The Twilight Zone: Dead Run (1985)

John de Lancie appears in a supporting role as Satan's V.P. of Human Resources.

Dead Run, the "B" episode 19 from the first season of the new hour long Twilight Zone, was a kind of perfect storm of good writing and good acting. Based on a short story of the same name by Greg Bear, the explosive writer of Moving Mars (Nebula Award winner 1990) and the stunning Queen of Angels, the episode is delivered by Steve Railsback (Life Force) and an ensemble cast of supporting actors including: Brent Spiner (Star Trek The Next Generation) in a cameo role as a Viet Nam era draft dodger, John de Lancie (Q from Star Trek The Next Generation) as Satan's V.P. and Barry Corbin (War Games, No Country For Old Men) as Hell's Trucker, Pete.

And the road to Hell needs drivers! Down-on-his-luck trucker Johnny Davis is just desperate enough to take this job. After some careful instruction from his pal Pete and a run-in with a gravel-throated minor demon with a mean case of pyromania - Johnny signs on with Hell's H.R. Dept. courtesy of John de Lancie.


The road to Hell itself is conducted by American truckers? It figures.

On his road trips from the world of the living to the "low road" to Hell (which looks a lot like Green Bay), Johnny interviews the ghostly souls of the damned. The doomed seem more than happy to recount their own personal tales of anguish and damnation to him.

On the final ride of the episode, Johnny frees four seemingly innocent souls while recollecting the Harrowing of Hell to them, the time between the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ Jesus when He descended into Hell (Acts 2:27 and Acts 2:31). Johnny points out the way to Heaven to his freed captives before getting back in his big rig to deliver the rest of his load of souls into the pit.

References:
Wikipedia, Dead Run
Wikipedia, John de Lancie
Wikipedia, Harrowing Of Hell

Flicks: Rope (1948)

Say Farley, what's with that strangled expression?

Rope (1948), a 70 year old movie that is definitive of "psychological thriller", was directed by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, with the screenplay by Arthur Laurents, actor Hume Cronyn, and Ben Hecht. Based on the play "Rope's End" by Patrick Hamilton Rope the movie stars James Stewart, John Dall as Brandon, and Farley Granger as Phillip - released by Warner Brothers in August of 1948.

Hitchcock's use of the illusion of one continuous shot to tell the story made film history by telling the electrifying story of a thrill-kill murder and the clues that eventually point to the guilt of the young murderers.


Boys! Now, when I said dinner was on me - I didn't mean literally.

Rope is a suspense film that runs like a stage-to-screen script from David Mamet who adapted Thomas Harris's Hannibal and wrote Wag The Dog. Rope is the first of Hitchcock's color (Technicolor) films and is notable for taking place in real time. Rope made $1.5 million bucks for a post-war WB Pictures when movie tickets were 5 cents apiece.

References:
Wikipedia, Rope (film)
Film Experience, Rope (1948)

This Flick is available at:

The Twilight Zone: The Invisible Man (1985)

To See The Invisible Man (from season one episode 40) was about as close as the 80's series got to the brilliance of Rod Serling or Richard Mathheson in the in the original 60's series.

Mitchell Chaplin (a faceted performance by Cotter Smith) is a man who has been found guilty of the crime of "coldness" - of not being friendly or open enough with those around him. According to the State, his punishment is to be rendered "invisible", a social outcast. For a period of one year, a scarring implant is to be placed on his forehead warns others to ignore him upon penalty of being sentenced to a similar fate.

What seems like a welcome chance to be left alone becomes a lesson in humility, compassion, and empathy, as Chaplin begins to feel the consequences of social isolation. Under the omnipresent eye of floating security drones that monitor all of society, people continually shun him. A blind man he meets, who can't see the mark, is refreshingly cordial, until a passing woman whispers the warning "invisible" to him. The blind man furiously curses Chaplin and turns away.

Misfortune after misfortune befalls Chaplin. His lowest point reached when he's denied medical care after being hit by a car due to his status. On the last day of his sentence, two guards enter his apartment and remove the implant, restoring him back to visible society.

