Christmas With Dave Foley #5: Newsradio "Stupid Holiday Charity Talent Show"

Newsradio's final Christmas episode is "Stupid Holiday Charity Talent Show" (from the same titling geniuses who brought you "Super Karate Monkey Death Car" and "Spooky Rapping Crypt"). Matthew has been fired by Andrea Planbee, and a wacky sitcom plot ("which, when I think about it now, doesn't even really make sense at all," Matthew says) hinges his reinstatement on the staff winning a talent show.

Dave's embarrassed about all his talents (the tapdancing revealed in the previous season, plus jelly-making and possibly his high-school performance in Grease), so everyone else has to come up with acts. I love watching Vicki Lewis get to sing (which Beth never did much, and you should totally check out Vicki's Christmas album), and it's always nice to see Bill at the piano. Lisa offers to do mental math. Joe hits stuff.

Sidebar: Maybe because it's not mentioned in the dialogue, I don't remember noticing the end of Joe's story before today. During the final scenes, both his hands are bandaged up. I wish the DVDs had deleted scenes.

Double Sidebar: While I'm wishing things, this was the first episode after Khandi Alexander left, and I'd be interested to see Catherine's talent. Catherine is maybe too regal to entertain at a silly talent show, so would she just refuse? Or would she have something surprising to help Matthew?

And so Dave has to pull out his final, genuinely impressive talent: knife-throwing. This episode, of course, is memorable as Dave's reunion with Kevin McDonald, who appears as a perfectly Kevin-ish character, Dave's knife nemesis.

Dave's short-lived confidence leaves as quickly as it came, of course, and so the real hero turns out to be Matthew all along. He pulls out his surprise talent: ventriloquism. And it goes about as well as anything Matthew does, though he gets a depressing holiday surprise: more pity, and his job back.

So Dave's depressed, and we're all feeling sorry for Matthew, and then Dave puts the final twist on the show, and Christmas at WNYX has come to an end. It's by no means their best Christmas show, but it's plenty good, and I still watch it every year.

As a Newsradio episode, I rate this one 6/10. It's got plenty of memorable lines. But the plot is so constraining, and frankly the show had a hard time righting itself after Khandi left. But, a Newsradio 6/10 is a 9/10 for most other shows.
As a Christmas episode, I rate this one 5/10. It's got Matthew singing "Silent Night," in the first and best scene. There are decorations and a little bit more Christmas talk, but not a lot of holiday spirit. When Beth sings, she sings "Makin' Whoopee," which is a great song, but not exactly seasonally appropriate.
As a spotlight for Dave, I rate this one 8/10. Dave Nelson is usually a bundle of nerves, and this whole season saw Dave on edge more than usual (I still love "The Public Domain," for example). It's great to see his dynamic emotional arc in this show -- he's got a roller-coaster of emotions, and Kevin to play off of.

The Space Ghost Halloween Collection, Chapter Four

Episode the Last is from Season Four, and it's entitled "Piledriver."

The show opens with a twist on Scooby Doo, with a nice joke for the voice-chasers out there -- Zorak (originally voiced by Don Messick) is subbing in for Scooby (originally voiced by, yes, Don Messick).

Rob Zombie has a few minutes, during which he denies feasting on the flesh of humans, but most of the screentime in this episode goes to another member of Tad's family, his grampa, Leonard Ghostal. Gramps is voiced by Randy Savage, and it seems his character is an old wrestler, who showed Moltar's dad whatfor a few decades ago.

Raven-Symone brags about having met Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. I don't wanna start rumors, but have we considered a Raven-Symone curse of some kind?

Then Zorak and Moltar enact an old-school wrestling ambush, and Grampy Space Ghost is down. They blame Raven for it, of course, and Spacey believes them. Of course.

Zorak gets his, of course, and then Grampy's ride stops by, en route to beating up Mary Hart.


