User Reviews

Harried housewife Ruthie (the irritating Jill Jaress) gets a visit from strange alien salesman Kaatzu (veteran comic Jack Carter ravenously devouring the scenery with highly annoying and unrestrained glee). Klaatzu gives Ruthie a mechanical device that enables her to silence the noise caused by her son Little Nicky's (the insufferably bratty Miguel Alamo) constant drumming, but not necessarily in a good way.

Director Christopher T. Welch pitches the humor at way too broad a level for said humor to really work while Julie Selbo's silly script spoofs "I Love Lucy" in a way which proves to be more dumb and grating than remotely funny or clever. Worse yet, the characters are all extremely obnoxious and unbearable one-note caricatures, with Michael Santiago rating as the single most heinous offender due to his unbearably hammy portrayal of histrionic father Nicky. The frustratingly ambiguous ending doesn't help matters any. One of this show's lesser half hours.

All the way to the end, the show could get on such a role with a good string of episodes only to fall prey to a stinker, halting the momentum of the season. Woof, "Barter" is quite a dog. Its intentions are to spoof of a classic show featuring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (with Jill Jaress and Michael Santiago portraying them in broad strokes) adding a sci-fi twist to shake things up, but the execution of the whole episode aims for laughs through the approach of satirizing a sitcom from twenty years when the episode was made. Problem is that all the performances go way overboard (for instance, Santiago mimics Arnaz by trying to use "thin" instead of thing and the Hispanic accent is excremental, while Jaress does the "wahhhh" bit when her son's fate is "mishandled") while the sci-fi premise (alien salesman with an attraction to ammonia (!!!) offers to barter with family after a device of his is misused to "freeze" the son while in the middle of a raucous drum session in the living room) is so silly (not clever) the whole ordeal is taxing to endure. The language of Jack Carter plays with the English language but does so in the most oogly-boogly, wretched way possible. The steam that comes from his ears (and the train steam noise made during it) after a nice dose of ammonia just exemplifies the method of goofy comedy this episode considers funny. The ending, where the parents must give up their child or else he remains frozen, is one of those pulled-out-of-the-ass developments I just found rather odd…it seems those involved in this farce felt the need to include a punishment for the family (punishment enough for us having to sit through this).

Tales from the Darkside: Barter starts as housewife Rosie (Jill Jaress) hears a knock at her back door (insert sexual innuendo here...) & standing there is an elderly man who calls himself Klaatzu (Jack Carter) who ask's for some ammonia to drink. Rosie gives him some & in return Klaatzu who is in fact an alien gives her a stop-start device which enables Rosie to 'stop' her hyper active young son Little Nicky (Miguel Alamo) & then 'start' him up again at will. Unfortunately the device breaks & Little Nicky remains frozen unable to move...

Episode 19 from season 4 this Tales from the Darkside story originally aired in the US during July 1988, directed by Christopher T. Welch this is a pretty dreadful penultimate episode. The plot synopsis & another user comment on the IMDb claim that Barter is a spoof of the TV series sitcom I Love Lucy (1951 - 1957) which ran for over one hundred & eighty episodes, the problem is being from the UK I have never seen an episode of I Love Lucy & have no idea what it's about so those connections & subtleties are completely lost on me. The script by Jule Selbo does have a sort of cheesy American sitcom feel about it, the set, the all American family & a certain tackiness about it but that's hardly any sort of recommendation. The actual story is a light hearted tale about an alien who gives a woman a device to turn her annoying son off & the resulting 'hilarity' that ensues as the device breaks so she can't start him again. Really poor uninspiring stuff all round to be honest that doesn't make any real sense & doesn't entertain in the slightest. Quite what this oddball American sitcom parody is doing in a supposedly horror themed anthology series called Tales from the Darkside is anybodies guess.

The last but one ever episode of Tales from the Darkside this follows the show's tradition for being set in one simple location with no special effects to speak of & a very limited cast. The guy who plays the alien Klaatzu is very irritating, the voice he has & the way he speaks in broken English really got on my nerves. The guy who played the father also puts in an annoying performance with an atrocious accent. This one has nothing to do with horror at all, the Sci-Fi links are tenuous & the whole episode feels unfunny, boring & just plain silly beyond belief.

Barter is the penultimate Tales from the Darkside episode & like so many before it there's no horror, no mystery, no suspense & an oddball story that goes nowhere & feels pointless even at a lowly twenty minutes.

I don't know why people dislike this episode so much. It's one of my favorites. Maybe people don't like it because it's more funny than scary. The ending is kind of scary, but even that is more sad than scary. I guess it doesn't really fit with Darkside because it isn't scary, or at least not the same kind of scary.

Or maybe the young folks watching Darkside for the first time now are too young ever to have seen I Love Lucy, so they just don't understand the episode. The episode does a great job of mimicking how old TV sitcoms were. Even the awkward, goofy not-really-funny style of alien talk and steaming-ears of Klaatzu was funny in the way of being a mimic of the old-fashioned type of humor. That goofy-type humor isn't really my kind of thing, personally, but I recognize the parody of that humor style in this episode, and it's funny that they used that style in the episode. Maybe young folks these days just don't get it because they don't have the reference of the old shows that used that kind of humor. Young viewers probably also didn't catch things like the Gene Krupa reference. It was also funny how "menace" was said as "mense", which is pretty much the opposite of menace.

Same with the way Little Nicky yelled every line. Kids in shows back then usually said their lines very loudly, I think to be picked up by the overhead microphones, maybe. Young viewers might not have caught that detail, but I got a laugh out of that! It's my favorite detail that made this episode really feel like an old Lucy show.

Or maybe this generation is dependent on a laugh track, which is something that this episode did not carry over from the real Lucy show. Maybe a laugh track would've helped this episode. Think about it: how many Lucy episodes would you actually think are funny if there were no laugh track? Some, yes. But most of the real Lucy show, like Lucy's "eeeugggh" faces and all that, would seem just awkward if there were no laugh track. Still, the old I I Love Lucy was a lot better than sitcoms these days, which have zero actual humor and just have characters insult each other while a laugh track lets viewers know it's supposed to be funny -- which it isn't. Lucy and other shows of that time had a totally different kind of humor that the young viewers of Tales of the Darkside these days probably just don't understand when watching this Darkside episode online.

I don't want to spoil any more than that, so I'll just say it's a clever, funny, light-hearted Lucy parody with a sad (and scary in a way) ending.