Something Weird on TV: Monsters Part Six – Monsters Between Us

The seventh episode of the second season of Monsters is about, I kid you not, evil pickles. Thereby making it Paul Tremblay’s ultimate nightmare. Featuring the always-reliable Fritz Weaver (Creepshow) and an early-career Gina Gershon as a femme fatale, “Jar” is one of several episodes that trades in the tropes and stereotypes of hardboiled detective fiction. It’s one of four series episodes helmed by Bette Gordon, who previously directed “The Mother Instinct” back in season one.

“The Demons” has a similarly stacked cast, albeit stacked with very different people. Night Court’s Richard Moll plays a sorcerer (the synopsis calls him an alien, and he certainly isn’t meant to be human) whose attempts to summon a demon instead net him a human insurance agent. The human must then summon a demon of his own, who turns out to be a fellow insurance agent played by regular nerd actor Eddie Deezen.

As you might imagine, “The Demons” is yet another broad comedy episode, this time co-written by Martin Olson, who has been a lead writer on a number of animated shows including Phineas and Ferb and Rocko’s Modern Life, and directed by Scott Alexander, who is better known as a screenwriter himself, having written Problem Child, Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, 1408, Big Eyes, and others.

The next episode is another Robert Bloch adaptation, this time about an elderly man in a nursing home who falls in love with a nurse and doesn’t want to go when Death comes for him. To get out of it, he makes a deal to supply Death with souls… until the Grim Reaper wants the soul of his new love. Oddly enough, this episode also boasts a pretty impressive cast, albeit in yet a third different way.

As the characters are all older, the cast this time is made up of familiar faces from movies and TV of the ‘50s. Our protagonist is played by Commando Cody himself from the 1952 Radar Men from the Moon serial, made infamous by playing as shorts in front of a string of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. His love interest is none other than Barbara Billingsly, who was June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver and the “Jive Lady” in Airplane, among others.

“The Mandrake Root” is another episode with a pretty much all-Black cast including Frankie Faison and singer Melba Moore. Moore plays a housewife who is cleaning out her deceased grandma’s basement in preparation to sell her home when she discovers that there was more to Grandma Muriel than met the eye. In the basement, she finds the titular root which, when watered with human blood, grows into a seductive plant-man (Byron Minns) who wants to feed off her husband in exchange for becoming her lover – the same arrangement he had with her grandma.

The episode is helmed by Brian Thomas Jones, the director of the 1988 splatter film The Rejuvenator as well as six episodes of Beetleborgs, to name just a couple. Jones also previously wrote a pretty good episode of Tales from the Darkside, season four’s “The Spirit Photographer.” He didn’t write this episode, though. That was Harvey Jacobs, who also penned “New York Honey” back in season one, as well as several usually comic episodes of Tales from the Darkside and not much else.

“Half as Old as Time” sees Leif Garrett in some dodgy old man makeup as a dying man who wants to find the fountain of youth. While even I have said that pretty much every episode of Monsters involves, well, a monster, it would probably be more accurate to say that every one of them involves a makeup effect or some other sort of practical creation. In this case, that’s primarily Garrett’s old age makeup, despite the fountain being ostensibly guarded by a snake deity.

The teleplay is credited to a passel of TV writers and was directed by Christopher Todd. This was Todd’s only credit on IMDb, which may be partly because he seems to have died young at only around the age of 31.

Our final episode tonight is “Museum Hearts,” written and directed by Theodore Gershuny (Silent Night, Deadly Night) who also wrote and directed “Holly’s House” back in season one, as well as half-a-dozen episodes of Tales from the Darkside. As you may have noticed, this has been a relatively undistinguished batch of episodes, with a bunch of TV talent behind the scenes. That doesn’t change with “Museum Hearts.”

Ostensibly a story about a lothario who becomes trapped in an unfinished museum exhibit with his two girlfriends – who don’t know about one another, naturally – and a bog mummy, “Museum Hearts” is a largely uneventful battle of the sexes skit in which the man gets his comeuppance at the hands of the trio of “witches,” who end the episode quoting from Macbeth, though nothing in the buildup really allows for such theatricality.

The bog mummy looks good and the actors, including Patrick Breen (Quellek from Galaxy Quest) and Sarah Trigger (Joanna in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey), are pleasant enough. The main problem with “Museum Hearts” is that it struggles to fill even its short running time, resorting to a lot of lightning flashes and dreamy sequences to pad itself out.

Though there aren’t really any notable duds in this batch, there aren’t many high points either. Even the monsters are largely undistinguished, though the eponymous personification of Death in “Reaper” is fairly striking.

Will things pick up next time? You’ll have to join us to find out, as we head into the second half of season two and encounter more aliens, werewolves, weird bugs, and Steve Buscemi, to name just a few.