Two Episodes of “Monsters”: “The Match Game” (1989) & “Far Below” (1990)

Because it is the season (or even the Season), I found myself drawn to revisit some episodes of an old teenhood favourite. “Monsters” was the Laurel Entertainment production anthology series that followed “Tales from the Darkside”. Even more so than the older show, this was made on the cheap. So cheap, the twenty minute episodes tend to take place in only one or two sets – sometimes locations – and seldom feature more than five actors including the guy in the monster suit. There’s always a guy in a monster suit, at least, so don’t worry. Every week’s a bottle episode, basically.

This, in combination with the short running times, does lead to rather sparse and simple stories for the show to tell, but the better episodes make clear everyone involved understood what they were doing and perfectly willing and able to work effectively in the rudimentary style needed to simple get an episode done.

“The Match Game”, directed by Michael Brandon and written by David Chaskin, Christopher Orville, and Richard P. Rubinstein himself, is the rather more costly looking of these two episodes. A quartet of young people (including Ashley Laurence and Tori Spelling) come to a supposedly haunted house to play a game of relay race style ghost story telling. Of course, they awaken something nasty that dispatches some of them gorily.

It’s a moody little tale that uses the possibilities of an actual location in addition to the house interior set nicely, with some rudimentary but effective suspense created by cutting between the ghost stories by matchstick light and the feet of the thing they awaken coming nearer and nearer. There’s decent acting, moody lighting, and even a neat gore gag. The plot is obviously nothing to write home about, but the whole thing works as the simple and straightforward tale of horror it is supposed to be.

Our second episode, “Far Below”, is an adaptation of Robert Barbour Johnson’s minor Weird Tales classic about the measures taken against Lovecraftian ghouls in the New York subway system. It was adapted by the late, great Michael McDowell – among other things the screenwriter of Beetlejuice but also a fine horror novelist – and is one of only two directing credits of the great Debra Hill, one of the major producers and sometimes writers responsible for so much that’s central to the cinema of the fantastic. The resulting episode about the guy (Barry Nelson) running the secret anti-ghoul program of the subway trying to convince a very commanding young auditor of the importance of his work is not a masterpiece, exactly. It looks even cheaper than the other episode – particularly the subway set looks like something out of late period classic Doctor Who – so much so that there’s very little camera or editing magic Hill could have done to make anything look any better. The monster suit’s pretty bad as well.

So Hill focusses mostly on Nelson’s scenery-chewing performance and the increasingly sardonic tone of McDowell’s script,  and on keeping things moving to the inevitable twist ending. Which does end up turning this into a satisfying bit of horror, if not exactly the thing one might dream up out of the combination of Hill, McDowell and a very fun classic weird tale.

Still, like with all of the better “Monsters” episodes, I can’t help leaving this one with a smile, because the show’s successes feel very much like the product of people winning out against terrible odds.