Rod Serling's NIGHT GALLERY
Season 3
Available on disc

THE RETURN OF THE SORCEROR

A scholar of ancient texts is asked to translate a passage from a notorious book of black magic for a student of sorcery. He gets caught up in a family soap opera of love and death and... resurrection.

NIGHT GALLERY is back, but as a half hour show with only one story to tell. This opening tale isn't one of the strongest the show has ever produced, but it does feature the inestimable talents of Vincent Price as a paranoid practitioner of the mystic arts and the contrasting modern presence of Bill Bixby as the young translator. Having the full running time to concentrate on just one story does allow for the pace to be a little more measured and to build the atmosphere more, but the story really doesn't have the strength to match the performances. Also, as the story progresses, the focus switches to the third, and weakest, member of the cast. When you have Vincent Price in the show, you have to have other cast members who can match him if you don't want to create a sense of anticlimax.

The direction is perfectly fine, though certain choices do raise questions. When you're walking down a hallway with a mist rolling along knee-deep, you'd expect someone to at least mention it. Not the best episode of the show, to be sure, but far from the weakest storyline as well, and the presence of disembodied hands at the like at least add a few graphic chills.

A barely surviving photographer meets the model of his dreams, and everyone else's. Soon, she is on every billboard, selling everything that a man can desire. What, though, does she desire?

The storytelling here is a little muddied, though the narrative itself is fairly clear. It is in the nature of the hungry-eyed girl that clarity is lacking. She spoiler alert feeds on the desires of men that she inspires, but also seems to have been created by them. This, though is never adequately explained and it is left up to the audience to desire just what is The Girl With The Hungry Eyes. What she definitely is is series regular Joanna Pettet, an actress who has the sort of ethereal beauty that can convince she is capable of causing desire in any man. What she doesn't possess is the infinite mystery that the enigmatic character ought to have boasted, not quite managing femme fatale or exotic goddess.

By contrast, James Farentino is fine as the down to earth photographer who is as captivated as every other man, but who starts to suspect that his model is not all she seems, or perhaps is very much more. How he makes the leap to knowing how to spoiler alert destroy her is a complete mystery. He has absolutely no reason to suspect his course of action will prove successful and yet he is certain of his actions even as he takes them.

The Girl With The Hungry Eyes has a nice set up and even says something about the nature of desire and how it can be warped into consumerism, but it never really quite comes together.

A young couple with financial difficulties are forced to take up residence in the old home of a recently deceased relative. There is only one stipulation - don't mess with the trunk in the attic.

This is the simplest of scary tales - what's in the box? Unfortunately, it's not only the simplest of stories it's one of the least scary. The box rattles and creaks and it can't be sent elsewhere. It manifests someone in the bed of the sleeping wife, but is that really the box or something else entirely. Who has written the spell on the husband's typewriter? Yes, things go bump in the night, but they aren't things that are even remotely creepy or fear inducing. A lame joke threatens to be the end, but then there's a bit more that leads to a coda almost as unsatisfying.

A hit is put out on a notorious gangster and his search for an escape from death leads him to the house of an eccentric doctor who offers him safety at the price of everything he owns.

Even filling in just a half hour show, there isn't really enough plot here to fill out the running time. The whole first scene, which sets up the character of the gangster true enough, could easily have been completely excised and the episode would have worked just as well. Also, the twist in the story isn't nearly as chilling or suprising at it thinks it is.

The pleasure of this episode, however, lies not in the story but in the bringing two old-time heavyweights together in the shape of Mickey Rooney and Raymond Massey. Watching them thesp off against each other is genuine delight. They may not be particularly realistic performances, but you don't hire these two and then ask them to underplay. Beyond that, there isn't really too much to get excited about.

A young woman comes home to find her twin sister hanged from the ceiling. Suicide is declared, but then the woman starts to hear the sound of her dead sister tapdancing the studio upstairs.

A fairly standard ghost story plays out with no real surprises and not very much excitement. The twist is that there is no twist, or is there? Even the presence of Sandra Dee in the main role fails to arouse much interest.

Jim Figg is the heavyweight champion of the world, but when he steps out of his post-match shower he finds himself in an entirely different location. He is challenged to a fight with Roderick Blanco, a man who apparently challenges and beats all new champions. Blanco's wife suggests to Figg that he would be better off losing, but Figg has never thrown a fight.

