CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Day of the Triffids (1962)

In 1951, author John Wyndham's classic science fiction novel, The Day of the Triffids, was published. This provocative literary work concerned the rise of genetically-engineered carnivorous plants (!) called Triffids. Because of a military accident, the poisonous, monstrous plants had spread rapidly across the Earth's surface and were the source of study by many concerned scientists, including protagonist Bill Mason.

After a blinding global meteor shower (possibly another military accident...) the vast majority of the human race was then blinded, thus ensuring the collapse of our 20th century technological civilization and the total domination of the planet by man-eating, mobile triffids. Bill Mason, who's eyes had been bandaged during the meteor shower, was spared this macabre fate, as were a few others (including soldiers stationed on submarines...), and together the survivors had to reckon with the terrifying post-apocalyptic world.

Among other things, Wyndham's novel served as an explicit critique of the Cold War (particularly the shadowy veil of secrecy surrounding the Iron Curtain). On perhaps a deeper thematic and social level, the book also revolved around the growing pains of a new world order, and even touched on controversial subjects such as polygamy.

A film adaptation of The Day of the Triffids from scenarists Bernard Gordon and Phillip Yordan and director Steve Sekely played in cinemas in 1962. It's generally considered a classic to the over- thirty-year-old crowd because - heck - we grew up with it. In reruns on television, primarily. Franky, looking at the movie today, you can detect it is a low budget effort with extremely limited effects. Nonetheless, The Day of the Triffids boasts a tremendous sense of scope (thanks, in part, to the use of several highly creative and nearly invisible matte paintings.) Still, it's difficult to deny that this 1960s take on the material proved a bit less provocative than Wyndham's source material.
Specifically, the triffids are here tagged as being extraterrestrial in origin, rather than the result of CCCP genetic tinkering. There's actually no reference to the Soviet Union in the film whatsoever, and many of the characters have been been dramatically altered, though Bill Mason -- here an American naval officer -- remains our protagonist. The Cold War commentary is totally missing, and that's a disappointment. Furthermore, much of Wyndham's sociological material (namely polygamy, and the absolute necessity of polygamy to repopulate the species) is also excised.

In place of these elements, the film version of The Day of the Triffids adds a subplot revolving around married scientists, Tom and Karen Goodwin (played by Kieron Moore and Janette Scott), battling Triffids on an isolated island. The husband is an unhappy alcoholic, toiling away in a lighthouse with his concerned wife. When the triffids attack, hubby shrugs off the whiskey and recommits himself to science in an effort to destroy the Triffid infestation and save the planet. Quite by accident, Tom discovers that sea water (salt water) dissolves the beasts. This too is a significant alteration from the novel, which offered no simple solution to the Triffid dilemma.

Though much of Wyndham's original material has been jettisoned, it's not fair to state that Day of the Triffids is entirely devoid of resonant or meaningful themes. In particular, it depicts quite ably not only man's battle against Mother Nature (the evil Plants), but also against his own human nature. There's one riveting sequence, for instance, set in rural France, in which escaped convicts (still possessed of sight) attack a girl's school and attempt to force themselves on the blind girls living there. As the trailer puts it, "civilization disintegrates into primitive animalism!" Yikes!

Yet I also admire The Day of the Triffids because it balances the darker view of humanity at his worst (exploitative, alcoholic, and defeatist) with one showing him at his best. There is hope and commitment in this world, dramatized particularly in regards to the birth of a baby at a Spanish villa, and Mason's decision to help bring this child into the world safely.

Also, Mason (Howard Keel), a young girl named Susan (Janina Fay) and the headmistress at the school, Ms. Durrant (Nicole Maurey) -- three total strangers -- create what can only be described as a tightly-knit, ad-hoc nuclear family. And Tom's dedication (and shaking off of the booze...) also speaks to the finer angels of human nature. When the chips are down, mankind can rally, the film suggests. "I care what happens to us," says one character in the film, and you'll feel the same way.

Also, the isolated lighthouse scenes, though reputedly added at the last minute to grant the film an adequate running time, succeed in raising the tension quotient considerably. In movie terms, this is a classic "siege" scenario (see: Night of the Living Dead): angry, mobile Triffids threaten to break into the lighthouse at every turn, and Tom and Karen have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. At one point, they are overrun and left to flee up a staircase to the top of the lighthouse. The triffids pursue, slowly but surely. These claustrophobic moments help the film live up to the trailer's description of the film as a "flesh-crawling experience in terror."

Critical objectivity requires that I acknowledge some pesky flaws here. The Day of the Triffids starts off slow (really, really slow...), with a relatively stupid narration that explains to the audience the obvious concept of carnivorous plants. ("There are certain plants that are carnivorous...are "eating" plants," intones a baritone-voiced narrator with utter seriousness).

Also, the opening Triffid attack on a night guard at the Royal Botanical Gardens is laborious drawn-out, and tends towards silliness. The guard appears to be mesmerized by the Triffid, and wanders into the waiting branches of the beast. It should have looked like it yanked him in, not like he wanted to give the Triffid a hug.

But after approximately thirty-minutes or so, The Day of the Triffids really picks up, and makes the absolute best of an extremely limited budget. In depicting a worldwide holocaust, the film efficiently (and economically) depicts what occurs when mass blindness afflicts a plane in flight, and a ship at sea. We see cities and military installations on fire (via models, mattes, and rear-projection work). There is a beautifully-orchestrated chase sequence (replete with that genre convention: the car that won't start) set in a misty swamp, as a mammoth Triffid uproots itself, and crawls up out of the bog in pursuit of Susan. Another moment, with a slimy Triffid methodically crawling up the lighthouse staircase step by step (as Tom and Karen sleep, unawares) is also suspenseful.

Yet what remains jaw-dropping about The Day of the Triffids is the manner in which the film successfully projects an epic sense of scope. There are awe-inspiring compositions aplenty. My favorite shot depicts thousands of hungry Triffids gathering at an electrified fence, while Mason tries to fight them back with a flame thrower. The high-angle imagery is just right, as the Triffids - en masse - move and caw and click dramatically, and Mason wages what appears to be a hopeless campaign against them.

The Day of the Triffids depicts a world-wide meteor storm, a train wreck, a plane crash, military bases aflame, vast metropolitan centers devoid of life (in scenes that seem to forecast images in films such as Day of the Dead [1985] and 28 Days Later [2002]) and also makes the threat of walking. man-eating plants palpable...and by the climax, totally believable. That's no small accomplishment, and the sense you get watching this film is that everybody - from director and actors to the special effects artists - truly committed to the project. They stretched their miniscule budget as far as it could possibly go, deploying ingenuity to fill the gaps.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: it isn't entirely unreasonable, in my view to give a somewhat flawed film an A for effort. The Day of the Triffids -- even with some occasionally dim-witted moments -- really goes for the gusto. And it succeeds more often than it fails. Therefore I believe it earns the long-standing reputation as a classic of the genre. A caveat, of course: this film in no way could be considered more than modereately faithful to the Wyndham novel. If you're looking specifically to recreate that experience, you may be disappointed in the movie. But if you're looking for a good, post-apocalyptic horror film from the 1960s, one with an unusual and memorable antagonist as well as some resonant images of mankind's fall from grace, this movie fits the bill.

CULT TV FLASHBACK # 57: Strange World (1999)

I felt a tingling sense of deja vu while watching the alarmingly-derivative Fringe (2008) pilot the other night, and it wasn't merely because the whole thing seemed like the dumbed down, Cliff-Notes versions of the far superior X-Files.

No, my memory banks kept tripping on another sci-fi TV series that sought to aggressively mine some of the same "fringe" territory as this new J.J. Abrams series.

