Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

You unlock this door with the key of imagination...a series that was possibly the greatest TV show of all time, and the inspiration for a whole generation of filmmakers. That's right--I'm talking about The Twilight Zone.

No...not that!! I mean Rod Serling's classic tales of morality with unrelated characters and plots. So, how do you make a movie out of that? With four different directors. Yes, this movie is cut into four different segments, and the directors (in order) John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), Steven Spielberg (needs no introduction), Joe Dante (The Howling), and George Miller (Mad Max).

The movie opens with a Dan Akroyd cameo that takes an unexpected twist, in probably the best part of the movie. After that, the four segments are modern day retellings of episodes from the series: A racist douche (Vic Morrow) gets his comeuppance through some unusual time travel, several retirement home residents get the chance to be children again, a schoolteacher (Kathleen Quinlan) is finds herself in a house ruled over by a powerful child (Jeremy Licht), and a paranoid traveler (John Lithgow) suspects that a gremlin is on the wing of his plane.

What was wrong with creating original scripts for the movie? It probably would have been better than reusing old ones. But nevertheless, the movie...a bit hit and miss. Segment 1 was good, segment 3 was good, but had a weird obsession with Looney Toons, segment 4 was good, even though it seemed sort of brief, but segment 2...was the weakest. Which is really odd, considering the director. OK, so it's not really very bad, but the plot is a little too similar to Cocoon and the kids in it bring back bad memories of SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (more on that on Friday). Also, this isn't necessarily bad, but the contrast between this and segment 1 is a bit weird--we go from a bleak ending involving a Nazi concentration camp to this upbeat and lighthearted story being young again. Well, I guess that's just The Twilight Zone.

Another thing--I really don't like the theme song replication they made for this movie. Couldn't they have made it look like it did in the show instead of an 80s CGI demo reel. What is this, Steve Job's Twilight Zone? But anyways, this is a pretty good movie. It doesn't always live up to the source material, but it's not bad either. If you haven't seen it, see it.