Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

3.5 / 5 Jan '09

Tagline: You're travelling through another dimension. A Dimension, not only of sight and sound, but of mine. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!
Directed by: Joe Dante
Written by: John Landis
Actors include: Vic Morrow, Kathleen Quinlan, John Lithgow
Genre: Sci-Fi, Horror
Length: 101 minutes
Banned: Nope
Country: USA

Review:
Well I'd have to say that I'm rather disappointed in this one. I'd definitely known about the tragedy surrounding this film which made me way more curious, well that and I really like the original series (from what I've seen so far). I guess first I'll talk about the tragedy. See for one of the segments John Landis hired underaged children that were illegal to work to film in a night sequence in the Vietnam feature. The children and Vic Morrow (Jennifer Jason Leigh's dad) were trudging through waist deep water when something happened to the helicopter flying above, and the blades cut the children and Vic in half and killed them in real life. Anyhow there is a lot of controversy surrounding this, and since I'm here to review the movie I'll move on. Anyhow aside from the first little montage, the next sequence is the Vietnam one. It's about a bigot played by Morrow who gets a taste of his own medicine. It definitely seems unfinished, and not all that great but I guess they did whatever they could with it, it seems to be the only story not based upon an original tale. From there we go into Spielberg's segment which was the worst of the lot. It was the remake of the episode with the old folks and kicking the can being the fountain of youth. It was pretty much the same as the original episode, but I didn't really like it either, too sentimental and not enough weirdness, why was that one chosen I wonder? From there they did a version of the awesome episode "It's A Wonderful Life" only this version was far from awesome. They took it to beyond absurd (and although there were some cheeky references to the original) and I really honestly disliked it. The only reason to bother with this episode is the conclusion and a colorful remake of the gremlin on the wing of the plane sketch (even if I preferred the original). It was still a pretty fun little episode that Lithgow made! Still there wasn't anything that interesting here and although I think they tried, it just wasn't a very good homage to the original sadly. Quite a disappointment, but still one of the most interesting tales behind the scenes though!

Availability:  On DVD & Blu-Ray