Synopsis: Roy Nable (John Ritter) and his wife Helen (Paw Dawber) are a couple of normal folks. Day jobs include selling plumbing (him) and head of sales (her); after work, they like to come home and watch a little TV. Well, Roy likes it a lot more than Helen does. His excessive watching is causing a divide in the family unit. When teen daughter Diane (Heather McComb) and young son Darryl (David Tom) conspire to get their parents out of the house for a little rebuilding of those broken bonds, they do not expect to find their parents actually gone . . . But they are. Not to the Hamptons, though. Roy took possession of a special cable package (complete with satellite dish in the backyard) and in turn found himself possessed by the new system: the dish turned on him pulling himself and Helen into a special feeding ground for Hell. Forced to endure being characters in a variety of shows and movies that lampoon trends of the 1980s/1990s, Roy and Helen must stay one step ahead of the demons running the station—if they die, Hell gets their souls, if they survive for 24 hours, they get to go back to their world. It is a fight to stay alive and a humorous poke in the eye of the times, featuring Jeffrey Jones and Eugene Levy as demons, and a host of often goofy but nevertheless Hellish takes on prime time offerings. Genre director Peter Hyam helms a goofy spin on scary watching with 1992’s Stay Tuned.
DANIEL’S TAKE
A movie like Stay Tuned is something of a watershed of gags and jeers aimed at the 80s and 90s. I write that in full knowledge that I am losing half my readers. That’s okay. I’m okay with that. I am a product of those decades, and I can still recall them with some degree of joy. When I see a couple of ghoul longhairs announce “Schwing!” and employing an “Extreme close up camera!” to bang some poor punk tied to a chair and forced to wear a sweater labeling him “Sphincter boy”, I get the joke. It makes me chuckle. A bit nostalgic on my part? Sure. So long as we do not get too lost in nostalgia, we can enjoy it. A movie that employs it (or exploits it, ymmv) can be silly and sometimes stupid fun. That is Stay Tuned in a nutshell. Silly, check. Stupid, oh boy yes. Fun, sure thing.
Horror and comedy has a checkered past. Some of the better entries in that field have managed to blur the lines between the two camps, delivering memorable flicks. This includes, on one hand, something like the original Ghostbusters (1984), which has funny lines/situations paired up with honestly eerie moments; on the other hand, we have Evil Dead II (1987), which manages to balance a gruesome horror picture with some zany physical comedy. The two movies manage to succeed as both scary pics as well as horror flicks, showing the breadth of the latter genre and the versatility of the former. Stay Tuned is less interested in evoking suspenseful or gross set pieces than either of the flicks I mentioned. In its opening, it does build some suspense about the fates of the doomed Seidenbaum family. A henpecked hubby Murray (Bob Dishy) and his wife Sarah (Joyce Gordon) get a visit from a mysterious stranger that ends in screams . . . However, where the other movies I mentioned balanced their gags with their horror elements, Stay Tuned prefers to walk a different path, that of a comedy which plays with spooky elements.
The movie does not really hit anyone’s Halloween watch list for a variety of reasons, one of them being that it’s not even remotely frightening. However, it has the sense of humor that Robert Bloch brought to plenty of his horror works. It is the kind of movie that would loudly proclaim it has the heart of a small child, and then show a picture of a jar sitting on a desk containing some indeterminate but nevertheless meaty looking lump of tissue suspended in a pickling bath. Bad taste? I suppose so. Funny when done right? You bet.
John Ritter has made a handful of horror pieces, often blends of the horrific and the humorous. Of the lot, I would say Bride of Chucky (1998) was the best of the bunch. In that flick, he played an overprotective douche of a dad who abused his sheriff’s powers to look after his daughter. He gets a great death scene in Bride, and he gets the chance to chew the scenery when he passes through the frame. For Stay Tuned, he veers away from that particular role, and is essentially a likeable schmuck who happens to be addicted to old movies and television.
Pam Dawber takes her own role as the capable woman who still loves her husband, even though he is only a shadow of the man he once was, with aplomb. Sometimes asked to be the damsel in need of rescue, she also gets to be the hero rescuing her damsel-in-distress hubby when they enter the realm of Hell TV.
The supporting players are solid casting decisions, with Jones as the villainous Spike, top dog demon head of the channel. He has a remote control on one of those rigs that let Robert DeNiro whip out a pistol from up his sleeve in Taxi Driver (1976), and he scowls and snarls and occasionally laughs (maniacally of course) as he schemes to get those souls.
