Have a little pre-Halloween fun with Friday the 13th: The Series

Before there was Buffy,Angel or those chicks from Charmed,we were given the supernatural adventures of cousins Micki and Ryan who, along with old buddy Jack,sort out cursed antiques in Friday The 13th: The Series. The show had no connection to the Jason Voorhees slasher movies whatsoever but there was plenty of good ghoulish fun to be found.

The basic premise of the show is that Micki & Ryan inherited an antique shop from their Uncle Lewis who,of course,made a pact with Satan to sell cursed objects in exchange for wealth and immortality. Uncle Lewis wound up trying to back out of the deal and meeting his Maker for it. The two cousins find out(after selling off the rest of the store's inventory)from Jack about the whole evil merchandise deal and decide to round up all the bad items to lock up in a vault. Why not just destroy them,you may ask? That would be too easy so, to make things more interesting,the cursed objects have Satanic Scotchguard that keeps them intact.



This was a fun show;one of my favorite episodes had Micki falling under a vampire's spell due to a cursed cloak and clasp that allowed the wearer to time travel and become a bloodsucker. There was even a little chant that the vampires used to trap folks with the Count Floyd cape that went like this:

"Now, you and I, through eternity will be bound.
For with this cape immortality is found.
And with this clasp we can travel through time.
Just a drop of your precious blood mixed together with mine."

And that ditty ended with"But first you must become ONE OF US!" Subtle. They even managed to throw in Bram Stroker as a character for a Dracula connection. So damn hokey but I ate that stuff up with a spoon and asked for more.




Other wicked wares included a compact mirror that made hot guys fall in love with Plain Janes,a quilt which made the dreams of psuedo-Amish folk come all too true and a scarecrow that needs to chop off a few heads to make your garden grow. The show ran for three seasons and is still in reruns but not yet on DVD. Hopefully,someone will take pity on those who fondly remember this sinister series and make it available soon.

In the meanwhile,here's a few clips from the pilot episode"Inheritance" to savor.