Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 19 – Mr. Dingle, the Strong

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews, Twilight Zone , , , , , , , , , ,

 

Burgess Meredith and Don Rickles.  Need I say more?

The episode opens up in a bar where two of the patrons, an unnamed bettor played by Don Rickles and his bookie are arguing over whether a bad call in a baseball game means Rickles doesn’t have to pay up on a bet.  Rickles asks the opinion of Luther Dingle (played by Meredith), a stuttering vacuum cleaner salesman who has more honesty than sense of self-preservation and for his opinion gets knocked over the bar by Rickles.

As the bartender breaks up the fight and gives Dingle advice on staying out of trouble a two headed Martian enters the bar (invisibly) and discussing what they just observed decide to give Dingle the strength of three hundred men.  Dingle notices something is wrong when he can lift one of his vacuum cleaners with his pinky.  But the first indication that something had really changed for Dingle was when he accidentally pulled the front door to the bar off its hinges while trying to open it.

The next day Luther is in the town park when a young woman with a baby carriage sits down next to him on a bench.  Striking up a conversation, he asks her if he appears normal.  When she says yes, he asks her to observe something strange.  He lifts her and the bench she is sitting on with one hand.  He follows this up by taking a round rock about eighteen inches in diameter and pulling it apart with his bare hands.  A passing newspaper photographer asks him to do it again but instead Dingle lifts a larger than life size bronze statue of a soldier over his own head with one hand.  The photographer snaps the shot and it ends up on the front page of the town gazette.

Now Dingle is a celebrity and he is receiving job offers for everything from television shows to boxing careers.  A tv crew arrives to televise his story and Dingle provides examples of his strength.  He punches holes in the walls, smashes a table in two and even cracks one of the supporting beams of the bar while showing how he can lift the building.  And he picks up Don Rickles and spins him around and tosses him away.

But the Martians are not impressed with what Dingle has done with the power they have given him so they reverse the treatment and while attempting to continue in his exhibition of strength he becomes a laughing stock.  As the crowd disperses the Martians meet a pair of Venusian experimenters who are looking for Earth subjects to test their high intelligence ray.  On the Martians’ suggestion they pick Dingle and give him five hundred times the intelligence of a normal man.

While Rickles and his bookie are arguing about what a batter is going to do in a televised baseball game Dingle opines that based on his understanding of probability and quantum mechanics the batter would hit a home run, which he immediately does.  While Dingle lectures the barroom denizens on advanced physics Serling tells us that Dingle will continue to draw the attention of interplanetary behavioral scientists in this corner of the Twilight Zone.

Dopey?  Of course.  Cheesy?  Indubitably.  Good or bad?  Good.  B+

Who is 20BooksTo50K?

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

One of our readers here, Chemist, sent me this link in response to my link to Dave Freer’s post on sf short stories.  So I read it.

Turns out 20BooksTo50K is a a “community dedicated to helping authors with the business of writing.”  What could be wrong with that?  Well anyone who remembers the Puppy Wars over the Hugo nominations know that the scolds of science fiction would prefer to burn down their own awards rather than allow anyone who isn’t up on the current LGBTQ grovelling to get into the nominations.  so it surprises me not at all to hear that Puppy redux is happening at the Nebula awards over the nomination of several 20BooksTo50K authors.

Having been a strong supporter of the Puppy writers (in terms of buying their books), I’ll have to check the authors in 20BooksTo50K to see if any of them click with me.

So many books, so little lifetime left.

Thanks to Chemist for the heads up.

 

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 18 – The Odyssey of Flight 33

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews, Twilight Zone , , , , , , , , , ,

The plot of this one is very straightforward.  A jet airliner in route from London to Idlewild (present JFK Airport in NYC) experience s strange turbulence that mysteriously boost its air speed to 3,000 knots.  The pilots and navigators speculate about the jet stream and other natural phenomenon but most troubling they lose all radio contact with the outside world.  The stewardesses attempt to keep the passengers calm but the strong turbulence frightens them.

Finally deciding that risking a mid-air collision with another plane is less dangerous than their depleting fuel level they descend and get below the clouds.  The can make out the shapes of the New York City islands, Manhattan, Long Island and Staten Island but there is no sign of the buildings.  Flying in to get a closer look they discover that the area is a Jurassic landscape complete with jungles, giant fern trees and sauropod dinosaurs.

Shocked by what they saw they decide that somehow, they not only broke the sound barrier but somehow, they also broke the time barrier.  No knowing what else to do they decide to ascend back into the jet stream and push their speed to the maximum in hopes of reversing their situation.  And this is what they do.

When they begin to descend again, they can see the New York skyline and are jubilant.  When they radio the tower, they get LaGuardia airport and ask to be provided a radar vector to land.  When the tower says they don’t know what radar is the pilot said that his jet aircraft was running out of fuel.  The tower tells him they don’t know what a jet is but he is free to try and land.

