I lucked out today and found a copy of the DVD of Really Weird Tales at Half Price Books. I almost bought it at the Kino Lorber sale. I didn't save that much over the sale price of the brand new DVD but a couple of bucks buys another movie and the used DVD was clean as a whistle. I had a DVDr of RWT that I copied off an old VHS tape back in 2005 and that doesn't look that good. Now I have a nice looking version of the HBO TV program that parodied shows like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. The three episodes, produced in 1987, run about 88 minutes. That was one of the nice things about HBO, no commercials. Really Weird Tales is a little SCTV like, which isn't surprising, since many of it's cast and crew are working on this new project.
Joe and David Flaherty wrote most of the scripts, with John McAndrew and Catherine O'Hara working on a script each. Joe is the host of the show, he introduces each story, pops up randomly during the episode, then wraps it all up. Joe is joined by these other SCTV people, John Candy, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara, John Hemphill and Jayne Eastwood, some in each program. There are plenty of other Canadian actors in the cast. Lot's of talent, yet the production just isn't as entertaining as any good episode of SCTV. The stories are sort of funny but I'm lacking the good laughs. All the actor's do a great job but the script is weak. Can't do much about that. It only lasted the three episodes. It's nice to have a nice copy, I'll probably watch it again some day. In the mean time, there's much other material to watch, including hours of SCTV. I just finished transferring the episodes I had from VHS to DVDr, these include material that hadn't made it to DVD yet. At this stage I doubt we'll ever see a complete series collection.
Comments