YouTube Finds :: Do You Dare Face the Terror that Awaits You in the Darkroom?

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"You're in a house. Maybe your own. Maybe one you've never seen before. Do you feel it? Something evil. You run, but there's no escape. Nowhere to turn. You feel something beckoning you. Drawing you into the terror that awaits you in ... the Darkroom!"

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Like a lot of folks of my age strata, the only clear memory I have of ABC's Darkroom is the episode where a son's plastic army men come to life and attack and kill his father, which had less to do with the allegorical tale on the horror of Vietnam brought home and more to do with an obsession over my old Marx Battleground playset. And it was these fleeting memories that drew me in for another look after stumbling upon the series when I fell down a YouTube hole a few days ago. 

Often compared to The Night Gallery, the nastier and far meaner Darkroom owes more to the old EC horror comics of William Gaines and Al Feldstein, like Vault of Horror or Crime Suspense Stories. The brainchild of William Sackheim, he envisioned an anthology series based on a photographer recounting the tales of certain photos as he developed them. Sackheim then took it to producer Peter Fischer, who eventually sold the series to a ready, willing and able ABC. Seems the network was looking to cash in on the resurgent horror boom spawned by Friday the 13th and its imitators. 

With James Coburn serving as our sinister master of ceremonies for each tale of regret and woe witnessed, after an opening credit sequence that could give anybody the drizzles, I was kinda amazed at the lack of moralizing found here; and how cynically downbeat and gleefully brutal the series was. 

For, seemingly with each and every episode, someone, whether they deserved it (the murderous biker in 'Catnip', the evil pimp who picked on the wrong granddaughter in 'Needlepoint') or not (the girl who cried vampire in 'The Boogeyman Will Get You', the poor stranded motorist who gets fed to a monster by some old coot in a glorified pick-pocketing scheme in 'The Partnership', and even the dad who is killed by his son's toys in 'Siege of August 31'), met a dire and fairly gruesome fate by the end of each story.

The only episode that didn't end horribly was 'Make-Up', where a young hood (Billy Crystal) comes into the possession of an old actor's make-up case, which magically bestows on him the traits of the characters on the labels, allowing him to take revenge on the gangster who double-crossed him.

I kept seeing Robert Bloch in the scriptwriting credits, and I saw Paul Lynch (Prom Night, Humongous), Rick Rosenthol (Halloween II) and Curtis Harrington (Night Tide, The Killing Kind) both more than once as director. There was also an amazing amount of star wattage, including David Carradine (who got fed to that monster), Helen Hunt (as the girl with vampire issues), Brian Dennehy, Ronnie Cox, Gloria DeHaven, and Samantha Eggar, and a metric ton of character actors and familiar TV faces leavened into this thing.

Alas, from the very beginning one could sense Darkroom wasn't destined to last very long. Before the cameras even rolled there was already trouble just getting the scripts past the censors. And those that did brought on a rash of complaints from viewers and parent groups who found it too intense and unseemly. Thus and so, quickly proving itself to be unsustainable due to standards and practices issues and budgetary woes, the series only lasted for seven episodes, airing between November of 1981 through January 1982, with a grand total of 16 vignettes of varying length spread out between them before it was yanked off the air -- which explains the decades long confusion since it first aired where people mistakenly thought there were 16 episodes when there were only seven.

However, the show briefly returned from the dead one year later. Turns out ABC would not allow several filmed vignettes to air, deeming them too nasty; and so, instead of just junking them, these were expanded and repackaged for a theatrical release, Nightmares (1983), which, as you remember, featured Emilio Estevez contracting Pac-Man Fever and getting sucked into a video game and a fairly hysterically-executed superimposed rat terrorizing another family.

Probably nowhere near as interesting as I'm making it out to be, but, no matter how misguided things got, I still dug the hell out this revisit to the Darkroom. Turns out I was remembering the series better than I thought, too. I had just misremembered a couple of stories as belonging to Tales from the Darkside or the Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone reboots -- two series where a good chunk of of the creative force behind Darkroom wound up landing when the lights came on at ABC. There's even a couple of episodes that probably rate further exploring with their own individual write-ups. Hrrrrmmmm. Someday, maybe. And the whole shebang is out there, floating around YouTube if you care to take a look and judge for yourselves. 

