ecl@hocsj.UUCP (10/28/84)
TWILIGHT ZONE SILVER ANNIVERSARY
NIGHTMARES
Two film reviews by Mark R. Leeper
I saw these programs on two consecutive nights. Both are anthologies
originally made to be shown separately on TV. The TWILIGHT ZONE SILVER
ANNIVERSARY is made up of three of the four episodes that until now never
got put into syndication. Two were held out because of lawsuits over their
originality, and the third for reasons never made public. A fourth episode
that never made it to syndication is considered offensive to the Japanese-
American community and will probably never be shown again on TV. (These
facts are from THE TWILIGHT ZONE COMPANION.) NIGHTMARES is a collection of
four episodes of an unsold TV series which were edited together and released
as a theatrical film. Now it has made it back to TV, or at least cable TV.
The episodes in THE TWILIGHT ZONE SILVER ANNIVERSARY were chosen for
their previous unavailability, not for their quality. They are pretty much
run-of-the-mill. They come from later and somewhat uninspired seasons. The
program started with a little boilerplate on how great the series was (and
it was some times), all the great stars who got their start there, etc.
The first episode was "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain." This is
a very minor youth serum story starring Patrick O'Neal (who hosted THE
TWILIGHT ZONE SILVER ANNIVERSARY). To call this predictable is an
understatement. There is no simpler plot for a horror story about a youth
serum. There *is* only one thing that can go wrong with a youth serum. It
told that story.
Next came an hour-long episode called "Miniature." With a half-hour TV
show there are about eleven minutes to establish a situation, eleven minutes
for plot complication, and about two minutes for the intro and credits.
Most of what made the half-hour TWILIGHT ZONEs good was clever use of the
eleven minutes of plot complication. That part had to move very fast. The
hour-long TWILIGHT ZONEs had the same time for set-up, credits, etc., and
the extra twenty-four minutes went into plot complication. That meant there
were thirty-five minutes to do what Serling used to do in eleven. So much
for Serling's skill of telling a story fast. The hour-long episodes were
real foot-draggers for the most part. "Miniature" would have made a good
half-hour episode, but it is tedious in the hour format.
It stars Robert Duvall as a poor friendless schnook who is molly-
coddled by his mother and ridiculed by his co-workers. He does, however,
have one thing that makes his life interesting: he looks into a particular
doll house in a museum and the wooden dolls come to life and play out a
story for him.
To enhance the fairytale quality, a process has been used to show what
goes on in the doll house in color. This a computer process in which a
technician gets the first frame of a scene on a screen and paints it using
an electronic pen. The computer then recognizes the same field in the next
frame, so it automatically paints it the same way. The technician paints
only the new fields that have been created by, say, a character coming into
the frame. The result is not as believable as a color film, but it is
colored as well as could possibly be done by hand. The colors look like
they came from old French postcards. Duvall's performance is a little
overdone, a pity considering the superiority of his acting later in his
career. This is an okay story, but it is too much like other TWILIGHT ZONE
stories and is overly long.
"Sounds and Silences" is about a noisy man who is punished by first
being made overly sensitive to sound, then under-sensitive. The three
stories act as reminders that though TWILIGHT ZONE at best was excellent,
many episodes were fit for one watching but not much more.
Somewhat better on the whole were the four stories from NIGHTMARES.
The opening to the film (and presumably it would have been the opening to
each episode of the series had the series been made) is a logo every bit as
disquieting as the logo of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. The viewer is racing over a
landscape and under an overcast sky, both in electric blue. They come
together at a dark horizon punctuated by two red disembodied eyes. Not that
it buys a whole lot, but the logo is eerie.
The first of the four stories (called, as I remember, "Terror in
Topanga") is a standard suspense story. It concerns a housewife so addicted
to smoking that she goes out for cigarettes in spite of warnings that an
escaped homocidal maniac is loose and doing his thing. The story is built
around a surprise plot twist. In fact, the twist is a little too
understated and short. There is more padding than story, but the padding is
presented crisply and suspensefully enough that even if the plot twist is
missed the story is worth seeing.
"The Bishop of Battle" is named for a mysterious videogame. The main
character is a videogame addict who has a compulsion to find out what
happens when a player gets to the 13th level. "Some guy in Jersey did it
twice," we are told. That's a good touch, incidentally, since it is clear
from the story that nobody would get to level 13 a second time and the
rumors are apocryphal. In classic EC comic tradition the story starts out
by showing us the main character is a videogame hustler. In the old EC
horror comics all sorts of nasty things happened to people, but they were
always evil-doers and the unpleasantness was always presented as justice.
The idea of something *really nasty* waiting on an unattainable level of a
videogame is clever and original enough to justify the story, even if the
actual nasty does not come up to audience expectations.
"Benediction" is the clinker of the set. In it we have a Catholic
priest who is losing his faith getting a sign that the Devil exists, in the
form of a flashy black pick-up truck with tinted windows. It borrows
heavily from THE EXORCIST, PREY, and especially THE CAR. Only one very nice
dream sequence and one imaginative entrance of this hell-on-wheels truck
make this segment watchable.
NIGHTMARES saves its best segment until last. "Night of the Rat" stars
Veronica Cartwright and Richard Masur as a couple whose house has a rat
problem... On top of having a few small rats, they have the leader of the
pack--a giant (well, 6-foot) demon rat out of German folklore. Not too bad
a story at all. The special effects were even adequate. Not really a piece
of frightening horror, but not too bad.
What's the moral of all this? Well, I guess it is that the great old
series we remember just seem great because we remember the best. THE
TWILIGHT ZONE had more weak stories than good ones. I am watching some
third-season STAR TREKs and they are really hokey at times. These are
series that started good and built their reputation on their best efforts.
TV fantasy was good in the golden old days: the days of the first couple of
seasons of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, the first and maybe the second season of STAR
TREK, but even that was pretty spotty. This is another of those golden
years it seems, because TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE so far has had more good
episodes than bad. NIGHTMARES, had it sold, would have had at least three
good episodes. The best shows were very good in the old days, just like the
best of British television is pretty good. But that does not mean that the
average show from Britain of the 1950's was all that good. It may be that
the highs are not as good. The best of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE may not
affect us like the best of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, but then series lasted longer
in those days.
(Evelyn C. Leeper for)
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!lznv!mrl