The Ray Bradbury Theater (TV Series) The Handler (1992) User Reviews

He Wasn't Ethical But You Couldn't Say They Didn't Deserve It

[Hitchcoc · 7/10 · 8 April 2015]

Michael J. Pollard (a very strange person; remember him in "Bonnie and Clyde") plays a small town undertaker. He is quite eccentric and people are generally mean to him. He gets his revenge on them by preparing their bodies in ways that reflect their evil (putting ink in the veins of a racist, for example). He seems to have some part in how they met their deaths, but we don't know about the specifics (except for a man that is shot by a jealous husband after Pollard calls the husband). Well, we know things are probably going to go sour at some point. He is having so much fun doing his thing when a man who has had a history of seizures and near fatal attacks revives on the slab. This is not good, of course. This is the concluding episode of this series and it is certainly unsettling.

"Out of the Church, into the Earth."

[classicsoncall · 6/10 · 23 March 2022]

The premise of this story is kind of interesting. An undertaker (Michael J. Pollard) seems to take an unusually perverse delight in his profession, with four corpses backed up in his mortuary cooler. He prepares each of the bodies for burial in a tasteless manner that reflected the way in which those people lived. In the case of a racist, Mr. Benedict (Pollard) purchased a couple gallons of black ink to inject into the man's veins, thereby rendering him black in death. What he wasn't counting on, was that one of the stiffs brought into his parlor wasn't dead yet! When Mr. Blythe (Henry Beckman) revives from his temporary incapacitation, he wildly confronts the mortician for his unsavory practices, apparently well enough known to the people of the town. You have to take the closing scene with a grain of salt however, as it's suggested that Blythe may have hacked Benedict to pieces, and scattered his remains among all the graves in the cemetery. With the name 'Benedict' painted on all the headstones, you have to consider that maybe Blythe was even more demented that the guy he put away.