That program was called Strange World (1999) and it aired on ABC from March 8 to March 16, 1999. Although thirteen episodes were developed and crafted by uber-producers Howard Gordon (24) and Tim Kring (Heroes), the program was only broadcast three times on ABC before the network unceremoniously pulled the plug. At the time, I remember being terribly disappointed by the quick cancellation, because the series felt like it might actually go somewhere interesting, despite the fact that it tended to orbit similar kinds of stories as The X-Files or Millennium.

Strange World focused on Dr. Paul Turner (Tim Guinee), an M.D. who had been exposed to a deadly toxin during the Gulf War. (Remember the series aired before we were back in Iraq...). In the early 1990s, Turner returned Stateside only to learn that he was being kept alive by a mysterious antidote, one administered by a secret cabal's representative, the Mysterious Japanese Woman (Vivian Wu). While attempting to resolve this mystery, Turner also took a job at US ARMIID (United States Army Medical Institute for Infectious Diseases) to investigate, and I quot:, "the criminal abuses of science in the United States."

So yeah, this is pretty much what Oliva Dunham is doing in Fringe. Oopsy.

What kind of stories did Strange World tell? Well, they were few in number, I can tell you that! More importantly, the plots involved the terrifying side effects of illegal scientific experiments (gee, just like the engineered plague we saw in Fringe's pilot!).

One Strange World episode, "Lullaby," centered on pregnant women learning they were pregnant not with human babies, but with developing human organs that could be "harvested" by the shadowy conspiracy. Another episode (the pilot), concerned an illegal and unethical cloning operation. The last story aired on ABC, "Azrael's Breed," involved a scientist who was pushing "the boundaries of death" by injecting the brain cells from dead people into the minds of the living to create so-called "death memories."

The X-Files outlived good imitators (Nowhere Man), bad imitators (The Burning Zone), and sometimes just mediocre ones (Sleepwalkers, Prey). Strange World seemed pretty promising, as I recall, though in fairness Guinee looked as though he was the victim of a cloning plot involving David Duchovny.

The facet of Strange World that I found most appealing (and which granted the series some sense of urgency) was the personal nature of Turner's quest. His life depended on discovering the answers to the weird weekly cases and scientific riddles. He knew he was a "pawn," a piece of a larger puzzle and so had to sort of "gut check" himself to make certain he was operating by his own agenda, not the (unknown) agenda of the cabal.

Okay, so Strange World is not a great show, but maybe it is one that would have matured and improved if given a little time and support. I wonder if Fringe, which has some Strange World DNA mixed in with its corrupted X-Files genetic material, will survive longer...

If you're interested in Strange World, I understand that the Chiller Network has aired all thirteen episodes. I know I'd love to see the show again today. I suppose there's no fan base out there pushing for an official DVD release...

New from McFarland

Here's what's on tap from McFarland this month. This is another group of books that reveals the depth and versatility of McFarland's catalog. You've got everything here from Westerns and horror (including "revenge of nature" flicks!), to special effects and my revised and updated text on Superheroes.

Special Effects Artists

Throughout the course of film history, artists have used matte painting, stop-motion animation, model photography, process cinematography, in-camera effects, travelling mattes, optical printing, physical and floor effects to entertain audiences. These are the special effects artists in this book.The biographical entries provide career synopses and movie credits, spanning the early years of cinematography through the end of the mechanical age of filmmaking, marked by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and its combination of conventional effects and computer-generated images. An extensive filmography is then presented. The book contains numerous stills, a glossary, bibliography and index.

The Psychology of the Western
Western films are often considered sprawling reflections of the American spirit. This book analyzes the archetypes, themes, and figures within the mythology of the western frontier. Western themes are interpreted as expressions of cultural needs that perform specific psychological functions for the audience. Chapters are devoted to the frontier hero character, the roles of women and Native Americans, and the work of the genre’s most prolific directors, Anthony Mann and John Ford. The book includes a filmography and movie stills.

The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television, 2d ed.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a complete guide to over 50 years of superheroes on screen! This expanded and updated edition of the 2004 award-winning encyclopedia covers important developments in the popular genre; adds new shows such as Heroes and Zoom; includes the latest films featuring icons like Superman, Spiderman and Batman; and covers even more types of superheroes.

Each entry includes a detailed history, cast and credits, episode and film descriptions, critical commentaries, and data on arch-villains, gadgets, comic-book origins and super powers, while placing each production into its historical context. Appendices list common superhero conventions and clichés; incarnations; memorable ad lines; and the best, worst, and most influential productions from 1951 to 2008.


Creature Features
This work offers a critical, colorful and informative examination of different types of monster movies, spanning the silent period to today. Chapter One focuses on dragons, dinosaurs, and other scaly giants from films like 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, an impressive stop-motion production that ushered in a new era of atomic-spawned monster films. Chapter Two examines “big bug” flicks, beginning with 1954’s giant ant–infested Them. Chapter Three focuses on ordinary animals grown to improbable proportions through scientific or sinister experimentation, such as the huge octopus in 1955’s It Came from Beneath the Sea. Chapters Four, Five, and Six look at films in which nature goes berserk, and otherwise innocuous animals flock, swarm, hop or run about on a menacingly massive scale, including 1963’s The Birds and 1972’s Frogs. Finally, Chapter Seven focuses on films featuring beasts that defy easy definition, such as 1958’s The Blob and Fiend Without a Face.


Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula
Bram Stoker’s initial notes and outlines for his landmark horror novel Dracula were auctioned at Sotheby’s in London in 1913 and eventually made their way to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where they are housed today. Until now, few of the 124 pages have been transcribed or analyzed.

This comprehensive work reproduces the handwritten notes both in facsimile and in annotated transcription. It also includes Stoker’s typewritten research notes and thoroughly analyzes all of the materials, which range from Stoker’s thoughts on the novel’s characters and settings to a nine-page calendar of events that includes most of the now-familiar story. The coauthors draw on their extensive knowledge of Dracula and vampires to guide readers through the construction of the novel, and the changes that were made to its structure, plot, setting and characters. Nine appendices provide insight into Stoker’s personal life, his other works and his early literary influences.

TV REVIEW: Fringe (pilot)

The pilot for J.J. Abrams' series Lost (2004 - ) is -- without any exaggeration -- the finest I've ever seen. That's not a comment on the direction the series has ultimately taken (don't get me started, please...). Just my honest assessment of the involving, intense first episode. It was...amazing.

By direct contrast, the pilot for J.J. Abrams' new genre series, Fringe is one of the absolute worst that I've seen in a good long while. With Fringe's disappointing initial outing, we very much have a modern case of the Emperor's New Clothes: the pilot is alarmingly naked in terms of real human interest, and shockingly devoid of originality in terms of conception, look and execution.

There's been a lot written in the press lately (hype) about how Fringe is not a rip-off of The X-Files. Don't believe a word of it. This show is such a flat-out rip-off of Chris Carter's work it's actually an embarrassment. Allow me to enumerate (briefly) some of the many similarities between the two productions:

1. Fringe, like the X-Files is set in the milieu of the FBI. With agents, search warrants, stake-outs, car-chases and "investigations."

2. Fringe, like the X-Files, finds solutions to unusual problems (like a nasty new airborne disease/terrorist WMD) in the notion of "extreme possibilities" (the paranormal/fringe science) On The X-Files, this description meant any number of things (NDEs, Astral Projection, psychokinesis, etc.). First up in Fringe: "a synaptic transfer" that allows two minds to meet in the dream world. You may have seen this idea played out already in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) with Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher. Lower. Lower...

