Cry For the Strangers (1982)

Is it ghosts or madness?

It’s one of the core questions of paranormal plotlines. In Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and in John Saul’s Cry For the Strangers. Is it ghosts or madness? And which one is scarier?

This post is for Realweegiemidget’s Darlin’ DallasersBlogathon, an event dedicated to checking out the non-Dallas work of Dallas regulars. I picked Patrick Duffy, who starred as Bobby Ewing – the initial main character of the lauded primetime soap, and originator of the “it was just a dream” shower reveal. Also, he sometimes hangs around with this crab:

In 1982, Duffy starred in a TV movie adaptation of Cry for the Strangers.

He played psychologist Brad Randall, a man tired of the Frasier Crane Seattle psych scene and in the mood to shake things up in his life. He and his wife, Elaine, decide to move down the Olympic peninsula to a creepy little town called Clark’s Harbor. Having lived my entire life in the PNW, I can tell you straight up that Clark’s Harbor is a weird place, and not just because of the looming threat of the supernatural.

It’s described in the original novel thusly:

“And it did look like a picture-postcard New England town. The buildings that clustered along the waterfront were all of a type: neat clapboards, brightly painted, with manicured gardens flowering gaily in the spring air.”

The film faithfully represents this, making Clark’s Harbor look and feel like Cabot Cove’s prettier, more bedevilled cousin. It’s bizarre. I have no idea why you’d go to all the trouble of setting something in Washington just so you could make it look like New England. Why wouldn’t you just set it in New England?

Anyway, the town is peopled with the usual New Englanders, including a reticent sheriff played by Brian Keith, fishwives and fishermen in northeast garb, gossipy café waitresses, and a whole bunch of multi-generational locals who give Brad and Elaine a frosty reception.

But that’s the town’s way. Newcomers aren’t welcome.

Newcomers aren’t safe.

Not when the storms are coming.

Clark’s Harbor, turns out, is beset by Gothic weather that would make the Brontë sisters go: “Hey, cool it with the atmospheric symbolism.” Lightning forks across moody purple skies, clouds roll in over swaying fishing boats, and storms break… and break… and break… against the strangely abandoned Victorian mansion that Brad has decided he has to live in. It’s on a hill called Devil’s Elbow. Across the bay from Devil’s Kneecap, I’m guessing. Just up the coastline from That Bruise the Devil Can’t Remember How He Got.

Everyone loves a massive coincidence, and in this story, the coincidence is the Palmer family. Their son, Robby, was diagnosed in Seattle as being severely autistic (this was in the early, early days of modern autism research, and it was kind of a hot topic in literature for a while. It was only three years after autism was officially separated from schizophrenia in medical literature, and horror writers in particular latched onto it).

You’ll never guess who Robby’s Seattle therapist was.

Dr. Brad Randall.

The Palmers, wanting a quiet and more easily structured life away from the city, moved down to Clark’s Harbor the year before. Since then, Robby’s made a miraculous transformation. He now behaves like any other boy his age, as though he’d never been anything different.

Brad right away finds this impossibly suspicious, but he can’t ignore that it seems to be happening.

Like any reasonable mental health expert, Brad begins to wonder if Robby’s recovery might be related to the high number of storms. It’s not totally out of left field, on the first night the Palmers rolled into town, they camped on the beach during a terrible storm – because if there’s one thing parents of autistic children know is a good idea it’s moving houses without a plan and sleeping in an unfamiliar setting during a thunderstorm. The Palmers are on the ball. Weirdly, though, that first night is when Robby started to change for the better.

In a casual session with Brad, Robby explains that he finds the storms soothing, but they put him in a kind of trance, and afterwards he doesn’t remember anything he did during the night before. (Storms only happen at night, you see.) At least once he’s snuck out with his younger sister Missy, and during a recent storm they lost track of the family dog…

The whole thing would just be a small peculiarity if it wasn’t for the murders. Every storm, a stranger dies. Someone from out of town, or not originally from Clark’s Harbor, turns up extremely dead in the morning. It’s pretty gruesome stuff, too. They’re usually found buried up to their necks in pits on the beach, then slowly drowned as the tide comes in. This is why the locals don’t like getting too close to newcomers, and also why Brad, Elaine, and the Palmers are all in more danger than they know.

There might be ghosts. Maybe. It's probably a serial killer, or the spirits that killed the last couple to live in Devil's Elbow, it's all very vague.

