I listen to the podcast Canceled Too Soon, which is about TV shows that were cancelled after one season or less. It’s a wide variety of shows, and I decided to watch a few of the shows that they covered, watching the episodes on YouTube, and re-listening to the episodes to hear the commentary.
The first was Terror Vision. First, that got me into watching the 1986 cult horror comedy movie, which I enjoyed in a campy, goofy way, about an alien entering a family’s home through their satellite TV and eating them. But afterwards, I watched this obscure 1980s horror anthology of the same name that had nothing to do with the movie. The series was from circa 1988, shot on video (or shot on “shitteo”), had terrible, wooden actors with no other credits to their names, and had flat, predictable storylines that got wrapped up in 10-15 minutes, like a monster in a kid’s closet, a vampire dentist, a clothing store that turns young women into mannequins, a stalker in a house, etc. It was fine to watch more in a “what the hell is this?” way as a weird forgotten relic of the 80’s. The producers had serious credit with being involved with Liquid Sky and Jim Jarmusch movies, and one actor went on to a real film career in stuff like Total Recall, but everyone else just felt so random and awkward. I do like 80’s horror anthologies like Tales from the Dark Side, Monsters, 80’s Twilight Zone, and others, so this was my thing to watch, even if it was really bad.
The next was Nightmare Cafe, a short-lived series from 1992 from Wes Craven that started out with promise, but was more hokey than horror. Two newly-dead people are resurrected to find a mysterious cafe run by Robert Englund, and the cafe acts as a rest stop for people to change their lives for the better by going back and fixing the past. There’s a TV where they can both see the past and present times, and the ghosts can teleport when they need to help somebody or understand a past event. The first episode started out with good mystery to understand the backstories of the ghosts, and how they go back in the past to change things that they were cowards about before so even if they still die again, they die as heroes and not losers.
The problems with the show were that the storylines were more sappy and less “nightmare,” like the ghosts meeting old family and friends who don’t know they’re dead, and helping them with their problems, like having an abusive boyfriend or son in a coma. Or two film noir stories that felt heavily dated and out of place in 1992. I was expecting more of a horror show, and it was more sentimental. Or, as the hosts said, not stories out of Touched by an Angel. And Englund, despite how charismatic he is (and he rocks a long dark coat well) is totally wasted as a supporting character who narrates the plot sometimes, talks to the audience Rod Serling-style, seems like an agent of Satan but it’s never really said where he comes from, and pops up throughout the episodes playing minor characters in various getups and accents. He deserved better on a show called “Nightmare Cafe.”
The last that I watched was a T.V. movie pilot also from 1992 called Steel Justice, in which the spirit of a cop’s dead nine-year old son possesses a toy robot dinosaur, and the dinosaur grows fifty feet and breathes fire to help his dad fight crime. The show takes this plot very seriously, with a gritty futuristic cop drama, set in a Blade Runner-like city, the cop having nightmares about his son’s death by a crime boss, and an ancient immortal man coming to guide the cop with this transformation, and it’s just half-baked and dumb. It’s hard to take the story seriously with a giant robo dinosaur breathing fire on guys selling illegal weapons and mowing down people and crashing through buildings, and trying to buy this Highlander-like story with the immortal guy. The show basically threw so much money into this TV movie pilot with explosions and gritty city set designs and tons of extras, all for a show that didn’t get picked up because it had a ludicrous plotline.
I’ll likely watch more shows, but these were just some of the few I saw. I also watched an episode of Bone Chillers, a kids’ show from 1996 about a haunted high school with monsters, that featured Linda Cardinelli as a goth teen. It was OK, a little too goofy for me, but cute for kids.
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