There are the seeds of a great episode here, but they are not given the time, depth or detail to fully germinate. Exactly who is Blanco, apart from the rugged Chuck Connors who is convicingly tough-looking enough for the secret real champion? We're told he's been beating champions for hundreds of years, but does that make him the Devil (there is certainly plenty of red in the surroundings) or the Spirit of Boxing or some sort of warlock or what? We do know that whoeve wins the fight is then locked into the role of fighting champions until they lose, but why, to what purpose? There are a number of acolytes, including Blanco's wife, all of whom serve him without question, but nobody provides any answers despite being given plenty of opportunities.

There is a theme about the thirst to be the champion will lead to taking decisions knowing they are not in your own best interests and pride going before being trapped in eternal servitude, but if this is a trip into Hell then it is one the lead character's ego forces him to take willingly rather than knowing there was someone who beat him, even if he let him. Unfortunately, the lack of specificity leaves a sense of disastisfaction at the end.

YOU CAN COME UP NOW, MRS MILLIKAN - A perennially failing scientist poisons his forgetful, tardy wife in order to experiment in bringing her back to life, much to the upset of his remaining relative.

This is a character sketch of two lovely main characters, delightfully brought to life by Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Nelson, the failed but always optimistic Mr Millikan and his scatty, forgetful wife. The time spent with the pair of them is very entertaining. If that were all there was to the segment it would have been just as enjoyable, perhaps even more so. Then the plotline kicks in and the outcome is so utterly obvious that much of the goodwill leaks away before the end.

SMILE PLEASE - A young photographer gets the chance of a lifetime to get a very rare photograph.

The punchline as sketch segments that blighted the early part of Season 2 before, thankfully, disappearing make an unwelcome return in this short waste of time. Fortunately, it really is short.

A businessman starts to receive threatening messages to do with the death of a go-go dancer. He follows the instructions for a blackmail meeting, but instead finds himself marooned in an old farmhouse with a decidedly strange old man, awaiting the return of the vicious-sounding Sonny.

There are no hints of the supernatural about this tale - it is a story of calculated revenge for a cowardly act. Neither the act nor the revenge are made clear until a good way into the story, keeping the mystery going as to what is actually happening and who the real villain of the piece is going to turn out to be. The reveals don't quite live up to the expectations, but it is one of the more successful stories in what has been so far been a lacklustre third season.

As a sketch of young boys and their friendships, this is OK, but as a story of suspense and horror, it's a total failure. The young actors are neither good nor bad, but the story does paint a rose-coloured picture of childhood. As for the sting in the tail of the tale... ho, hum.

PROFESSOR PEABODY'S LAST LECTURE - A professor of mythology gives a scathing lecture about the old gods of the Cthulu mythos whilst a storm rises outside the classroom.

Carl Reiner gives a boisterous performance as Professor Peabody, pouring scorn on the old gods in a lecture that seems to consist mainly of calling out their ridiculous names. He manages to command the attention of the viewer throughout, though very little actually happens until the last frames when... well, that would be telling. Suffice to say, the segment is nowhere near as good as his performance, which is the only reason to watch.

A prison psychiatrist becomes fascinated by the relationship between an inmate with a skill for hypnosis and another who seems to be unusually suggestive.

This seems like an original set up for a less than original plot, and a plot that really doesn't make all that much sense when you look too closely at it, but strongly echoes the Season 1 story Dead Man in that it follows a scientist studying a patient who can manifest the symptoms of whatever is suggested to him. This time around, it's a prison psychiatrist and a carny hypnotist rather than a sanatarium boss and the location is a prison rather than said sanatarium, but otherwise it has a very familiar theme.

It's in the details that this episode falls down, and mainly the character details. The hypnotist decides to have his star pupil smash his hands to bits agains the prison walls. Why? Why would the psychiatrist become so immediately fascinated by the situation that he would rush headlong into dangerous experimentation? How would a man who has never set foot on a jet know what the symptoms of hypoxia are in order to manifest them, and why would he think he would suffer from hypoxia when imagining he is flying a sealed jet airliner.

There is a certain pathos in the final scene and the explosive climax does raise the question of what powers lie within the human mind, but the episode falls short in almost every other way and the biggest crime of all is sticking Burgess Meredith in a role with barely any dialogue. What a waste.

A man who seems incapable of showing grief at the loss of his invalid wife is gifted a cat by one of her friends. Alone in his big house, he is assailed by the ringing of the bell his wife used to summon him and there seem to be an awful lot of killer cats wandering about all of a sudden.

