User Reviews

***SPOILERS*** Known as the class comedian medical student Doc Carroll, Joby Baker, plans to pull a practical joke and his friend and roommate in collage Skip Baxter, Michael Parks, when his drinking gets out of hand at a collage Halloween party. With Skip out cold after consuming two dozen bottles of beer he finds himself the next morning his his room with a dead body in his bed. Told by a shocked Doc that he drank himself silly and took the bar waitress Ruby, Jennifer West, home and in a drunken rage strangled her!

Trying to hide the body and keep from being arrested for murder Skip the star halfback on the collage football team starts to miss his practice sessions concentrating more on what to do with the dead body in his room then his football obligations for the team. Trying to get rid of the corpse Skip while driving around town ends up at Mrs. Fisher's, Ruth McDevitt, house who offers him a drink breakfast and a bright idea. Mrs.Fisher telling Skip that today is the day that they pick up the garbage he decides to dismember the body put it in paper and plastic bags and have the garbage man dispose of it!

What Skip didn't know was that the corpse he found in his bed wasn't that of Ruby but of a stiff from the morgue that Doc kid or corpse napped in order to teach him a lesson in not getting himself drunk and making a complete a** of himself in public! But now with the joke now over Doc desperately needs to return the corpse to the morgue that he's in charge of before his boss Professor Dawson, Martin Blaine, finds out that it's missing.

***SPOILERS*** Doc not knowing that the dead body has been hacked to pieces and disposed at the local garbage dump tells Skip about it. Skip in him finding out about the joke Doc pulled on him he now has only one choice to solve Doc's very pressing problem. Get a new dead body to replaced the now missing and chopped to pieces old one. And you can just guess who's body Skip has in mind!

'The Cadaver' is one of the most remarkable Hitchcock Hour episodes because it has real emotional and psychological resonance. Michael Parks is excellent as Skip, a handsome medical student who'd rather party and be a playboy than sit down and study. His room-mate Doc, very well-acted by Joby Baker, is a notorious practical joker and is often admonished by faculty for his attempts at gallows humor. When Skip's drunken antics cause him to miss too many classes and football practice sessions, Doc decides to intervene. He decides to scare Skip straight with a whopper of a practical joke.

All that needs to be said here is that the joke is much more effective than Doc expected it to be. Parks's reaction to the prank is expertly played and his brief stay in the company of great veteran actress Ruth McDevitt is a high point. An episode not to be missed, for dark humor and some fine performances.

An interesting story, cute but with ghoulish underpinnings. It sounds, in precis, like a comic caper. A medical student, Michael Parks, has been goofing off a lot -- getting drunk at night, playfully abusing the girls, skipping class and football practice. His roommate, Joby Baker, decides to snap him out of it by stealing a cadaver from the dissecting room, planting it in Parks' bed, and telling Parks that he is the murderer. Baker figures that Parks, who blanks out after a good night's drunk, will be so terrified that he'll straighten up and fly right, and Baker intends to return the stolen corpse to it rightful slab later in the day.

He's misjudged Parks, who bundles the cadaver into a rug and tries to dispose of it by driving it around in the back of his convertible, looking for a likely spot. The story has to stretch its plausibility until it creaks in order to give Parks access to a home carpenter's shop where he can saw the body into pieces and leave it in a couple of garbage cans.

Baker is horrified to learn that the cadaver has disappeared and when he reveals the joke to Parks, he learns that he shouldn't have revealed the joke to Parks. Parks goes completely bonkers.

The bonkers part has been neatly set up from the beginning, because the first two times we see Parks in action he drinks himself into insensibility, but not before he pulls a few stunts that are less funny than bizarre. I mean -- throwing your shrieking, fully clothed girl friend under a shower and then standing there under the spray and cackling maniacally?

None of the performances stand out except Michael Parks, and he's hard to figure. He has the features of a movie star, or at least it seems so, but his acting talent isn't easy to judge. He isn't given very many lines, and some of them sound like they're coming from the throat of Montgomery Clift.

He's probably a first-year med student because he's evidently taking a class in Gross Anatomy. I don't think Jody Baker or anyone else could convince him that the body in his room has recently died. By the time they reach the dissecting room they're all withered and leathery and reek of formaldehyde.

The story is a little weak in detail but it's ultimately tragic. Parks is a nice-looking and intelligent kid and it would be nice to see him succeed and become a doctor and live like a Roman Emperor in Rancho Palisades. Instead he winds up hanging from a pillar, a raving lunatic.

You get the idea where this story is heading but that doesn't make it any more believable. Doc Carroll's (Joby Baker) plan to 'scare straight' his buddy and roommate Skip Baxter (Michael Parks) goes awry when the semi-sober Baxter decides to be pro-active about getting rid of the corpse Doc placed in his bed to fool Skip into thinking he killed someone. In any other program, wrapping a dead body in a rug to get rid of it demands the utmost secrecy, usually under cover of darkness, but here, Skip tosses it in the back seat of his convertible and drives off in search of a convenient dumping ground. I won't even get into what a mess he would have made by using a power saw to cut up the body (well, I guess I just did), nor will I mention how easily the sanitation worker hefted a garbage bag with a body in it (oops, did it again!). I did get a kick out of Mrs. Fister (Ruth McDevitt), capped off by her chicken liver omelet; that was a humorous diversion. Professor Dawson's (Martin Blaine) insistence that the missing cadaver be replaced gave Skip the bright idea that maybe it should be done by Doc, thereby proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Baxter was never playing with a full deck right from the start.

Despite the dumb story, look who appears in a significant supporting role - Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon, Rafer Johnson! He certainly had the look of a college football player, by contrast, teammate Skip Baxter looked only about half his size!

A medical student steals a corpse as a practical joke to scare his alcoholic roommate who thinks it is a waitress who he is friendly with on campus. That is supposed to be amusing? But wait, the alcoholic panics, wraps the body in a rug, drives away with it, befriends an amazingly stupid woman, puts the body in her garage, and proceeds to dismember it with late husband's power saw. Now, that is funny. How did an episode like this get on the air in 1963 in such bad taste? After viewing something like this, would one want to donate one's body to medical science?