Monster of the Day #1704

Updated on February 21, 2018 By Ken Begg 19 Comments

Neat!

Yesterday, case in point. Woke up late, didn’t have time for the MotD. Arghh.

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  • Gamera977

    The plant creature from ‘Counterweight’ which is only in the episode for about two minutes or so. It’s a talky dramatic episode about human reaction under stress but I guess they had to have a ‘bear’ even if it had such a small role. In any case it’s a nifty stop-motion animation effect.

  • Marsden

    Earthworm Jim’s grandfather?

  • Flangepart

    “Why back in my day, we had to avoid being eaten by Pterodactyls! Huh, some superhero YOU turned out to be…”

  • Ericb

    For me the creepiest part of that episode is when stop motion fern kills the other plants in the terrarium it’s in.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    So, I went ahead and watched this episode. As Gamera977 notes, it’s really, really talky–and I hope and pray that Lyz from AYCYAS never sees this. (Shudder). It has an interesting score, and the “alien light” effects are very well done, but it just seems kind of random and pointless. It also has an odd end credit scene, where each cast member is highlighted as they disembark (all done silently to the episode’s main score).
    According to the book, the original story had the idea that, unbeknownst to the crew, a person would be placed on a spaceship as a deliberate magnet for all their aggression and hostility, so that (aside from him) they would function toward the common goal and not develop hostilities between themselves–the crewman becoming a sort of Judas Goat. This was completely removed from the final episode, so that while Michael Constantine’s character is a complete ahole, there’s no hidden agenda to his ahole-ness. Unless…
    …in that end credit sequence, he appears and seems quite friendly with the flight attendant, possibly hinting that his Judas Goat role was as it was intended.
    But then there’s that alien plant monster, telling humanity that all we do is hate and kill, and we’re not ready, etc, etc.
    I think at this point the producers, executives and sponsors were pretty desperate. Alas, what might have been.

  • Gamera977

    Lol, I got the impression they were running out of scripts at this point! Interesting about the Judas Goat, kinda wish they’d went with it instead of the alien light being (or maybe both).

  • Beckoning Chasm

    I was just thinking how many of the episodes of this show didn’t have bears, and I came up with this list:

    Outer Limits non-bear episodes

    In this case a bear constitutes a being, human or non-human, of monstrous appearance, whether hostile, benign or neutral.

    Season One:

    The Hundred Days of the Dragon
    The Borderland
    Controlled Experiment
    The Forms of Things Unknown

    Season Two:

    Soldier
    The Inheritors

    Marginal:

    The Man With the Power (the cloud-thing probably counts, even though it’s just Donald Pleasance)
    Expanding Human (not sure a minimum of make-up makes a bear)
    I Robot (not really a monster, certainly not evil)

  • zombiewhacker

    While we’re waiting for Ken to feel better, how about a quick discussion about how you think the 60s anthology shows rank, top to bottom?

    The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, etc.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Shouldn’t that list really read, “Everything other than the Twilight Zone”? I don’t see how anything else can come in first.

    And Ken, we all hope you feel better soon.

  • Gamera977

    Afraid I’ll have to disagree a bit there. Personally I’ll take ‘The Outer Limits’ over ‘The Twilight Zone’ any day. ‘The Twilight Zone’ was one of those shows that when it was good it was amazing, when it was bad it was horrible. And to me too often it relied on the ‘kicker’ ending instead of telling a solid story.

    ‘Thriller’ was generally excellent when except for the crime drama episodes that mostly left me cold. The ‘One Step Beyond’ episodes I’ve seen have been generally average, I haven’t seen any great ones so far but nothing really terrible either. I don’t really remember ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ that well.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    I always thought Outer Limits would have been fantastic, had it been a half-hour show. Many if not most of their episodes just seemed stretched beyond the ability of the story to endure. If it was a show like Night Gallery, where the stories could be of variable length, it would have been better served. That said, “Corpus Earthling” is probably the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen on TV. And I really hated season one’s insistence on beginning with spoilers. I’m sure that was part of the “get the monster out there FIRST THING (even if it ruins the surprise)” edict they seemed to insist on, but still.

    Twilight Zone was very hit-or-miss for me. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street:” is fantastic, as are many others, but some of them had a treacly, sentimental nature that was kind of off-putting.

    I never saw “One Step Beyond” and I honestly found “Thriller” kind of dull. Never finished the series.

  • Gamera977

    Good points!

    I loved the horror episodes of ‘Thriller’. ‘Terror in Teak Wood’ and ‘The Hungry Glass’ are my favorites. ‘Pigeons From Hell’ is widely acclaimed as the best but frankly I like the two above better.

    ‘One Step Beyond’ is as far as I know entirely in public domain now. I’ve watched the entire first season and about half the second on YouTube. There were only three seasons and it looks like the whole show (in varying shades of video quality) is there on YouTube.

