John Kenneth Muir's Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV
Creator of the award-winning web series, Abnormal Fixation. One of the horror genre's "most widely read critics" (Rue Morgue # 68), "an accomplished film journalist" (Comic Buyer's Guide #1535), and the award-winning author of Horror Films of the 1980s (2007) and Horror Films of the 1970s (2002), John Kenneth Muir, presents his blog on film, television and nostalgia, named one of the Top 100 Film Studies Blog on the Net.
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Shatner Day: The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973)
Shatner Day: The People (1972)
Shatner Day: Mission Impossible "Encore"
Shatner Day: Thriller: "The Hungry Glass"
Thriller, The Hungry Glass," stars the great William Shatner, and is a kind of regional-based horror story of the supernatural variety. The tale is set in a chilly "New England autumn" and a sleepy seaside community. It is in this setting that photographer Gil Thrasher (Shatner) and his wife, Marsha (Joanna Heyes), purchase the Bellman house...an old mansion strangely devoid of mirrors
Almost immediately upon moving into their new home, Marsha and Gil are startled by images of Laura's ghost, the woman in the mirror. beckoning to them. She is trying to "break through," to "reach you" and there is no doubt that she is murderous.
The terror builds and builds in "The Hungry Glass" until the malevolent ghost pulls unlucky Marsha into the looking glass with her, leaving her husband to destroy the mirror. Before the episode ends, there's another shocking death too.
This Thriller episode features some remarkable visual compositions. As the show commences, we get a view of the vain homeowner, Laura -- a beautiful woman. Or rather a view of her reflection, for she is seen only through a row of mirrors mounted on the wall. We move with Laura as she dances and plays to the looking-glass, and our vision of this character hops from mirror to mirror as she whirls and spins. In each mirror, we ponder, exists a universe unto itself. Then, when Laura is forced by circumstances to open the front door, we see the real Laura for the first time: an elderly hag who looks like she's already been embalmed, in the words of the teleplay.
Of course, we also get a great Shatnerian performance here.
"The Hungry Glass" is exactly the same.
And yes, Shatner does get to scream in "The Hungry Glass." So in his horror anthologies, I think he's three for four in that category.
"The Hungry Glass" is also filled with ironic commentary about mirrors.
Douglas Heyes directed several classic, timeless Twilight Zone episodes including "The Howling Man," "The Invaders" and "Eye of the Beholder." Thriller's "The Hungry Glass" is right up there with the best of those in terms of presentation and impact.
Shatner Day: Twilight Zone: "The Nick of Time"
"Nick of Time" is the story of Don S. Carter (William Shatner) and his new wife, Pam (Patricia Breslin). Their car has broken down on their honeymoon trip to New York, and the couple is forced to make a pit stop for repairs in the sleepy little town of Ridgeview, Ohio.
It is there, in the Busy Bee Diner, that this couple will -- according to narrator Serling -- find "a gift most humans will never receive," the ability to "learn the future."
Why? Well, because this town and this diner rests on "the outskirts" of The Twilight Zone.
Our central character Don is an interesting guy, and Shatner's performance here is one of his best. Don's the superstitious type, with a rabbits foot on his key chain right beside a four-leaf clover. He is given to expressing himself in phrases such as "keep your fingers crossed."
"It's like you married an alcoholic" he admits to Pam in one of his more lucid moments, aware of how superstitious he really is.
But on now to Don's unusual nemesis. It's a rinky-dink napkin dispenser with a Devil Bobblehead perched on top. It's the "one cent" "Mystic Seer," a fortune telling-device that for one penny will read you your future. It does so by ejecting little cards that cryptically answer yes or no questions.
Sounds harmless enough, right?
Not so fast...
First, the machine accurately predicts that Don will get the promotion he's been waiting for.
Then it reports that the couple's car will not take four hours to be repaired, as was told the couple.
Don grows ever more convinced that the "gizmo" is actually telling him his future. "Why was it so specific?" He asks Pam. "Every answer seems to fit," he insists.
