Something Weird on TV: Monsters Part Nine – Monsters Under Pressure

The third season of Monsters starts strong, with a half-dozen of the more successful episodes we’ve had so far in the series. Not that there aren’t stronger episodes to be found elsewhere, and the occasional semi-dud in this bunch, but there’s rarely been a more solid string all in a row.

Former “Coca-Cola Girl” Carol Lynley stars in “Stressed Environment,” where she plays a research scientist who has spent twelve years attempting to hasten evolution among rats. The result? A new species of mutant, tool-using rats. We’ve talked about screenwriter Neal Marshall Stevens before – this is his third episode of Monsters – and the director is a familiar name, too. But the stars of the show this time around, besides Lynley, are the Gremlin-like rats, brought to life in part through stop-motion photography by John Dods, who provided special effects for a pile of other episodes of the series, not to mention The Deadly Spawn, Spookies, and many others.

Monsters was a prime-time type of show, complete with occasional dark themes, some blood, and more than its fair share of semi-erotic content, sporadically almost bordering on softcore. However, it was pretty much always PG-13 material. “Stressed Environment” doesn’t have much room for eroticism, though it does open with a prolonged and pointless sequence of a lab tech getting undressed. Oddly enough, the sequence may be the closet the series has yet come to full nudity, as the camera takes in a generous portion of “sideboob” from actress Kathleen McCall, whose other credits include only a handful of appearances on TV.

As I said, this string of episodes is unusually strong, but “Murray’s Monster” may be its nearest thing to a miss. Our only comedic episode this time out, it concerns a (terrible) psychiatrist who hopes to use the monstrous transformation of one of his patients to kill his wife. Written and directed by Scott Alexander, creator of the Problem Child franchise and one of the writers on the recent Goosebumps movie, “Murray’s Monster” may go exactly where you expect, but when it comes to comedy episodes of this series, there are certainly worse ones.

Our next episode comes from a story by acclaimed sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writer Lisa Tuttle. It’s a creepy and sweaty number that is also the only directing credit for makeup artist Kenny Myers. Do maybe skip “Bug House” if you’re pregnant, though. Or if you have a fear of bugs.

David Odell has written a few good episodes of Monsters and Tales from the Darkside (and at least one bad one), and “Cellmates” does him proud. An EC Comics-style tale of a yuppie asshole in trouble with the law south of the border, who gets put into a “bad cell.” It seems that folks locked in that cell tend to go missing. At least, according to the old guy in the next cell over.

The yuppie is played by Grease 2’s Maxwell Caulfield, while the old guy is played by Ferdie Mayne, whose credits include nearly 300 movies and TV shows, but who I knew best probably from The Fearless Vampire Killers. As with many episodes of Monsters, however, the real star is the special effects, in this case a weird take on vampirism that uses a wonderful melting wax effect.

As I’ve mentioned before, Monsters is often defined as much by its limited sets as by its creatures, and the episodes in this batch are no exception. “Cellmates” took place entirely in a jail cell, and “Outpost” takes place entirely in a single room, as well, This time, our locale is the eponymous outpost on a mining planet in the far future, after humans have had faster-than-light travel for more than 200 years. Like many episodes of Monsters, it’s also a two-person show starring Juliet Mills (recently in The Primevals) and dancer Tony Fields, under a pile of prosthetic makeup.

In what the IMDb synopsis calls a “sad existentialist drama,” Mills plays a representative of a space mining corporation who has come to the lonely outpost to interview Sebastian, played by Fields, a heavily genetically and cybernetically modified being who has been engineered to survive the planet’s harsh conditions. Her goal? Ascertain why he has not been meeting his quotas.

The episode is about their clash of world views, and about the cruelty and inhumanity of capitalism, and its final twist is effective, even as you can see it barreling toward you down the track. Both Mills and Fields sell their roles in what is essentially nothing more than an extended two-shot from screenwriter Michael Reaves, who penned several other episodes of Monsters, most of them not this good.

We close out tonight with another really solid episode. “The Hole” comes to us from a trio of writers, among them legendary comic book scribe Gerry Conway. Set during the Vietnam War, it takes place entirely underground, in a maze of Vietcong tunnels. The premise here is one that will be familiar to pretty much everyone who has ever played a fantasy roleplaying game: while digging the tunnels, they dug “too deep,” and awoke an ancient evil. Now, the dead buried in the tunnel walls are coming to life, in the form of delightful Creepshow-style revenants.

These undead creatures are the real draw, but the tunnels themselves are an evocative setting for a horror picture. Any time horror stories use the real-life horrors of war as their backdrop, they are generally the stronger for it, and this is no exception.

It’s a strong place to end a string of episodes that have been pretty much top drawer from start to finish. Can the rest of season three keep up this pace? Join us next time, and we’ll find out!