3. Fringe, like The X-Files, focuses on an untrustworthy authority figure. In fact, this character-type was a regular staple of The X-Files. Specifically, I'm referring to the incredibly sympathetic notion that someone derided, dismissed or de-valued by society at large (perhaps a criminal, perhaps a madman, perhaps just an unconventional thinker...) could be the best source for understanding "the truth" about the featured mysteries. Even "Spooky" Mulder fits this type to some degree. As do the conspiracy theorists, The Lone Gunmen. As late as this summer's X-Files: I Want to Believe, we saw this character type at his most raw and troubling, in the form of the psychic pedophile priest. On Fringe, we get quirky, inappropriate Dr. Bishop, both a madman and a criminal, one who possesses many secrets.

4. Fringe, like The X-Files, focuses on the "The Mytharc" or "Pattern." The X-Files was famous for an exploration of a larger conspiracy, one including the FBI, heads of state, and various departments in the United States Government. The conspiracy had a secret, malicious agenda. In Fringe's pilot, we're introduced not only to a specific episodic mystery (an airborne, self-eradicating germ) but the conspiracy operating behind it. There's not a Cigarette Smoking Man hanging around yet, but we have Blair Brown (replete with a cheesy robotic arm...), a representative of the company Massive Dynamic. She and her corporation are working behind the scenes on the by-now rote malicious and secret agenda.

5. Fringe, like The X-Files, centers on a male/female pair-up. It's Duchovny and Anderson on The X-Files, and Joshua Jackson and Anna Tory on Fringe. I should point out an important difference here. On the X-Files, Scully and Mulder actually boasted fields of expertise. Mulder was a behavioral psychologist (and one of the best profilers in the FBI). And Scully was an M.D. The characters on Fringe seem to have no specialties at all. Peter Bishop (Jackson) is simply tagged a "genius" (that way, a writer has to do no research whatsoever - the character is just SMART!) and Olivia Dunholm (Tory) is merely your average gun-toting, ambitious FBI agent. Each character is about as interesting as wonder bread. Without the crust.

6. Both shows have the same home: The Fox Network. Wonder how that happened?

So yes, pretty clearly, Fringe is a dedicated rip-off of The X-Files. iI's also a rip-off of a short-lived, obscure series from 1998 called Strange World, which concerned "medical mysteries" like the one featured in this pilot. My problem: it's not a good rip-off of either show.

The X-Files is such a classic not merely because the subject matter (the paranormal) is fascinating; not merely because the conspiracy is intriguing. But rather because it boasted the good sense and artistry to create two characters (Mulder and Scully) who viewed their world in vastly different ways. As viewers, we saw the world interpreted through each lens. The writing and acting were so utterly brilliant that moments of heavy exposition played not like boring recitation of fact...but foreplay. We fell in love with Scully and Mulder because they were both smart and passionate. And I don't mean passionate about sex, necessarily, but in the manner they interpreted "the facts" of any given case. Ideas represented the currency of the show. Bold ideas; boldly interpreted.

Whereas on Fringe, there's only the veneer of intelligence, not intelligence itself. In other words, all the concepts and ideas in the pilot are pulled from smart sources (like The X-Files and Altered States), but don't feel organic to this enterprise. You can't import intelligence, and you can't import wit. This was the same problem I had with Orci and Kurtzman's brain-dead Transformers (2007) movie. There was no authentic human element to grasp. Similarly, Fringe already seems anti-science, railing against "science" and "technology." In The X-Files, the villain was the misuse of science and technology, not science and technology itself. There's a distinction there. One asks us to examine human nature (how do we apply our knowledge wisely and morally?) and the other is blatantly anti-intellectual.

So what we're left with in this pilot is a dull police procedural with a conspiracy underneath, and a touch (and I mean a touch...) of the paranormal. Oh, there's a car chase, well-staged. There's a creepy prologue (also an element of The X-Files' formula), here set on a plane in flight. There are some nice special effects involving a man with translucent skin, but the X-Files has already done that too (in Fight the Future and the Season Six premiere.) Worst of all, in Fringe's pilot there's no joy, no fun, no sense of curiosity at all. It's a mechanical, heartless product...a machine grinding out sausage for the masses.

I'm going to keep watching, and I hope the series gets better. I would always rather write a positive review than a negative one. And I have been wrong before, that's for dang sure. But for the time being, I'm going to call a spade a spade: Fringe is a charmless, brazen rip-off of The X-Files. One that copies all the specific elements of that TV classic, but has zero understanding of why it worked in the first place. Fringe is positively soulless. In fact, that's the creepiest thing about it.

Theme Song of the Week # 26: Something is Out There (1988)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Time Machine (1960)

George Pal's 1960 fantasy masterpiece is the undeniable grandfather of the time travel film genre. It's also likely one of the most popular and well-known science fiction movies ever made, pre-Star Wars. You've probably seen the movie's trademark (and titular) vehicle in movies such as Gremlins (1984), and on TV programs including Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1981) and even Leonard Nimoy's version of In Search Of (1974).

Believe it or not, the time machine itself boasts a fan base. If you've never seen it, the only way I can describe it is as a Victorian-style snow sled. It basically consists of an elaborate (padded) chair, brass siding, an oval control panel and a spinning vertical dish (rear-mounted). In whatever fashion you choose to describe the time machine, it's not merely gorgeous, it's strangely believable, both as a functional device and as a "futuristic" artifact of the long gone Victorian Age.

As you probably know, the 1960 film (with Academy Award winning special effects from Gene Warren and Wah Chang) is based on socialist H.G. Wells' 1895 speculative novella The Time Machine. Both the film and the literary work focus on one man: an eccentric London inventor, in the film named George (Rod Taylor). On December 31st, 1899, this renaissance man attempts to convince his skeptical dinner guests (including Alan Young, Whit Bissell and Sebastian Cabot) that he has indeed invented a device that can travel through time. It occupies the same space, yet moves through eras. His skeptical guests don't believe George, even after an effective demonstration of a miniature model.

After his dinner guests have departed, George and his friend Philby (Young) share a philosophical discussion. "Why the pre-occupation with time?" asks Philby sincerely. George's answer is telling. He doesn't much care for his own time, an epoch when science is called on only to invent new weapons, ones that can more efficiently "de-populate" the Earth. Not entirely unlike Taylor in Planet of the Apes, George hopes that there is a better world for man "out there." Only in this case, "Out there" is not on another planet...but in another age. Philby considers the time machine dangerous and urges the destruction of the invention. A time machine, he believes may be "tempting the Laws of Providence."

After Philby departs, George retreats to his study and activates his time machine. He stops first in 1917 and meets Philby's grown son, who tells him of the first World War with Germany. A disappointed George returns to his machine and plunges further ahead in time. On the next occasion, he arrives in the early 1940s, just as German bombs level London during the Blitz. Pushing even further ahead, George travels to 1966 just as a nuclear war between the East and West breaks out. He meets an ancient Philby in this era -- a man wearing a silver radiation suit -- who urges him to take cover in a nearby bomb shelter before "the mushrooms". George leaves this era behind just as the bombs strike and travels further ahead. Further and further...

Finally, George stops his machine in the far-flung world of 802,701 AD. Wilderness appears to have reasserted itself over the ages, save for some oddly-advanced (though damaged...) structures, like a vast dome. George soon meets the denizens of this era, the androgynous and peaceful Eloi. He learns the Eloi have no government, no economy, and now laws.

Nobody in the society works, and worse -- they don't even know how to grow their own food. The Eloi can't write or read and have grown terribly incurious. George asks some questions ("the only way man learns and develops, he says, in one of the film's many great lines of dialogue) and is escorted by the lovely Weena (Yvette Mimieux) to a library of information discs. The discs (or "talking rings" as Weena calls them...) recount for George the rest of the story: The War between East and West lasted for 326 years and poisoned all the air. Mankind splintered, with some survivors moving underground into vast caverns and some stragglers remaining in the sunlight and fresh air (what little there was of it.) This is "the hopeless future," as George terms it.