Darkroom (1981-1982) Universal TV :: American Broadcasting Company (ABC) / EP: Peter S. Fischer / P: Robert F. O'Neill, Christopher Crowe / AP: Medora Heilbron, Skip Lusk / D: Paul Lynch, Rick Rosenthal, Peter Crane, Curtis Harrington, John McPherson

Operation: 00-Oddballs :: Making Love and Kicking Ass in 47 Different Languages Never Looked So Cool!

Our latest fantastical feature opens with a montage of natural disasters in the scale of biblical proportions, pounding and plaguing almost every nation on Earth. We then move under the sea, to a stealthy black submarine, where three figures -- a stunning red-head, a bald-headed thug, and that guy from Knight Rider -- twist a few knobs on some hand-held cosmic doohickey, and then smugly watch the devastating results of their machinations through the periscope as more hurricanes rage, volcanoes erupt, and the Lydecker Dam crumbles, causing a valley of miniatures to be washed clean away.

Meanwhile, in Washington DC, at the headquarters of the international crime-fighting group known as Z.O.W.I.E. [Zonal Organization World Intelligence and Espionage -- or something like that], Lloyd C. Cramden (Cobb), Z.O.W.I.E.'s top banana, feverishly consults with his fellow agents and experts to try and figure out who is behind all of these unnatural weather disasters. Seems Cramden smells a dubious plot behind it all because whoever controls the weather controls the world. And so, he orders everyone to submit what qualifications are needed to root-out these no-goodniks, which will then be fed into a super-computer to determine the best man for the job. But when the answer is finally regurgitated, the boss is none to happy about the results. For the safety of the entire world relies on a man who never found an order or procedure he wouldn't follow, the original international man of mystery, lady-killer, and roguish scoundrel, Derek Flint!

When Dr. No debuted back in 1962, I'm sure producers Albert Broccoli and Harry Saltzman were hoping the adventures of their suave super-spy, James Bond, would be a hit and make them some money; but I don't think even they could have predicted the magnitude of the world-wide phenomenon they had just hatched. And as their franchise quickly blew up, it wasn't long before people started to cash in with their own tales of spies and intrigue in almost every form of popular media. Some were good. Some were bad. And some of them were pretty darn funny.

And for the record: if the world was indeed in trouble, and it were up to me to decide who gets to save it? There's no question, in my mind. Forget 007, I'd be calling Derek Flint, too. This jet-setting playboy and doer of good deeds was a true Renaissance man and played beautifully by the seemingly miscast James Coburn. At first glance all spindly arms, long legs, catcher's mitt hands, huge clod-hoppers, and a face that's all teeth, well, looks can be deceiving. Smart, tough, and lethally effective, Coburn's Flint was also Hugh Hefner's wet dream. I've touched on this before, but, from the very beginning, the James Bond franchise was precariously teetering on the edge of self-parody already. And in 1966, producer Saul David convinced 20th Century Fox to push the Bond mythos over that inevitable edge with Our Man Flint, where our hero and his bevy of beauties ran totally amok through some truly eye-popping sets, where swank and the space-age met on the graph of such things. Just take a look:

Ably aided and abetted by Jerry Goldsmith's martini-buzz-fueled score, will our man Flint be able to stop these nefarious forces of evil and their diabolical blackmail scheme to change the world into a slightly bent utopia, where all women are turned into pleasure units to stock the Whiskey-A-Go-Go and the Dreamland Drive-in in the Reward Room of GALAXY? To answer that you can either give it a spin for yourself or you can get a full debriefing of Our Man Flint, part four of our Operation: 00-Oddballs Spy Spoof Retrospective, over at 3B Theater. 

Other Points of Interest: 

 

Full film review of Our Man Flint at 3B Theater.
 

Poster campaign for Our Man Flint at the Archive.
 

Newspaper ads for Our Man Flint at the Morgue.
 

Our Man Flint (1966) 20th Century Fox / P: Saul David / D: Daniel Mann / W: Hal Fimberg, Ben Starr / C: Daniel L. Fapp / E: William Reynolds / M: Jerry Goldsmith / S: James Coburn, Lee J. Cobb, Gila Golan, Edward Mulhare, Shelby Grant, Sigrid Valdis, Gianna Serra, Helen Funai