...doesn't quite capture the magic of the old television series, but it makes a good stab at trying.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
"You wanna see something really scary?"
--Dan Aykroyd, "Twilight Zone: The Movie"
From 1959 to 1964, one of the most inventive shows ever broadcast, "The Twilight Zone," thrilled television audiences. Co-written and hosted by Rod Serling, it was an amazing series and one whose 148 individual installments viewers continue to enjoy today. Serling went on to do "The Loner" from 1965-66 and "Night Gallery" from 1969-73, among other things, before his untimely death in 1975. It would be only a few years later that Hollywood paid its ultimate tribute to the classic program and made "Twilight Zone: The Movie" in 1983. To do Serling and his series justice, producers Steven Spielberg and John Landis hired four of cinema's top sci-fi/fantasy directors (including Spielberg and Landis) for the job of helming the film's four separate segments.
Needless to say, when you're dealing with various unrelated episodes, you're going to get variable results. Despite the big-name directors, you'll probably find some of the segments better than others. Like everything else in life, though, the likes and dislikes will vary from viewer to viewer, so there is a little something in the picture for everyone. I just wish the overall movie had been more consistent.
Things start out wonderfully with a short prologue featuring Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd as a couple of buddies out for a nighttime ride on a lonely back road. If the rest of the movie had maintained the caliber of this opening bit, I would have been able to recommend the whole picture without reservation. Following that, actor Burgess Meredith, who starred in several of the old television show's most-notable installments, introduces each segment in place in the late Rod Serling.
The first major episode comes from writer and director John Landis ("Animal House," "The Blues Brothers," "An American Werewolf in London"), and it is the only episode written specifically for the new movie, the others being adapted from vintage TV scripts. The Landis segment is about a racist named Bill Connor (Vic Morrow), who thinks of himself as better than everybody else because he's a true-blue, white Anglo-Saxon American. After a boisterous, hate-filled, anti-everybody tirade in a bar, he finds himself suddenly thrust successively into Nazi Germany, the Deep South, and other situations where he learns firsthand the horrors of intolerance. It's an interesting premise, but it comes off as too preachy and too obvious, with not enough of a surprise ending. People these days probably know the episode best (and, unfortunately, the movie) because of a tragic helicopter accident on set that killed Morrow and two children.
Steven Spielberg directed the second segment, based on "Kick the Can" by George Clayton Johnson, Josh Rogan, and Richard Matheson. It's a rather sentimental tale about old folks at a rest home "where hope is just a memory." Into their midst comes Mr. Bloom (Scatman Crothers), an "elderly optimist" who tells them, "the day we stop playing is the day we start getting old." He teaches the despairing old people how to regain their sense of fun and worth. Crothers, as always, is terrific. I mean, when wasn't he? From "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" to "Silver Streak" to "The Cheap "Detective" to "The Shining," he was always good. The story itself is remarkably sweet, typical of Spielberg's more gushy moods and reminding one of some of the stories by Ray Bradbury as well.
Joe Dante ("The Howling," "Gremlins," "Matinee") did the third segment, based on "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby and Richard Matheson. It is by far the weirdest, most bizarre story of the bunch, about a schoolteacher, Helen Foley (Kathleen Quinlan), who gives a little boy a ride home after accidentally hitting him on his bike. But when she meets the boy's family, it's Looney Tunes time, literally. Although the episode is playful, funny, and not a little frightening, it leaves one strangely unfilled.
Average user rating (1-5):
Not yet rated.
Not yet rated.
[release]21853[/release]