Tag Archives: Twilight Zone

KARROLL’S CHRISTMAS (2004) is a fun Christmas Carol riff; Alex Karroll is a disgruntled greeting-card writer who hates Christmas ever since his ex-girlfriend shot down his proposal (in public, no less), only half aware of how badly he’s slipping into bitter depression despite having a new and better girlfriend. When Bob Marley’s ghost shows up (it seems Jacob spent some time in Jamaica as a young man; Bob’s a descendant), it turns out they’ve mistaken Karroll for his even meaner neighbor, Wallace Shawn, so he finds himself dragged into Shawn’s past life instead of his own. Of course the spirit of goodwill wins out, but not before some fun; in its own way as subversive of the conventions as Scrooged. “Your use of the word ‘lunatic’ is very offensive to me and to, well, lunatics.”

Having watched CHASING CHRISTMAS (2004) for Now and Then We Time Travel, I knew it would make a good double bill for the first film; Jack (Tom Arnold) is the Christmas hater this time, due to catching his wife cheating on him during their daughter’s Christmas pageant; unfortunately after Christmas Past (Leslie Jordan) drags Jack back into his childhood, Past snaps, feeling centuries of guilt-tripping people has been completely futile, and strands Arnold in 1965. And if Jack can’t get back to the present before Christmas Day, he’ won’t exist any longer … A fun one, as I thought the first time I watched it.  “I am not some mean old man — I hate Christmas for a reason and no amount of memory is ever going to change that.”

I also caught EVE’S CHRISTMAS (2004) for the book, but I had no memory of that when I decided to stream it. Nor did the first thirty minutes jog my memory as unlucky-in-love Eve gets transported back to right before the wedding to her hometown sweetheart that never happened when she left for a Big Apple job (leaving your home town and not marrying your childhood sweetheart are terrible, terrible, terrible mistake in rom-coms like this). Once I realized I’d seen it, I stopped (trust me, I wasn’t missing anything).

I can’t say THE SANTA CHRONICLES (2018) did any better for me. This made-for-Netflix programmer has two kids attempt to catch Santa result in Mr. Claus losing the hat that gives him his magic powers. Can kids and Santa recover the hat in time to save Christmas? Despite Kurt Russell as a somewhat grump Father Christmas (constantly annoyed that no matter how much he works out, people expect him to be plus-size), this wasn’t worth finishing either.

While I’d planned to rewatch 12 Dates of Christmas it appears I gave that one away with many of the other time-travel DVDs. So instead I went with the old reliable WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) in which entertainers Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby put on a show to save their former CO’s Vermont Inn, and possibly snag dancers Vera Allen and Rosemary Clooney for themselves. As familiar as an old shoe by now, but there’s no denying the charm of the performances (particularly Kaye and Vera Allen in “Best Things Happen While You’re Dancing”) and the gorgeous Technicolor look. I also found myself thinking of ways it could have gone horribly wrong, like if they’d done the minstrel-show number in actual blackface. “‘Wow’ is somewhere between ‘ouch’ and ‘boing!’”

Another perennial is TWILIGHT ZONE: The Night of the Meek with Art Carney as a burned-out, drunken department-store Santa who gets to play the role for real when he finds a bag that allows him to give everyone the present of their dreams (hmm, where do you suppose it came from? Why, that’s right!). Rewatching, I was struck by the episode’s generosity of spirit; the officious department store-owner is precisely the kind of character who usually gets coal in his stocking in some fashion, but here even he gets a merry Christmas. “Just once, I’d like to see the meek inherit the Earth.”

MR. MAGOO’S CHRISTMAS CAROL (1962) stars the short-sighted cartoon character voiced by Jim Backus as a Broadway star, here performing in an musical adaptation of Dickens. This squeezes in a substantial amount of plot for under an hour, though dropping some details such as Scrooge’s family. Well done, with good songs, though I’m curious what millennials would make of the stylized, simplified style of animation UPA uses here (it was considered quite groundbreaking back in the day). “A hand for each hand was the way it was planned/Why won’t my fingers reach?/A million grains of sand in the world/Why such a lonely beach?”

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holder.

THE ANGRY RED PLANET (1960) is by the same creators as the tedious The Time Travelers and equally uninteresting, except for one truly memorable monster, the absurd bat-rat-spider. An expedition to Mars encounters various Martian horrors before the Martians send them home and tell them not to come back, the end. Very, very talky in the drawing-room SF vein (even though most of the talk takes place in labs or on the ship). “Nothing I’ve seen contradicts the theory that basic matter is the same everywhere in the universe.”