The real fun, of course, is spotting the spoofs. They come a mile a minute, as some points, and not all of them stick the landing, but enough of them do to make the film a worthwhile watch. Is this art? Nah. Does it intend to be? Nah. It is solid entertainment, sticking Ritter and Dawber in crazy situations. Wrestling that is for real? Northern Overexposure, where they battle the elements and hungry wolves? A game show titled You Can’t Win? These and more opportunities for laughs come. There is even a quick shout out to Ritter’s own early acting successes as the male lead in Three’s Company, which has forever relegated the star to that particular hell known as Syndication Reruns . . .
Stay Tuned takes devilish pleasure in exploring the time it was made in. Though I like it for the spoof aspect, there is a fair story about kids trying to get their parents out of harm’s way, as well as an up and coming demon/film school graduate (Erik King) looking to challenge Jones for the spot of head of the network.
I say they are demons, but are they really? Or are Jones, Levy, et. al. just a bunch of dead guys in service to the dark lord? Only Satan knows for sure, and he is not telling. It is one of those topics that fans can likely debate into the ground, but I am not invested enough to do so. No matter their nature, the bad guys are scheming minions of Satan (one might say schmucks of Satan, in fact), so demons or living dead guys . . . it doesn’t really matter much in the final analysis, yeah?
Stay Tuned is a flick akin to Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), where the attraction is less the overarching story than the pieces going into it. Sure, there’s some wonder about how Roy and Helen will get out of this or that situation, or what’s up with that jerky dude Murray Seidenbaum, who left his wife to die under the stomping feet of a kaiju, but the movie is so plucky and go-lucky that we know they will manage to come out all right pretty much from the get go. The Nables are a tad dysfunctional but nowhere near as bad as the family in a flick like, say, Terrorvision (1986), which we reviewed yesterday. We even know that Roy will get his head out of his tuckus and his duff up off the chair and make use of those fencing skills we saw early in the picture. So, the movie is not a suspenseful yarn on those fronts. We know the family will get reunited, the kids will have their parents back, Helen will get the man she fell in love with back, and Roy will make use of his television knowledge in a way to grow into someone less of a schlub. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That stuff is background for the real draw: We want the spoofs.
Perhaps one of the flick’s finer achievements is a lengthy Chuck Jones-style cartoon featuring Roy and Helen stuck in the bodies of anthropomorphic mice running one beat ahead of a killer robot cat. The sequence is as rich with violence, zany humor, bizarre beats, and surreal non-sequiturs as any Looney Tunes/Tom and Jerry cartoon from the good old days. This sequence serves more than to spoof/paying loving homage to the animated shorts of yesteryear; however, it is the turning point for the characters themselves. In this one, they stop reacting and start to take direct action, and this is all done without breaking the tropes established by Warner Bros. et. al. In fact, Stay Tuned embraces those tropes with every fiber of its being, while throwing logical curves that fit within the established axioms, and the results are dynamic and enjoyable. When the film does this, it is at its best, operating in known properties with known boundaries.
The flick offers a sly commentary on the television and film industries as well. The cut aways from the television action to the room where Spike and his fellow hell-ions discuss theory and audience are choice little jabs at the Hollywood process. Like Donald E. Westlake’s Sam Holt series of amateur detective thrillers, which used mystery and thriller novel plots to poke Hollywood’s foibles, Stay Tuned uses the comedy/horror flick as a framework for giving itself room and permission to takes some jabs at The Industry. The result is far meatier than one might expect. No one will confuse Stay Tuned with a more acidic work like, say, Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), which came out the same year, but the movie is not merely the goofy, pure family fun flick it seems to be at first brush, either.
All said, Stay Tuned might not seem like a Halloween season movie, and in many way’s I suppose it isn’t. What it is, instead, is a feature that uses a macabre sense of humor, which might appeal to horror fans, to sharpen the edges. It is not a flick to watch by dark of night or during a booming thunderstorm, say, but it is nevertheless an enjoyable little exercise in satire, comedy, and yes spooky cinema for a Sunday afternoon.
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Stay Tuned is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming editions. It used to play like gangbusters on cable, which is when many people caught it originally.
Next up, we will continue our exploration of the horror-comedy with an off-the-wall gem from Don Coscarelli: Bubba Ho-Tep is the writer/director’s adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale’s novella of the same name, and it pairs Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis as Elvis and JFK (who didn’t die) stuck in an old folk’s home in East Texas. When they learn that evil stalks their home’s hallways in the form of a soul-sucking monster, they decide it is well past time to rise to the occasion and kick a little monster butt. Grab a copy today. It’s available in DVD, Blu-ray or streaming editions.
“SHOCKtober Movies: Stay Tuned” is copyright © 2019 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Poster and still image are taken from IMDB.
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