    ‘Night Gallery’ I’ve never seen but would really like to. And I remember the much later ‘Tales From the Dark’ from my childhood, another one I’d like to catch up with.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    Night Gallery has some things which I think held up pretty well–it was similar to Twilight Zone, but with Serling only as host, so there was more variety in presentation. It’s been years, though.
    Tales From the Dark Side, my recollection is fairly dim, but I seem to recall it was basically a one-gimmick-per-episode thing.
    What else? Never saw Amazing Stories, Freddy’s Nightmares, Monsters (also from the TFTD folks) or Friday the 13th the Anthology. I’m sure there are others out there….

  • zombiewhacker

    TFTD – agreed. And often the gimmicks weren’t that great to begin with.

    Occasionally, though, an episode would come along that offered a great set-up… but then the pay-off would be no good.

    In particular, I recall one ep (written by George Romero, no less) where Barnard Hughes played a sadistic, small town Scrooge-type whom all the poor locals owed money. Once a year, on Halloween night, Hughes would make the townies a cagey offer: send your children trick-or-treating to my mansion. If your kids find the loan papers I’ve hidden inside my home, I’ll tear up the debt agreement and your family will owe me nothing.

    But it was all a dirty trick. Hughes, an inventor in his spare time, had rigged his house with all sorts of booby-traps and haunted house-type gizmos, guaranteeing that any child who dared to venture inside Hughes’ home be scared away screaming before the vital financial documents could ever be found.

    I remember watching when this episode was first airing and thinking to myself, “Wow, this is gonna be great. Is this episode where Hughes’ character finally meets his match? Maybe one of the local kids has a few tricks up his sleeve, outsmarts Hughes and beats him at his own game!”

    But, sadly, it was not to be. Rather than coming up with a genuinely clever resolution to his story, Romero simply threw in an out-of-left-field WTF ending that left me completely dissatisfied. Up to that point I have to believe it was one of the best scripts Romero had ever written. And, just like that… pfffft!

    Sorry… I needed to get that off my chest after 30 years. I feel better now.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    That sounds like the pilot episode of TFTD. And that’s where my admiration of George Romero kind of hit a roadblock. It seemed he wasn’t interested in telling a story or even scaring people, no, he wanted to teach people a lesson. There were good people and there were bad people, and the good were impossibly good and the bad were impossibly bad, and the story wound its way through those two poles.
    It’s a shame, really, because Romero really had a very powerful sense of how to, for lack of a better phrase, “punch people in the face” artistically. He could have been the Ultimate Sam Raimi.
    Oh well. There, but for the New York Times…

  • Gamera977

    Thanks, I just remember the great ‘Tales From the Darkside’ introduction but not much else other than the Zuni Fetish Doll episode. I’ve got it somewhere around here but guess I’m a little afraid to watch it!
    ‘Amazing Stories’ I watched about half of the episodes back in the day, The only one I really remember is the awesome one about the Miss Universe pageant. Basically an alien dude called the ‘Cabbage Man’ shows up complaining that you can’t call it Miss Universe since all the contestants are from Earth. So he brings a bunch of crazy bizarre alien contestants, with some really great FX, frankly it amazed me back then you could do this on a TV budget. And the ‘Cabbage Man’ was played by ‘Weird Al’ Yakovic in a crazy loud spastic style like a cross between Max Headroom and Gilbert Gottfried with make-up to make his head look like a cabbage!

  • zombiewhacker

    Just did some browsing at Wikipedia…

    Considering One Step Beyond’s red-haired stepchild status among anthology shows, I was surprised at the range of quality actors who guest starred during its three year run: Warren Beatty, Joan Fontaine, William Shatner, Christopher Lee, Robert Blake, Charles Bronson, Whit Bissell, Veronica Cartwright, Werner Kemplerer, Louise Fletcher, Arthur Franz, Cloris Leachman, Robert Loggia, Jack Lord, Robert Lansing, Patty McCormack, Patrick Macnee, John Marley, Elizabeth Montgomery, Yvette Mimieux, Edward Platt, Donald Pleasance, William Schallert, Suzanne Pleshette, Andre Morell, Mike Connors, Pernell Roberts, Torin Thatcher, Robert Webber, and Peter Lawford! Yegads!

    I might start checking out episodes on YouTube just for the heck of it.

  • Marsden

    I watched the rest of The Tick on Amazon. It was really good. Overkill is my favorite new character. I like the new take on Dot. It works good as a superhero action story as well as a comedy, but it’s not a sillier version like the last live action Tick.

  • I’m still of mixed feelings on it. On the one hand I did like and enjoy it. On the other, it really felt like it could have worked better as a movie. Lots of padding.

    Dunno, Maybe they’ll have the kinks worked out for second season. Here’s hoping.