Which brings us to the biggest trouble with Cry for the Strangers. In its efforts to leave things eerily unexplained, keeping the madness door and the ghost door open at the same time for as long as possible, it doesn’t explain much. Or anything, really. Events just happen. Tension builds, but never suspense. The plotting is muddled and unsatisfying. The ending literally has Elaine asking about the many plot holes while Brad stares into the distance and tells us we’ll never know the answers.

It’s worth checking out only if you’re extremely bored, or if you find Patrick Duffy with a cheesy academic-type beard hilarious, which I do. (It looks very Amityville Horror, but like the low-fat yogurt version. Brad is the diet soda of horror protagonists. I love him.)

What’s totally worth checking out, regardless of your boredom levels, are the other posts in this blogathon! Yay! The master list posts on Sept. 22 on Realweegiemidget’s blog, so be sure to stop by. And if you’re in the mood for more Dallas tie-ins while you wait, you can check out Larry Hagman in these I Dream of Jeannie recaps.

Dungeons and Dragons 01x04: Valley of the Unicorns

Time once again to hear from regular guest contributor Daisy and the D&D gang! Like always, if you'd like to do your own guest recap of something, you can contact me at jvonhalsing@gmail.com for guidelines.

Episode four is called “Valley of the Unicorns.” It’s written by Paul Dini again, this time with Karl Geurs, whom IMDb tells me worked on Winnie the Pooh’s Most Grand Adventure and The Jungle Book 2. So I guess we can expect a lot of Uni for this one.

Oh joy.

We open to the scene of a spooky forest, where the trees literally have faces and a fully grown unicorn is drinking from a pond. Lightning cracks, and suddenly a pack of wargs descend upon the unicorn! As the enemies face off, we jarringly cut to Uni, freaking out and jumping into Bobby’s lap. Bobby asks her what’s wrong. Eric, who’s busy shaking rocks out of his boots, says that it’s probably nothing, because Uni freaks out at the slightest provocation. Which is true. But then Uni suddenly bolts.

The kids give chase, Eric awkwardly trying to yank his boot back on.

Eric: “We can’t go anywhere until I get rid of the rocks in my shoes!”

Diana: “Keep ‘em. Maybe the rocks in your head need company, Eric!”

This is going to be one of those episodes where everyone is a gigantic dick to Eric, isn’t it?

Super Friends – The Lost Episodes: Terror on the Titanic

I’ve decided that we all need a little more fun at the moment, so instead of looking at Rod Serling’s Patterns like I was going to, I am instead recapping an episode of Super Friends where they fight the Titanic.

Yes. The actual Titanic.

Saturday Morning Cartoons went extinct a couple of years ago. With streaming services allowing parents to curate their kids’ viewing, and 24hr cartoon channels available, the once noble establishment that brought forth everything from The Jetsons to the North American Pokémon craze died a peaceful, largely unnoticed death.

But, for fifty years of broadcast television, it was a coveted block of time carved out for the wild imaginations of kids, and the advertisers trying to target them. A devil’s pact of calculated branding and genuine fun.

The history of Super Friends, in particular, is a mess full of title changes, network changes, syndication deals falling through, and so much behind-the-scenes drama it’d make a hilarious HBO drama set at Hanna-Barbera in the 70’s. You’d never guess how much backstabbing went into producing each seven minute episode about a super hero friendship team.

Dungeons and Dragons 01x03: The Hall of Bones

Daisy's back with another exciting episode of Dungeons and Dragons! For those of you who don't know, Daisy is our semi-regular guest blogger. A long time fantasy fan, her looks at the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon are always hilarious and insightful. To find more of her stuff, click the tags at the bottom of the post, or the spiffy D&D banner in the sidebar. Take it away, Daisy!

Today's episode is called “The Hall of Bones.” Woo, spooky! It’s written by Paul Dini, who, among many other things, worked on Batman: The Animated Series.

We open to the kids hurrying through some kind of creepy swamp. Magical ecosystems, man. Screw ‘em. Apparently they’re being chased by something, and we get our first glimpse of it when Diana narrowly evades being caught by some sort of hairy flying monster. Point Diana. Uni’s not so quick, though, despite being on all fours, and manages to get swept up by the… griffins? Flying monkeys? Oh, yup, they’re flying monkeys. Uni loses a point.

Bobby freaks out, of course, and rescues Uni by… knocking a tree into the flying monkey that’s holding her, and nearly killing them both. He manages to catch her before she can smash into the ground and presumably break all of her legs or get crushed by the falling tree.

I’m not giving him a point for that, even though it technically worked out. After that flower crap in the last episode, I’m drawing the line on dumb luck here.

