Weary.
We welcome back to Midnight of Viewing the Whole Anthology podcast, where this season we're taking a look at George A.
Romero's nineteen eighties television series Tales from the Dark Side. Sharing the Midnight view with me are the Culture Cast Chris Stashu.
This machine eats noise, and.
The Projection Booth's Mike White.
It's just silence, My noise is being Tonight, we're taking a look at the next two episodes of season four, the final season of Tales from the Dark Side. Those are Going Native and Hush Going Native. Season four, episode seventeen, originally aired on June the nineteenth, nineteen eighty eight, Written by Ted gurshoone from a short story by or rather from a story by Andrew Wiener, and then directed by Andrew Wiener, starring Kim Greaset, John Apria, Cynthia David, and
Richard Coleman. This is about an alien observer who discovers what it means to be human. What did you think of this one, Chris?
You know, Mike and I had talked earlier in the week and Mike said, and I quote, I really enjoyed. I gonna say what the last two episodes of this. You know these two that we're talking about now, and I hope you do too well. I can tell you on half of them that we're talking about right now. I enjoyed it immensely. This might be one of the best episodes of the show that we've seen. It's thematically interesting, it's narratively unique in a way that we have not
really seen in this show. And I think it actually not for once in this show's run, but few and far between, do any of these episodes really touch on something kind of serious. It's more fun or scary or fun and scary. I think that this episode actually is hitting on some interesting ideas and talking about some things.
That are pretty serious.
And to use the kind of vehicle of a emotionless alien from another planet who's coming to observe us as a kind of vehicle for again, she says she's an alien, but we could just use that as a you don't feel.
Like you belong and there you go, and so any of us get that.
So just using it as kind of a parable for that, I found it immensely entertaining. And yeah, I mean this is like I said, I found this to be one of the better episodes of this show, and maybe go as far as to say one of the better episodes of anything we've watched.
Together for one of these anthology shows.
So what about you, Mike, Well, yeah, kind of already spoiled mine, But yes, I loved this episode. I found it to be shot. You know, you were talking the last time we met Father Malone as far as that Tom Savini episode, and you're like, I don't know how much of this is the transfer versus this being.
Over lit or things.
This one almost benefited from kind of shitty video quality because everything feels so soft and overlt and just like the lights when they're in.
The window that's in the therapy room that they're having all of these and I'd love that it's nineteen eighty eight and they're having these you know, big confrontational therapy sessions and things.
It reminds me a lot of some of the stuff that I remember from like wr Mysteries of the Organism, where just like the scream therapy, you like people being rebirthed in those things, and like just them with these you know, native native pillow clubs and they're hitting pillows and screaming and stuff. Oh yeah, this is some of the psychoshit that people were doing back in the nineteen eighties. I really appreciate this.
Yeah, I loved it.
I really just enjoyed the way it was shot. I loved the voiceover. I thought Kim Grease was fantastic. I mean, she every time I see her and stuff, I really enjoy it.
I don't know.
If she's that good in a shriek if you know what I did last Friday the thirteenth, But I definitely liked her work in like Brazil and what else was she in?
A Manhunter?
You know?
Oh?
Well, of course, jud I actually really fucking loved Chud.
Yeah.
I thought she did a really good job. And yeah, I highly enjoyed this. Like you said, this might have been my favorite episode that we've seen. So now I'm waiting for Father Malone to just shit all over it.
Wouldn't that be so?
No, I loved this. I love it.
I loved it particularly because no matter what series we've watched, by the time we get to the last series, it's all dog shit, It's all failure after failure. This season of Tailsiman Dark Side feels like a limping season of any other season. It doesn't feel like this is the end at all. I've always loved their films, their episodes that feel like a short film. This definitely feels like a short film. My god, the director is pulling in photography.
I'm assuming he's a photographer and these are all his photographs, but he's made this alien an observer of human behavior, and she does that through photographing every part of culture that even comment on that, and she's making them into slides, which super effective that we get to see her watching the slides of her the slides being projected upon her.
