Ramblings On...A Guilty Pleasure...(revisited)

Well, with all the cursed objects floating around yesterday's Supernatural, I felt the need to repost my blog article originally posted a bit back in LJ.  I was able to find some cool pictures though...to better illustrate:

I'll bet you assumed my guilty obsession would be about Supernatural.  No, that's just an obsession.  There is no help for it, no cure, and I am not guilty about it.  But I've been wanting to write for a long time on a show I found randomly.  A show that has become one of my random obsessions.

The years when I was in law school (now over five since I graduated), I used to have what I called "background X-Files" or "background Twin Peaks" episodes.  I must have some level of ADD.  I cannot totally focus on one thing for more than a few minutes.  I need to have some level of distraction to get anything done.  In college, when I was studying, I would have my tv on with Twin Peaks or X-Files running in the background.  The eppies of both shows I have seen so many times I could reverse engineer scripts from memory, so they provided just the right level of distraction...I would look up when a part came on I really wanted to see, but otherwise, I could be doing one of the various other things I was doing at once...I have found another show for me to use in this capacity (Note:  Sadly Dean is a bit too much of a distraction for me to consider Supernatural appropriate "background viewage").  This "new" show is Friday the 13th: The Series.

Don't let the title fool you--the show has nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs. Voorhees, Jason Voorhees or the ill fated camp counselors of one "Crystal Lake".  The show was originally going to be named The Thirteenth Hour, but it was decided that the other title would attract a greater viewage.  The show aired from 1987-1990 with about 70 episodes.

I found this show the summer I was reduced to part time work.  A little fact about me.  I like horror flicks...however, during times when I am particularly depressed, they are pretty much all I watch...that and old Dr. Who, which always used to put me to sleep...During that summer's depression, I decided to watch the entire Friday the 13th movie franchise.  Half time meant a lot less money, so I got acquainted with the local library.  They should probably stop calling them libraries--media center is a much more accurate name.  Our "library" has tons of books and audio books, but also DVDs, CDs, video tapes and video games.  Like you may have guessed, Friday the 13th: The Series was right next to the Friday the 13th movies.  So I took out the first season.

The late 80s clothes alone make the show worth the watch.  Remember in the Stargate SG-1 episode 200 where the producer guy says "If you're gonna steal ideas from other shows, at least steal them from shows no one else watches"? This seems to be one of those shows that not many people watched, but many ideas have been taken from.  If you are a fan of supernatural/horror style shows and you watch this show, I think you'll get where I am coming from.

It all begins with this creepy old guy running an antique store, Lewis Vendredi's Antiques. He is refusing to sell a doll to a little girl's family.

Next thing you know, he is being hauled into fire...and a niece and nephew of Lewis's have inherited the Antique store.  The niece is one Mickey (Michelle) Foster (played by Louise Robey).

Mickey with her wonder 80s hair and very hip for the times clothing is a 20 something woman just about ready to start on her white picket fence apple pie life with her fiancé who is currently in law school.  She wants to fire sale everything and go back to civilization.

The nephew is adorkable Ryan Dallion (played by John LeMay). He is a slightly geeky guy who loves his comic books and left college when he inherited the antique shop. To him, this seems ideal, but after trying to play the shopkeeper, he admits it is a little more than he can do alone, and agrees to sell off everything like Mickey wants.

OK...so where is this going? Enter Jack Marshak (played by Chris Wiggins), Lewis's "business partner" who procured the oddities and antiques that Lewis sold in the store. Apparently Lewis was behind on payment, which is why Jack showed up. Finding out that Lewis is dead, however, makes Jack think that maybe something else happened to Lewis...See Jack taught Lewis about the occult, and Lewis had gotten into some very dark stuff. He had been attempting to find some way to make a deal with the devil for immortality. 

But that couldn't have happened--I mean, he would still be alive if he had, wouldn't he? Mickey reasons...But Jack thinks that maybe Lewis bit off more than he could chew, and the devil called in the marker...The only way to know for sure would be to find out if Lewis had been successful...

Well, to shorten up a little, Lewis did make that deal. In exchange for immortality, he would give the devil his soul, and he would sell cursed items to unsuspecting folks at the antique store. Ryan, Mickey and Jack find the log tracking the merchandise...not all the antiques in the store are cursed, but a great many are...and in their "fire sale" Mickey and Ryan sold some. Now they feel compelled to help Jack track down these cursed items before they damn the people who possess them. 

So each week, the three of them are trying to find some cursed item. Sometimes they get lucky and are able to find out about a cursed object quite by accident, other times it isn't quite so easy, but always something horrible is going on because of these items.

Even though it can be a bit trite and the extras are recycled a tad too often, I really like the show for its interesting ideas on the occult. This show predates even the X-Files, and started before Twin Peaks went on the air. I feel that the usage was actually a level of genius, because these items preyed on people at their most vulnerable--what are you willing to do to get that which you most desire. Sure sometimes it is about love, but also about things like an aging model trying to set back the hands of time, someone dying of cancer finding a way of surviving, helping an attempted rape victim who was hit by a car running away and became a parapalegic get use of her body back...They work the way our Sunday School teachers told us the devil would work--by dangling that thing you most need right when you need it. All you have to do is kill for it. Sadly, this really isn't about saving the people under the thrall of the cursed item. They have killed, their souls are damned...it is about getting the cursed objects back and safely in the vault beneath the store (because cursed objects cannot be destroyed)so that they cannot harm anyone else.