User Reviews

Monsters: Taps starts as Broadway musical star Suzy (Mary Jo Keenan) want to leave New York & head for Hollywood to be in the movies, her boyfriend, boss & fellow dancer Gary (Neal Jones) refuses to let Suzy out of her contract. Suzy decides to take extreme measures & murders Gary, she cuts the body up & thinks she has gotten away with it. One year later Suzy returns to New York & is menaced by Gary, or at least part of him that only ever wanted to dance with her...

Episode seventeen from season one of Monsters this originally aired in the US during March 1989, co-written & directed by David Misch & I have to say that I liked Taps quite a lot. Taps is very much a horror comedy that definitely know's it's own absurdity & has it's tongue placed firmly in it's cheek accordingly as there's all sorts of double entendre jokes (like Suzy saying 'you always wanted me to be a hack actress' while cutting Gary's body up), lots of silly innuendo & a silly but amusing sequence in which Suzy is attacked by Gary's severed leg with it tripping her up, stamping on her foot & kicking her over! You can't take Taps seriously & the makers knew this so the whole episode feels like some dark black horror comedy & it works rather well, at only twenty minutes in length at least it's short, it moves along like a rocket, it's fairly gruesome at times, it has a sense of humour & made me smile on more than one occasion. I really did enjoy Taps that while silly entertained me & brought a smile to my face, what more do you want?

This episode of Monsters doesn't have a monster as it were but it's gorier than most with Suzy dismembering Gary, there's severed hands, blood, severed arms & legs & there's not many films or telly programmes in which the female lead is attacked by a living tap dancing severed leg! The cast play it for laughs & I like to think Keenan was deliberately over-the-top or otherwise she's a poor actress.

Taps is a really fun & highly amusing episode of Monsters that differs from the usual since it doesn't have a traditional monster as it were but as a black comedy it's terrific stuff with some funny scenes & the odd bit of gore too which helps.

Taps starts with aspiring dancers Gary Gregory and Suzy St. Claire fighting over the couples unseen future Suzy dreams of becoming an Hollywood actress with the help of her agent Sam while Gary wants the two to stay together and pursue a dancing career and goes as far as to threaten Suzy that she will never leave him. This makes Suzy take desperate action and poison Gary killing him, she then cuts up his body and hides it in a trunk. A year later and now a popular actress Suzy returns back to the scene of the crime the hotel room to stay, and finds a big surprise awaiting her. Like another reviewer stated you could call "Taps" a rather mediocre rip-off of Robert Bloch's "Frozen Fear" and while it kinda is that wasn't really my problem here, the main issue I had was with lead actress Mary Jo Keenen who plays Suzy, an actress who's claim to fame seems to be a three episode stint of "Seinfeld" and a role in the forgotten early 90s series "Nurses", she's pretty bad here hamming up her lines and playing everything out for comedic effect, and I get this isn't really the story to take all to seriously, but, still she wasn't good. Still theirs some pretty macabre moments here like when Gary is murdered and cut up, and the final as silly and goofy as it is is rather enjoyable. Our location seems to be a single hotel room as far as I can tell.

Dancer and aspiring actress Suzy St. Claire (a solid performance by Mary Jo Keenan) kills her overbearing boyfriend and dance partner Gary Gregory (nicely played to the jerky hilt by Neal Jones). Suzy goes as far as to cut up Gary's body into little pieces only to have one of his legs comes back to life to get revenge on her.

Director David Misch relates the enjoyably absurd story at a snappy pace as well as gets a good deal of laughs from the amusing sense of goofy gallows humor that includes loads of choice dopey puns. Dan Frazer contributes a sturdy turn as Suzy's pragmatic agent Sam. In addition, we even get a few nice bits of mild gore and the final shot is simply priceless. A real hoot.