Friday the 13th: The Series (TV Series) Root of All Evil (1987) User Reviews

The Cursed Shredder

[claudio_carvalho · 7/10 · 21 March 2024]

A man named Harley O'Connor throws his mother, Mrs. O'Connor, inside a shredder while cleaning their lawn in a suburban house. Months later, Jack opens a letter from a costumer to Lewis with one hundred dollars inside and thanking for his shopping. Ryan tracks down and finds that the letter is from Harley, and the sold item is a portable shredder. They go to Haley's house and finds it is derelict, and soon they learn that Haley is interned in a mental facility. Their further investigation shows that a man named Robert "Smitty" Smith bought the apparatus in an auction. Smitty is an old man that owns a small gardening company that is working for the wealthy Mrs. Amanda Harrington arranging her garden. His low-life employee Adrian is blackmailed by a vagrant and kills him. He throws his body in the shredder and receives money from the machine. Soon he learns that more valuable the person he throws inside the shredder, more money he receives. Ryan and Micki meet Smitty and offer a large amount to him to buy the shredder, and Smitty accepts the offer. Adrian overhears the conversation, and Smitty becomes his next victim in his crime spree. Meanwhile, Lloyds visits Micki to press her to return home with him; otherwise, he will call off the wedding.

"Root of All Evil" is one of the best episodes of "Friday the 13th: The Series", with a good story of a cursed shredder. Enrico Colantoni perform a great villain, so scum that in the end he worths nothing for the shredder. The end of the romance of Lloyd and Micki is also entertaining. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Onde Caminha o Mal" ("Where Evil Walks")

Money doesn't grow on trees

[allexand · 5/10 · 2 July 2009]

A cursed mulcher finds its way into the hands of a lowly gardener who quickly discovers that it has a rather gruesome way of determining a person's net worth...

The most interesting thing about "Root of All Evil" is that is stars a young Enrico Colantoni, who would star in the hit sitcom "Just Shoot Me" a decade later. Also, we're finally given resolution to Micki's engagement.

This episode is not quite as good as its predecessors as the villain is rather dull, most of the victims are so annoying that you want them to get fed to the mulcher, the villain is given a prime opportunity to kill Ryan and doesn't, we're presented with another antique that can't possibly fit in the vault, and the opening scene features a woman who suffers from "80's horror victim syndrome" and just stands there and allows herself to get stabbed with a rake.

The one thing that it has going for it is that the Lloyd storyline is brought back and finally given proper closure. Once again, it shows that the trio are human and that despite knowing they have a duty, things aren't always black-and-white for them and they have their own wants and desires beyond Curious Goods. I also give them a thumbs-up for not going down what would seem like the obvious route and severing Micki and Lloyd's relationship by having him fall victim to a cursed antique (though Ryan and Jack would not be so lucky with their loved ones). Given the fact that Lloyd was supposed to be wealthy and the mulcher generated money I fully expected him to end up as mulch. I also liked the poetic justice given to the villain when he finally ends up in the mulcher.

"Root of All Evil" is an OK episode overall. It's not a huge step down for the series like "The Poison Pen" or "Cupid's Quiver," but as good as the past few episodes have been overall, they would still get even better.

Average.

[The_King_of_Cool · 5/10 · 16 September 2017]

Episode 9: Root of All Evil- ***

Jack, Micki and Ryan set off to track down a cursed mulcher. Micki's fiancé Lloyd (Barclay Hope) shows up at the shop demanding answers from Micki. This was an OK episode, far from the best, but also far from the worst it's simply average. This episode guest stars Enrico Colantoni under the name Rico Colantoni. This was the first of many episodes Rob Hedden would write and he'd also later direct some episodes. Hedden would later write and direct Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.

A misstep after three good to great episodes

[movieman_kev · 3/10 · 25 March 2009]

Micki and Ryan search for an cursed lawn mulcher (kind of akin to the wood-chipper in Fargo) that has the power of spitting out money relative to how rich the person/victim that's fed to it is. It lies in the possession of a gardener's assistant who uses it at first to get out of the debt that he's in before getting greedy. Also the sub-plot about Micki's fiancé, Lloyd (Barclay Hope) comes to a head (good riddance).