This episode feels to me like every Twilight Zone eighty five boomer episode that was attempting to understand and quantify and suss out what was going on with their generation, done in twenty two minutes and actually coming up with a fucking a serious reason underpinning everything. The fact that, like you said, Mike, I love that it's this. She goes to try and figure out how humans tink by going to a therapy session, which of course was all
the rage at the time. Everyone was trying to figure out how they all ticked at that generation in particular, and the type of therapy we're given here is the silliest of them, which is the beating a pillow with a foam bat and crying about your father or somebody or whatever. And the fact that this alien who has been nothing but observer up until now figures out.
What they're all afflicted with.
That and every human is afflicted with the thing that makes us human is how fucking ultimately lonely we all are. And I just thought it was magnificent. I thought the performances across the border fucking great.
I love Kim Grease.
I always wondered because she was, like you said, Brazil came out, Manhunter came out. I saw her in this, I saw in a bunch of other little things like around that time, and I thought, here she goes. And then she dropped off the face of the earth forever. And I couldn't figure out why, because she's retired.
Is that what happened in eighty seven?
In two thousand and wow, one.
Year after that movie you were talking about Mike, the one that sounds like one of those movies made by those.
Of the guys Reeberg and Seltzer.
Seltzer, Yeah, maybe, you know, maybe maybe she was a theater actress and just sort of returned to the stage for that period of time. But we were robbed of a lot of great cinema from Kim Grease because she's this is one of the best performances of the series. She carries this with virtue, very little dialogue, and it's just all she's in every frame basically, and it's never an interesting and I wanted to know more about the character, and I wanted to know more about her story.
It reminded me a lot of in my skin, just that kind of distance between the people, and just that even though she's giving us a voice over, she's not over explaining things, and just this whole idea of she has to be at a distance because if she starts to feel like the humans, maybe she won't be allowed to go back to her planet, you know, just that whole I have to be colder, though, I really wanted to experience what's going on with these creatures that are
all around me. I mean, she doesn't, you know, suck the souls out of anybody, or you know, turn into black oo or anything. But I just really felt that kind of more observational type of alien. And I'm glad too that it was a woman alien that it wasn't a male alien because it's just Okay, we've seen that a thousand times. But here we have this female alien and you know, she's getting approached by this guy everything.
And again I was like, well, she could you know, attach her suckers to this guy, draw it out of a spinal juice or something. I don't know, but they just treated it like you said, she's an alien. But is she an alien?
Is she just a person?
Because so often we all feel alien, we all feel like we're on the outside, and she expresses that and this episode expresses it so beautifully.
Yeah, this could have been the moment she got out of the asylum, you know, like she could have had a psychotic break ten minutes before the episode began.
That's and that's my thinking.
And again that's not my explanation for it, but I love that there is that level of ambiguity to it that does allow you to be like, well, it doesn't necessarily need to be that she's an alien for this to work. It just needs to be that she feels
alienated and on her own and alone. I mean, you know the ending, you know monologue where she talks about solitude, like that's you know, it's heartbreaking, you know, and it but it's also true, like it's the truth, and that's we haven't really seen episodes of any of these shows. Was that really cut to that core of human emotion and being the way that this episode does. And I don't know, appreciated it so much because it just seems so well written and well thought out and well executed.
Everything seems intentional, and I appreciate that.
The fact that there are no goblins in it prevents me I from calling it my favorite, But I think this might be the best episode of the series if the series existed just to give us this, and then it might have been worth it.
And I will say, to be fair, this episode could have been and again probably should have been at Twilight's on nineteen eighty five episode. It works more tonally in a show like that. This show actually tonally, this episode doesn't work in this show to your point, Father Malone, like, I like this a lot, but I wouldn't.
I don't know.
