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.

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.

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.

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.

Season 2-Episode 8 of Rod Serling's anthology series "Night Gallery" opens quite wonderfully with Patty Duke back in Neely O'Hara mode as a television gossip reporter who continually dumps on tippling faded star Virginia Mayo, who ends up committing suicide--but not before delivering a diary to Duke's TV tattletale that appears to be writing her future. Written by Serling and directed by William Hale, "The Diary" delivers the spooky goods; David Wayne is solid as a psychiatrist, Lindsay Wagner has two or three lines as a nurse, and Duke is terrifically hateful. Elsewhere in the hour, Cesar Romero plays Count Dracula visiting a blood bank (he's there to withdraw, not make a deposit); John Carradine is an old coot who entices three schoolboys to dig for "a big surprise" on his property; and Carl Reiner is a pompous college professor debunking ancient gods--while the skies outside grow increasingly ominous. Directed by Jerrold Freedman, this silly tale relies on a single visual joke at its finish line, although Reiner gives his reading a jolt of acting relish.