But as they approach Queens, they see the unmistakable outline of the 1939 World Fair.  They are still over twenty years in the past.  The pilot tells the passengers over the intercom exactly what has happened and that they will make a second attempt to return to 1961 but that they are running low on fuel.  He also asks them to remain calm and pray.

Then Serling says if you hear a plane up there that sounds lost, it may be Flight 33 lost in the Twilight Zone.

This is a straight up time travel story.  No real explanation just facts on the ground (or in this case in the air.).  Not a particularly likely or even clever premise.  But guess what?  I like this story a lot.  The flight crew is very appealing.  The captain and his officers are capable and don’t lose their heads under extremely stressful circumstances.  The two stewardesses are very human and refreshingly feminine.  There is one funny vignette with two of the passengers that is mildly amusing and also very familiar.

And best of all nobody starts screaming at the walls as is sometimes the case in a TZ episode.  All the characters are stereotypes of the time; the brave war tested pilots, the pretty ingratiating stewardesses and the Claymation brontosaurus in the swamp.  No neurotics.  Check, check, check, check.

A.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 17 – Twenty Two

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews, Twilight Zone , , , , , , , , , ,

 

A woman in a hospital bed is awakened at night by a very loud clock ticking.  She reaches for a glass of water and drops it on the floor where it shatters.  She hears footsteps in the hallway and gets up and follows it in time to see a nurse enter the elevator and head for the bottom floor.  The woman waits for the elevator, takes it down to the bottom floor, follows the hallway to the end and in front of Room 22 which is the morgue, she sees the nurse open the door and say to her, “Room for one more honey.”  She screams and runs away.

The next morning the woman who is a stripper named Liz Powell is visited by her doctor who tells her that she is imagining that a dream is reality.  She tells him that she’s had this alleged dream several nights running and every time it happens exactly the same way.  He tells her that it’s a symptom of her nervous exhaustion and can’t possibly be real because the night nurse looks nothing like the description that Liz gave.  He tells her tonight to change what she does to force the dream out of its pattern.

That night she tries to change things by not reaching for the glass but she ends up knocking it over accidentally anyway.  The dream finishes out as expected.  The next day she leaves the hospital and goes to the airport to catch a flight.  She has the same strange feeling she did during her dreams.  Then she drops a glass figurine that shatters like the glass.  Finally she heads for Gate 22 and at the top of the stairs is the nurse dressed as a stewardess who says “Room for one more honey.  Liz screams and runs down the stairs back to the airport.  Watching from the window she sees the airplane take off and burst into flames.

What the hell?

Okay, Barbara Nichols, who plays Liz is a voluptuous babe (although a little the worse for wear and tear).  But I’ve gotta say this was a hot mess.  It’s the story of a prophetic dream but I don’t know how to describe this as a good episode.  Let’s be generous and give it a C.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 16 – A Penny for Your Thoughts

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews, Twilight Zone , , , , , , , , , ,

Hector Poole is a bank clerk who while walking one day to work bought a newspaper and when he threw the quarter into the newsie’s cash box it landed on its edge and stayed there.  The newsie tells him he’s never seen that happen before and when Hector sees what he happened he realizes he now can read the minds of the people near him.

Unfortunately, almost everyone whose mind he reads are thinking of doing something bad.  One of the bank’s customers is planning to use a loan to bet on the horses in an attempt to pay back money he embezzled previously.  His boss is planning to cheat on his wife.  And one of the other clerks is planning to steal a briefcase full of money and run off to Bermuda.

The only positive is that the secretary Helen is secretly in love with him.  As the day progresses Hector gets deeper and deeper in trouble.  When he tells his boss about the embezzler his boss assumed he was cracking up.  When he tells him about the clerk who planned to rob the bank he convinces the boss to confront the clerk and when no money is found in the clerk’s bag Hector is fired.  As he’s packing up he gets up the courage to tell Helen he likes her too and that he can read minds.  But when Bagby finds out that the embezzler has been exposed he rehires Hector.  Helen telepathically tells Hector to confront Bagby and demand a promotion and new office.  Bagby refuses but Hector lets him know he knows about the affair he is having.  Bagby relents and gives in to Hector.

Hector asks Helen to walk home with him and on the way he buys another newspaper and this time his quarter knocks over the one that was still standing on edge.  And at once he could no longer hear the thoughts of those around him.

