Twilight Zone: The Movie (June 23 at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE screens Friday June 23rd at 7:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Rod Serling’s revered TV half-hour anthology The Twilight Zone, aired originally from 1959 to 1965, told different sci-fi and fantasy-tinged morality plays each week. It’s long shadow inspired this Warner Brothers big-budget movie anthology that made its theatrical debut in 1983 – an era when the blockbuster box-office returns of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg fantasias led the entertainment rackets to lavishly remake, relaunch and reboot all the way-out properties they owned the rights to. Whether the studios “got it” or not.

Three parts of the four installments in TWILIGHT ZONE – THE MOVIE remake favorite TZ episodes, but the first, directed by John Landis (hot after AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON) is an original. It's about a bigoted businessman (Vic Morrow), ranting about losing a job promotion to a Jew, who instantly finds himself cruelly knocked about the whole 20th century, suffering the same persecutions as blacks in the Jim Crow South, Jews in the Holocaust, and Indochinese during the Vietnam War. This was the featurette in which actor Morrow (and two child actors) died in an on-camera accident, perishing beneath a crashing helicopter while filming the Vietnam section. The horrific waste made even more disappointing by the segment itself, a one-note bashing of a nasty guy that feels like something whipped up by slumming liberal Hollywood film-school students.

Dope Island: Mayan Eyes Have Seen the Glory of...The Outer Space Connection

If you are reading this, it is likely you survived the Mayan Calendar running out, or you are a conquering alien. Let's assume the first. Nothing happened on December 21, 2012, outside of the usual binge-buying of firearms by gun nuts, while, faraway in tall towers, business schemers plotted more layoffs. Christmas season fourth-quarter cutbacks, foreclosures and all that. Otherwise, business as usual, nothing to see here.

Well, there was one thing to see, and I saw it, courtesy of a lucky thrift-store purchase. It is a theatrically released documentary that had much to do with creating the Mayan-doomsday myth, 1975's THE OUTER SPACE CONNECTION. This feature can probably be secured now in a variety of high-tech-downloads I little understand; I got it the old fashioned way, a fuzzy VHS copy in a battered slipcase cover in a thrift store.