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Twilight Zone - The Movie [Blu-ray] by Joe Dante, John Landis
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DVD Cover InformationDirector: Joe Dante, John Landis Brand: Warner Brothers DVD: Region Code 0 Audio: English (Original Language); French (Original Language); German (Original Language); Vietnamese (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed); Spanish (Dubbed) Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen Picture Format: 1.85:1 Running Time: 101 minutes DVD Release Date: 2007-10-09 Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of Twilight Zone - The Movie [Blu-ray]Movie Review: Too Affectionate and Sentimental Summary: 3 StarsTWILIGHT ZONE - THE MOVIE made headlines long before it opened when actor Vic Morrow and two Asian child actors were killed in a horrific accident during filming.
The scandal, the trial, and the resulting publicity cast a dark shadow on what is otherwise a harmlessly sentimental trip into the Twilight Zone.
The opening with Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks is pure John Landis, more of the same laugh/fright effect that worked so well in AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. But Landis' contribution to the tales, an original story not from the Zone canon, isn't up to Rod Serling standards. The comeuppance of bigot Vic Morrow get repititious and--honestly--problematic when you consider that the US soldier is lumped with the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
Spielberg's choice is the lamest: cute elderly people get to become cute little kids for a night. Any otherworldly wonder is lost under a heavy flow of Speilberg syrup.
Joe Dante has fun with his tale but his sappy ending--far different than the original TV version!--could've been directed by Spielberg.
This is THE TWILIGHT ZONE, people, not THE GOONIES.
Only the last time, my personal favorite of all Twilight Zone episodes (the original starred William Shatner, hilariously lampooned in the second ACE VENTURE movie), reaches the Zone. John Lithgow is brilliant as a spazzing passenger in Richard Matheson's "Nightmare at Thirty Thousand Feet." George Miller (THE ROAD WARRIOR) does an awesome job of putting you in the plane by filming the sequence with a handheld camera.
Lithgow's performance was so good that he SHOULD have been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards. Well, he was. But since THE TWILIGHT ZONE was tainted by the tragedy of Vic Morrow's death, Lithgow was nominated for his six minutes of standing around in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (you forgot he was even in that, right?). Such is Hollywood.
Think of all the Zone scripts that screamed for a big screen, big budget treatment. "To Serve Man"? A condensed version of Burgess Meredith as the librian who survives the world-ending nuclear holocaust? "The Martians Have Landed on Maple Street"? And Spielberg picks a story with adorable little tykes and codgers.
Not what it should have been.
Summary of Twilight Zone - The Movie [Blu-ray]Studio: Warner Home Video Release Date: 10/09/2007 Run time: 101 minutes Rating: Pg A highly anticipated release for fantasy fans in the summer of 1983, Twilight Zone: The Movie presents three adaptations of classic episodes (and one original story) from Rod Serling's anthology series by a quartet of the biggest directors in Hollywood. With Stephen Spielberg (also the film's co-producer), John Landis, George Miller (The Road Warrior, Happy Feet), and Joe Dante behind the camera for this portmanteau feature, one might expect Serling's episodes to positively gleam with star power, but the truth is that Twilight Zone: The Movie is a hit-and-miss affair. Landis opens with an amusing nod to the original series' pop-culture appeal with Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks riffing on their favorite episodes before a hair-raising shock finale; unfortunately, his second offering is a bland morality plan about racial tolerance that will forever be overshadowed by the accident that claimed the lives of star Vic Morrow and two child actors during shooting. Spielberg's take on George Clayton Johnson's "Kick the Can" looks lovely and is well performed by its cast (especially Scatman Crothers), but it struggles to bear up under the weight of treacley sentiment so common to the director's films at the time. Dante's version of Jerome Bixby's "It's A Good Life" (about a boy with monstrous powers) is rife with his trademark energy and black humor (and his cast of regular players, including Kevin McCarthy and William Schallert, strike the right balance of terror and comedy). But it's Miller's revamp of Richard Matheson's legendary "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" that delivers the biggest payoff, thanks to John Lithgow's super-charged turn as a nervous airline passenger who's convinced he's seen a monster tampering with the plane's wing. Burgess Meredith (himself a veteran of the original TZ) provides narration; the widescreen DVD features no extras save for the original trailer and a remastered digital transfer. --Paul Gaita
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