Boris Karloff Hosts Thriller - Child's Play

At its best I thought “Child’s Play” does well at conveying a disturbed child, escaping into fantasy (which often includes violence through fired guns), whose journalist father spends a lot of time away or at his typewriter preparing his articles while the mother tries to keep a strong bond with the wild boy. The active imagination and so much time alone, his grand made-up adventures compensation for an absentee father, seems to have only encouraged what soon results in the episode as the family gathers at the summer cabin for a few weeks from civilization. When the episode loses me is the ongoing, never-ending conversations between Overton and Leslie about their son, their marriage, his distance, his alienating job, possible separation, the lack of a relationship between father and son, the lack of dialogue and intentional avoidance. When little Tommy Dolan isn’t shooting the apple of the head of a kid at summer camp (this is the reason he is with them instead of there), he’s pointing a secretly taken gun off his dad’s gun rack from the wall at a fisherman in the area, calling him “Black Bart”. Funnily/ironically enough, Overton’s character’s name is Bart. The fisherman threatens to tell his parents but Dolan has the gun and will shoot him if he doesn’t adhere to his demands to not move another step. An innocent bystander happens across this boy so lost in fantasy he could very well be killed because the imagination has pictured him a villain. While that goes on, mother and father continue to discuss and talk about possible separation, with dialogue that often has Overton deflecting from responsibility while Leslie scoffs and sighs, just wanting for them to address their issues and put them to rest. God, I found them frustrating. I guess you could say that a lot of couples in a marriage that seems to be dragging its feet due to no real dialogue. Overton always seems very uninterested in truly just hashing out what is wrong between them, while Leslie keeps trying to keep him calm, often saying that she doesn’t want to be ugly to him. Good grief. I can just imagine how her line of “Just tell me what you want me to be?”  would make the blood boil today. I cringed at the thought of how many might react to that. Why can’t she just be who she wants to be? Why does she have to make him happy? What about her own happiness? Yeah, and elsewhere their child is holding a fisherman at gunpoint. When Leslie talks about the lack of attention, just wanting some sort of acknowledgment she’s there, if just a pat on the head so he knows she is there, I was basically, “Just shoot me, Tommy!” Oh and then we get Overton blathering on about his work and how that is important to him. The mental exhaustion, the need to devote entirely to the job, admittedly taking her for granted; Overton tries to explain why he’s neglecting her. “Trivial domestic considerations”…he actually tells her that he can’t be bothered with this! What a piece of work, this guy! Oh, and her admitting she’s not very bright or clever…if this “Scenes from a Marriage” couldn’t get any worse, Leslie wallows in her “lack of abilities”. This script and characters I can only imagine will infuriate a section of viewers who might watch it. You hurt me, I hurt you, I don’t want to hurt you, do you want to hurt me? Do you want to separate? Are you sure? Well, I don’t know, do you? And on, and on, and on, and on… Eventually the parents decide to work at their marriage, rush to find their son when they realize he took a gun, and locate the boy as he plans to shoot an apple off the head of the fisherman. So father convinces son to shoot the apple off his head while mommy looks on in fear. And eventually all is well. Ugh. 1.5/5