In 802,701 AD George discovers something else too. Mankind is "divided" (not united) by the ultimate class warfare. The Eloi are not alone. The inhuman, cannibalistic Morlocks live underground in caverns and feed off the simple, cattle-like Eloi. The Morlocks boast advanced technology (including running water and heat....) but are brutal, domineering, exploitative. The Eloi -- far from being "free" as George first thought-- are servants herded underground (by air horn sirens...) to serve the Morlocks.

Although the movie doesn't specify it, the novel makes clear that the fat, lazy Eloi are the descendants of the leisure class; the industrial Morlocks are "blue collar" workers. In the movie, they're also blue skinned, hairy monsters with glowing eyes.

One of the elements that makes The Time Machine such a memorable film (and one that holds up so well today..) is this social commentary about the "division" of mankind into "sides." Over the ages depicted in the film (from 1917 on...), The Time Machine reveals a mankind splintered by endless wars, conflicts apparently of ideology and nationalism. The divisions of war finally become such that there is actually a physiological schism in the race: Morlocks and Eloi no longer even share the same biology. This film suggests such division is mankind's destiny, that international wars will lead only to ruin, and a collapse of the species intellectually and physically. When Wells wrote the original novella, he was well-acquainted with Darwin's work, and it's fascinating to me that Wells pondered not an evolution of the species, but rather the devolution of our kind: a pervasive moral, intellectual and physical degradation.

Another brilliant touch I mentioned above, briefly. Specifically, the Morlock "call" for the Eloi to gather at their city entrance is the same air horn or siren noise that for generations warned humans to seek underground shelter during times of attack. That particular sound was heard so frequently throughout human history that the Eloi response has become quite literally Pavlovian in nature. The horns sound, and the Eloi drop everything and mindlessly go to the Morlocks...their enemies.

In watching many time travel films over the last several weeks, I begin to detect with some clarity how different artists have manipulated the form (on film) to depict their stories, and make their dramatic points. Time After Time balanced the idealism of an earlier age with the hectic world of "today" and played like a satire on the present (or more rightly, 1979). The Final Countdown asked questions about whether it is right and proper to interfere in history. Somewhere in Time is a more intimate approach to time travel; one in which the human mind --- and the capacity to love (romantically) -- is the impetus for such odysseys.

Pal's The Time Machine boasts another style all together; and it's entirely in keeping with the literary work and interests of Wells himself (and films such as Things to Come). Specifically, the film extrapolates about the direction we're headed. The film visualizes for the audience the changes that could happen, if we don't alter our ways. The reason to travel to the future is change the now, so the film is social commentary too, but in a far more grave sense than Time After Time. Given that this film was crafted in 1960 (during the Cold War), it is understandable that the focus here would be primarily on war and the consequences. Just think, at their ages in 1960, Time Machine writer David Duncan and director George Pal had already lived through World War I, World War II, The Korean War, and the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. It was THE issue vexing us in their lifetime. There wasn't much cause for optimism.

This film was remade in 2002 by Simon Wells (yes -- a relation of H.G. Wells!) , but -- in a troubling symptom of the times -- the time traveler's journey there became an entirely "personal" one; vastly undercutting the thematic underpinnings of the tale. In that unfaithful version of the material, the time traveler's beloved fiancee had died, and he simply wanted to change that bad negative outcome. Therefore, the reasons behind time traveling in the 1960 version: curiosity, hunger for change, dissatisfaction about the present, hope for the future (balanced with warnings about what it could be...) were all essentially abandoned. I think that's a grave mistake and a betrayal of the source material.

Think about it: George, the time traveler of the 1960 version, goes to the future, and sees what we have done to ourselves as a species through our constant divisions (social and military). But he doesn't give up. He doesn't cower. Instead, he fights for the human race. Ultimately, he commits himself to the world of 802,701 and sets about the hard work of building a new culture, a new civilization. The message here, right beneath the surface: Yes we can. We might fail, we might even hover on the precipice of total destruction, but we can choose to involve ourselves; to fight. And we will succeed.

Otherwise, all the future's just a...bridge to nowhere.

Happy 42nd Birthday to Star Trek

It was forty-two years ago (on September 8, 1966) that the first episode of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek aired on NBC. The episode in question was George Clayton Johnson's "The Man Trap" (about a salt vampire/shape-shifter threatening the Enterprise). As I remember from various Star Trek histories, Variety, TV Guide and other popular media gave the episode (and the series) a negative review. Funny to think about everything that's transpired since "The Man Trap." Seventy-eight episodes. An animated series. Six movies with the original cast. Four TV spin-offs. And a re-imagination in the works...

On a more personal note, today also happens to be the 19th anniversary of my first date with my wife, Kathryn. On September 8, 1989 (a Friday) we went to dinner together at Aunt Sarah's Pancake House in Richmond, Virginia (on Broad Street). I remember the occasion well, because a homeless person tried to bum cigarettes off Kathryn as we entered the restaurant. And, over waffles and French Toast, we had a debate about the words "crotch" and "groin." Could they be used interchangeably (as synonyms) or do they carry distinct, separate meanings?

We're still having variations of that discussion today...

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Rope (1948)

Filmed on a single, multi-room set representing a high-rise apartment penthouse in Manhattan and utilizing long, masterfully-constructed takes (sometimes nearly ten minutes in duration), Alfred Hitchcock's Rope is one of the Master of Suspense's most compelling, unique, and cleverly-executed films.

Because this tale of a "perfect murder" and its aftermath unfolds in nerve-wracking real time, and because the film's limited environs generate a kind of claustrophobic, hothouse atmosphere, the tension builds and builds in Rope until a welcome catharsis occurs at the film's climax. A window is swung open and the ensuing - intoxicating - breath of fresh air beautifully (and simply) releases the pent-up anxiety and suspense.

Rope is based on a 1929 play (Rope's End) by Patrick Hamilton, which in turn is based on the strange real-life murder case of Leopold and Loeb. As you may recall, these two University of Chicago students murdered a teenage boy, Bobby Franks, in 1929 for the simple reason that they wanted to commit "the perfect crime."

Infamously, these killers fancied themselves authentic "Nietzschean Supermen" (or Ubermensch) and therefore were not only above the law; but actually the creators and arbiters of a new, better law. One in which God was dead, and the "superior" class had the right to murder the inferior.

Attorney Clarence Darrow defended these notorious, well-educated killers, and his well-remembered defense was - essentially - that it was foolish to blame Leopold and Loeb for putting into practice a philosophy they had been taught in school. In other words, Nietzsche's writings were to blame! And the University that taught them those philosophies was at fault too! Nice huh? To some extent, this unique gambit paid off: Leopold and Loeb escaped capital punishment and were sentenced to life in prison instead.

In Hitchcock's film, we are introduced to two highly-intelligent university graduates, Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger). And they are not very different from Leopold and Loeb because they too debate Nietzsche's Superman, they too believe they are superior to other men, and they also desire to "artistically" commit the perfect murder. In fact, we first meet Brandon and Phillip in the brutal act of homicide itself.

The opening shot (after the credits) is a quick pullback from a close-up on the victim's face as he expires. As the camera withdraws, we watch Phillip strangling unlucky David (the victim) with a rope; and Brandon holding his body up (his hands over the dead man's breasts). They quickly stuff the corpse into a prominently-placed chest, which now serves as an ad-hoc coffin. Then, evidencing no shame whatsoever in their behavior, these boys continue to plan a party in the apartment for that very afternoon; one in which David's kindly father, Mr. Kentley (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), aunt (Constance Collier), and fiancee, Janet (Joan Chandler) are all slated to attend.