Pam isn't so sure.
And then things get really spooky. Don asks the machine if something will happen to the couple if they leave town. The answer: "if you move soon."
He then asks, "should we stay here?"
The answer: "that makes a good deal of sense."
Finally, Bob interprets a message from the Devil Bobblehead to mean that he and Pam shouldn't leave the diner until after 3:00 pm that afternoon.
Pam objects and forces Don to leave the diner. At one minute to three, on the street outside, they are nearly run over by a speeding car...
Convinced and stubborn, Don returns to the diner and begins asking the Mystic Seer more questions, even though Pam begs him not to. "You made up all the details, and all that thing did is give back generalities," she tells him.
He still won't leave. Not until his new wife tells him that the machine is running his life, and that she can't be married to a man who "believes more in luck and fortune" than in himself.
Don and Pam escape this trap, what Serling terms "the tyranny of fear and superstition," but in the episode's final shot, we see that another couple isn't so lucky. "Can we ask some more questions today?" They ask the machine.
"Do you think we might leave Ridgeview today?"
"Is there any way out?"
Yet what's so enjoyable about "Nick of Time" is that we don't know whether Don is right (and the Devil machine is predicting the future), or if, in fact, he's merely superstitious and all the right answers are mere "coincidence" as Pam suggests.
The ultimate point is, I suppose, what you choose to believe in: fear or hope. You can choose to believe that you are small and in danger; or you can take control of your life and face the hardships with strength, and with the ones you love at your side.
Beyond a fortune telling device that may or may not be supernatural, there is no overt fantastical element in this installment of the Twilight Zone and yet it is oddly effective, and affecting despite this fact.
Visually, it's assembled in clever fashion by director Richard Bare. The first shot of the episode is a wobbly view from a tow truck bed, looking down from a high angle at the car being towed, with Don and Pam inside. This is an important view, because it establishes right from the beginning of the episode that Don is not "driving" his life (nor his car). He's simply being pulled in one direction or another, towed by his fear and superstition.
Later, when the couple first enters the Busy Bee Diner with the Devil Bobblehead/Mystic Seer, the camera views Don and Pat from the far side of a lattice-work room separator/divider, a sort of visual frame-within-a-frame signifying entrapment or doom.
This same camera set-up recurs at several important moments in the show.
The first time, we view two other local residents in thrall to the Mystic Seer at the dining booth, also through this "entrapment" lens (the criss-cross frame of the lattice).
Finally, when Pam encourages Don to summon his inner courage, the shot has changed to reflect their strength. The lattice wall is no longer between camera and character -- a visual obstacle and blockade -- but rather behind the characters. They have escaped the trap. They have moved literally past it.
I also get a kick out of the extreme (and I mean, EXTREME) close-up shots of the Devil Bobblehead, always jittering ever so slightly but nonetheless playing his Satanic cards close to the vest. He's an interesting villain because he's inanimate and yet we "impose" some sense of fear or personality on him.
Shatner's performance is so good because he plays a character suffering from a lack of confidence. That's funny, given that he's the guy who plays Captain Kirk, but I would argue that even there, in Star Trek, that's the quality that makes the character work so well. Kirk is a human being, a leader of men, but he still second guesses himself ("Balance of Terror") or fears losing his job ("The Ultimate Computer").
Watching early Shatner performances you get a sense at how deft the actor is in playing a likable yet vulnerable character. He doesn't quite reach the heights of hysteria in "Nick of Time" that he would achieve later in "A Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," but the script calls for different things. I really like Shatner in this kind of every man persona. To me, he represents the perfect 1960s young male: a self-aware, intelligent, resourceful, JFK-type with just enough self doubt and neurosis to make him thoroughly disarming.