This episode is a fantasy take on the Jack Lemon movie “The Apartment.”  Hector Poole was played by Dick York who was Darrin Stephens on Bewitched.  He has the face of a beleaguered honest shnook.  Here’s a Twilight Zone with a goofy plot and a happy ending.  A.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 15 – The Invaders

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews, Twilight Zone , , , , , , , , , ,

The story takes place in a rustic farmhouse, with only candles and lamps for light, out in the middle of nowhere.  An older woman (played by Agnes Moorehead) is cooking her dinner in the kitchen.  Suddenly a high-pitched whine hurts her ears and then there is a crash on the roof of her house and she falls to the floor.  When she climbs up a ladder and opens a door onto the roof, she sees a miniature flying saucer about five feet in diameter has landed on the building.  As she watches a little man in a space suit about eight inches tall walks out of the ship.  She knocks him into the opening and he falls down the hole.  Another comes out of the ship and fires a tiny ray gun at her so she bowls him over with a lamp she throws at him and he falls off the roof.

The woman climbs back down the ladder and starts searching the house for the little invaders.  She meets up with them a number of times and they manage to hurt her enough with their ray guns to raise a series of blisters on her skin.  One of them even steals a kitchen knife and cuts her on the hand and calf at various points in the story.  Finally, at a certain point she traps one of them in her bed blanket and after tugging the knife out of his grasp she beats the blanket with the space man in it against a table until we assume, he is dead.  Then she puts the space man into a box and throws it into the fire place to burn.

The woman then up the ladder to the roof and taking a small hatchet she chops the space ship into wreckage.  While she is doing this, we hear a voice apparently calling over a radio to his base reporting that they have landed on a planet of giants and that his crew mate has been killed and that he himself is dying.  He warns that no retaliation or further landings should be attempted because the giants are just too powerful.

As the woman walks away, we get a closeup of the ruined ship and written on the side is US Air Force, Space Probe No. 1.  The tiny men were us!  Dun dun dunnnnnn!

When I was a little kid, I thought this was great.  Then when I grew up, I thought it was really cheap.  Now, I’m somewhere in the middle.  Agnes Moorehead is an annoying mute and pretty homely to boot.  She only screeches, whines, cries and moans a little.  Are the giants mute?  Who the hell knows?  The fact that the space men were running around like high speed mice whenever they were off camera but stood like statues whenever you could see them was very cheesy.  How they wielded a knife that was bigger than they were and almost weighed as much is beyond comprehension.  And how the two of them weren’t killed when they were dropped from what to them would have been a hundred feet on Earth is laughable.  And finally, once again they managed to recycle a prop from Forbidden Planet (the miniature flying saucer).

Alright, I’ll split the difference B-.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 14 – The Whole Truth

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews, Twilight Zone , , , , , , , , , ,

Jack Carson plays Harvey Hunnicut a New York City used car salesman who tries to sell decrepit automotive wrecks to unsuspecting car buyers.  His sales pitches have absolutely zero resemblance to reality and never get anywhere within a mile of the truth.

Along comes an old man selling a Model A Ford and Harvey tells him that the car isn’t worth a dime but he’ll give him twenty-five dollars.  The man sells him the car and then tells him that the car is haunted.  Any man who owns the car has to tell the absolute truth about everything.

Now Harvey starts going into his sales pitch to a young couple and tells the awful truth about the awful cars he sells.  Of course, they run away and Harvey is starting to despair.  Next his wife calls up and he tells her that the inventory story he tells her every week is actually a ruse to hide his weekly poker game with the boys.  Finally, his sales assistant asks him again about his long-delayed raise and Harvey tells the sad truth that there isn’t a chance in the world of his ever getting a raise working for Harvey.  His assistant punches him in the face and knocks him down before exiting the establishment.

Next day a politician named Honest Luther Grimbley comes in looking to buy an old car that will make his constituents think he is poor.  Harvey is willing to sell it for a song but when Grimbley asks if there are any strings attached, he tells him the honesty catch.  Grimbley recoils and said no politician could possibly buy it because it would destroy his career.

Before Grimbley leaves he tells Harvey that it would be fun to sell it to the politician who was on the front page of the newspaper.

In the last scene we find out that Harvey has sold the car to Nikita Khrushchev who is getting ready to speak at the UN and now will have to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  He calls the operator and asks if there is a way for him to speak to Jack Kennedy.

Jack Carson is great.  He can even make this clunker fun.  And I always give Serling a break if he can make it funny.  This should be a B but for the above considerations I’m going to promote it to an A-.

Reflections on the Political Landscape

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Reviews , , , , , , ,

A while back I put Colin Woodward’s book, “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” in my wish list based on the Z-Man’s description of its importance.  I’m about twenty percent into it and I’ve got an idea of where it is going.  I also can tell that Woodward is a thorough going lefty but that there is a lot of useful information in the book.  The beginning of the book describes the origins of the various “nations” that he contends still underly the current political and cultural reality of the United States and its surroundings in North America.

As I said, there is a lot of slant to his description of the character of the various populations and you can tell where his sympathies lie and who he is virtue signaling to but there is also valuable information that actually helps to explain some general behaviors that can be observed at work today.