Also attending the party is one Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), Brandon and Phillip's former house master at prep school, and the man responsible for indoctrinating them not only in the philosophies of Nietzsche, but also -- perhaps -- the world of homosexuality. In fact, there's some distinct cattiness from Phillip over Rupert's presence at the party, since it is clear that the older man and Brandon once had an intimate relationship. Or as the script puts it, "Brandon would sit for hours at the master's feet..." I think, given the circumstances, we can understand what that really means, especially given screenwriter Arthur Laurents' assertion in the making-of featurette that Rope is really about "It" (It being homosexuality). In fact, it's so much about "It" that Cary Grant turned down the opportunity to play Rupert Cadell, for fear of being associated openly with homosexuality. But Cadell is an interesting character here because he is that one person in Brandon's life who can see through him; who recognizes what his stutter means; who sees Brandon's flaws and strengths.

Over the course of the afternoon party -- as we watch the sun set beyond the New York skyline -- Brandon wickedly manipulates Janet and another guest, her ex-boyfriend, Kenneth (Douglas Dick), and Phillip attempts to evade Rupert's increasingly-troublesome prying. Rupert comes to suspect the boys of David's murder. Eventually, he finds evidence (David's hat...) and in the film's final scene, confronts Brandon and Phillip after the other guests have left.

Rope's final scene is one of the finest, most elegant Hitchcock ever shot. Night has fallen outside the apartment, and garish neon lights (flashing red and green) flood in as Rupert makes the discovery of David's corpse. The lurid illumination, reflecting on the characters' faces, clearly represents the gruesome, sensational nature of the murder. It is also here that the boys (like Leopold and Loeb) shift the blame for their heinous act to Rupert himself; to his teachings and philosophizing. Defensively at first, and then more assertively, Rupert counters with an explicit rejection of Nietzsche's superman theory:

"By what right do you dare to say that there's a superior few to which you belong? By what right did you decide that that boy in there was inferior and could be killed? Did you think you were God, Brandon? Is that what you thought when you choked the life out of him? Is that what you thought when you served food from his grave?...You choked the life out of a fellow human being who could live and love as you never could, and never will again!"

Then -- utterly disgusted -- Rupert swings open the penthouse window that we have seen tightly shut for eighty harrowing minutes, creating the breath of fresh air and symbolic catharsis I mentioned at the commencement of this review. He fires a pistol into the air...essentially summoning the police, and the scene turns to haunting, lasting silence as Brandon and Phillip are left to contemplate their crime...and impending punishment.

In many ways, Rope is filmed like a stage play, and to fully understand the movie, one must ask the question: why? Why would a master filmmaker, a formalist such as Hitchcock, commit himself so fully to such a limiting, rigid mode? After all, film is an infinitely more flexible, elastic format than the theatrical play. In movies, for instance, you can travel anywhere, choose any perspective, telescope time and accomplish other important tasks. You can slow moments down or speed them up. You can feature optical effects. In the theater, you are forever chained to the stage, to a limited number of settings, and to the view from the seats, before the proscenium arch.

Recognizing the talent of the filmmaker here, I don't believe that Hitchcock made Rope in this peculiar fashion simply to honor the original format of Hamilton's play, but rather because he detected how all the elements of the stage (limited space, limited views, so forth), enhanced the suspenseful atmosphere of this particular morality tale.

For one thing, Hitchcock's approach offers the advantage of depicting the story (mostly without cuts) in something approximating "real time." There are no commercials. No scene breaks to another location (like 24, for example). Instead, we follow Brandon and Phillip from the instant of the murder to the discovery of the selfsame body some eighty-one minutes later. There isn't a moment, nay a second, to relax....David's corpse could be unearthed at any moment. As audience members, we share that tension with these two men.

By remaining in one place; by limiting the story to a relatively short span (an afternoon/evening party), Hitchcock squeezes as much suspense as possible out of the scenario, making it a real pressure cooker. Because of this, the catharsis at the end (the open window) means something. Had the audience (and Hitchcock's camera) followed Rupert home, or taken Brandon outside for a cigarette break, the suspense would have bled out of Rope rather quickly. Why go somewhere else when you can create the exact effect you want by staying put? It's economical and effective filmmaking.

Okay, but then why so few cuts during the length of the film? A good director could still cut into lengthy scenes with close-ups, medium shots, and high angles, but still not leave the premises, right? Well, yes, of course. But consider what a filmmaker gains by not (frequently...) breaking up the natural rhythms of the actors. Without distracting cuts, their interaction plays as more real. Because it is sustained. Rope plays almost like a very interesting visit to a most unique zoo: See Brandon and Phillip in their natural environs! And, they have a secret...

Something important is also gained by not chopping up the coherent visual space of the apartment. Frequent cutting would dissect the terrain into little pieces, and again, abruptly negate some essential quality of suspense. Consider the important placement of the chest/coffin containing David's corpse. It's in the middle of the apartment -- you can't miss it. Going back to my zoo analogy, it's the elephant in the room. All the time. By breaking into shots like close-ups, or by cutting away to the kitchen, for example, you negate the power and pull of this prop.

There's one marvelous and tense sequence in the film in which Brandon's dutiful maid clears dishes off the coffin, and almost opens it -- right before our eyes. Again, if you cut away -- if you aren't keeping track of the terrain -- any character could have been fiddling with the chest all along, and we - the audience - wouldn't necessarily see it or know it. This way, Hitchcock's way, every character seems to orbit that coffin, but the sanctity of it is never violated. Not until the end of the picture.

The title Rope expresses much important information too. A rope is not just the murder weapon of choice. In some sense it describes the symbiotic relationship between Brandon and Phillip. A rope, by definition, is a "length of fibers twisted together to improve strength," yet not flexible enough to offer compressive strength. In other words, you can pull a rope...but you can't push it. Similarly, Brandon and Phillip are symbolically intertwined. Together, they are strong enough to commit the crime -- goading each other on -- but, like a rope, they are not strong enough to evade capture. When pushed...they collapse. Especially Phillip. Also, the manner of the film's shooting is much like a rope, with each cut a "knot" along the way of a larger, linear length, right?

Finally, the movie is a literalization of the idea of giving people enough rope to hang themselves. Brandon and Phillip boast every opportunity. They are well. educated. They are rich. They live in a free society...but they ultimately use their freedom to commit a murder; in essence...hanging themselves. Which, will likely be their outcome, though it will be society doing the actual hanging, I guess.

The writing in Rope is exceptionally clever and frequently droll. The screenplay is layered with double meaning, without feeling labored. By that, I mean that much of the dialogue seems to boast some ghoulish alternate readings without really pushing it. "I hope you knock 'em dead," one character tells Phillip about an upcoming recital. "I bet you're going to play a foul trick on all of us," suspects Janet of Brandon. "I could really strangle you, Brandon," says another character. On and on it goes.

My favorites: "I'm sure the boy [meaning murder victim, David] will turn up some place." And the film's classic line: "these hands will bring you great fortune." That last one is spoken by the ditsy Aunt to pianist Phillip, but it could plainly refer to his act of strangulation, not his musical acumen. For it was murder, not conventional artistic talent, that made Leopold and Loeb household names. We assume the same will be true for Phillip and Brandon.

The just-under-the-surface homosexuality angle is also played pretty well here, without being overtly ridiculous. Notice that the socially unacceptable act of murder (committed by two...) is followed immediately by Brandon's lighting up of of a cigarette. It's like afterglow, no?

And then listen as Brandon describes the act of killing. He utilizes loaded terms such as "satisfying" and notes that when "the body went limp, I knew it was over." Again, I submit (especially after watching the interview with Laurents...) that these are coded phrases and words, ones that equate the inappropriate act of murder with...something else some people might term inappropriate.

And don't even get me started on the champagne bottle, and how it functions as a blatant phallic symbol: handed back and forth fervently between Phillip and Brandon after the murder; twisted and man-handled and then...popped. Is the purpose of all this subtext merely to equate one deviant act (murder) with another one (homosexual sex?) Perhaps so, but before passing judgment, one should remember that Stewart's character is also coded as homosexual. By the film's conclusion, Rupert serves as the film's protagonist and moral compass, so Rope is hardly one-sided in its depiction of ..."It."

