The Twilight Zone: The Movie
An highlight reel for the Twilight Zone spirit.
They are correctly ordered from best to worse.
Racist guy gets a taste of his own medicine.
This part was forever tarnished by the accident in which the protagonist and two kids got crushed by an helicopter, but this is the story that best embodies The Twilight Zone ethos. A gedankenexperiment that transports the aggressor to the shoes of The Other in Occupied France, KKK-land and ‘Nam.
Peter Pan with old people.
Halloran from The Shining goes around retirement homes bringing life to their inhabitants. They experiment a few hours of childhood again, which is enough to keep them going in the old age they remain. Directed by Spielberg, and it shows.
Good Samaritan tricked by a child from the corn into an hellish house.
This is a showcase for a surrealistic atmosphere and weird images. Can be summed up by Looney Toons with Fleischer cartoons. Crazy enough to work.
Imaginary (or is it?) creature that a single passenger sees wrecks a plane
This was directed by George Miller, but he got the short end of the stick. It’s a remake from the old episode that starred William Shatner.
This time, John Lithgow was cast as the man that sees the monster on the plane wing, but nobody believes them and he goes to the loony bin. There’s a staggering amount of scenery chewing, goes up to eleven.
Bonus points for having the intro characters having difficulty of telling The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits apart. Been there, done that.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.