physicist, who determines that there is a dimensional portal under the bed. He reasons that the child must have rolled out of the bed, fallen under and gone through the portal, as did the dog, probably scenting his mistress.

After physicist guy figures out that they can track the kid - sort of - through what he believes to be the fourth dimension, they locate her and call the dog, but the dog can't find its way back. So the fool father reaches in and then falls in. From there he calls to his daughter and the dog, trying to bring them to him. He does, just in time, as the fissure is closing. The end,

Things I thought would happen, but didn't: Meh, I thought he and his daughter might be left in there, or alternatively, he might have thrown his daughter through back to their own dimension but been trapped there himself.

Things I liked: Not much; I suppose the idea - though it's not mentioned, I just think it works - of there being an actual monster under the bed, even if the monster in question is an undiscovered dimension, works quite well. About the only thing in this episode that does.

Things I didn't like: Pretty stupid story. I particularly was annoyed by the fact that, in the kid's bedroom as they can hear her cry and are looking under the bed (doing that thing we all do: we know we've looked already and ascertained that what we're looking for is not there, but we don't believe our eyes and we look again) NOBODY thinks to look in the fucking wardrobe, which, if this wasn't the show it is, would be the place you would think most likely the kid had got to. Wandered into the closet, and now trapped in there. But no: the father even runs PAST the damn thing and neither considers the possibility that their daughter might be in the wardrobe. Idiots.

Comments: Overall a pretty poor story I feel. Given that it's a Matheson short story, I'm perhaps a little surprised, and also given that it's season three, which would have been right in the middle of the rich vein this series enjoyed around that time, with episodes such as "I Sing the Body Electric", "Kick the Can", "To Serve Man", "Five Characters in Search of an Exit", "The Little People", "It's a Good Life"  and "Dead Man's Shoes", I find this a curiously dissatisfying return for us to The Twilight Zone, and a damp squib to start our third round. As the man said, meh.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "Re-generation"
Series: The Outer Limits
Season: 3
Year: 1997
Writer(s): Tom J. Astle
Storyline: After his son is killed, a scientist plans to clone him using a new technique his company is pioneering. Dubious at first, his wife allows herself to be implanted with the cloned cells, but as she nears her time, and Graham begins his run for the senate, she starts to worry. How will people take it when this new baby grows up and looks identical to her dead son? What will Justin - Rebecca is determined the child will not be named after her dead son but has not yet chosen a name - think when he sees pictures, apparently of himself, older, around the house? How will they explain it? Graham dismisses her concerns, but given that he is now a public figure he must share them. That kind of thing can ruin your political career before it has a chance to even get going.

As the pregnancy progresses, Rebecca starts to feel that she is seeing things through her unborn baby's eyes, though the doctor - who works for her husband's company and was the one who performed the insemination - insists it's all in her mind. It's soon impossible to dismiss this though, as Rebecca makes it very clear she can communicate with her baby. The doctor starts to pay attention. It seems the brain cells that were used for the cloning process have retained memories, and are operating independently of those in the foetus.  However as these memories come back to him, our little Justin-to-be is getting very agitated inside of mommy and wants out!

Or is he reacting to the presence of his father? Rebecca seems to think so, and as Justin's memories flood into her she sees she's right: Graham was responsible for her son's death. It was an accident, but still, now she knows her husband has a temper that led to the death of their son. She decides to leave him, but then has a premonition - presumably through foetus Justin - that Graham is going to push her down the stairs. She runs for the attic instead, and when Graham comes up shoots him with shotgun.

In a weird kind of coda or postscript, we see then that the doctor is carrying an embryo clone of Graham in her. Yeah. Right.


Things I thought would happen, but didn't: Got to say, had nothing here.

Things I liked: The basic idea, so far as it went, was probably not terrible. Best I can say really.

Things I didn't like: Most of this episode really. The scenes of the embryo inside Rebecca's stomach were particularly disquieting.