In terms of theme, Rope is more interesting (to me, anyway), in the manner that it systematically takes apart Nietzschean philosophy. The entire film serves as a sort of anti-elitism diatribe. Here are these two entitled, upper class American boys who spend too much time reading and discussing philosophy. They are highly educated, yet so detached from the day-to-day struggles of living that they come to believe that murder is an art form...and that they are, indeed, the artists. What this philosophy really represents, suggests the film, is "contempt" for one's fellow man.

When Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) created his theory of the "superman," he was responding to what he saw as the central problem of Christianity. Namely, that it makes people turn away from the problems and possibilities of this world for that of another, a presumably Utopian one (Heaven). Why focus on pressing problems here, in the now, if we can all count on gold-lined streets in the after-life for all eternity? In crafting the Superman, Nietzsche removed God and Heaven from the equation, and replaced those concepts with a morally superior but human creator, one who would see the average man as a sort of joke, an embarrassment...a lower form. There are aspects of this philosophy I find appealing, I admit. Nothing bothers me more than people who think it is better to do nothing in this life, and wait around for their "reward" in the next. But the problem with Nietzsche's idea is exactly what we see depicted in Rope: human arrogance and corruptibility.

Let me digress a second. My biggest disappointment with this summer's hit, The Dark Knight was that it danced around the very question Rope focuses so tightly on. In that film, as you'll call, Batman resorted to illegally wire-tapping everybody in Gotham City to catch one man, the Joker (a validation, make no mistake, of President Bush's similar national decision to wire-tap American citizens). But what man is infallible and incorruptible? What man would use that knowledge and power...and not be tempted to abuse it?

Remember, absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the Batman movie, Nolan made it easy for Bruce Wayne to make this choice: the character had Morgan Freeman at his side, a pillar of movie incorruptibility (at least pre-divorce.) In real life, who is the Morgan Freeman we're supposed to trust (blindly) to use that scarily powerful technology just once (and not be corrupted by it.) Rice? Cheney? Hadley? Addington? Libby? So, I truly felt that The Dark Knight overlooked the moral implications of Batman's decision to use illegal and invasive technology. We were left with the same superficial, Manichean-style thinking we detect in President Bush all the time: "Trust me, I'm the good guy. I'm fighting evil. Take my word." Personally, I think it's far more likely that people are like Rope's Brandon and Phillip. Believing they are above the law and the real arbiters (or "Deciders?") of what's right and moral.

I use the example of The Dark Knight because I think (by point of contrast) it helps illuminates the depth of the moral statement in Rope. As soon as you believe you are above God's law -- and man's law too -- a person who can rightly decide which "inferiors" should die, you've crossed a line. Even murder can be justified. And, as we see at the end of Rope, there's no going back.

I was going to end this review of Rope with some variation of the line that as a director and storyteller, Alfred Hitchcock really knows "the ropes," or "really ropes us in," but I don't want a silly, final turn of phrase to turn you away from what is a truly superior and unique thriller, one boasting many layers and a deep moral core. I know this isn't one of Hitchcock's more popular films (it was virtually ignored upon release because of the "It" factor), but it's surely one of the best in his canon.

CULT TV FLASHBACK #56: The (New) Twilight Zone (1985-1989)

Submitted for your approval: the mid-1980s CBS remake of Rod Serling's classic 1960s anthology. But, in a twist worthy of the famous land of shadow and substance itself, there's no Serling here (the legendary writer passed away in 1975); there's no moody black-and-white photography either (the series is shot on gauzy video instead...) and the bland stories - with a few spiky exceptions (namely "Her Pilgrim Soul" and the intense "Nightcrawlers") -- don't quite feel like they would have passed muster had Serling been steering the ship.

Yes, you have just entered...The Twilight Zone....lite.

The 1985-1986 TV season actually saw several anthologies debut on network television...and none of them were particularly good. "Proud as a Peacock" NBC offered the dreadful and over hyped Spielberg production Amazing Stories, plus a remake of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The latter venture offered the Master of Suspense himself (also long dead...) vetting colorized introductions to new episodes, and we can surely be grateful, at least, that the new Zone did not choose the path of featuring Zombie Serling. Despite the myriad flaws, this Zone lasted longer than the other anthologies named above, running for two uneven years on CBS before being shunted to syndication for a dreadful, low budget final season that is not merely Twilight Zone lite, but an insult to the heritage of the franchise. Stinkeroo.

But during the first two years on CBS, talented executive producer Phil De Guere and a stable of terrific writers made a serious, well-intentioned effort to update the classic series. Harlan Ellison was aboard (briefly) as a creative consultant, and well-known directors such as William Friedkin, Wes Craven and Tommy Lee Wallace helmed some standout episodes. I watched this series religiously as a teenager (I was sixteen years old), and still have nostalgic memories of it. Honestly, you can tell everyone was giving the new series their all, but this new Twilight Zone has not -- for the most part -- aged very well.

First off, I blame that fact on the uninspiring look of the series. Shot on crappy videotape, most of the episodes ("Nightcrawlers" excluded) resemble dreamy 1980s commercials for feminine hygiene products. There's no distinction, no originality in the visual component of the series, and so you could watch an episode and not be certain whether you're actually watching Simon & Simon or The Twilight Zone.

Even back in the black-and-white age, there was no mistaking the crisp, black-and-white canvas of the original Twilight Zone for anything else (One Step Beyond, for instance, aired simultaneously, but it lingered more on long shots and featured far fewer close-ups). On the original Twilight Zone, the photography was as distinctive and the editing as staccato as Serling's trademark narration. Who can forget the brilliant photography and mise-en-scene in "Eye of the Beholder," or the careful balancing of shadow and light in "The After Hours?" Separating The Twilight Zone from a distinctive even trademark look was a terrible, perhaps fatal mistake. Now, I understand the series had to be shot in color for the 1980s, but there are ways -- even in color -- to forge a sense of visual distinction. Witness the white-on- white minimalism of Space:1999, the lush fairy tale golds and bronzes of Beauty and the Beast, the grainy documentary look of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre; David Fincher's silver Seven, or even the various color palettes of such series as Prison Break, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Something, nay anything, would have helped in this regard.

The 1980s Twilight Zone doesn't win plaudits for internal consistency either. Serling's opening and closing statements on the original series always let you know where you were, who you were with, and why you were there. There was no hedging. On the new Twilight Zone, some episodes included back and front end narrations, some had no narrations whatsoever ("Nightcrawlers"), and some - oddly - featured an opening narration but yet no closing narration ("A Little Peace and Quiet.") Often times, you couldn't tell what the hell the narration was talking about either.

Charles Aidman narrated the new Twilight Zone (when there was a narration), and he did a fine job. His voice was more sweet, more whimsical and definitively more grandfatherly than the rat-a-tat machine gun-style of Serling. Ironically, this was also the choice of Spielberg's Twilight Zone: The Movie (which went with another kindly voice, the one belonging to the great Burgess Meredith). I respect these selections as a way not to imitate Serling's delivery, yet still have serious eservations about the appropriateness of a kindly-sounding narrator. After all, The Twilight Zone is a place where the scales of justice are often righted; where the unheard are heard; where the cruel get comeuppance. Serling was sharp, witty and occasionally brutal in his approach to the narration. Thus, I would have preferred a similarly hard-edged narrator, a more aggressive, commanding voice. Why? When you have only fifteen minutes to vet a story, and you must gloss over certain things, it's good to have someone strong offering the punctuation. Otherwise, you start and end with a whimper, not a bang. And at the end of every twisty Twilight Zone, you deserve that bang.