Four months after completing his sentence, Chaplin is confronted in public by a young woman (whom he encountered during his invisibility) who now wears the scar of the implant. Knowing the law, initially he ignores her, but her crying moves him to turn around and hug her. As they are quickly surrounded by drones who announce a new sentence of invisibility for his crime as he declares that he can "see" the woman...

References:
Wikipedia, Twilight Zone: To See The Invisible Man
Postcards From The Zone, 1.40: To See The Invisible Man

The Twilight Zone: The Shadow Man (1985)

The Shadow Man, Episode 23 from season one, was directed by Joe Dante, who also directed The Twilight Zone Movie (1983) Gremlins (1984), and the original Howling (1981), is an interesting tale of a bullied kid who seeks a particularly strange and vicious revenge on a schoolyard bully.

Danny (Jonathan Ward) is the smartest and least-liked kid in school. A group of jocks, led by dumb jock Numero Uno "Eric" ambushes Danny to frighten him to death. Danny seeks a literal and frightening revenge when a mysterious Boogie Man-like entity crawls out from under Danny's bed that night. The demon indentifies himself as the Shadow Man. The being swears allegiance to Danny that he will never harm the person under whose bed he lives. Then, the Shadow Man leaves.

The next day, Danny tells his friend about the Shadow Man but his friend dismisses it. Later, Danny hears about two children were attacked by what witnesses say was a maniac that looked like a "shadowy man". That night, Danny falls asleep but wakes up as the Shadow Man, after reassuring Danny again, roams out into the night. Leanne, the girl he has a crush on, needs help in Algebra, so he goes to her house to help. She's impressed that he would come out with all the shadow man attacks going on.

Danny, knowing what he controls the Shadow Man, decides to schedule a fight with Eric the bully. Eric shows up, and so does the Shadow Man. As Eric the bully runs off Danny, unafraid, stays. Unfortunately, this Shadow Man starts choking Danny. Danny, asks, in shock, why the Shadow Man is hurting him.

The Shadow Man informs Danny that he is "a Shadow Man from under someone else's bed..." as Danny chokes to death in his icy hands.

References:
Wikipedia,Twilight Zone: The Shadow Man
Postcards From The Zone, 1.23: The Shadow Man

The Twilight Zone: There's Something In The Walls (1985)

In 1985, CBS brought the Twilight Zone back after 20 years. The new series often lacked the biting insight and character studies of the original series. Television production standards were different in the 1980's. There was less emphasis on actors and more emphasis on storyline. To counter the lackluster of the resurrected series, the second edition of three "Zones" and counting, the producers brought in director Wes Craven and writers Greg Bear and Stephen King.

Something in the Walls (season three episode 19) is bizarre, paranoid tale of Sharon Miles, an institutionalized woman (Deborah Raffin) who believes she is being chased by demons. Sharon wears all white clothes and sits in her all white room terribly frightened as she tries to convince a clinical psychiatrist that she's being chased by demons that manifest themselves in patterns. Any patterns. Anything but sheer, solid, blank white walls and clothing will sprout demons at her. Patterns to Sharon turn and swirl in her imagination (and some nice 80's effects work) into vicious demons that wanted to hurt or kill her.

Sharon tells her doctor she believes her son is in danger from these same pattern demons. One night, a storm damages Sharon's all-white, patternless room. The next morning her doctor finds her in a suddenly saner and tranquil state of mind. She tells him that "it was stupid to believe in such irrational fears" and intends to check herself out of the mental hospital.

The doctor notices the strange pattern in the corner of Sharon's immaculate room. The doctor thinks he hears something. Something like Sharon's panicked voice from the walls. The "real" Sharon is right in front of him - smiling. Sharon convinces the doctor to dismiss the noise. After all she's sane now. As she and the doctor begin to leave her room for the last time she looks up to see a wailing version of her own face in the pattern as the episode closes pondering the definition of sanity.

References:
Wikipedia, Twilight Zone: There's Something In The Walls
Postcards From The Zone, 3.19: There's Something In The Walls

The Twilight Zone: Two (1961)

Charlie Bronson ends his lonesome wandering in the post-Apocalyptic world of Two.