As an episode of SGC2C, I rate this 3/10. I'm not much of a wrestling fan, so the unified theme of this episode doesn't do much for me. My favorite part is the 30-second opening gag. (Apparently, I'm in the minority here -- I get the impression a lot of people love this one. YMMV.)
As a Halloween show, I rate this 2/10. Scoob and the gang aren't doing anything spooky, and Raven-Symone wasn't even a psychic yet. Spacey's opening joke ("What do you get when you cross a Zombie with a Raven?") is the only Halloween-related content here. It's my fault really; I just saw Rob Zombie and assumed there might be some horror talk. I'll try to find a festive one in December to make up for it.

A Spoopy Month #15: The last of the leftovers, warmed over and with some kinda weird sauce on top. What IS that?

It's time for the last batch of movie reviews from last year, and it's a weird mix indeed.

October 31, 2014:

(big inhale) Okay. So, yes, Tower of Terror isn't very good. And yes, the nominal star of this made-for-TV movie is Steve Guttenberg. But, again, I'll try to be positive:
A lot of this, like a LOT of it, was filmed at the attraction in Orlando. It's great to see close-ups of that setting, from angles we can't get to as guests.
Melora Hardin gets to sing in this, which she never got around to as Jan Levenson.
It's always nice to see Mike McShane in anything, even if his '97 appearance in this can't make up for his complete lack in involvement in the US Whose Line.
Um... well, it starts with "Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)" which is a great song.
It's great that this film, while not officially related to the Twilight Zone in any way, adapts every other thing about the attraction, including dropping our heroes in a modern-day freefalling elevator, and even the random assortment of 1939 victims, who are all major characters in this.

Okay, enough positivity. I've been rewatching the first season of Twilight Zone this month, in between movies, and the writing on that is so damned adult. I just wish this had been written so adults, ones with full attention spans and active intellects, could enjoy this movie as much as their children would.

Well, it could be worse. It could be The Country Bears.

(And just in case you don't click through to that Wikipedia link, here's a neat piece of trivia. The writer/director of this is now a YA author, and he's written the bellboy from this film into his series as a very minor character. That's pretty cool.)

October 31, 2014:

The Astro Zombies: Whoo boy, now THIS is a bad one. I've only seen one other Ted V. Mikels film (Girl in the Gold Boots, on MST3K), and it was just as bad, but much more depressing. This one isn't depressing, just boring.
What's that you say? How can a film with reanimated solar-powered, radio-controlled corpses be boring?
Well, John Carradine can explain the process to us (and his greasy assistant) in minute detail. The film was written by Wayne Rogers, later to become TV's Trapper John, who is apparently the world's biggest electronics nerd (he's on the board of a company that makes semiconductors). I'm not smart enough to know why the technology in the film doesn't work in real life, but the film really really really wants us to believe it has scientific credibility. (The scientific equipment in the film was apparently scrounged from a dump. At one point, a body is stored in a freezer which is clearly a grocery-store frozen-food bunker.)
Not only is the mad scientist really boring, this movie has the world's worst spy. We see Tura Satana (Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill!) interrogate two people. The first one, she only asks him "Who are you?" (and her henchman has JUST read his ID from his wallet) and shoots him before he can answer. The second time, she's trying to recruit Carradine to reanimate corpses for her country's army, and shoots him less than two minutes into the process, after he's agreed to do so.
Starting in 2008, Mikels made three, count 'em, three sequels to this!
I have two more films (good ones, at least) to talk about tomorrow.
Happy Halloween, everyone!