Rod Serling wrote something like ninety episodes of the original Twilight Zone. He was narrator for all of them. He also rewrote various episodes by other superb writers and produced the entire five year series. Considering his ubiquitous presence, it's fair to state that the Twilight Zone represented (primarily) his voice, his morality, his artistic sensibilities. Since he was gone by '85, the new series had no choice but to find it's own voice. And it is here, that I think the show truly failed to live up to his legacy.

Take for example, one of the worst offenders, "Little Boy Lost." In this story, a woman photographer must make the choice between taking a new job or starting a family with her steady boyfriend. During the course of the story, she is haunted (on a photo shoot at the zoo) by the spirit of the child - a boy named Kenny - she ultimately chooses not to have. This is odd, because she's not even pregnant.

"All you have to do is want me," the boy tells her pitifully. Yikes! Under the surface of the narrative, there is a deep pro-life bias. The sweet little boy (Scott Grimes) asks his would-be mother why she does not want to have him; why she does not love him, and it's all so madly extreme that you expect Pat Boone to show up and lecture about the evils of abortion. As much as I disagree with this viewpoint - I could buy it as a straight morality play from that point-of-view.

Yet, the same episode entirely lets the boy's would-be father, Greg, off the hook. Why isn't he haunted by the son he chooses not to have? Why just her? A whiny little she-man and drama queen, Greg doesn't want to "compete" with the woman's career, so he makes a "choice" too...to break up with her. So isn't Greg just as much to blame for the fact that this "little boy lost" isn't born? Greg could have been a stay-at-home dad, his wife could have had her career, and they both could have had the kid who wanted to live and be loved so badly. But no, the episode wears philosophical blinders about the man's role in this little reproductive drama. Greg wants to make no accommodation in his own life to have that family and child. He just wants the woman to do it. And then she gets stuck with the ghosts of children future.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single 1960s Twilight Zone episode that is so blatantly sexist, or that has aged this poorly...even after forty years. I mean, what's the real point here? That every woman who chooses a career is actually killing a potential child? That's what the episode seems to indicate, and that's absolutely reprehensible from a moral standpoint. As I stated, the woman isn't even pregnant, all right? She just wants to be a professional photographer! Choosing to be childless is not the same as terminating a pregnancy (at least until Sarah Palin is in office, then we'll have to talk again...). Choosing a career is not the same as having an abortion, yet "Little Boy Lost" can't make that critical distinction. As a result, the whole episode is icky. Greg is a self-righteous jerk, and the cute little kid is used as a bludgeon to make the lead character feel bad about a choice to live her life the way she wants.

Pack your bags, Zoners...we're going on a guilt trip! "Little Boy Lost's" ending narration backs away from the sexist interpretation of the episode as fast as it can, calling the story simply "a song unsung," "the wish unfulfilled," but it's too little too late.

Watching this episode last week, I was reminded of a comment on Serling's particular and singular ethos, one made at his eulogy: "He showed us people maybe we'd rather not think about. But with that keen perception and sparse dialogue, he grabbed you...and told you in no uncertain terms that these people deserved at least a little victory, breathing space, someone to care about them." "Little Boy Lost" is sort of the opposite of Serling's approach, isn't it? It judges. It makes a work-a-day character feel guilt, shame and pain for something by rights she has no reason to feel guilty about. (Again, not pregnant, just wants a career...)

"Shatterday" is another signature episode that fails rather dramatically. And that's a surprise, especially considering all the name talent involved. Wes Craven directs a short story by Harlan Ellison (adapted by Alan Brennert). And the installment stars a very young Bruce Willis as one Peter J. Novins, an ostensibly argumentative man who "pushes" people...until one day the world "pushes back." He's in a bar one evening when he telephones his apartment...and a doppelganger picks up on the other end. Turns out this doppelganger is a better Peter J. Novins than he is; and that this enigmatic double is setting right all the mistakes of his life. Meanwhile, our Novins starts to fade away, "becoming a memory."

Personally, I love the ideas lurking in this vignette. I love the notion of a doppelganger; and the conceit that someone else might live your life better than you can. But, alas, "Shatterday" never actually dramatizes Peter Novins being a bad guy. The story picks up immediately before the terrifying phone call. As a result, we're told he is a "pusher" (meaning a nudge, I guess) and a bad guy, but we never see it play out. All of Peter's actions in the episode are actually readily understandable, given that he believes an impostor is taking over his very life, aren't they? Wouldn't you push back too?

Allow me to make another invidious comparison to the original series. It would not have made sense, for instance, in the Serling episode "The Silence," if we had met the lead character there after he had made a bet to stop speaking aloud for a year's time. No, we had to see the loquacious central character babbling mindlessly and egotistically for a time, so we would understand the torture that he would go through in the course of the narrative. We had to understand the crimes of the jabberwocky before we got to see his sentence handed down by the mechanism of the twilight zone. The same is true in "Shatterday"...we have no empirical evidence that Novins deserves what happens to him. And there's just no fun in seeing cosmic justice meted out if we don't understand the cosmic violation in the first place. One on-screen example of his pushy nature would have sufficed. And I don't mean sassing a bartender. That's not a Zone-worthy offense if you ask me.

I hate to write negative reviews, especially about a series as good-intentioned and diverse in storytelling as this eighties Zone. So let me accentuate at least one positive story that seems - at least to me - absolutely true to The Twilight Zone's spirit and heritage. The story is titled "Wordplay," and it concerns a harried businessman (Robert Klein) who - because of a shake-up at the office - must learn the details of 67 new medical products in one week's time. All of these new-fangled products bear tongue-twisting names and are woefully technical. But then, something seems to change for the salesman...language seems to melt right out for under him. Suddenly, it's not just the products he can't understand...it's everything! The word "lunch" is replaced with the word "dinosaur." The word "throw-rug" replaces the word "anniversary." Suddenly, this little guy trying to make his way faces an entirely new challenge, re-learning the English language. The end of the episode is simultaneously devastating and hopeful, as this forty-something year-old man sits down heaviliyon his son's bed, and begins going through first grade picture books...meticulously learning one new word at a time.

The thing of importance here: this "little guy" has been dealt a raw hand (as the little guy often is). But he's not going to stop fighting. He's not going to be defeated by it. "Wordplay" reminds us that the human spirit -- nay, the American spirit - is indomitable. It's a terrific little tale; one that reflects how quickly the workplace was changing in the 1980s. (I remember, for instance that 1986 was the year my father began to learn Japanese...). So "Wordplay" was about something happening in the larger culture too; a pervasive fear that the old skills weren't going to be good enough in the newly emerging global workplace. "Wordplay" is a terrific show, and there were many such shows.

"Nightcrawlers," which I reviewed two weeks ago (for Friedkin Friday) is another stand-out installment, one which concerned PTSD and the repressed horrors wrought by the Vietnam conflict.

So what's my conclusion here? What's my closing narration? Perhaps just that you can't go home again. That it's damned difficult to revisit a classic. Especially when you don't necessarily have the arrows in your quiver (referring to the cheesy video...) to make your effort appear as stylish or as individual as what came before. The New Twilight Zone is thus a very mixed bag, and I suppose that's why even those viewers who "grew up with it" (myself included), find far more of interest (visually and thematically) in the Serling classic.

In the new series, you can spot a brief, almost subliminal flutter of Serling's iconic b&w visage in the opening credits, and that's all. He's really only there briefly in spirit too. For all the criticism Night Gallery has received over the years, there's much more of the Serling spirit present in that series, in stories such as "The Messiah of Mott Street" and "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar." For that reason alone, Night Gallery feels more like an authentic follow-up to the original Twilight Zone than this mediocre 1980s remake.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Somewhere in Time (1980)

Very often, it seems that science fiction films are designed and mounted with a hard technological edge. It's easy to detect why this is so, and I imply no criticism of that fact.

