The Diary/A Matter of Semantics/Big Surprise/Professor Peabody's Last Lecture

'The Diary' - Patty Duke stars as a heartless gossip columnist who targets an aging(but still beautiful) actress(played by Virginia Mayo) who is driven to extremes by the stress, including giving her a cursed diary which metes out a special kind of justice... Best of these four with the Duke character getting exactly what she deserves by the clever ending.

'A Matter Of Semantics' - Inept comedy short with no point at all.

'Big Surprise' - John Carradine plays a sinister-seeming man who plans a big surprise for a young boy. Not bad, but still all build-up with little payoff.

'Professor Peabody's Last Lecture' - Goofy in-joke comedy short with silly outcome.

There are four separate stories packed into this episode's fifty-one minutes, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that at least one of them sucks. The worst offender is tale number two which lasts just a few minutes and is essentially a one joke piece: a vampire enters a blood bank... to make a withdrawal. Badum-tish! For all I know, this might have been a new joke back in '71, but I've seen it printed in comics so many times over the years that it no longer has the desired effect.

Before this, we get a story starring Patty Duke and Virginia Mayo. Duke plays Holly Schaeffer, television's foremost 'hatchet lady', who uses her gossip show to make cruel comments about washed-up movie star Carrie Crane (Mayo). Crashing Schaeffer's New Year's Eve party (which features a dwarf in a nappy as the 'new year baby'), Crane delivers a gift to the cruel woman: a diary. After Crane leaves, Schaeffer opens the journal to find that the first page is already filled in, in her handwriting, and that it predicts Crane's suicide. Sure enough, the actress throws herself in front of a car moments later.

The next day, and there is another mysterious diary entry which foretells of the death of Schaeffer's one true love, Jeb (Robert Yuro); later that day, Jeb dies in an accident. On the third day, there is no entry, which leads Holly to believe that she is going to die. Her sanity slipping, she has herself committed for her own safety, living the rest of her days in a padded room, trying to beat the diary by completing the entries herself. I can't say I liked this one all that much, but that's not to say it's bad - just not my cup of tea. Look out for a young Lindsay 'Bionic Woman' Wagner as a nurse.

The third story is a bit of a weird one: John Carradine plays a creepy old man who tells young lad Chris (Vincent Van Patten) where he can find 'a big surprise'. Together with his friends, Chris goes to the location that the man told him about and starts to dig. The two friends eventually give up and wander off, but Chris continues until he finds a wooden box secured with a padlock. It's a creepy set-up, but the 'big surprise' waiting for the boy inside the box is just plain bizarre.

The last story is a lot of fun for fans of Lovecraft, and might even have been a source of inspiration for a young Sam Raimi: the brilliant Carl Reiner plays a Miskatonic University professor lecturing on the subject of superstition and ancient cults. As he recites from a copy of the Necronomicon (as in The Evil Dead), he mocks the 'great old ones', incurring their wrath, the man eventually transformed into an unspeakable monster. There are numerous Lovecraft references, Reiner hams it up a treat, and the ending is wonderfully silly. Now this one WAS my cup of tea!

Even though I am not really a big fan of horror movies in general, I bought "Night Gallery" last year for the famous movie and television stars in them. I really prefer the old black and white horror movies, where less is more, over the excessive gore shown in the movies from the 1980s to today.

Having said that, I am going to review the nine stories that were my favorites. This may seem to be another usual outing courtesy of Night Gallery with its odd humor, but what made "The Diary" fascinating to me was Patty Duke's outstanding performance in it. She is given a diary as a present but there's more to it than meets the eye.

Patty Duke is a mean gossipy tv show host who puts down actors past their prime. A comeuppance befalls her and it ends rather bizarrely and abruptly, which only adds to the eccentricity of this production and leaves you feeling like, that's it? Wow!

If you come across this on tv, do yourself a favor and watch Patty Duke at her best.

My other favorites, which will all have their own separate reviews, are ""They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" with William Windom, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," narrated by Orson Welles, "The Dark Boy," with Gale Sondergaard, "Camera Obscura," with Ross Martin, "I'll Never Leave You...Ever," with Lois Nettleton, "The Little Black Bag" with Burgess Meredith, " The House," with Joanna Pettet and "Certain Shadows on the Wall," with Agnes Moorehead, Grayson Hall, Rachel Roberts and Louis Hayward.

There were also some other good episodes for honorable mentions, but these listed were to me the best of the best. As of this writing, some of these other reviews may not have been written but will be hopefully sometime soon.

As a high school kid, I fell in love with Patty Duke. She had that show where she played an American school girl and her identical cousin. She sort of sparkled. In "The Diary" she is an unadulterated virago who set out to hurt people with her scathing, gossipy diatribes. She seems to have no remorse. When an aging actress has alcohol problems, she goes after her with a vengeance. The woman is defenseless, appearing at a party and handing Duke a Diary she has purchased at a great price. Soon thereafter, she commits suicide. Duke shows no remorse, harboring back to a difficult childhood as justification, challenging her shrink when he attempts to help her. It is the Diary that is at the center of all this, or is it?

"A Matter of Semantics" is another one of those Dracula throwaway things that were frequently inserted. Basically a lame joke.

"Big Surprise" features "John Carradine" who played Dracula more than any other performer. He lives in an old house and the kids are petrified of him. He gets one of them to approach and tells him the location of some sort of surprise. He and his buddies dig four feet down until two of them have had enough. We are led on by what the big surprise will be. I have to say, for me, it was a disappointment.

"Mr. Peabody" Last Lecture" (no, not that Mr Peabody) has Carl Reiner playing a very boring professor who is teaching his charges about the ridiculousness of some things that are thought to be religions. He tells lame jokes and allows nothing to deter him. He invokes the Cthulhu mythos and all its characters and speaks disdainfully of it as a storm rages outside the building. His students have interesting names: Lovecraft, Derleth, and Bloch among others. He also reads from the "Necronomicon" of Abdul Alhazred. These are, for the uninitiated, all part of the H. P. Lovecraft world. The conclusion is predictable but fun. By the way, if you've not read any Lovecraft, this is an invitation.

I adored the Night Gallery and was very pleased to have recently gotten the complete series.

Many of the segments are, frankly, mediocre, but some are classically terrifying. The episode with Roddy McDowell as the nephew who kills his rich uncle and Ossie Davis as the butler, the episode with Carl Betz as the doctor, "Camera Obscura" with Rene Auberjonois and Ross Martin (taken directly from the short story of the same name), and many, many others: all of these were good for a night of keeping the lights on. It's both good and rather sad to see all these great actors we grew up with who've since passed on. ~sigh~ I just finished watching "Big Surprise" again. And it's still as frightening and funny as ever.