Two (season three episode 66) aired in 1961, featured two enemy soldiers, a man and a woman, facing paranoia and destruction in a post-Apocalyptic world that had nearly bombed itself into exinction.

The episode opens on a female soldier of a final atomic war, her face dirty and her army uniform tattered. The woman (played by future Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery) stumbles into a deserted, burnt out city. She looks into some of the shop windows then finds a restaurant. where she searches for food. The woman finds a can of chicken, but before she can open it, a man (played by Charles Bronson) walks in and eyes the food from the doorway.

Recognizing his uniform as an enemy uniform, the woman begins defending herself and her findings, initially throwing pots and pans, and attempting engaging in hand to hand combat with peak physical condition Charlie Bronson. Not a bright idea, lady!

The man knocks her out and begins to eat ravenously while the woman lies unconscious on the floor. He notices a calendar with a woman on the wall and turns to look back at his opponent. The man seems to realize that he needs companionship more than he wants to continue a pointless conflict.


Elizabeth Montgomery says "Hello" the old-fashioned way: with lead.

When she comes to, the woman understands none of the English the man uses to reassure her. However, she follows Bronson from the restaurant to a theater where he stares at a poster advertising a romantic film (entitled "Enough Romance"?). The man turns to smile at the woman again hinting that he longs for her companionship. But hostility and suspicion flare again when they run across skeletal remains at the theater entrance. They each take up their nearby rifles simultaneously aiming at each other. After a tense moment Bronson walks away only to be grazed and slightly wounded by the his female counterpart.

In the end of the episode, they shed their uniforms. With their guns slung over their shoulders, they walk away side by side along the road, more closely resembling a bride and groom than enemy soldiers.


References:
Wikipedia, The Twilight Zone: Two
The Original Twilight Zone, Episode Guide

The Twilight Zone: The Obsolete Man (1961)

The Hall Of Injustice serves up nothing but hilarious death sentences - and that's just for Misdemeanors!

The Obselete Man (from season two episode 65) takes place in a totalitarian state. Burgess Meredith stars as Romney Wordsworth a man put on trial for the crime of being "obsolete." His occupation, to the shock of everyone, is being that of a librarian - a profession that became punishable by death when the State eliminated literacy. To make matters worse, Wordsworth also believes in God which, funny enough, is also punishable by death. The State has declared that there is no God. Wordsworth is prosecuted by the leader and figurehead of this society known only as the Chancellor who declares before an assembled court: Wordsworth, not being an conformist asset to the State, shall be executed.

Upon being convicted of obsolescence, Wordsworth is given a choice as to his method of execution. Drawing a curious reaction from the court, he cryptically requests that he be granted a personal assassin to whom he may disclose his preferred method of death, the Chancellor himself. He also requests that his execution be televised.

In compliance with the condemned man's wishes, a camera is installed in Wordsworth's study to broadcast his death live to the nation, so it's citizens may see Wordsworth in his final hours. He summons the Chancellor, who shows up at 11:15 PM. After some discussion, Wordsworth reveals to the unsuspecting chancellor that he has locked the door, and that his chosen method of death is by an explosive hidden in the room and set to go off at midnight.

Wordsworth intends to show the nation how a spiritual man faces death and proceeds to read Psalm 23 and the beginning of Psalm 53, among others, from his illegal Bible. He also points out that, as the events are being broadcast live, the State will risk losing face by trying to rescue the high-ranking Chancellor. As the time winds down, Wordsworth's calm acceptance of death stands in sharp contrast with the Chancellor's increasing panic.


In a facist future, atheism is the state religion. John Fritz co-stars as it's high priest, The Chancellor.

Moments before the bomb explodes, the Chancellor, in a desperate plea, finally begs the old man to let him go: "In the name of God, let me out!" Wordsworth immediately obliges, but not without repeating the mention of God — which the State had "proven" not to exist. The Chancellor bursts out of the room to safety just as the bomb explodes and kills Wordsworth, who dies with dignity.

In the final scene, the Chancellor, now stripped of his rank and reduced to a criminal, is declared obsolete. The crowd in the courtroom eventually surrounds him, and proceeds to drag him, kicking and screaming, to his own death sentence.