A PIECE OF THE ACTION (1976) was Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier’s third and final big-screen team-up (the first being Uptown Saturday Night) and easily the worst. Instead of blue-collar buddies, they’re now master criminals (safe cracker and conman respectively) blackmailed by retired cop James Earl Jones into serving as mentors at a job center for troubled inner-city youth. I loved this the first time I saw it, but now I recognize how many shopworn tropes are in it — this could as easily have been Welcome Back Kotter or one of Warner Brothers’ 1930s dramas about slum kids, coupled with the time-honored plot of Guy Becomes Teacher, Blossoms Into Decent Human Being and lots of stuff about how all the kids need is Confidence and a Good Attitude. Another problem is that there are two main plots, the crime drama (will the vengeful mobsters catch up with them?) and the kid stuff, and the film doesn’t mesh them smoothly. “That’s your first lesson — nobody gives you something for nothing.”

DC LEGENDS OF TOMORROW had a much better season than its first, replacing Vandal Savage with the Legion of Doom (“I got the name from this cartoon I watched as a kid.”), a trio of established villains who very much want to rewrite history to put wrong what once went right. This was just a really fun show and the final episode of the season was spectacular. “Why would a relic from the Crusades turn up in the Galapagos during the Reagan era?”

I recently discovered that the one nonsyndicated episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, The Encounter, was online at YouTube and so thought I’d give it a look. This story of Nisei George Takei and WW II veteran Neville Brand locking horns with each other is superbly acted — given it’s a two-man show, they picked two great guys. Unfortunately the racial overtones are (as they say) problematic, staring with the Big Reveal that Takei’s father was a Japanese spy working with the attackers at Pearl Harbor (there was no Japanese fifth column at Pearl Harbor). The rest of the arc seems to imply that Takei has something to atone for equivalent to Brand murdering a Japanese officer, or that he’s still somehow a threat just because of his sinister Japanese-ness or something, which probably explains why it’s not in syndication or on DVD.THE GRAND DUKE was Gilbert and Sullivan’s last production and I wasn’t optimistic about it given Utopia Limited and Princess Ida (the preceding creations) were hardly their A-game. Surprisingly this was very entertaining: a troupe of actors plotting to take over a small German principality get a lucky break due to an arcane rule of law that allows one of their number to legally assume the Grand Duke’s role. However it turns out that includes the Grand Duke’s responsibilities, such as marriage — or engagements — and it turns out the Duke’s been kind of free with his proposals. Great fun, good looking and well performed; the duke is somewhat modeled on Trump, but that works fine.. “Be a violet — a crushed, despairing violet.”

For the first time in a couple of years, I can binge on Christmas movies this month instead of sharing space with time-travel material. Woo-hoo! Two of the  movies this week belong in the bring people together subgenre of Christmas films: Christmas is simply an excuse for a lot of people to be together in the same place at the same time.

Case in point The Best Man (1999) brought a group of college friends back together for a wedding, but Christmas serves just as well in 2013’s BEST MAN HOLIDAY. It’s fourteen years later and the cast of the first film (including writer Taye Diggs and pro football star Morris Chestnutt) has a big Christmas reunion, which leads to them dealing with career collapse, celebrity, cancer, pregnancy, adultery and parenthood. Not a standout, but watchable, and I don’t require much more in December. “He can get married again, but not to her.”

Likewise WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954) has a plot that could as easily have been made into, say, July in Vermont: entertainment duo Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby wind up at their former CO’s inn, realize he feels over-the-hill and useless (not to mention the inn is struggling) and launch a scheme to rebuild his confidence and boost bookings. Meanwhile Kaye conspires to nudge his partner into a liaison with pretty nightclub entertainer Rosemary Clooney, while himself falling into the arms of Vera Allen. But of course, would July in Vermont be watched half as much as a Christmas film? Some great dance numbers and good songs (“White Christmas” itself, for instance) but “What do you do with a general?” is not one of them. And a production number that includes nostalgia for minstrel shows makes me wince a little. Still, overall this is good, old-fashioned entertainment. All rights to image reside with current holders  “If there’s one thing I learned in the army it’s to be positive—especially when you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Now the non-Christmas duo—Surprisingly, RUDOLPH AND FROSTY’S CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1979) puts two of the best-known Christmas characters into a film set, yes, in July: Rudolph, Frosty and the latter’s family leave the North Pole to help out a struggling circus, which gives the evil sorcerer Winterbolt a chance to snuff out the light in Rudoph’s nose, the last remnant of the magic that kept Winterbolt imprisoned for centuries. This might have worked as an hour special, but at ninety minutes (probably two hours with commercials when first aired) it feels very padded (the circus stuff in particular). However it is interesting to see Rankin-Bass throw in added continuity from Frosty’s Winter Wonderland, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town (makes me wonder they didn’t work in Peter Cottontail or the Winter Warlock). “Darker, darker, grimmer, grimmer/Let Rudoph’s nose/Lose it’s glimmer!”