If I said it was my favorite Tales for the Dark Sided episode, I don't think it would be because to your point, this show does kind of traffic in something that I'm a little bit more interested in overall, which is goofy horror, weird out there George Romero, that kind of stuff, Like I'm more interested in the goblins and the scaring children in your house at Halloween of
it all. But this is something that feels so atypical of this show that it stands out, and it stands out more so than so many other things that we saw on shows that we're trying to do this kind of storytelling and kind of you know, introspective human kind of emotional storytelling, because that's Twilight.
It's on eighty five. Was that's what it was really interested in overall as a show.
I'm really curious if Andrew Wiener the guy who's listed as director, though it was it was Ted Gernshei was listed on Wikipedia, but IMDb has Andrew Weener. I'm here. He's got like a couple credits, but not very much at all. Was that an alias for somebody else or just did he just not make that many things.
I'm a terrible host because I don't know, and I wish he had made more because I loved this.
Yeah, same, Well, I'm really glad because I was just like, oh shit, what if Chris watches this and he's just like, what the hell what we were you hitting me? Were you pulling my leg?
Oh?
God?
Now this is I mean, this was you know, it was really impactful in a positive way. And again, it speaks to the human condition in a way that I wasn't expecting something like this too.
I wish actually this episode had appeared in the first season, because had it done that, then it would have corrected what you're saying, Chris, which is this feels a typical of the series, and I think had it been more typical of the series, than the series might still be going on.
Honestly.
Yeah, yeah, I mean the show does kind of traffic in the flights of fancy and fun, weird, cutting black sows of it all a whole hell.
Of a lot.
This is their word play.
Yeah, it really is. This is the home Man episode. What's the first episode of Crypt that it's the same thing, you.
Know, the man who was death Yell, there we go.
Yeah, speaking to the human condition in a way that the show kinda never really ever did ever again, you know, the Tales of the Dark Site has not really spoken to the human conditioned a whole lot, and Tales of the Crypt never really did either, but they did one time, and man, the one time they did it, it's pretty fucking great.
I've been thinking about it for decades.
I know someone was asking me at the Horror convention that we were at With'ser Tales from the Crypt episode was like the first one, isn't that a shame?
I think I know who you were talking to, all right. Our next episode is Hush from season four, episode eighteen, aired originally on July the tenth, that's a month later, nineteen eighty eight. This one has written by John Harrison as John Sutherland, from a story by Zenna Henderson and directed by Alan Colter, back behind the director's chair after
writing a previous episode. This one stars Nia Lanning, Eric Jason, and Bonnie Gallup, a boy inventor and his teenage babysitter or menaced by the boy's latest invention, a noise eater, which I think of this one, Mike.
We are with the fucking inventors again.
They can't help themselves. But despite that.
I this one. I found it to be pretty cute. I like the whole did you guys watch Teleteby's.
Yes, Yes I did. Actually, this is the new New, the new.
Psycho News cousin fucking New New coming after you man. I mean that New New was already scary enough when it was sucking up all those teletebbee the pancakes of their eating. Uh, but yeah, here it wants to suck all the noise out and I love the sound effect of the noise being sucked out of things. And again, you know we're talking with that last episode as well. It's not really Tales from the Crew, sorry, tales from
the dark Side. It's you know, that one was, you know, pretty thoughtful and thought provoking, and this one is very mean spirited. And you've got the woman coming home, you know, because we've got the tea age babysitter and the boy being terrorized by the psycho New New and yeah, when the mom comes home, she gets the noise sucked out of her and we don't know exactly what that means, but it's not good. So yeah, I really enjoyed this one.
How about you, Chris, the philandering wife I believe is what was going on?
Correct?
Is that? Okay that's the implication?
Yes, no, not an implication straight up? If that that girl knew?
Yeah, who you're talking to on the phone Pta meeting right.
You guys say, Psycho New New, I would say, it looks like a vacuum that the mugwamps from Naked Lunch would use.
Is a whole Yeah, this is like one of vaginal It's.
Like an asshole, like it looks like a sphincter, Like it's a living sphincter.
At the end of this tube. It's disgusting.