References:
Wikipedia, The Twilight Zone: The Obsolete Man (1961)
IMDB, The Obsolete Man
The Twilight Zone, Wiki

The Twilight Zone: To Serve Man (1962)

Head Chef Richard Kiel prepares to close the book on the human race in: To Serve Man (1962).


To Serve Man (from season three episode 89) featured the unmistakable Richard Kiel of Eegah! (1962) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). To Serve Man is one of the most sardonic and twisted episodes ever launched from the brain of Rod Serling. From a short story of the same name, originally a pulp story appearing in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1950, by Damon Knight.

A strange race of alien giants, known as the Kanamits, land on Earth promising to be humble servants to the cause of humanity. The aliens' intention, announced at the United Nations in New York is to serve Man by sharing their advanced technology. The aliens quickly solve all of Earth's greatest woes, eradicating hunger, disease, and warfare. Soon, humans by the hundred are volunteering for trips to the Kanamite home planet, which they believe is a paradise.


"Disking-and-dashing" is punished by Kanamite deep space marination.

Not all is well, however, when a crackerjack ace code-breaker steals a copy of the Kanamite book and discovers the aliens' true intentions: to turn Man into interstellar Spam. Their book, "To Serve Man," is actually a cookbook. The aliens miraculous gifts were designed to make humanity complacent like fattened cows before slaughter.

In the end, Michael Chambers (who's been narrating this story in flashback) is aboard a Kanamite ship, heading for their planet (and almost certain consumption as Man Spam). He looks directly at the audience and says, "How about you? You still on Earth, or on the ship with me? Really doesn't make very much difference, because sooner or later, we'll all of us be on the menu...all of us."

In 2001, the original story by Knight was awarded a Retro Hugo Award as the "Best Short Story of 1951". To Serve Man was also the basis for V: The Series (1984) - a 1980's tv series about hungry reptilian aliens who planned to do very much the same thing to Marc "The Beastmaster" Singer and Faye Grant.


References:
Wikipedia, The Twilight Zone: To Serve Man (1962)
Wikipedia, Richard Kiel
IMDB, The Obsolete Man
The Twilight Zone, Wiki

The Twilight Zone: Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up? (1961)

Small town dilemmas with an extraterrestrial twist are on the menu in this episode of the original Twilight Zone.

Paranoia with a wicked sense of bizarre humor is on the menu in Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up? (from season two episode 64) written by Rod Serling and starring the perrenially odd and humorous Jack Elam.

During a freak snowstorm, two state troopers investigating a crash and are led to believe that it was caused by a UFO. The troopers follow footprints leading from the crash site to a local diner, where a group of passengers from a bus to Boston are waiting for word that a bridge up ahead is safe to cross. There is one more person among the travellers than there were people on the bus. There's a growing suspicion among the stranded travelers as the passengers each try to guess which among them is the alien. When they finally get permission to go across the icy unstable bridge they all leave before the alien is discovered.

Shortly afterwards, Mr. Ross, a businessman played by John Hoyt, returns to the empty diner to tell the cook that the bridge collapsed killing the occupants of both the bus and the police car. As the cook wonders how the businessman survived aloud, Mr. Ross unveils his third arm by stirring his coffee with his third hand. Ross tells the cook that he's a Martian with plans to colonize on Earth.

Laughing, the cook tells Mr. Ross that he's too late. Taking off his paper hat, the cook reveals a third eye. The extra eye is "a trait all Venusians share," he tells his new Martian friend, and that his people, the Venusians, have already started a colony in America - meaning that the "Mr. Ross's" Martian invasion force has been intercepted.

Notes:
The late, great Jack Elam got his start in the infamous anti-marajuana exploitation flick She Shoulda Said No! (1949), later appearing in B westerns and posthumously in DJ Shadow's Entroducing album.


References:
Wikipedia, The Twilight Zone: Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?
IMDB, Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?
The Twilight Zone, Wiki
Pop Culture Project, "Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?"

