Main cast: Elizabeth Ashley (The Woman), Kirstie Alley (Angelica), Desiree Becker (Kathy), Lawrence Dane (The Surgeon), Ricky Paull Goldin (Peter), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Phillip Noyce
Out of the Night is a Halloween episode, so perhaps appropriately enough, Kirstie Alley is in it. Some folks from Another World are also in here, although I have never really followed that one when it aired, so I’m not sure what the significance of that is.
In this one, we have Peter, a kid on the run from the police. He sneaks into this hotel, in search of a contact, only to find this place is brimming with oddly-behaving staff and guests that seem to be in costume for Halloween. Sure enough, nothing is as it seems here.
This episode seems to be a continuation of an annoying trend that has taken hold in this series: a series of disjointed sequences clumsily put together to be explained in the end as everything is just a dream sequence all along. This is a tired trope in anthology TV, made worse by the fact that this episode in particular is double whammy’ed by horrible acting and script.
The script makes little sense even when viewed as a series of disjointed dream sequences, as things just lurch around with no apparent logic or direction. Worse of all, it’s no fun. These scenes aren’t imaginative or memorable, just… there, really, to pad up the airtime.
Peter’s behavior comes off as erratic and nonsensical. For example, he never questions why he can apparently teleport from one place in one scene to another, very different set in the next scene. My favorite moment is how, when an older woman tries to seduce him, he screams at her for wanting to have sex instead of listening to his sad life story. He sure knows his priorities!
This brings me to the horrible acting. The whole thing is wooden soap opera acting tier—that explains the Another World folks showing up here, I’d imagine—with wooden delivery of lines, single dead-eyed expression throughout, and lack of discernible emotion from the cast.
Kirstie Alley takes all three to new heights, however, as her character, the magician Angelica, seems to be doing her best impression of a mannequin version of Nanny Fine. Still, I can’t really be down on her that much, as she is the sole source of entertainment here with her unintentionally hilarious terrible acting. She brings the extra oogie to the final score of this episode all on her own, so props to her for redeeming an otherwise utterly fun-free waste of time of an episode.