Sheila freaks out and herds Bobby and Uni away from the remaining winged primate threat. Hank fires off some shots at the monkeys, and… what’s this? Hank’s magical arrows disappear before they can do anything. Bobby tries to knock over another tree, because that’s how Bobby rolls, but his club just smacks uselessly against the trunk. Looks like everybody’s having performance issues. Eric encourages everyone to dive behind him and holds up his shield, which seems particularly brave given the circumstances, and it actually works! At first. A flying monkey dives at them and is repelled. Point Eric.

Eric: “They’ll never break through this!”

Dammit, Eric. Now you’ve jinxed it. Of course, that’s the moment when Eric’s shield gives out. Bobby speculates that the batteries are dead. It’s actually a pretty good metaphor.

Blacke’s Magic 01x07: Address Unknown

Magicians make great TV, everybody loves a good mystery, and the creators of Columbo and Murder, She Wrote clearly knew how to construct a winning series. That’s why it’s such a surprise that 1986’s Blacke’s Magic doesn’t really work.

Loveable Hal Linden is Alexander Blacke, a retired magician who teams up with his conman father, played by Harry Morgan, to solve crimes. Most of their solutions involve big illusions and set-ups that instantly call to mind The Sting – and that’s where the problem comes in. Swindles, disguises, and splashy big con finales replace the more interesting aspects of putting someone who thinks like a magician into high stake logic puzzles. (Something much more capably accomplished with the BBC’s 1997 series Jonathan Creek, if you’re interested.)

Today’s episode opens with two men meeting in a shadowy parking garage. One of them, Dale Richmond, is a nervous-but-stalwart businessman type. The other is the worst things about the 1980’s congealed into human form. He starts the conversation – which appears to be about gathering information about military corruption – with “Yo!” and calls his contact “guy.”

His name is Billy, and he’s driven a red sport scar to a clandestine meeting. He’s here to tell Dale that he wasn’t able to get “the letters,” but he’ll definitely have them tomorrow.

Billy is terrible at whistle-blowing, just the worst ever.

Billy’s boss, a man named Hilliard – or possibly Yaryard, but I chose the one that’s an actual name – has a senate hearing tomorrow afternoon, giving anybody with a key easy access to an empty office. Billy will be in and out of Hilliard’s drawers without him knowing a thing.

Dale stresses that he just needs correspondence between Hilliard and “the General.” He doesn’t want anyone taking extra chances.

Aw, come on, Dale! Does Billy seem like the kind of guy who’s cocky enough to take extra chances?

Billy shoots a finger gun, winks, and jumps into his sports car. They’ll get this corruption scandal outed in no time.

Mrs. Columbo 01x05: Caviar with Everything

It’s more than fair to say that Kate Mulgrew is best known for appearing as Captain Katherine Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. But, well before that, in 1979, she got the lead in a very strange spin-off series called Mrs. Columbo.

There’s a lot to explain about all of this, which is amusing because the series only ran for thirteen episodes. It was an eventful misfire.

It started with the end of the first run of the regular Columbo series. NBC decided that they wanted to do a weekly hour long spin-off revolving around Lt. Columbo’s previously unseen wife being an amateur sleuth. (Why she would try to solve a murder on her own when she was married to the greatest homicide detective in history is the real mystery.) The creators of Columbo, Richard Levinson and William Link, said that it was a horrible idea for a show and they didn’t want to do it.

So, NBC did it without them.

Dungeons and Dragons 01x02: Eye of the Beholder

Daisy is back for another guest installment of D&D! If you're interested in swapping posts or doing a guest recap of your own, contact me at jvonhalsing@gmail.com for details and guidelines.

Episode Two of Dungeons and Dragons is ‘Eye of the Beholder’, and it has noticeably fewer villainous pet rabbits and randomly teleporting dragons than the first one, but also way more bumbling knights.  Whether you consider that an improvement or not is probably a matter of taste.  I find that this episode gets overlooked a lot, especially in terms of how it relates to Eric’s characterization, but I think that has more to do with most of the plotline being kind of forgettable than anything else.

So let’s get to ‘Eye of the Beholder’.

We start out with a scene of the kids walking in the desert again.  Oh joy.  The horses from the last episode are gone.  I guess they returned them to Helix in a fit of upstanding behaviour.  Or maybe they died.  I mean, it’s not like anybody is really an expert on horse care here.

Presto:  “It must be a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade.  And there isn’t any shade!”

Sheila:  “You can say that again!”

Diana:  “With four suns up there, what d’you guys expect?”

