Something Weird on TV: Monsters Part Ten – Misunderstood Monsters

Our next two episodes of Monsters are star-studded – or, at least, packed with people who are more famous for something else. We start off with “Small Blessings,” a black comedy episode that uses a fanged, mutant baby who eats pounds of raw meat every day as a metaphor for the assorted perils and frustrations of parenthood. Helmed by Roger Nygard (director of the documentary Trekkies) and written by a duo responsible for several other episodes of Monsters, the actual stars of “Small Blessings” are Julie Brown (Clueless, Earth Girls Are Easy) and Kevin Nealon of Saturday Night Live fame, who play the parents.

More surprising, though, is a young David Spade, in only his fifth IMDb credit, following mostly several other one-episode TV appearances. Spade plays the local meat delivery boy (which sounds like a porno setup but, for once, is not) who turns out to be the cartoonish serial slayer who has been stalking the neighborhood. He calls himself the “Silver Slicer,” and rubs a knife on his face as he contemplates hacking up our young mother and her newborn bundle of “joy.”

Despite its jokey title, “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bites” is not really a comedic episode. It stars none other than Wil Wheaton and Matt LeBlanc as a pair of teens who break into the barbershop across the street because they are convinced – based on very shoddy logic – that the barbers are vampires. It’s the only episode of Monsters directed by John Strysik, who helmed episodes in all four seasons of Tales from the Darkside, but perhaps more interesting is its writing credit.

Today, we know Dan Simmons primarily for The Terror, a doorstop of a novel that was transformed into a TV series of its own on AMC. Back in 1990, though, The Terror was still a long way off, and Simmons was better known for stuff like Carrion Comfort and Song of Kali, which won the World Fantasy Award despite being decried as quite racist – I’ve never actually read it.

This was Simmons’ second outing as a writer for Monsters, following on the heels of the season two’s “The Offering.” Like that segment, this one goes around the fact that it could easily have gotten away with showing very little (vampires are fairly budget-friendly, after all) by instead offering one of the series’ weirder monsters – a welcome contribution, after listening to Wheaton and Le Blanc bicker for most of the episode.

If you thought that the parade of “big name” actors was going to continue, though, think again. Unlike “Shave and a Haircut,” the next episode, “The Young and the Headless,” really is as jokey as its title implies, with a Tales from the Crypt-esque love triangle involving a meathead soldier of fortune, a wheelchair-bound scientist, and the woman they’re both after. Naturally, it ends exactly as you might expect, and the monster this time around is predominantly the meathead’s remote-controlled headless corpse which, among other things, does the moonwalk and the swim.

“The Waiting Game” kicks off with a nuclear holocaust and follows the survivors who are trapped in a bunker in the aftermath, making it another of the series’ many single-location pieces. It’s not a bad episode, albeit a largely forgettable one, and its one-sentence synopsis on the DVD case gives away its last act twist.

The screenplay for “Sin-Sop,” meanwhile, feels strangely truncated, like it was two ideas jammed together. It starts with a reporter planning to expose a faith healer who uses a machine to extract sin from people. The machine is powered by the corpse of the “evilest man who ever lived,” who can now cleanse others of their own sins after his death.

This seems like plenty of setup for an episode, but it also introduces a killer on the run who happens to hide out in the faith healer’s headquarters, which makes the first half and the last half feel weirdly disjointed from one another. The episode is nonetheless not a bad one, with another denouement that feels very Tales from the Crypt-ish, helmed by the director of From Dusk ‘Till Dawn 3 – the one set in the Wild West and featuring Michael Parks as Ambrose Bierce.

Unfortunately, when you’re doing a project like our year-long coverage of Monsters here at Something Weird on TV, you don’t always have the luxury to make things line up with your schedule. This means that there is no particularly Halloween-y episode in this batch of Monsters episodes, even though this column was originally intended to go live in October… but there is a Christmas one.

“A New Woman” is written by series regular Edithe Swensen as a modern take on Charles Dickens’ classic Christmas Carol. Mason Adams (who played Charlie Hume on the Mary Tyler Moore Show spinoff Lou Grant) is a spirit who appears just before a greedy woman pulls the plug on her dying lover to convince her to change her ways. It’s a much sloppier production than the source material on which it is based, and the episode makes the somewhat baffling choice to be shot under a blue filter for about half its running time.

It’s the second of two series episodes from director Brian Thomas Jones, who had previously helmed the 1988 splatter movie The Rejuvenator, while his earlier Monsters episode was “The Mandrake Root” back in season two. I haven’t seen The Rejuvenator, but I have heard tell of its gloppy special effects, which seems credible, given that the Creepshow-like undead in this episode are pretty gooey.

Merry Christmas (I guess) and a belated happy Halloween from everyone here at Signal Horizon and Something Weird on TV. We’re not done with this season of the column just yet, though, as we’ve got two more months of season three left to go. How will they pan out? Tune in next time and see for yourself…