After the previous three episodes of the series which progressively got better (Shadow Boxer being a personal fave of mine), this outing was a bit of a letdown to put it diplomatically. The cursed antique was silly, the main villain was too stupid to be menacing in the least & I really didn't care for the sub-plot. Thankfully this was merely a small misstep for the series as a whole, but an unwelcome one.

My Grade: D

We and you too, you most of all, dear boy, will have to pass through the bitter water before we reach the sweet.

[Gislef · 3/10 · 8 August 2020]

I remember watching this episode when it first aired. And... it's even worse than I remember. For one thing, Enrico (Rico) Colantoni is wasted as the laughing drooling maniac killer of the week. At the end he falls into the mulcher and... good riddance to him. I guess they couldn't get Denis Forest for this episode.

Then there's the mulcher as a cursed antique. An antique? Okay, when I think "antique" a mulcher isn't the first thing that comes to mind.

The victims are all forgettable. Veteran actor Jack Mather as Smitty is probably the best of them. I don't even know what Charles did, since any explanatory dialogue they had for him was rendered inaudible by a long-distance mic. I guess he's a landscaper. Or maybe an architect. Why does he wear a suit while wandering around the garden. Who knows? Who cares?

Lloyd is a jerk, and good riddance to bad rubbish. The fact that he breaks into Micki's room via the window, after spying on her, doesn't say a lot for him as either a lawyer or a human being. And later he breaks into the store again, to get Micki drunk and presumably have sex with her.

Rewatching it thirty years later doesn't do the episode any favors. The whole bit with Harley is pretty much a waste. It rather awkwardly puts the trio on the mulcher's trail, but the starting flashback (which isn't revealed as a flashback until later) doesn't help. If Harley was such a big money maker and partner with Lewis in Satanic pact-making, why is he working in his mother's backyard doing gardening with her?

Why does the interior of the mulcher flash red? I guess because it's the "mouth of Hell", but nothing is ever made of that except the symbolism. At the end Adrian produces nothing but blood as Jack says that he wasn't even worth a dollar. Oh, the poetic irony! But why don't the earlier victims produce any blood? The mulcher not only converts their bodies into money, but converts their blood into money? Isn't that convenient.

Lloyd's off-handed comment that Ryan is Micki's cousin "only by marriage" puts a finger on why I never bought the two as romantic partners. Yeah, they're not blood relations, but they're cousins in name. Instead there seems to be hint of romantic interest, which Lloyd's comment gaslights. And which seemed to be an early aim by the production staff, and later reared its head when Johnny showed up. We don't need romance: cursed antique hunting is serious business, folks! That, and Micki and Ryan had no romantic chemistry anyway.

There are also other little fun bits. Like how everyone on the gardening staff seems to keep constant tabs on Smitty. So when he disappears, Jack talks to everyone on the staff and determines Smitty's non-whereabouts. I guess the gardeners have quite a gossip "grapevine". Heh. And Jack pretending to be close to Lewis to get close to Harley. Which doesn't result in anything, except Jack learning about how the wealth of the victims producers bigger bills. Which isn't an important part of the plot anyway. I suppose it gives Adrian a reason to kill Amanda. But he doesn't seem to need one anyway: he's another of the show's early one-dimensional psycho killers.

Speaking of one-dimensional... what's up with the vagrant that knows Adrian by name? He says that Adrian owes money to legbreakers, but we never hear about that again. I guess this early in the proceedings, the production staff didn't want to risk making Adrian in any way sympathetic by giving him a justifiable reason for getting the money. They'd do better later in the second season "The Mephisto Ring", when killer Donald Wren is threatened by legbreakers.

Fortunately, this is the last really bad episode. We've got through the bad, now the good. Hence the review title.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?