Season Two of The Original Twilight Zone is available at:

The Twilight Zone: Steel (1963)

Episode 122 from season five, is another great Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) script. It stars the broiling Lee Marvin as a desperate man fighting his own greed and a robotic punishment machine. In 1974, boxing has been made illegal. Only robots are allowed in the ring. Former boxer "Steel" Kelly and his manager Pole are forced to make an inhuman decision when their out-dated robotic fighter suffers a final mechanical break down prior to a fight.


In the future, the boxer's eyes actually start out blackened.

Steel Kelly is forced into the ring, disguised as his broken robot, where he barely lasts three minutes of the fixed fight against a brutal machine. The rigged fight ends with Kelly taking a fall - bruised and nearly killed but stubborn as ever, Steel tells Pole that with the take money they'll get the parts to fix Maxo.

Matheson's story echoes the unwinnable man vs. machine conflict of the Post-Industrial Revolution world where the souless machine always wins.

In a bizarre recent development, Variey magazine has reported that Dreamworks Studios are spending $80 million on what they are calling Real Steel, an adaptation in which former upbeat tap dancer and Broadway singer Hugh "Wolverine" Jackman will headline. The filming for this atrocity is set to begin in June of 2010. It will arrive in theaters the same day I collapse in epileptic fits of frantic laughter.


References:
Wikipedia, The Twilight Zone: Steel
Wikipedia, Lee Marvin
IMDB, Lee Marvin
Twilight Wiki, Steel
Obsessed With Film, Dreamworks Set To Butcher "Zone" Classic!

Season Five of The Original Twilight Zone is available at:

The Twilight Zone: He's Alive (1963)

The late great Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider, Blue Velvet) stars in He's Alive.

He's Alive, broadcast in 1963 (from season four episode 106), featured the improbable rise of a emotionally shattered young man as he makes an unlikely ascent into the role of an American Hitler. The role starred a then unknown actor Dennis Hopper.

The Twilight Zone's casting directors (under the keen eye of Rod Serling) were on the look out for new talent in the early sixties. The Zone gave many struggling actors, like William Shatner and Lee Marvin, starring roles on national television. One of these roles went to a young, angry Dennis Hopper.

Hopper was previously cast in two roles with James Dean (whom he admired immensely) in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and in Giant (1956). Dean's death in a 1955 car accident affected the Hopper deeply. In LA, Hopper's roommate actor Nick Adams, who was known for roles in Japanese films, also died young before he could achieve lasting fame. All of this emotional rawness and professional trugdery in tv westerns happened years prior to his acting and directing break through on Easy Rider (1969). In the late 1950's and 1960's Hopper's career was strictly bit roles in crumby cowboy flicks and B-movies.

In He's Alive, broadcast in 1963, Hopper plays Peter Vollmer a young man who taken in from the city streets by an old Jewish man. Ludwig Donath plays an elderly Holocaust survivor only to have Vollmer turn neo-Nazi on him when Vollmer trades his soul for the cunning advice of a mysterious, shadowy man with a German accent.

After a series of successful rallies, the stranger in the shadows reveals himself to be, in fact, Adolf Hitler (veteran tv actor Curt Conway). On Hitler's orders, Vollmer kills his benefactor the old man. When the police arrive to arrest Vollmer for conspiracy for a previous crime he's shot while fleeing the scene. Hitler leaves, off to search for another worthy candidate.

In closing, Rod Serling eulogizes democracy as Hitler scuttles away in the shadows:

"Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare - Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there's hate, where there's prejudice, where there's bigotry. He's alive. He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town..."

According to the Internet Movie Database, He's Alive drew more hate mail than any other episode. This reaction was a solid review of Hopper's performance and the country's reaction to violent totalitarianism if only in a fictionalized metaphor.




References:
Wikipedia, The Twilight Zone
Wikipedia, Dennis Hopper
IMDB, Dennis Hopper

The Twilight Zone: Eye of The Beholder (1960)

Janet Tyler finds out what happens when you eat the brown acid in The Twilight Zone.

Eye of The Beholder broadcast in 1960 (episode 42 from season two) was re-edited and re-titled The Private World Of Darkness in 1962 and is one of the most referred to episodes of the entire series.

Janet Tyler has undergone her eleventh treatment in an attempt to look like everybody else. The details of the treatment are not given, but Tyler is first shown with her head completely bandaged, so her face cannot be seen. She is described as being "not normal" by the nurses and doctor, whose own faces are always in shadows or off-camera during the first part of the episode.