SNOW DAY (2000) wasn’t actually a Christmas movie, only a winter movie: when the eponymous event hits, weatherman Chevy Chase has to outperform a TV Weatherman of Evil to keep ratings up, wife Jean Smart finds herself cut off from the office and their kid and his friends hope that just once they can gum up the snowplow long enough to get two days out of it. Bland, though I’m obviously not the target audience. “Is it true what they say about running over kids with your snow plough?”

NOEL (2004) is in the second subcategory, using Christmas joy for a contrast with the characters’ loneliness and despair, with the lonely and despairing including Susan Sarandon (mother has Alzheimer’s), Penelope Cruz (boyfriend is violently jealous), Paul Walker (boyfriend in question), Alan Arkin (loonie with a tragic past) and Robin Williams (despairing priest). Nowhere near as deep or poignant as it imagines, but again, watchable. “He didn’t give you a cock-and-bull story about being my reincarnated mother, did he?”

TWILIGHT ZONE: Night of the Meek was a second season episode that fits into the second subgenre but also the third (movies that are actually about Christmas—because for me, any movie where Santa Is Real qualifies). Art Carney plays a drunken department-store Santa who stumbles across a sack in the street, then discovers that whatever people ask for, he can find inside it …I’ve seen it several times, and it’s still remarkably effective. “Just once, on Christmas, I’d like to know that the meek really do inherit the Earth.”

GHOSTBUSTERS (2016) is the all-woman remake starring Kristen Wig and Melissa McCarthy as former ghost-hunting best friends who broke up when Wig turned to serious physics instead. Now they reunite alongside mad scientist Kate McKinnon and Big Apple history buff Leslie Jones to stop disgruntled janitor Neil Casey from unleashing Hell on Earth. Extremely funny (TYG liked it and she’s not a fan of the original) with a cast include Mayor Andy Garcia (“Do not compare me to the mayor in Jaws!”), university dean Charles Dance, Annie Potts as a snide hotel clerk, Dan Ackroyd as a cabbie (“I ain’t afraid of no ghosts.”), Bill Murray as a James Randi-type and Chris Hemsworth as the women’s brain-dead receptionist (there are also cameos for Slimer and Stay-Pufft). I highly recommend this one (all rights to image with current holders). “When the Fourth Cataclysm comes, laborers such as yourself will be the last ones led to the butchery.”

TYG then dredged out my copy of GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) to see if she’d enjoy it more than when she watched it years ago — nope, but I had fun watching Bill Murray do psychic research, Sigourney Weaver finding evil in her fridge, Rick Moranis attempting to make friends and Ernie Hudson promising to believe anything for a paycheck (his character was originally much more competent, but the role was rewritten when plans for a name black star fell through). “What my associate says is right—this man has no dick!”

ROWS (2015) is a horror film in which the protagonist’s efforts to deliver an eviction notice to a spooky old woman in a supposedly haunted house lead to what are either precognitive flashes, hallucinations or time jumps back and forth. One that I might add to the appendix in the proofing stage (lord knows I’ve picked ones with flimsier qualifications); in its own right, a chaotic mess. “Why did you stab that man?”

Rewatching the first season of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, the most striking thing is Rod Serling’s fondness for ordinary guys and out-of-luck losers, from drunken ex-gunfighter Mr. Denton to Jack Klugman’s depressed musician in “A Passage for Trumpet” to the burned-out businessman in “A Stop at Willoughby.” (a fondness which didn’t stop Serling from going tragic, as in “The Big Tall Wish.”). It’s also noteworthy that despite the affection in many scripts, Serling was perfectly aware how horrible we could be, most particularly in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Plus of course, despite occasional flops such as “Mr. Bevis,” the stories are mostly excellent. Still worth watching after all these years. “No, it’s not what you need—but it’s exactly what I need.”

DEFIANCE‘s second season (I reviewed the first here) has the city now under control of the Earth Republic, despite which things go on much as before, with various romances at cross-purposes, crime on the streets and the Daytak family entangled in various personal dramas. Still not A-list for me, but still worth watching. “You killed my parents and I loved you for it.”