If you want someone to play repressed emotions then who better than Leonard Nimoy? Unfortunately, his presence is the only thing that enlivens this muddily thought out tale. The plot is fairly simple, but the meaning is not - a failing that is all too common in this season of the show. Is his dead wife haunting him? Is the cat morphing into leopards and tigers at the behest of the ghost or the absent friend? Did he sleep with his secretary whilst his wife was sick and is that why this is happening? No acceptable answers are given and the story just rolls to its inevitable conclusion.

An alcoholic woman suffers from the delusion her new house will be enough to make her ex-husband get back with her. When this fails, she asks the ghost in the attic to scare him to death, a course of action he strongly advises against.

This is definitely a one-woman show for Geraldine Page as the alcoholic lonely woman who isn't above spectral murder. Her performance is vivid and convincing, making her the villain of the piece, but one we can empathise with in her pathetic delusions. The ghostly element to the story doesn't live up to her performance, but at least the twist in the tale, when it comes, delivers a neat surprise. Something of a rarity in this show of late.

The story is something of a retread, or expansion, on Season 2 segment House - With Ghost and is a great improvement.

A young man becomes obsessed with a woman stranded on a barge, even after he hears rumours that she may be a vampire.

Lesley Ann Warren is an undeniably beautiful woman and her looks are made the most of in this soft-focus photographed tale, but everything else about the story is utter nonsense. The main character acts in whatever way the plot requires him to, one minute in love with the vampire, then with his girlfriend, then back to the vampire, then he's going to kill her, then he's going to sacrifice himself to her. The audience's head is left spinning by his unbelievably changeable nature. There are hints about a fine tale of love lust and long teeth in this story, but it is so cack-handedly presented as to be inept and instantly forgettable.

Irene is a medium of such natural power that she is sometimes taken over by the spirits. Charlie, though, is always there to bring her back to herself. They have moved to a small town for some quiet, but there are spirits here as well.

NIGHT GALLERY hasn't done a lot of fourth wall breaking in its three seasons to date, which is to say it hasn't done any at all. Dean Stockwell addressing the audience as though they were the spirits in question challenges the fourth wall and certainly makes the episode stand out from the others. Unfortunately, it doesn't stand out in many other ways. The relationship between Stockwell and Sally Field's character is the high point, as they manage to create a relationship that, whilst weird, does seem believable. She loves him with a simplicity that seems to be her entire emotional nature and he clearly adores her and worries for her. We can buy into that quite easily, especially with Stockwell's to-camera narration.

Much harder to buy into is the story itself, mainly because there isn't much of one. There's a spirit and it wants Irene and Charlie to do something and, well, that's just about it. There is a twist in the tail of the tale, but it's one that has hardly been prepared for and so has little impact, leaving an unsatisfying feeling at the end of a tale that was told with some originality of direction and script, even if there was no originality in the plot.

An older man jilted at the altar by his much younger, flighty bride to be takes revenge with a locally-sourced voodoo doll.

Jealousy regarding an older man and his attractive younger love gave us one the show's highpoints in Season 2's episode The Caterpillar, but this episode isn't on a par with that one. It does at least take the time to set up the characters of the flighty girl, the stuffy husband to be and the louche character from her past who steals her away. It then goes on to side with those who have done wrong rather than the wronged. The use of the doll to right a wrong is straight out of The Doll in Season 1. The twist is also one that's been used before and the recycling of old ideas is one of the reasons why this season has felt so weak.

HATRED UNTO DEATH - Married anthropoligists run into relationship when the husband takes an instant dislike to a captured gorilla he believes has taken an instant hatred to him.

There are echoes of KING KONG in this story of a gorilla taken from its home to be examined and tested in the USA. What there isn't is any of the pathos of that story. Instead, there is a a general idea of hatred being passed down generations as a sort of racial memory, but this is never really explored. Even the revelation of a picture of one of the man's ancestors standing over a dead ancestor of the ape would have clarified everything better, but the story just rumbles along its tracks to an ending that is somewhat muted because of the lack of any real meaning.

A story featuring a gorilla is only ever going to be as good as its gorilla. Whilst obviously a man in a suit, the face is expressive enough to carry the day and just about squeak by the inspection. When moving around, however, it's just about the least gorilla-like gorilla we've ever seen. This is the last of the full-length segments of the show and it feels as rushed and unfinished as the rest of this last season and a weak way to go out. But wait...

HOW TO CURE THE COMMON VAMPIRE - A vampire is found in its coffin.

To add insult to injury, the show signs off with one of the very short and totally pointless 'funny' vignettes that serves only to remind us of the show at its lowest. What a shame.