For example, Woodward waxes poetic about the New England characteristic of local autonomy and small-town democracy.  This is presented as a contrast to the feudal rule of aristocratic Virginia where great landowners lorded it over the common men and monopolized the government and the courts.  Supposedly this is still the reality today.  But anyone living in New England knows that any community that imposed any policies out of synch with the smothering regulation existing at the state level would be assaulted with the full force of the state’s judicial and administrative might and quickly the offenders would find themselves in prison and their families dispossessed and harassed out of the state.

One of the features of New England was its early adoption of universal education and the establishment of higher education as the basis of elite status.  This is also touted as a democratic virtue as opposed to the wealth-based basis of education in Virginia.  Looking at the present day it’s instructive to see that the educational situation is much changed.  The educational state of the poor even in New England has degraded to the point where claiming universal education is very debatable.  And the status of higher education has likewise changed to the point where elite status is more of a legacy condition than any kind of meritocratic status.  In other words, the state and poorer colleges have been degraded to where their degrees are approaching a worthless status whereas the high-status Ivy League schools are the domain of elite families and the affirmative action minorities that they include for the sake of appearances.

What seem to be happening is that the supposed egalitarian impulses of the New England nation and their descendants in the other Left dominated areas of the country have abandoned the pretense of equality and now embrace the model of an elect elite directing the lives of the rest of society as some sort of latter-day serfdom.  This conforms more closely to the Marxist model than any puritan world view.  And this of course makes sense.  As the New Englanders shed their Christianity, they reached out for what replaced it in their environment, the fashionable socialism of nineteenth century intellectuals.

I’ll have a full review at some point and other discussions of the ideas and the applications of these ideas to the present condition we find ourselves in.  Z-Man was right. There is useful information in this book overlaid with leftist smugness.

Howie Carr breaks Down the AP Stylebook for Both Parties

photog Current Events, On-Line Article Reviews, Reviews , , , ,

We all know how the Media describes things about the Left and Right, namely positively and negatively respectively.  Howie is not breaking any new ground here but he adds the right wing “smirk” as the newest crime of the deplorables and apparently it justifies violence.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/03/03/howie-carr-smirking-media-bias-against-gop-couldnt-be-clearer/

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 13 – Back There

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews, Twilight Zone , , , , , , , , , ,

This is a straight up time travel story.  Peter Corrigan is a member of an elite club in Washington D.C.  He and his fellow club members are debating whether it’s possible for someone to go back in time and thereby change history.  As he leaves his club, he becomes dizzy outside the door and when he comes to himself, he realizes that everything has changed and appears as it would in the mid-nineteenth century.  When he arrives at his home it isn’t his anymore.  He talks to the landlady and she agrees to rent him a room.  As he’s walking to his room, he hears an army officer who is leaving say that President Lincoln will be at the theater that the officer and his girlfriend are also about to attend.  Upon cross-examining the officer, he confirms that the performance is the one that Lincoln attended when Booth assassinated him.

Peter rushes to the Ford Theater and tries to convince them that Lincoln’s life is in terrible danger.  He makes a nuisance of himself and ends up arrested.  At the police station he tries to convince the police about the assassination and is about to be jailed when a stranger intercedes with the police and has Peter remanded to his custody.  The man introduces himself as Mr. Wellington and takes him to his rooms where he tries to understand how Peter knows what he says he knows.  After Peter tells his story Mr. Wellington gives Peter a handkerchief for an injury he sustained with the police and a glass a wine to calm his nerves.  But the wine is drugged and Peter passes out.  When he awakens, he yells for help and the landlady and a police officer show up.  Telling the landlady his story he finds out that the man wasn’t named Wellington but John Wilkes Booth.  Now Peter is panicked and he tries to force the policeman to run to the theater and save the President.  But it’s too late, Lincoln has already been shot and the news is being shouted on the street.

Now when Peter walks down the street he is back in the future and he arrives at his club and he tries to tell his former debaters that history cannot be changed even if a man can go back in town.  But a curious thing has happened in his absence.  A man who was a waiter previously is now a rich club member.  By his own narration we find out that the family fortune was founded when his ancestor who was a Washington policeman forcefully attempted to convince the authorities that they should protect Lincoln at Ford’s Theater.  This prescience so impressed everyone that he was advanced to authority where his performance brought him riches.  So even if some things can’t be changed, others can.  When Peter reaches for his handkerchief, he finds one monogrammed JWB (John Wilkes Booth).

Peter is played by Russell Johnson (the Professor from Gilligan’s Island).  It’s a pretty clever story and somewhat fun.  The only downside is the scene where Peter is at the door of the theater and he is pounding on the door and shouting.  It hearkens back to my dislike for any Twilight Zone episode that degenerates into someone shouting wildly at no one visible.

Because of this I’ll take away a half point B-.