There are four suns this time?  Oh my god, is Eric dead?  But, no, there he is, standing with the group.  The rest of the kids sit down to take a break except for Eric, who keeps standing.  I have suspicions that his sweat has rusted his armour shut and he can’t bend enough to sit down.  In the foreground we see Uni get hit with a couple stray blasts of sand.  She shakes her head and goes to investigate the source of the flying sand.  Eric talks about how he’s been in this situation before, but at the time he was actually just lost in his parents’ safari-size backyard.

Eric:  “I was lost.  The sun was baking my brains.”

Presto:  “So that’s what happened to your brains.”

Dungeons and Dragons 01x01: The Night of No Tomorrow

Today's recap is the first guest post submitted by my friend, Daisy. Daisy is a lifelong SF fan and a big retro cartoon enthusiast, so she's chosen to take a look at some grand old Saturday morning gems with a science fiction or fantasy theme. Everybody be nice and keep your feet off the coffee table.

The first episode of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon is ‘The Night of No Tomorrow’, and… it is not one of the better ones.  It’s not terrible, either.  But it definitely has some pacing issues, and I do have to wonder about the decision to start the series after the kids have already arrived in the Realm, rather than leading into it with the amusement park ride and giving us a chance to see something of their lives on Earth.  It might have been a better way to get in some establishing character moments and give us an idea of what they’re trying so hard to get home to.

That said, and without further ado, here’s ‘The Night of No Tomorrow’.

Voyagers! 01x04: Agents of Satan

It’s Harry Houdini’s birthday today, and I love combining historical trivia with your recap experience, so we’re watching an episode of 1982’s Voyagers!

This was a family show created by Scholastic to get kids more interested in history, even though it’s wildly historically inaccurate. Every week, displaced time travellers Phineas Bogg and Jeffrey Jones get flung to a temporal emergency by a device known as The Omni. Bogg, played by Jon-Erik Hexum, claims to come from a future society of time travellers called, unsurprisingly, voyagers. Jeffrey, on the other hand, is a kid from 1982 who got caught up in all of this when his dog attacked Bogg’s history guidebook. Through a twist of fate and fall out of a window, he was flung along with Bogg back to the time of Moses.

It’s not so bad, because as it turns out, Jeffrey – played by Meeno Peluce, real life brother of Soleil Moon Frye of Punky Brewster – is an orphan and also destined to be a time cop anyway. And he’s useful. Bogg, despite being responsible for aligning the time stream, doesn’t know much about the past. The guidebook he lost was crucial to his success. Luckily, Jeffrey’s dead father was a history professor, so Jeffrey is a pint-sized poindexter who knows everything Bogg doesn’t.

Every week, The Omni sends them to a new temporal emergency, and it’s often something that’s interwoven with several other temporal emergencies, so our dynamic duo has to untangle history like it’s a necklace you left at the bottom of your purse. Once that’s done, they get to move on.

Today’s episode starts with a Puritan woman in a white bonnet running through a misty swamp at night, pursued by an angry mob with dogs and torches shouting things like: “After the devil-witch!” and “There is no hiding from the Lord!”

Harper Valley P.T.A. 01x03: Mail and Female

Harper Valley PTA started out as a 1968 radio hit for Jeannie C. Riley, about a widowed single mother who isn’t bothering to conform to small town standards because she wears miniskirts and laughs at jokes. According to the local PTA, this makes her a floozy and her degenerate ways must be stopped, so they send her a cease and desist order in the mail. She goes to their next meeting, airs the town’s dirty laundry and, metaphorically, flips everyone off before she goes back to living her life as she damn well pleases. Great song, very catchy.

In 1978, it was made into a drive-in movie starring Barbara Eden. If it had starred literally anyone else, it probably would have been lost to the sands of time. But the same piece of casting that saves it from obscurity dooms it to not making any sense. Barbara Eden, even in the most mini of skirts, doesn’t seem as a scandalous figure, or the kind of woman that other women would be venomously jealous of. Like, if she ever played a serial killer, the general response would be: “Aw, leave her alone, FBI! She’s fun!”

And when you’re turning a three minute song into an eighty minute movie, you have to pad the story. So there’s car chases and kidnappers are hired, and then people have to get disguised as nuns, and there’s a subplot about a real estate mogul who threatens to foreclose on women’s houses if they don’t make out with him, and it’s a lot. Which means when, in 1981, they decided to turn the film into a television show, they had to take a lot of stuff back out, and the end result is that the general premise gets a little lost in the shuffle.