Comments: A pretty dumb story with a terrible ending. The actual idea - the child trying to tell his mother that his father was responsible for his death - was okay, but then the guy gets shot for it? It wasn't even deliberate. And he wasn't - so far as I could see - menacing or stalking her, Jack Nicholson in The Shining-like, when he came up to the attic, just trying to calm her down and reassure her. And for that he gets two shells in the belly? But the kicker was the ending. Stupid to the max. What was he going to do? Marry the doctor when he grew up? Please. Or was this supposed to hint that they had been having a affair?

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: 'Til Death
Series: Tales from the Crypt
Season: 2
Year: 1990
Writer(s): Jeri Barchilon
Storyline: Oh god: it's about zombies, isn't it? A struggling hotel owner in Haiti realises that the land he wishes to build on is a swamp, and it's going to cost him a lot more than he has. He turns to the rich heiress who has just arrived, complaining about everything and quite obviously up herself. In her he sees a meal ticket, and sets his sights on her. Unfortunately for him, she is not interested, seeing right through him. He has an ace up his sleeve though; he knows a local witch, who gives him a love potion, warning him that one drop will make her love him, two will make her his forever. It doesn't seem to work at first, but then later that night she calls on him and, well, it obviously is working.

Unfortunately he hasn't been listening and gives her too much of the potion, which first sends her into convulsions and then kills her. We don't need a Trollheart Theory here: it's pretty clear what's about to happen. And it does: she rises from the grave, still in love with him. Over a short period of time she begins to decay, though she doesn't seem to realise it herself. In horror, he shoots her, but of course she's already dead so that doesn't help. He runs off into the night, ending up in the swamp where he's sucked down into the quicksand. But she pulls him out, and he manages to set her on fire and kicks her into the swamp where she disappears.

As he staggers back to the house, he's running the night's events over in his mind when there's a knock at the door, and there she is! In desperation (she's pretty much a skeleton in a dress now) he drinks poison. But the witch brings him back, and now he's stuck with his dead wife forever. Oh, and the head of the doctor friend she chopped off is animated too, for some reason.

Things I thought would happen, but didn't: Nothing really, other than the witch bringing him back to life. Don't understand that at all.

Things I liked: Nothing. I fucking hate zombies.

Things I didn't like: Pretty much all of it.

Comments: What the living fuck? I understand the idea, but then the witch brings him back from the dead - not explained how - and then there's the head of the doctor grinning away with a bad pun on his lips? What's that supposed to mean? At its heart (sorry) a very predictable story which ends up more or less exactly as you would expect, and then has this mad little coda stuck on the end. Weird.

Rating:

[Trollheart]

Title: "If the Shoes Fit"
Series: Tales from the Darkside
Season: 1
Year: 1985
Writer(s): Armand Mastroianni/ N. Ward/Louis Weber
Storyline: A candidate for governor checks in to a hotel, sharing his "wisdom" with the bellboy that politics is a game: doesn't matter about the issues, he says. Give people a good time and they'll vote for you. He's not interested in talking about his policies - probably because he has none - and is the consummate flim-flam man, hoping to coast into the governor's mansion on the votes of good-old-boys and impressionable girls.

He starts to hear circus music, then instead of his suit being delivered to the hotel he finds a clown's costume, which the bellboy seems to think is not strange at all; in fact, he helps him into the suit. But when his campaign manager calls to take him to the rally, there is no bellboy and his suit looks normal. Then he, um, ends up in a circus ring with a clown car. Right.

Things I thought would happen, but didn't: Not a clue.

Things I liked: Nothing.

Things I didn't like: Everything.

Comments: This is stupid even by TOTD standards, and that's saying something. I get what they're saying - politics has to be taken seriously, you have people's lives and livelihoods and futures in your hands and all that, and some - most - politicians will get there by whatever means they feel best serves them, but it's heavy-handed to the max and just ridiculous. Plus I hate clowns.

Rating: