Word: seasons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...example, is an engaging adventure series based on the comic book, but the TV hero's cheesy superantics come straight from Woolworth's. Low-rent special effects have also turned War of the Worlds -- an update of the H.G. Wells novel and 1953 movie -- into a dreary stalemate. Last season the evil aliens seemed to do little but abduct unsuspecting earthlings and transform them Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style into blank-eyed automatons to do their bidding. A second wave of aliens has arrived this season with a slightly different plan: to abduct unsuspecting earthlings and make clones...
Snazzy makeup and special effects, however, are the stars of Monsters, a lively half-hour anthology, which each week delivers just what is advertised: a grotesque and usually malevolent creature, concocted under the supervision of makeup wizard Dick Smith (The Exorcist). Last season's menagerie ranged from an 8-ft.-tall bloodworm with carnivorous tastes to a woman who turned into a gigantic honeybee and flew off with her reluctant lover...
Tongue-in-cheek humor also lifts Freddy's Nightmares above the jolt-'em-out- of-their-seats level of its theatrical namesakes. Freddy (Robert Englund) can still be one ruthless customer: in the season opener, he sliced off a woman's head, which plopped to the floor like a ripe pineapple. Most weeks, however, he serves merely as the wisecracking narrator for unrelated stories revolving around dreams. Many are unexpectedly lighthearted; a few even approach satire. In one of last season's entries, a yuppie career woman had a thirtysomething nightmare about having a baby: her boss replaced...
...obsession with clunky, overexplanatory dialogue laying out the supernatural ground rules ("Demons can only rise or return on a full moon -- that's why the spectral energy is gathering ^ . . ."). But the show delivers a stronger dose of pure horror than anything else on TV. In the season's two-hour premiere episode, Lucifer tried to take over a convent in France. Before the overstuffed plot spun out of control, there were some startling set pieces: a possessed nun literally climbing the walls and patients in a mental ward going wild and murdering the staff. The show also managed to write...
...make it safe." Pier 45, the city's main fishing pier, was closed because inspectors found deep fissures running the length of the pier floor. With no alternative pier to sail from, the 150-boat commercial-fishing fleet has been idled just as the herring and Dungeness crab season was about to open. Other damage ranged from cracks in the paving of the main runway at Oakland International Airport to the rotting of 125,000 crates of strawberries at Watsonville, in the South Bay area, spoiled when electrical failure knocked out refrigeration equipment. And somewhere in Oakland 200 snakes...