It's one of the best like creature things I've seen because when it pops out from underneath the bed, I couldn't tell you what I was looking at. And then when it started to kind of unfurl and unfold, like I think humans have a real hard time with stuff that's like really indiscernible from anything else you've ever seen. And when it starts to unfold itself like that, I
was like, I've never seen anything. It is off putting and it is upsetting, and I found the episode to be genuinely creep for as for as kind of in introspective.
As the last episode was.
In terms of emotional human like relatability and the solitude of it all, this is just creepy and gross and weird, and it is kind of like a fairy tale esque story, and you know, the bad adult gets what they deserve in the end, and you know, they stop the monster and ends up, you know, sucking itself off, which is pretty funny.
And I thought this was fun. I thought this was a lot of fun. So father, Mom, what about you.
I think this is a case where reviewing these episodes back to back and in comparison makes it a winning combination because it's like a roller coaster. The last one was so nice and uplifting, and this one is just a straight charge down the hill. Here's mom, here's the kid, here's the babysitter, here's the villain. Let's fucking go. And that does it as economically as any good tales from the Dark Side. I can't believe they're doing this at
the end of the series. I can't believe they're pulling these out now, what the hell?
God damn it.
I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
The fact that the mom is sort.
Of philandering and it's all kind of played for goofs, and she was so endearing when she got in the house.
I thought, oh no, they're not going to do it.
Oh no, right, I'm watching tells them the darks God damn it, Mom, why didn't you stay out that? I thought the creature's fucking horrifying. Man, the little screams it makes when it kills things was horrible that it just sort of prowling around the house and every little noise. And I loved that at a certain point it started zeroing in on the most subtle of noises, like it went after the televisions, not that it went after the refrigerators condenser, like I could hear that hissing under there,
and it killed the refrigerator. Like, no matter what happens, that entire house.
Is going to need newtronics.
I love how horrifying it was that the kid goes it can hear your heartbeat?
Oh yeah, oh shit ah ah.
That's when I was like, Okay, now we're actually cooking with grease here, Like we're really we're putting the we're putting the screws to the characters in this episode. And I love when the episode goes that one step further. You know what, now that everything else has been exhausted, we have their heartbeat. It's it's subtle, it can hear it enough that it's gonna go after your heartbeat.
Yeah, awesome.
Like, I love that the episode took that into account too, because I feel like otherwise we might be asking that question.
It's nope, we have it covered. It's perfect.
It's it is a airtight episode in terms of logic, and it doesn't I don't need anything else explained to like where the vacuum creature came from, or how it existed or anything, just like everything was perfect.
Yeah. It's a sweet little cat and mouse game where our lead that does everything you would do, she doesn't not do anything, and there isn't a moment of screaming at her like do this, you idiot.
She tries it and ultimately solves it.
I think the way any of us did have thought about right, like just start I thought, just start tapping on the things back, like it'll figure out that it's the problem and then kill itself, which is what they eventually did. But the very setup that it can only be turned on and off with this remote control and it kills its own remote control was great because what a moment.
Of dread in any horror movie.
It's like, now you're fucking dead if you don't run now.
I love this one.
A great scare show from Dark Side.
And a great creature, like genuinely one of the weirdest creature designs I've ever seen. Yeah, it's mugwump adjacent from Naked Lunch, which has really strange creature design like biological mechanical mix.
Yeah, it's an It's basically a nineteen fifties floor vacuum that you would drag along with the hose attachment. But they've built in this little bellows on the side that is breathing in and out, which makes it even more alive and a little more off putting. Yes, this look.
Man. We've seen so many vam.
Pires and wear wolves and ghules and creatures, and they've all been so fucking beautiful.
But I kind of agree with you here, Chris.
This thing was the most fascinating, interesting looking creature I think the series is produced.
It's a killer vacuum. Yeah, and it's horrible and it's not goofy. It's not like the Killer Pool movie that came out.
