By Geno McGahee
I love TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE for the most part. I loved all these horror TV shows, but they cannot knock them out of the park every time. The 1984 “A CASE FOR THE STUBBORNS” features a very young Christian Slater as Jody, a young man that is mourning the loss of his grandfather. His mother, Ma (Barbara Eda-Young), is also dealing with the loss and prepares breakfast and that’s when it gets weird.
Titus, the grandfather (Eddie Bracken), makes his way downstairs and asks for his meal, shocking them. Immediately, I hated Bracken’s performance. He is terrible and he keeps slapping his lips together like he took a load in the mouth from a moose. Most grandparents are annoying and at least he checks that box, but I doubt the show’s intent was to annoy the viewer.
Reverend Peabody (Brent Spiner) shows up and tries to convince Titus to accept death and move on from this world. Titus won’t have it and insists that he is still alive, despite the fact that he is visibly decomposing.
To convince his grandfather to move on to the other side, Jody goes to see the local witch (Tresa Hughes) and you want to talk about bad acting. Hughes does this terrible witch laugh and is so over the top terrible, but she was better than Bracken. I’ll give her that.
The witch helps Jody out and they (spoiler) convince Titus to go and die. That is all this episode is and it’s terrible. Unless are you a Christian Slater fan, for some reason, and want to see his early work, I’d skip this episode. It’s just shit. The only thing I will give it is that the makeup at the end for the decaying grandfather wasn’t all that bad. It couldn’t make up for the rest of the episode though.