I find it fascinating that Shatner's two Twilight Zones and one Outer Limits ("Cold Hands, Warm Heart") place the actor in the thick of a couple relationship in crisis. He's always playing a husband dealing with something terrible, and trying to convince his wife that he isn't insane. Gremlins on planes, Venusians on "Project Vulcan," or a fortune telling machine that may be the Devil Himself.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Guest Post: Heart Eyes (2025)
Heart Eyes Warms The Heart, Then Stabs It to Pieces
By Jonas Schwartz-Owen
Sometime the WHO matters. It does in a whodunit, where the audience is invested in the crime, and it does in a who’s done it (as in who are the creators). Had Heart Eyes been written and directed by a newcomer, it would show a glimmer of hope for a future career. However, the script was co-written by the inventive Christopher Landon, creator of Happy Death Day 2U and Freaky, two smart, breezy comedy horror films with sly concepts and witty execution. The film was helmed by Josh Ruben, whose Werewolves Within and Scare Me were delightful, original horror comedies. Heart Eyeslacks the ambition and the skewed approach one expects from Landon and Ruben. Pretty much anyone competent with a film school degree could have made this film.
Melding the rom-com and slasher genres, Heart Eyes follow two attractive colleagues (Olivia Holt and Scream series dude-in-distress Mason Gooding) as they are targeted by a serial killer who slaughters couples on Valentine’s Day. The killer mistakes them for a couple, and, like cupid, sets up his arrow, but as a lethal weapon.
The script, which besides Landon, was also written by Phillip Murphy and Michael Kennedy, follows many of the elements in the Sandra Bullock romantic comedy milieu. Our protagonists, young Ally (Holt) and Jay (Goodling) meet-cute over a cup of coffee and are instantly charmed, only to discover they’re now competitors at their cutthroat marketing firm, so they hate each other. A life in jeopardy makes Jay more attractive and Ally finds herself falling in love. Her stubbornness leads him to disappear from her life, only for Ally to finally acknowledge that love, and chase him through the city to the airport for that romantic kiss. It’s perfect ‘90s comedy, except with buckets of gore.
If the movie’s rom-com aspects are Pitch Perfect (pun intended to those who recall the Jennifer Aniston comedy), the film’s parodying of ‘90s horror conventions is less on target. The film begins with our pre-credit victims, usually a big star (Drew Barrymore, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Kristen Bell/Oscar Winner Anna Paquin in the Scream franchise) or someone with cache (like Natasha Gregson Wagner in Urban Legend or Joseph Gordon Levitt in Halloween H20). No offense to Alex Walker and Lauren O'Hara, but both are unrecognizable and limited actors and don’t start the film out with a bang. The killer is also obvious, with a murky and bland motive. It almost feels like the real antagonist had been revealed on the internet à la Scream 2 and they quicky reshot a new villain and motive.
There are some gnarly kills, including one in the backseat of a car that is a variation on both a famous skewering from Death of The Twitch Nerve and a “holy” view from the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The killer’s mask, two glowing hearts, is visually creepy, while also comic. The authors also subvert the useless authority trope found in Last House on the Left, amongst others.
Holt and Goodling lend charm to their roles and build legitimate chemistry. The always delightful Michaela Watkins is doing her best Parker Posey impression as a high strung, browbeating Southern boss. There are also roles for ‘90s horror starts Devon Sawa (Final Destination) and Jordana Brewster (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) that are tongue in cheek.
Though a solid enough horror comedy, with some enjoyable moments, Heart Eyes could have been something special. Both Christopher Landon and Josh Ruben have proven they think miles outside the box. Heart Eyes just isn’t subversive enough.
Shatner Day: The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973)
This TV movie, The Horror at 37,000 Feet -- from 1973 -- has not, historically, received a lot of love from critics or audiences. It sta...

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Last year at around this time (or a month earlier, perhaps), I posted galleries of cinematic and TV spaceships from the 1970s, 1980s, 1...
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The robots of the 1950s cinema were generally imposing, huge, terrifying, and of humanoid build. If you encountered these metal men,...