Main cast: John Diehl (Miles Magnus), Mary Woronov (Viki), and Ruth de Sosa (Barbara)
Director: Carl Stine
Pillow Talk is an interesting choice of episode to be aired on Christmas Eve, 1988 – it’s about the bestselling horror author Miles Magnus, who makes it a habit to pick up women at bars on a regular basis. That doesn’t seem so bad, sure, but he’s actually feeding these women to the mysterious monster-thing in his bedroom. This monster-thing is apparently a very ancient entity that existed on Earth long before other creatures emerged. The last of its kind, it is now made to look like a bed, and women like the star-struck Barbara think it’s a cool waterbed… until they start sinking into it and tentacles shoot out of the bed to drag them into the depths of the “bed”. It is this monster-thing that inspires Miles’s stories – his stories are actually its horrific dreams that it shares with the author.
Merry Christmas, people!
The poor seduction and sacrifice of Barbara makes up the first fifteen minutes or so of this episode, and the rest focuses on Miles trying to pick up Viki for his muse’s next dinner. Viki turns out to be another author who is inconveniently curious and nosy about Miles, and the man soon realizes that he has picked up more of a bother than an easy meal for Mr Bed. Has he finally met a woman he can’t handle?
This theme of this episode is unexpectedly adult considering the overall somewhat family-friendly no-gore no-sex nature of the rest of the series, but I welcome the Lovecraft-ian overtones of primordial entities and their disturbing dreams, which are actually adorable when juxtaposed against the campy low budget nature of the “special effects”. The tentacles especially look like a grade school arts and craft project. The twist can be seen coming from a mile away, but the journey here is a sardonic cat and mouse game that culminates in an unintentionally hilarious death scene.
What bogs down this episode, though, is the bewilderingly flat and atonal acting from both John Diehl and Mary Woronov. Were they blackmailed to act in this episode, and were given lots of sedatives to prevent them from fleeing the set?
All things considered, though, Pillow Talk still remains a memorable episode to me. Come on, a Cthulhu bed. How can anyone resist such an adorable thing?