Understandably, the specific visual nature of the cinema offers the perfect opportunity to showcase state-of-the-art special effects, fancy modern vehicles, cool costumes and colorful flourishes. And the movie - a medium primarily of action and movement (hence the descriptor "moving pictures") -- also lends itself organically to physical conflict: car chases, fisticuffs, sword-fights and the like.

Yet the upshot of this fact is that it's much easier to sell a science fiction film about laser swords, superheroes, and transforming robot armies than one authentically about the mysteries of the human heart. A reliance on instrumentation (the camera) results to a large degree in a genre medium about instrumentation (batmobiles, HAL, atom bombs, etc.)

By explicit contrast, stories of the heart are always more difficult to dramatize...and downright chancy. In or out of the genre. The looming danger in crafting a truly emotional and romantic genre film is that by necessity it appeals to the emotions, not the intellect. And, well, some hearts are irrevocably...cold. Some hearts are guarded, impenetrable. And some are so stony and unresponsive that there's absolutely nothing that can be done about it.

To the cynical, mocking ear, sweet nothings and other deeply-held admissions of romantic affection -- shared between gazing and swooning lovers -- can sound alarmingly purple in perfectly-tuned stereo. These days, we love to say that such things are "campy" or "corny" if they make a direct appeal to the heart. Witness the backlash against Titanic (1997). Recall the accusing, snickering, pointed-fingers over Anakin's "sand" speech to Amidala in Attack of the Clones (2002). These days, it's so much easier to blow up romantic leads (like Maggie Gyllenhaal) than to write heartfelt romantic dialogue for them.

Why is this so? A couple reasons, I think. But when it comes down to it, it may be this: love is a deeply personal thing, isn't it? An emotion shared between two; one not easily transmitted between the masses via a technological medium. Film, after all, is homogenized, collaborative...technical. As an audience - as a mob even - we are primed to laugh, shriek and gasp. But not necessarily, to open ourselves up; to peel away our defenses.

Yet by the same token, who can truly deny that the best movies in history- like real love itself - transcend such barriers of the medium and seem...magical. How intellectual, for instance, is "chemistry" between two actors? How is that alchemical relationship quantified in scientific terms? Film records it; film registers it; film captures it. But people (the actors involved) make it happen. Sometimes between the lines.

I raise this meditation on love and film because I had the opportunity this week to screen another 1980s time travel movie (after Time After Time and The Final Countdown). Specifically, I watched Somewhere in Time (1980), the romantic film based on Richard Matheson's 1975 novel Bid Time Return.

The premise is simply that a lonely, empty man, a writer named Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) falls in love with a photograph of a radiant, long-dead stage actress, Elise, McKenna (Jane Seymour). He becomes so consumed with her image, in fact, that he actually hypnotizes himself into time traveling from 1980 to 1912...to court her.

In other words, this film is one romantic notion constructed upon another romantic notion, constructed upon another one. For some viewers in today's caustic pop culture, perhaps this is simply too much to accept.

Some viewers maybe. But not me.

Gazing across the vast swath of time travel films, the queue is replete with efforts that boast epic, earth-shattering concerns. What if the time traveler changes our past? What if history is altered? What if one action in the past changes everything that we have come to know? Indeed, this is the beauty, opportunity and terrain of time travel films as a format.

Yet, Somewhere in Time differentiates itself from the temporal pack by brushing aside such cosmic concerns. Here we are simply drawn into another life; another world....because of love. There are no explicit conversations about paradoxes, about time machines, or about any of the time travel boilerplate we have come to expect from the sub-genre. Rather, this film asks us to ponder a love so powerful, so out of the ordinary, that it goes beyond the veil of our reality. This element imbues Somewhere in Time with some sense of the spiritual; of the longing for the impossible in our every day lives.

A lush, impossibly affecting score from John Barry serves as our constant companion on this voyage to the distant world of 1912. The setting, a picturesque Grand Hotel, is romantic in and of itself, and the time period -- the last age of innocence and simplicity before the first "technological" war (World War I) -- also evokes feelings of innocence, simplicity and lyricism. It is a world without e-mail or television. Without cell phones or other modern distractions. Against this backdrop, a man of the present and a woman of the past fall in love before our eyes. And this is where you either accept the story the film wants to vet; or you denounce it as cheesy and corny.

And of course, some romance literature and film is legitimately cheesy. But that's because it's done poorly. I don't believe that's the case with Somewhere in Time. Specifically, director Jeannot Szwarc has crafted his film with a subtle sense of visual classicism. Many of his compositions, particularly one involving the lovers, a lighthouse, the ocean and a beached rowboat, evoke real paintings from the era. For another thing, Szwarc marshals his camera in a stately, anticipatory way. Anyone who has been separated from a lover for some length of time will know what I suggest by this. Just watch the scene (and camera work) involving Collier's first "real" view of Elise in 1912. We initially catch a glimpse of her (in long shot), in the reflection of a window-pane, and then, as Collier pivots, we cut to this beautiful and stately moving shot -- over the landscape -- as an eclipsed female figure comes slowly into view, the sea behind her. The build-up is deliberate and glorious, and if you've known love, you get it. If not...you're reading the wrong review.

After this, we're into the meat of a star-crossed love story. It's well-written, but what we're ultimately left with here is a rousing soundtrack augmenting the excellent chemistry between the two leads. The late Christopher Reeve is at his goofy, innocent best. He was always wonderful (and charming) playing the fish-out-of-water, the man slightly out-of-step with his time...and such is true here. And Seymour, an ethereal, distant beauty, melts slowly and methodically, until she delivers a rousing, theatrical monologue about love that is a high point for the actress in the film and in a career. Again, if you think it's cheesy, just consider the venue (the stage) on which this soliloquy is presented. Once more, Szwarc has done something more than modesly clever: provided a 1980s audience with an old-fashioned pronouncement of love, but through the appropriate artifice of the 1912 stage. Seen in that light, everything is as it should be.

I have concentrated in this review mostly on the romantic aspects of Somewhere in Time, and yet, in a sense that focus also does the film a disservice. Dig deeply into this movie, and you will find that it is teeming with ambiguities. For instance, ask yourself, where does the gold watch come from, originally? As the film opens in 1972, an elderly Elise McKenna gives a watch to young Richard Collier. She says the words "come back to me." After Collier has obliged, and traveled back to 1912, he gives the gold watch to Elise...so she can one day again give it to him. It's a mind-bender, because the watch seems to originate...nowhere.

Ask yourself too, what is the real role of Christopher Plummer's character, Robinson? He claims to know who Collier really is; and argues that Collier will "destroy" McKenna. In a sense, that's exactly what happens: when Collier is yanked back into the present, leaving McKenna behind...her career is ruined; she's depressed and lost. So the question becomes: is Robinson a fellow time traveler (perhaps another man who has fallen in love with that photo of Elise?) or is he merely a worried theater agent, fretting about his meal ticket? To its credit, Somewhere in Time makes absolutely no comment on this debate; it lets you sift through the clues and arrive at your own conclusion.

I remember when Somewhere in Time was first released, critics seemed to have a big problem with the idea that Collier had hypnotized himself into traveling through time. But today, after having read so much about quantum physics, II wonder why it is that we so readily accept the idea that a machine could do it. But our brains can't? I mean, a time machine is always invented by the human brain, isn't it? Our mental abilities are the root creative force in both instances. But I very much like the idea here that it is the brain - the dedicated, passionate, individual human brain - that makes the leap without benefit of hardware or instrumentation.

Because if you've ever been in love, you feel like you can move mountains with your bare hands. So why not time travel too?

Theme Song of the Week # 25: The Twilight Zone (1985-1989)