The outcome of the procedure cannot be known until the bandages are removed. Tyler pleads with the doctor and eventually convinces him to remove the bandages early. After a climactic buildup, the bandages are removed, revealing to the audience that she is beautiful. However the reaction of the doctor and nurses is disappointment; the operation has failed, her face has undergone "no change — no change at all".

At this point, the doctor, nurses and other people in the hospital, whose faces have never been seen clearly before, are now revealed to be horribly deformed in the audience's perspective, with large brows, curled lips, and misshapen, pig-like snouts. Distraught by the failure of the procedure, Tyler runs through the hospital as the terrible faces of everyone she runs into, apparently the norm in this society, are revealed. Large screens throughout the hospital project an image of the State's despotic leader (sounding and making gestures a lot like Adolf Hitler), calling for greater conformity.

Eventually, a man afflicted with the same "condition" arrives to take the crying, despondent Tyler into exile to a village of her "own kind", where her "ugliness" will not trouble the State. Before the two leave, the man comforts Tyler with the "very, very old saying" that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".


References:
Wikipedia, Eye of The Beholder
Cult TV, Twilight Zone Episode Guide
Twilight Zone Autographs

Season Two Of The Original Twilight Zone is available at:

The Twilight Zone: Nightmare At 20,000 Feet (1963)

William Shatner comes to face to face with his fear of flying in Nightmare At 20,000 Feet.

The 1983 movie version of the Twilight Zone contained a segment based the 1963 tv episode "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet". This original episode starred, you guessed it, William Shatner. Only three years away from his break through role on Roddenberry's Star Trek in 1966, Shatner was finding regular work in Hollywood television production like the Twilight Zone. He'd previouslly been featured in the 1960 episode "Nick of Time" as well as several local western productions such as NBC's The Outlaws Western.

Nightmare At 20,000 Feet (season five episode 123?) was another Richard Matheson entry into the tv series. William Shatner plays Bob Wilson, a salesman, who finds himself on an airplane for the first time since his recent nervous breakdown.

Enter Rod Serling, slinking onboard to set the stage:

“Portrait of a frightened man: Mr. Robert Wilson, thirty-seven, husband, father, and salesman on sick leave. Mr. Wilson has just been discharged from a sanitarium where he spent the last six months recovering from a nervous breakdown, the onset of which took place on an evening not dissimilar to this one, on an airliner very much like the one in which Mr. Wilson is about to be flown home - the difference being that, on that evening half a year ago, Mr. Wilson's flight was terminated by the onslaught of his mental breakdown. Tonight, he's traveling all the way to his appointed destination, which, contrary to Mr. Wilson's plan, happens to be in the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone."

Wilson spots an evil "gremlin" (actually what looks like an extra in a bad paper mache mask left over from Eye of the Beholder from 1960) hovering on the wing of the plane. Each time someone else looks out the window, the "gremlin" leaps out of view. No one believes Bob when he claims he has spotted a gremlin. Bob realizes that his wife is starting to think he needs to go back to the sanitarium... but if nothing is done about the gremlin, it will damage the plane enough to cause it to crash. Bob snatches a sleeping policeman's revolver then opens the "Auxiliary Exit" to shoot the gremlin, succeeding despite the fact that he is nearly blown out of the plane himself.

Once the plane has landed, Wilson is whisked away in a straitjacket, but there is evidence of his claims: unusual damage to the plane's engine — yet to be discovered by mechanics — that presumably can only be explained as being caused by something clawingat the structure's airframe. The original role of Bob Wilson is further polished by John Lithgow 20 years later minus the paper mache mask and man-girdle.


In the film update of Nightmare, John Lithgow is also "kinda scared of flying".

As part of the Twilight Zone movie, Lithgow encounters a less hokey lookin' gremlin - who, like his paper mache counterpart from 1963, has a real hard-on for air traffic related mayhem. At the end of this segment, Dan Akroyd delivers a classic line in a bit part as a creepy Paramedic asking an already shook up Lithgow: "You wanna see something really scary?"