November 1, 2014:

Eyes Without A Face, on the other hand, is really good. It's poetic and gorgeous, and the emotions in it are heartfelt. After the constant explanations of Astro Zombies, the almost underwritten script of this film (at least, the translated subtitles were pretty spare) is a relief. With that said, the director called it a movie of "anguish," rather than a horror film, and there's a surgery scene which is pretty hard to watch (at the Edinburgh Film Festival showing, reportedly seven people fainted).
Remember in my review of Shadow of the Vampire, which I compared to Night Tide, when I said I love genre films made by fine artists? This is another one of those, I think.
And, oddly enough, the plot for this is so obvious and horror-movie-like: a mad scientist, spurned by his colleagues, operating on humans, just like in The Atomic Brain and Astro Zombies, and several hundred other films (most better than those two examples).
We have one more spooky movie to talk about, and it's a pure delight. See ya tonight, folks.

November 1, 2014:

I Married A Witch: Here's a delightful piece of fluff to round out my month of spooky movies. It's a screwball romantic farce that begins with the eponymous witch being burned. She puts a curse on her accuser, and condemns his descendants to marry the wrong women, for all time.
Okay, so it's a little sexist -- the "wrong" women are pretty much all shrewish and controlling, as we see in a quick montage of 270 years, bringing us to the 1940s.
When the witch and her father are released from their eternal imprisonment by an errant bolt of lightning, she almost immediately decides to continue tormenting the latest descendant of the pilgrim who had her burnt, but her plan goes awry.
In the end, everything turns out for the best, despite the witch's vengeful father (played by Cecil Calloway, who I'd just seen that same day in a Twilight Zone episode, "Elegy," in which he plays a creepy caretaker and host to three astronauts millions of miles from Earth).
I think Veronica Lake is maybe a little too kittenish, even in the first part of this movie, to be truly believable as a vengeance-bound bride of evil. But those were different times, and it's hard to completely switch tones in a movie only 73 minutes long. Overall, good fun, even though I never cared for Bewitched (which, for legal reasons, was not based on this film.)
[So these last two movies I watched in conjunction with Greg Proops' other podcast, The Greg Proops Film Club. You can find those episodes here and here. He's been promising the Young Frankenstein episode, which I'm really looking forward to.]

Thanks for reading these old capsule reviews. All new stuff coming up, including some Halloweenish TV episodes and more movies and even more candy!

25 Days of Christmas #4a: "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace"

Trust me, I know I'm behind. Working on it...

So, here's the next Simpsons Christmas episode, and boy is it good. (To be honest, this isn't the NEXT Christmas Simpsons, but it's the next one on my DVD. I haven't seen "Marge Be Not Proud" lately.) As you may recognize from the picture above, it's "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace."  Bart gets up early to open his presents and ends up destroying his family's Christmas. A quick lie snowballs into a news story that rakes in $15,000 from the town, but the car bought with all that money also goes up in flames (shortly after a Mr. Plow callback). Then Bart's story goes up in flames, and the Simpson family once again find themselves pariahs. (According to The Simpsons Wiki, this is one of twenty episodes where one or more of the family become social outcasts.)

Bart's tearful confession is a nice redemption moment for him. (I can't help but be reminded of "Bart Sells His Soul," which still has a warm cushioned place in my heart.) Eventually, the town strike upon a uniquely Springfieldian resolution: they will take all the family's stuff, and forgive them.

Christmas, at its heart, is about forgiveness, at least, as we practice it in this predominantly-Christian country. The best Christmas stories examine faith, warmth, generosity, and forgiveness. Most of those qualities can be in short supply in Springfield. The townspeople in this episode, while quick to anger when provoked, make it their own duty to find a way to forgiveness within themselves. 

I'm a lousy forgiver, most times, but constantly find myself needing to be forgiven. I don't go to church anymore, but I still think of that line from The Apostle's Creed: "Forgive us our trespasses, while we forgive those who trespassed against us." There's not a much better goal for humans, I think.

As a Simpsons episode, I rate this 9/10. The show was still going strong, and there's just enough metaphor here to fuel the comedy.

As a Christmas show, I rate this 10/10. The whole episode is about Christmas, and about lots of different parts of Christmas, both spiritual and materialistic.

The Simpsons - Christmas  The Simpsons: Season 9