13 Nights of Shocktober: Stay Tuned

by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some horror movie recommendations to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 12: Spooky Fun Night
“666 channels of heart pounding, skull blasting entertainment.”
Stay Tuned 

Not long ago, when I worked the dayshift at Vulcan Video during Shocktober and needed something daytime appropriate (not rated R) to watch, I would often put on the 1992 horror comedy Stay Tuned. It usually drew amused reactions from customers. Stay Tuned has gone out of print on DVD but it is still available on Blu-ray and is currently available on some streaming services, including Amazon Prime Video. This is a very broad, goofy, and fun movie. If you’re looking to watch something light but still horror themed, I recommend Stay Tuned.

John Ritter plays Roy Knable, an average middle class man whose midlife crisis has him watching TV nonstop, even over the shoulder of his wife, Helen (Pam Dawber), while she tries to talk to him. Their marriage isn’t doing too great and she is ready to leave when she comes home and finds that Roy has bought a massive satellite dish from a travelling salesman. They don’t have much time to argue however because it turns out the salesman was an agent from Hell and the dish sucks them into a hellish TV world. The catch is that if they can survive 24 hours living through TV shows that are literally trying to kill them, they’ll be released from the contract.

It turns out that Hell is corporatized and run like a TV network complete with a broadcast control room and slimy executives. Eugene Levy is great comic relief, as always, even in his small role as Crowley, an obsequious, wise cracking executive. The whole organization is run by Spike (Jeffery Jones) who likes to ensnare souls is the most extravagant, showiest way possible. Why not make it entertaining? he says. The new intern, Pierce (Erik King), is disappointed by the lack of subtext in Spike’s methods. Spike, annoyed, asks Pierce if he is a film school graduate. Pierce then launches into his thesis on Kurosawa and Spike Lee. As a former film student, I found this bit particularly amusing.

This fun comes in Roy and Helen making their way through the hellish channels. They end up on a game show called You Can’t Win! (which Helen is clever enough to win), a wrestling match, a generic Film Noir, a western, and other Hell themed parodies of TV shows and movies. One of the best scenes comes when Roy and Helen end up as cartoon mice being hunted by a killer cat robot. The animation style and humor are in line with the Chuck Jones Looney Tunes cartoons, and at one point Mouse Roy sends away to ACME for a crazy contraption. The climax includes a montage of Roy and Spike stumbling through different channels. They end up in a swashbuckler movie, a hockey match between devils and angels, a movie called “Driving Over Miss Daisy,” a parody of Star Trek, and, best of all, a Salt and Pepa music video. Ritter is dressed in a yellow suit and turban, Jones is a DJ, and each are after the remote control, the key to Roy and Helen’s escape. The dancers, some representing good and some representing evil, pass around the remote, and Ritter tries to casually dance his way to the remote instead of just grabbing it. This doesn’t make any sense but it’s fun to watch.

At times Stay Tuned is clever, at other times it’s hokey. Casting notable TV stars like John Ritter (Three’s Company) and Pam Dawber (Mork and Mindy) is one of its clever strokes. The hellish TV parodies are pretty enjoyable even when they’re dumb: Three Men and Rosemary’s Baby, Northern Overexposure, Duane’s Underworld, Sadistic Candid Camera. There is even a parody of the Maxell cassette tapes commercial, for those old enough to remember the variety of blank cassette tape choices, myself included. One of the parodies has Ritter wearing a Hawaiian shirt stumbling over a couch with two women (one blonde, the other brunette) staring at him with a familiar song in the background (familiar, if, like myself, you’re old enough). He screams and immediately changes himself into another channel.

John Ritter had a great career in comedy and more serious roles like the miniseries of Stephen King’s IT. He was a talented physical comedian and gets to show off that talent a bit here (if you want to see more of John Ritter as a physical comedian, please watch Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed). Is this a secretly great film deserving of cult film status? Perhaps, perhaps not. Is it better than it has any right to be? Yes, firmly yes. The approach by Peter Hyams, both the director and cinematographer, and the talent of the cast are what have made this film worth watching and re-watching for me, and I hope for you too.