By Geno McGahee
What if you had a vampire living upstairs from you? What if that vampire did absolutely nothing wrong and was just on vacation? This tale really is about vampire hate and how it drove one troubled boy to commit murder. This Ray Bradbury Theater episode “THE MAN UPSTAIRS” is very odd and the ending doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It just left me really sad.
Grandma (Micheline Presle) violently stabs a turkey and lets the guts fall out in front of her grandson, Douglas (Adam Negley). He asks if humans look like that and she laughs and proceeds to sew up the turkey for some reason. I have no clue why, but she did. Douglas probably shouldn’t be raised in that home. Grandma may be a few cards short of a deck.
Koberman (Feodor Atkine) comes into town and rents a room from Grandma and tells the family that he is there for recreation. He is mysterious and keeps to himself mostly, which attracts the interest of Douglas. How dare Koberman not be talkative!
Douglas has these binoculars that are either night vision or heat sensing or both and he uses them to spy on Koberman walking and somehow, they can see to his organs and reveal that he has different organs. It looks like he has two hearts, connected. Douglas, sneaks into the room of the guest and sees pictures of him from many different times, proving that he has not aged and has been around for a long time. He is not human. He is either a vampire or an alien, BUT he has done nothing wrong. He’s on fucking vacation!
With knife in hand, Douglas creeps up on the sleeping guest, and guts him, tearing out his double heart and then sewing him up like the turkey. OK, police, come and arrest this punk and throw the book at him! I’m waiting… Nope, they stand in awe of the corpse and note that the kid basically did a service. He killed a vampire or an alien or something and that is what we should do. Kill everything that is different. It’s no wonder why people hate police with shit like this being allowed to happen.
THE MAN UPSTAIRS is a curious tale. I felt so bad for Koberman. His only wrong was smashing the binoculars of that little shit, Douglas, but he promised to buy other ones. He was just protecting himself, and the end of this tale shows exactly why he had to. Koberman, RIP. You got a raw deal.
Rating: 7/10
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