References:
Wikipedia, Nightmare At 20,000 Feet
Wikipedia, William Shatner
Cult TV, Twilight Zone Episode Guide
Twilight Zone Autographs

Season Five of The Original Twilight Zone is available at:

The Twilight Zone: The Nick of Time (1960)

Rod Serling sets the scene like a half-amused beatnik with a few minutes to lay it all out for "squares".

Who doesn't enjoy to love or hate William Shatner? He's too big to ignore completely. Shh-h-h-h-h-atner. The word should be a verb for over-acting. The guy wore a man-girdle and tupee for three years as Captain James "Jim" Tiberius Kirk and was still a sex symbol. Come on! No. Seriously. Come on!

Nick of Time (episode from season two of the series), first broadcast in November of 1960, features Kirk wheeling into town with his new MILF/Cougar wife wincingly played by Patricia Breslin, who later married both Darren from Bewitched and the Cleveland Browns former owner Art Modell. That being noted, in The Nick Of Time, The Carters are on there way to big bucks as Kirk has landed a high-powered job in New York City.


Before cell phones or tricorders, 20^th century man relied on cheap gimmicks to communicate with his world.

Enter the icy hand of Chance, coming in the form of a innocent looking "fortune-telling machine" that looks suspiciously like a napkin dispenser. The Carter's stop for lunch during their road trip at the Busy Bee Cafe in the fictional town of Ridgedale, Ohio and begin consulting the machine.

Although this episode was written by Richard Matheson (of "I Am Legend" fame) several ridiculous things keep happening in this episode. The fortune machine keeps correctly predicting the future while Kirk's wife gets antsy about his faith the machine - a faith that results in them never leaving good old Ridgedale because a bedeviled napkin dispenser said "no".


References:
Wikipedia, The Nick of Time
Cult TV, Twilight Zone Episode Guide
Twilight Zone Autographs

Season Two of The Original Twilight Zone is available at:

The Twilight Zone: Time Enough At Last (1959)

World's greatest literature enthusiast runs into a sight - er - slight dilemma during the post-atomic apocalypse.

As the holiday season quickly comes and goes it's time to rememember that other annual tradition - The Twilight Zone marathon. The Sleazeblender is proud to begin a tradition of it's own, new for 2010, each day for the next two weeks The Seaze-A-Saurus will publish a review of the episodes that made the series great.

Ladies and germs, welcome to the Twilight Zone Episode Guide.

Rod Serling, the creator of the series, was a brash genius who used his one-of-a-kind production talents to examine cultural traditions, oppressive fear and military morality into 21-minute-long suspense driven episodes confronting post-war American life. For TV, even by modern standards, this is unheard of. TV, for generations, has existed to obscure reality not to confront it! To confront paranoia and prevailing social anxieties in the "duck and cover" era of Lassie and the Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1950's seems an impossible challenge. Cue Jerry Goldsmith's guitar-and-bongo riff right here. Welcome to the 5^th dimension campers - the Twilight Zone.

Time Enough At Last (from the first season of the series, episode 8) was first broadcast in November 1959, as the fear of a imminent devastating nuclear war with Russia seemed inevitable. Time Enough tells "the story of a man who seeks salvation in the rubble of a ruined world".

The episode begins with Serling stepping into frame to deliver his sly, trademarked setting of the scene, doing so unnoticed in the middle of a busy bank:

"Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself, without anyone."

Enter henpecked bank teller Henry Bemis, played by Burgess Meredith. He loves books, yet is surrounded by those who prevent him from reading them. The episode follows Bemis through the end of the world, touching on social issues as unlikely as anti-intellectualism, atomic warfare, and the difference between solitude and loneliness.

Bemis, gathering books by the hundred, is at last undone by fatefull accident. The civilized world that had prevented him from reading has been swept away and is no longer present to make a simple repair his broken glasses. The episode closes as Bemis bemoans his fate, surrounded by years worth of books he'd intended to read, clutching the remains of his broken glasses and wailing: "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed...!"


References:
Wikipedia, Time Enough At Last
The Offical: Burgess Meredith.com

Season One of The Original Twilight Zone is available at: