Word: show
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...problem in doing such programs is the cost. Elaborate special effects are too expensive for most TV series, and the tackiness can show. Superboy, for 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...
Even when Monsters' stories are predictable and thin, the show is enlivened by grisly good humor. In one episode, two burglar brothers kill an old lady (Imogene Coca) while ransacking her home, but not before she bites one on the hand. The swollen wound soon takes the shape of the dead woman's face, which won't shut up. "It's like in one of them Wolfman movies," cries the cursed fellow. Replies his dim-witted brother: "What, an old lady bites you, and you turn into another old lady?" This weekend Soupy Sales plays a traveling salesman who, after...
Friday the 13th bears even less resemblance to the infamous, inexhaustible series of slasher films for which it is named. The TV version is another anthology show, its stories linked by an antique shop whose objects were cursed and sold to unsuspecting customers. Each week three continuing characters try to retrieve one of the objects before it wreaks its supernatural havoc. That serviceable premise provides the excuse for segments that range from old horror chestnuts (the ventriloquist controlled by his dummy) to spooky original tales (two abused children lure playmates into an evil playhouse...
Friday the 13th's worst sin is an 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...
...tenured professor at 29 and has become a champion of debt relief for developing countries. He first gained renown for his advice to Bolivia, which slashed its inflation rate from more than 20,000% in 1985 to 15% today. When Sachs visited Argentina last June, talk-show hosts rushed to schedule interviews. In a single hectic week last month, Sachs was in Peru and Brazil and then jetted to Warsaw, where he advises the new government...