Sister Wendy Beckett

Marvelously decadent, gripping and surprising. Wonderfully acted (especially Mildred Clinton's unexpected star turn.) Every bit as effective as it was 40 years ago, though sadly I can tell that most jaded young film know-it-all's will likely remain unmoved by it's stately subtlety and refreshingly `off-kilter' craftsmanship. I firmly believe Argento & Carpenter themselves may have been influenced by this stylish and effective effort and even possibly learned a neat directorial trick or two from writer-director Sole's horrificific exploits. It remains a magnificent cinematic sleight-of-hand, every inch of footage easily worthy of comparison to either Bava or Hitchcock! Masterful Catholic-guilt carnage and fun! Would make a stupefyingly enjoyable double bill with either Jarmusch's PATERSON (2017), Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW (1973) or even Roeg/Cammell's PERFORMANCE (1971).

Utilizing the familiar format of a (fictional) local PBS talk show, FERNWOOD TONIGHT (later AMERICA 2 NIGHT) was a one-off summertime replacement show from Norman Lear, intended to keep the Fernwood, Ohio vibe alive and kicking in viewer's consciousness between seasons of his hit show MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN, which was essentially an absurdist soap opera with a bizarre ensemble cast, played strictly as black comedy, whereas FERNWOOD 2 NIGHT took the form of a ridiculous (fake, as it was loosely scripted) TONIGHT SHOW style meet and greet variety program. Audacious, raunchy & consistently amusing, it remains a cultural staple and touchstone harkening back to the 1970s blatant, devil-may-care sensibilities just as open-ended as they were prior to the rampant political correctness & gentrification which replaced them by the early 1990s, Hosted by the talented musician and comedian Martin Mull, here playing Barth Gimble, a man of questionable aims and supposedly the cousin of the character Garth Gimble from MARY HARTMAN, who had allegedly been murdered or gone missing on that show the previous season. To Barth's right was the ever-amiable dufus Fred Willard, portraying the station manager's son Jerry Hubbard, a cluelessly chatty, ever-present nuisance with an unfortunate penchant for either overstating the all-too-obvious or intentionally mis-reading things solely for the inconvenience of indulging himself in yet another of his far too-numerous instances in which he inappropriately embarks upon rambling, disjointed and only partially concocted hypotheses & commonly off-topic monologues going off in all direction of needlessly long-winded tangents of unrelated exposition (similar to what I just sort-of-did right there!). Providing the musical accompaniment & entertainment each episode is Happy Kyne and the Mirth Makers, played by Frank DeVol, et al, a put-upon realist & limited musicologist left-over from the vaudeville days, and his house band, who perform polka cover tunes of popular disco hits of the time, such as `Shake Your Booty' (consult You Tube & find the clip of their `Boogie Fever' for confirmation of the degree of comic lunacy they brought to the show!) The style and tone of FERNWOOD 2 NIGHT makes it a singular experience and a true original and also sadly the type of televised entertainment that will simply never happen again and as such can also be viewed as an outdated ancient relic of our times. POSTSCRIPT - De Vol is the same `De Vol' who was responsible for composing and arranging the popular theme music for the hit shows FAMILY AFFAIR, TAMMY and MY THREE SONS as well as the much older pop curio classic `Teddy Bears Picnic'