Just don't go in the pool. Just don't know, my goddamn pool. This is no You're trapped in the house with a vacuum. But the gimmick is the vacuum sucks the noise, so don't make any noise. What a smart little turn of a turn, just a little perfect.
I wonder if that guy from the office saw this before he wrode a quiet place.
Yeah right, I mean, and I would.
This is better than that in terms of being economical with the storytelling.
Yeah, half hour in and out. You know, I was talking about just how pleasant it was that the previous episode just moved moves, you know, And yeah, this is the saint, you know. Just you don't feel the commercial breaks, you don't feel time passing. You just I started watching this and next thing I know, it's over. Because it was so much fun to engage with, and it feels like a thesis for the entire series because one of our main preoccupations has been our technophobia.
This series, more than any other that we've covered, has been obsessed with how technology is gonna fuck us up. And here's the ultimate example of that. It's just going to take the life right out of you.
And what I love is that the invent Because we were complaining about the inventor of it all, this actually works in terms of the inventor of it all actually pays off.
It's like a kid with asthma he's stuck at home.
He is an inventor.
And then just because he's a kid with asthma, it adds another layer of terror because the kid's gonna give out, give your location and he can't help it right right.
Which normally kids with the asthma in movies should just like, Okay, when's he gonna need this nebulizer?
One?
Yeah, and it's oh god, this work so well.
On the next episode of Midnight Viewing, we'll be taking a look at the next two episodes of season four. Those are Barter and Basher Malone. Did I say the next two? They are the final two episodes of Tales from the Dark Side. Midnight Viewing The Horror Anthology Podcast is a proud member of a weirding Way media group. Our theme song was composed by HP with an assist by Donald Rubinstein. Until next time?
What are you working on? Where can people find it? Chris Statue.
Weirdingwaymedia dot Com is where you can find all the things that I work on, including this show and then my own show, The Culture Cast, and then a whole host of other things that I work on, either with Mike or with Father Malone, like Chronicles from the Crypt, which we did many moons ago where we talked about the show that we've mentioned every like every other time, i'd take like a bet, like a I don't know what bet you'd get, but I feel like fifty percent
of the time we've mentioned Tales from the Crypt on the show, because again, it's kind.
Of the standard bearer.
So if you want to hear our thoughts on kind of that HBO horror anthology show that's still not available on HBO streaming for.
Whatever fucking reason.
Oh we know, yeah, we know, Chronicles from the Crypt is where I would point anyone who enjoys this show because that was, you know, the first time you and I worked it on anything collaboratively, Father Malone, So yeah, I would check that show out.
That's a deep cut. What about you, Mike White?
Yeah, well, well I was on one episode of the Tales from the crypts.
It was a disaster, but yeah, you know what, you know what I gotta say, Mike, you figured it out more than quicker than than Chris and I.
And the sad thing is that that was one of the better episodes of the show still to this day.
Yeah, but yeah, everything that I do is available at Waitinglymedia dot com.
Yeah, so come on.
Over and listen to the stuff I work on, as well as some of the other fine shows that we have on the network.
About your phone, I would actually say Mike hasn't figured it out.
He's here now through I mean we got him in the end.
Right. Well as for me, Every Monday, Falling Malone's weekly round Up where I look at whatever it's new and streaming in theatrical and every Friday it's Horror Anthology Podcast where eire we're looking at series like well, say us some dark Signs done. We're gonna be looking at Hammerhouse of Horrors next, of course every other week, but we have a substitute show where HP and I look at a different fest. We are wrapping up our Yahoucha fest. We've also got a Rick Moranus fest going on over
at the Patreon channel. Speaking of the Patreon Patreon dot com slash follow them alone. You're gonna get episodes, early, commercial, free and bonus content.
You can only get there.
But if money is tight, you can do us a solid Mike giving us a five star review, Subscribe and share on the Apple on Apple Podcasts, write us a nice review on Spotify. I don't know, do something else, comment, just tell someone else to listen anyway, Thank you all for joining us here at midnine reviewing. Until next time, try to enjoy the daylight
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