Getting scary this time of year and ‘Stranger Things’ happening
From Barnabas Collins to Gomez Addams, from Michael Myers to a creature menacing Sponge Bob Square Pants, ghouls, ghosts, and goblins are out in force these next two days, as television acknowledged Halloween.
Most series have a Halloween episode planned. The Food Network weighted in earlier this month with a cooking contest and a haunted hayride. “Saturday Night Live” this weekend reprised Tom Hanks as David Pumpkins. Kelly Ripa is bound to continue a tradition of appearing in costume on tomorrow’s “Live!,” this time with co-host Ryan Seacrest. And, of course, there’s the avidly streamed Season 2 of “Stranger Things” on Netflix.
Halloween is on the air, and television knows how to shout a large, scary “Boo!”
John Carpenter’s 1978 movie, “Halloween,” in which Michael Myers, called The Shape, murders his parents began a skein of horror movies featuring the homicidal teen in a stark white face mask. Jamie Lee Curtis, with all the roles she has to her credit, might be best known for the babysitter she plays in this movie.
On Halloween, Michael Myers outweighs other killers, like those in “Friday the 13th.” AMC recognizes this and is ending a monthlong “Fear Fest” by showing some of the “Halloween” films today and unspooling most of them in a marathon tomorrow, All Hallows Eve” itself.
This climax of “Fear Fest” seems like a throwback to the days when AMC was all the time.
Then again, the network is no slouch in the horror department considering it is the TV home of “The Walking Dead,” rival to HBO’s “The Game of Thrones” for the most watched program on television.
The station that continues to be dedicated to movies, TCM (Turner Classic Movie), is spanning a wider time frame in its wall-to-wall presentation of scary favorites.
All day tomorrow, it will be present horror favorites through the ages. Highlights include 1960’s “13 Ghosts” at 1 p.m., 1953’s “The House of Wax” at 4:30 p.m., and 1982’s “they’re here” classic, “Poltergeist.”
I wasn’t kidding about “Sponge Bob Square Pants.” This year, Nickelodeon introduced a new scary adventure for Sponge Box and friends, “The Legend of Boo-Kini Bottom.” It airs at 2 p.m. today and 8 a.m. and 4 movies all p.m. tomorrow. It’s one of several spooky “Sponge Bobs.” Others will also be run. Nick is also offering Halloween fare on other popular programs such as “PAW Patrol” and “Team Unizoomi.”
Freeform today is going in for a different type of freaky experience, showing more general movies with vampires or macabre themes, e.g. “Dark Shadows,” the movie, at 11:30 a.m., “The Addams Family” with Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston at 4:30 p.m., and “The Addams Family Values” at 6:30 p.m.
Tomorrow, Freeform presents a “Hocus Pocus” marathon , although it never explains exactly what that entails. My surmise, and fear, is it’s showing Disney’s 1993 “Hocus Pocus,” about the Salem witches, on an endless loop.
Now to the current and “Stranger Things.”
I watched the entire Season 1 of the Netflix series about a parallel world called the Upside Down, the people plagued by it in an Indiana town, and the homunculus-type creature that seems to loom large and dangerously, likely an evil byproduct of a scientific experiment gone amok.
Some of the basics of the series intrigued me, and “Stranger Things” was suspense enough and posed enough questions to get me to Episode 8, but I found most of the characters as their live mundane and waited for the gasp moment that piqued my curiosity and, occasionally, gave me a genuine chill.
That feeling lingered as I began watching Season 2. I saw two episodes when I went on radio with Dom Giordano (WPHT—1210 AM) on Friday.
I said I enjoy the show and would watch more but was rarely entertained between big moments. Even the nightmares of Will, the boy who was rescued from the Upside Down as the end of last season, and the new life of El, the original escapee from that gloomy region, didn’t impress. My one wonder was the opening of Season 2 which depicts a carload of teens running away from Pittsburgh police in a way that doesn’t yet logically relate to “Stranger Things” as we know it.
No doubt it will eventually tie in like the similar opening scene of an East German interrogation on “Fargo” last year.
Yes, there are again chill moments. Every time Will is seized by the Upside Down, interest spikes, El’s inevitable wandering from the hideaway in which a sympathetic Sheriff Hooper is caring for her also raises intensity.
But scenes with Winona Ryder, Will’s mother, and sequences involving the town teens seem dully written, perfunctory instead of witty or engaging, sort of like the Duffer Brothers, who created “Stranger Things” are coasting until they can release the next bombshell, the next gasp moment.
I admit here, as I will next time I’m with Dom (Friday, November 10), that I spoke two soon
The Halloween episode of “Stranger Things” was good and nicely teasing, but it was all I expected it to be, including Will, now called “Zombie Boy” by middle school toughs because of his return from the seeming dead, being frightened and taking another trip to the Upside Down.
After Dom’s show, I watched another installment of “Stranger Things,” one entitled “Pollywog” because of a creature Dustin, the daftest of Will’s friends, finds in his trash can at the end of episode.
Now I’m hooked. The pollywog is obviously an infant version of the homunculus. Soething Dustin can’t know but viewers, and Will, recognize. The Duffers have put an extra scooch of “Goonies” and “Alien” in the mix.
Things come to head in this episode that, for the first time in my experience with the show, turns it compelling.
Sequences involving Will and El are in a state of high tension, the loose “pollywog” presents a major threat, and I even became more involved with the romantic triangle between Nancy, a young woman haunted by her best friend’s disappearance in The Upside Down, a parallel to her brother, Mike, losing his best friend, Will, in the same way, Will’s brother, Jonathan, and the high school hunk, Steve.
Something jelled for me that hadn’t before, and I know I will spend the night I’m writing binge-watching “Stranger Things” to the end of the season.
I’m even able to watch the actors playing Dustin and Lucas, another friend of Will’s, and some adults I found wanting in talent until now. I also wanted to see more of Sean Astin’s character, a new one, a jovial guy dating Will’s mother, and offering Will some unwise advice.
I change my mind about programs so seldom, I’m enjoying the turnabout. Instead of regarding “Stranger Things” as idle claptrap heightened by real horror, I’ve been drawn into it. Upside the Halloween