In the cosmology of billiards film/television, there is an inherent yin and yang, meaning for every cinematic masterpiece such as The Hustler, there also exists a catastrophe like Virgin Pockets. The same holds true for billiards television. For masterworks such as “A Game of Pool” (from the Twilight Zone) or “Physical Education” (from Community) to truly shine, equivalent fiascoes must be produced to counterbalance and restore equilibrium. Such is the bottom-scraping role of Friday the 13th – “Wedding Bell Blues.”
Friday the 13th was an American-Canadian televised horror series that ran for three seasons from October 1987 to May, 1990. The series followed two antique hunters, Micki Foster (Louise Roby) and Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay), who try to recover and safely store a variety of cursed antiques. In the case of “Wedding Bell Blues,” that antique is a hexed cue stick, which enables its user to play can’t-miss pool, so long as the stick’s power is periodically replenished via impaling someone and taking the person’s life.
Airing in May 1989 during the series’ second season, “Wedding Bell Blues” includes embarrassingly inaccurate pool sequences, a third-grade script, and robotic acting. The full episode is available to watch here. As an example, early in the episode, Danny, the unwitting owner of the cursed cue, is at the Silver Dollar Pool Hall playing an opponent, who is trouncing him in 8-ball, calling shot after shot…except, none of the pocketed balls actually match the called shots.
The title, “Wedding Bell Blues,” refers to Danny’s girlfriend, the bridezilla Jennifer, who has convinced herself they will marry as soon as Danny wins the big pool tournament. She understands that feeding the stick (i.e., impaling pool hall patrons) is a necessary evil to keep his game sharp. As she says, “Long as I’ve known him, shooting pool is all he’s ever wanted to do.”
Her dirty little secret is that she is carrying Danny’s baby, so marriage is more important to her than anything. She doesn’t want the baby born out of wedlock. Thus, when her younger sister, Christy, played by the then-unknown actress Lolita Davidovich, says with cardboard conviction, “Why don’t you grow some brains and walk away from him?” she replies, with dramatic wallop, “Because I can’t.”
Clearly, my Friday the 13th bad luck came a couple of weeks late this year, as a more apt title for this time-sucking episode would have been “Billiards TV Blues.”
