TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110689/p88

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.3 KB | 139 lines

                                                                                VIDEO, Page 88

Invasion of the Wild Things


TV is overrun with thrills, chills and delicious horrors

By Richard Zoglin


    Except for a few racy double entendres on The Golden Girls,
network TV on Saturday night is a pretty tame affair. Twist the
dial a few notches, however, and there's mayhem aplenty. One
evening a few weeks ago, a man was impaled on the handle of a
hay rake by a wolflike demon that had risen from hell at the
behest of a satanic cult. A couple visiting an art gallery
wondered why the sculptures of terrified people looked so
unnervingly lifelike. (Any guesses?) And Freddy Krueger, the
razor-clawed maniac from the Nightmare on Elm Street films, was
back to his old tricks, scaring the wits out of people in their
sleep. His latest victim: a dream expert who, convinced Freddy
was after him, went berserk on a talk show and was shot to death
in front of a live TV audience. Eat your heart out, Geraldo.

    Slash TV? Not quite. But horror, fantasy and science
fiction have invaded the medium with a vengeance. The NBC series
Quantum Leap involves time travel, and Fox's new Alien Nation
postulates a Los Angeles of the future, where people from
another planet are trying to integrate into American society.
Cable is going for classy shocks in such series as Shelley
Duvall's Nightmare Classics on Showtime and HBO's Tales from the
Crypt, adapted from the old E.C. horror comics and directed by
such notables as Walter Hill (48 HRS.) and Robert Zemeckis (Back
to the Future).

    Mostly, however, TV horror is flourishing in a batch of
popular syndicated programs, usually tucked away on independent
stations. Eight such series are on the market. Three of them --
Star Trek: The Next Generation, Friday the 13th: The Series and
War of the Worlds -- were among the five top-rated weekly
syndicated shows at the end of last season. Oddly, they have
attracted little notice beyond their cult audiences, even from
the clean-TV crusaders, who would probably be appalled by the
prolific (though rarely graphic) violence. Which is just fine,
since it allows the rest of us to enjoy some B-movie pleasures:
comic-book energy, throw-logic-to- the-winds imagination Land,
occasionally, a good scare.

    Such attractions were rare on main stream TV in the past.
Rod Serling's Twilight Zone served up some chills, but it was
less interested in frightening the viewer than in offering
moral parables. Star Trek will forever be enshrined in TV's
science-fiction pantheon, but it wasn't nearly so scary as the
sight of the cast members growing old in the movies that have
followed. The 1960s anthology series The Outer Limits
represented the outer limit of TV's flirtation with the
fantastic, while Kolchak: The Night Stalker was the closest the
medium ever got to a good monster show.

    One problem in doing such programs is the cost. Elaborate
special effects are too expensive for most TV series, and the
tackiness can show. Superboy, for example, is an engaging
adventure series based on the comic book, but the TV hero's
cheesy superantics come straight from Woolworth's. Low-rent
special effects have also turned War of the Worlds -- an update
of the H.G. Wells novel and 1953 movie -- into a dreary
stalemate. Last season the evil aliens seemed to do little but
abduct unsuspecting earthlings and transform them Invasion of
the Body Snatchers-style into blank-eyed automatons to do their
bidding. A second wave of aliens has arrived this season with
a slightly different plan: to abduct unsuspecting earthlings and
make clones of them to do their bidding. Just how that is an
improvement remains to be seen.

    Snazzy makeup and special effects, however, are the stars
of Monsters, a lively half-hour anthology, which each week
delivers just what is advertised: a grotesque and usually
malevolent creature, concocted under the supervision of makeup
wizard Dick Smith (The Exorcist). Last season's menagerie ranged
from an 8-ft.-tall bloodworm with carnivorous tastes to a woman
who turned into a gigantic honey-bee and flew off with her
reluctant lover.

    Even when Monsters' stories are predictable and thin, the
show is enlivened by grisly good humor. In one episode, two
burglar brothers kill an old lady (Imogene Coca) while
ransacking her home, but not before she bites one on the hand.
The swollen wound soon takes the shape of the dead woman's face,
which won't shut up. "It's like in one of them Wolfman movies,"
cries the cursed fellow. Replies his dim-witted brother: "What,
an old lady bites you, and you turn into another old lady?" This
weekend Soupy Sales plays a traveling salesman who, after
wrecking his car, spends a night with a farm couple who have a
beautiful daughter living in the attic. Only one problem: when
he touches the girl, her skin starts to dissolve, revealing a
rotting corpse out for revenge against all the men who have
wronged her. Some farmer's-daughter joke.

    Tongue-in-cheek humor also lifts Freddy's Nightmares above
the jolt-'em-out-of-their-seats level of its theatrical
namesakes. Freddy (Robert Englund) can still be one ruthless
customer: in the season opener, he sliced off a woman's head,
which plopped to the floor like a ripe pineapple. Most weeks,
however, he serves merely as the wisecracking narrator for
unrelated stories revolving around dreams. Many are unexpectedly
lighthearted; a few even approach satire. In one of last
season's entries, a yuppie career woman had a thirtysomething
nightmare about having a baby: her boss replaced her on the fast
track, prison bars materialized outside her door, and she was
sent to Post-Partum Sleep Deprivation Camp for Unprepared
Mothers.

    Friday the 13th bears even less resemblance to the
infamous, inexhaustible series of slasher films for which it is
named. The TV version is another anthology show, its stories
linked by an antique shop whose objects were cursed and sold to
unsuspecting customers. Each week three continuing characters
try to retrieve one of the objects before it wreaks its
supernatural havoc. That serviceable premise provides the excuse
for segments that range from old horror chestnuts (the
ventriloquist controlled by his dummy) to spooky original tales
(two abused children lure playmates into an evil playhouse).

    Friday the 13th's worst sin is an obsession with clunky,
overexplanatory dialogue laying out the supernatural ground
rules ("Demons can only rise or return on a full moon -- that's
why the spectral energy is gathering . . ."). But the show
delivers a stronger dose of pure horror than anything else on
TV. In the season's two-hour premiere episode, Lucifer tried to
take over a convent in France. Before the overstuffed plot spun
out of control, there were some startling set pieces: a
possessed nun literally climbing the walls and patients in a
mental ward going wild and murdering the staff. The show also
managed to write one of its regular characters out of the series
in possibly the screwiest manner in TV history. After being
possessed by the devil, the fellow was transformed into a little
boy and returned to his mother. A bit inconvenient for the
family, perhaps, but in TV's world of horror, there are worse
ways to go.