User Reviews

***SPOILERS*** It's when Danny, James Kirkwood Jr, saw Jason Parish, Gary Campbell, sitting in the backyard reading the Daily Racing Form that he completely freaked out and went bananas bolting out of the Parish house and leaving his gorgeous fiancée Anna Parish, Suzanne Llyod, in tears! What Danny saw in the Parish's backyard made him feel that there's was something very fishy about the beautiful Anna in that she's related, by blood, to something so hideous as her locked up in the closet, when company arrives, brother Jason! In a desperate attempt to prevent Jason from being institutionalized, because of his looks, for the rest of his life Jason's mother Margaret Parish, Augusta Dabney, gets in touch with quack and recently disbarred Doctor Edward Brown,David Lewis, to see if his unorthodox methods of using hypnosis can save the young man from a life of heartaches & misery.

Doctor Brown is seeing what he's dealing with in what looks like, with his scaly arms & hands, a half man half fish humanoid, or fish-man, from the deep decides to get both Anna and Mrs. Parish's confidence in his work. Doctor Brown does that by hypnotizing Anna and having her forget all the suffering she's been going through, that resulted in Danny checking out of town, because of her "Creature of the Black Lagoon" looking brother Jason!

Working day and night in private with Jason in trying to get him to look human it's now Christmas Eve and both Mrs. Parish and Anna have just about had enough of Doctor Brown's keeping them from seeing Jason and if in fact he improved his looks to the point that he can be presentable at the local Boston Collage, where he been taking courses through the mail, graduation dance! It's when Jason's father George Parish, Bert Burns, shows up for the Christmas Eve dinner and tells his both shocked wife and daughter Margaret & Anna that he's having Jason committed to an sanitarium in New York City that Doctor and his famous patient Jason Parish finally make their long awaited grand appearance! The fish fry-like cure that Doctor Brown preformed on Jason, through hypnosis, was something for the record books. It turned Jason from looking like Fish Man Charlie into a sober and straight laced looking handsome Charlie Sheen almost overnight!

It's difficult not to reference "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" like other reviewers have here, since the quick glimpse we get of poor Jason Parish's (Gary Campbell) arms reveal a scaly creature who's entire features might be too gruesome to contemplate. Of course we know there was a real life Elephant Man, but I don't know of an actual malady that this story might have been based on. Where it winds up leaves the entire Parish family stunned, as noted Doctor Edward Brown (David Lewis) uses an early treatment of hypnosis to cure his patient and restore his features to normalcy. What's more at work here has to do with accepting people as they really are more than performing medical miracles, and on that basis the story works OK. Turning a man-fish into a human being is just a little too unbelievable at the other end of the scale(s).

A young man steals a glimpse, through a window, of his fiancée's family secret - her hidden freak-monster-brother, "something that doesn't belong in a house", and flees from the prospect of breeding anything similar. Next her father threatens to leave home unless his wife agrees to have the boy institutionalised, which she passionately refuses.

Left alone with her daughter and 'sectioned' son, the mother (played by an exceptionally well-cast Augusta Dabney, pain and wisdom shining through those fine eyes) consults a doctor, recently struck-off for dabbling in hypnotism. Played by David Lewis, he carries conviction through his strong physical presence, though his accent is the weirdest mix of Irish and almost joke-Scottish.

After a distinctly odd demonstration of his skill, which he calls 'mind force', healing a burn on the daughter's skin, he is allowed to start work on the son, of whose scaly-reptile hands we only get a brief but horrifying close-up view. Rasputin-like, the hypnotist is able to forbid the mother from seeing her son during the cure, which takes many weeks (leaving us wondering more than a little about the boy's daily living arrangements).

Then suddenly it's Christmas Eve, and the father is back, this time accompanied by the hospital administrator, demanding that the boy must be put away... when he suddenly emerges from his room, fully restored to normality, and then it's just like the end of a Jimmy Stewart film.

However unbelievable, this story is probably based on a real-life event, since they bother to give the family a surname (Parish) and set the scene in 1890's Boston.

* Warning! This review may contain spoilers! *

This story is very similar in content and context to that of the science fiction fantasy film The MAZE (Allied Artists, 1953) starring Richard Carlson. The basic plot seems to be derived from a possibly true story of a genetic defect in a Scottish aristocracy in the 17th Century found in Charles Fort's book "The Book of the Damned", in which the person with the genetic disorder looks more like an amphibian or fish than a human being. In The MAZE, the man resembled a giant frog; in this episode, he looks more like a man-fish genetic defect, with scales on his skin like a fish.

It is a known fact that human embryos do resemble amphibians in an early developmental stage, so one person whose DNA is scrambled so that he does not develop past this amphibious appearance but grows to adulthood looking more like an amphibious fish than a human being is a possibility.

Another aspect of this late 19th Century story that is interesting is the use of hypnosis, made popular by Dr. Carl Mesmer. It is also possible that with hypnotherapy such as that shown in this episode, a person born with a terrible genetic defect such as this could overcome his natural aversion to be part of human society instead of feeling like an outcast. However, no amount of hypnotism can correct flaws in one's own genetic DNA makeup.

An interesting, thought-provoking episode, showing how people are always looking at the outward appearances of persons, instead of knowing their inward thoughts in their hearts and minds, and appreciating them as people in their own right. Highly recommended!

Ordeal On Locust Street is yet another One Step Beyond tale that dangles the impossible or, as the case may be, improbable, in the viewer's face in its modest half-hour format, and like most of the better entries in the series it can raise goosebumps in the flesh of even a rational viewer when the story's well told, as in this case of this one.

Set in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood in the 19th century, the events depicted concern a reclusive and apparently agoraphobic young man young who lives in with his family in a comfortable brownstone, who is deeply embarrassed by a medical condition that left him with scaly skin like a fish, thus ugly and frightening looking to most people. We see very little of the man in the course of the episode; and his face is covered throughout.

The traumatized young man's mother consults with a hypnotist, or mesmerist as they were often called at the time, and he sets out to cure the young man's condition through what appears to be some kind of thought control, and over the course of several sessions he succeeds.

This is a more sedate than usual entry for this show, and it offers the only real glimpse of anything that could be called truly called horrible to behold--a scaly hand--in its entire three season run; and this image stands out for the first time viewer due to the rest of the drama being so low key and rather talky.

Such a medical condition as described in the show does exist, and so far as I know no one has even been cured of it either by hypnosis or psychotherapy. Yet as with most medical conditions there are cases of spontaneous recovery, and this may well be one of them. As usual, host John Newland's introductions and concluding remarks help seal the deal.