DVD Collectors Online

Twilight Zone: The Movie, a review by addicted2dvd

Title: Twilight Zone: The Movie Year: 1983 Director: Prologue & Segment 1: John Landis, Segment 2: Steven Spielberg, Segment 3: Joe Dante, Segment 4: George Miller Rating: PG Length: 101 Min. Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.78:1 Audio: English: Dolby Digital: 5.1, English: Dolby Digital: Dolby Surround, French: Dolby Digital: Mono, Spanish: Dolby Digital: Mono Subtitles: Chinese, English, Portuguese

Stars:
Dan Aykroyd
Albert Brooks
Vic Morrow
Doug McGrath

Plot:
1959. Friday nights. We time-traveled. Witnessed surprising twists. Entertained aliens. Experienced fear. And first journeyed to The Twilight Zone of Rod Serling's memorable TV series. And guided by four imaginative moviemakers, we traveled there again in 1983. Directors John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller fashion stories based on or inspired by classic episodes. Landis weaves the tale of a bigot who gets a walloping dose of his own hatred. Spielberg takes over with a fable of senior citizens offered a magical rejuvenation. Dante serves up a terror trip with a child who uses his cartoon-inspired powers to enslave his family. Then fright goes aloft with Miller's finale about a neurotic passenger who sees a monster on the jetliner's wing. Or does he?

Extras:
Scene Access
Feature Trailers

My Thoughts:
This is one of my old favorites. One of the first anthology horrors I ever seen. I always loved how this movie started. The prologue is a lot of fun. But I never cared much for the actual first segment of the movie. The one with the bigot finding out what it is like to be like the people he hates so much. It is a good idea for a story... and I wouldn't go so far to say it is a bad segment. It just seemed to not keep my attention as well as the rest of the movie.

The second story is more of a fun story. Where with the help of a new resident the people in the retirement home become young again while playing outside one night. And they need to decide if they want to stay young or be old once again.  Not the greatest story either... but I enjoyed it more then the first one.

In the third segment I enjoyed quite a bit. We meet a boy that can do anything he can imagine. Of course this is from a famous episode of the series. I am still not that familiar with the series and think that all the segments are from episodes of the series. But I must admit I like the way the episode was done more then the segment in this movie. As the movie made it too cartoon-ish.

The final segment is my favorite one in the movie. A man afraid of flying is up in a plane where he sees a gremlin out on the wing tearing up the plane. It is this segment that really made this movie for me. It pushes the movie to the next rating level for me personally.




Count:
Movie Count: 12
TV Ep. Count: 6
Other Count: 0
Time Started: 11:30am

(From Month Long Horror/Halloween Marathon: 2010 on October 4th, 2010)

Marwencol, a review by Antares

Marwencol (2010) 3/5 - I had been looking forward to viewing this documentary for a while and for the first hour or so, it tells a pretty good story about a man who is almost beaten to death at the hands of five young men. After awakening from a coma, all his memories of his previous life are wiped away, not to mention the reconstructive surgery needed to repair his disfigured face. At first, normal psychological therapy doesn't work for him, so he takes it upon himself to rehabilitate himself through an imaginary WWII Belgian town he creates in his yard called Marwencol. Through his imaginary village, Hogencamp slowly pieces together, not only memories of his past, but of the night of the attack. It is during this exploration into Marwencol that we come to know that Hogencamp was a talented artist before the attack. When the focus of the documentary stays on Hogencamp's ingenuity and talent in building this imaginary world, the story remains compelling. But at around the one hour mark, it takes a more awkward turn in that we start to witness Hogencamp's pent up anger towards his assailants, which he portrays in torture scenes in the village. It was at this point in the documentary where I started to feel that maybe this guy was a ticking time bomb, who will someday go Columbine on the people in his town. The scenes he portrayed in his revenge fantasy were extremely violent and somewhat twisted in Hogencamp's sexually repressed mind.

Then all of a sudden, the director shifts the focus to Hogencamp's little secret. He shows us a closet filled with over 200 pairs of women's shoes. Seeing how compulsive Hogencamp is throughout the first hour, the viewer believes that he started to collect them after the beating as some kind of release for his sexual repression, but it is then disclosed that Hogencamp was a cross-dresser before the attack. At this point in the film I was expecting a little exposition into what kind of person he was before the attack. It had been touched upon in the opening minutes of the film, but for the most part had been pretty much glossed over. And I feel that this omission from the documentary weakens the overall presentation.

(From Antares' Short Summations on April 19th, 2011)

Tom's TV Finales marathon, a review by Tom

[tom]025193205421f.jpg[/tom]

Columbo: Seasons Six and Seven (1976/United States) IMDb | Wikipedia Universal Studios Home Entertainment (United States) Length: 635 min. Video: Full Frame 1.33:1 Audio: Subtitles:

---

Plot:Columbo
Season 7.05 Make Me a Perfect Murder 28.02.1978
Writer: Robert Blees (Writer), Richard Levinson (Created By), William Link (Created By)
Director: James Frawley
Cast: Peter Falk (Columbo), Trish Van Devere (Kay Freestone), Laurence Luckinbill (Mark McAndrews), James McEachin (Walter Mearhead), Ron Rifkin (Luther), Lainie Kazan (Valerie Kirk), Bruce Kirby (TV Repairman), Kip Gilman (Jonathan), Patrick O'Neal (Frank Flanagan), Milt Kogan (Dubbing Chief), Dee Timberlake (Madge), Don Eitner (Pete Cockrum), Morgan Upton (Ames), Joe Warfield (Al Staley), George Skaff (The Producer), Jerome Guardino (Sgt. Burke), Susan Krebs (Wendy), H. B. Haggerty (Masseur), Buck Young (Guard), James Frawley (Roark), Socorro Swan (Nancy)

A great Columbo episode. One of my favorites. I chose to watch this episode for this marathon, because it was the last episode, when Columbo was still a TV series. What followed were TV movies. And as I have seen the last TV movie not long ago, I wanted to go further back in the series.

Rating:

(From Tom's TV Finales marathon on April 14th, 2013)