The Outer Limits (1963)

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Dargo
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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

Post by Dargo »

Just want to say I think these are very well-constructed synopses of this classic television series you've constructed here, wmcclain.

(...have especially enjoyed your spotlighting of the now seemingly little remembered actors and actresses who appeared in these episodes)
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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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12 done, 37 more to go.

Then there's 152 more from the rebooted series of 1995-2002.
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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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Tourist Attraction, directed by Laslo Benedek.

In a mashup of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and The Thing from Another World (1951) a tough and unpleasant businessman is testing new diving gear in South America when he captures a gill-man creature. He fights with the local General/President (and everyone else) over what to do with it.

Definitely one of the lesser episodes without much in the way of an Outer Limits sense of wonder. They hint at elements which are not developed: the creature was once worshiped as a god and has hypnotic powers (making it one of the Spawn of Cthulhu).

Way too much TV drama diddling around, soap opera with the secretary and confrontation with the strongman.

The gill-man outfits are not very good but give them credit for trying: underwater filming in that gear is not easy. The episode also has an unusual degree of outdoor effects, with flooding after a broken dam.

Unusually, the Control Voice provides (unneeded) narration during the program.

Notable cast: Ralph Meeker (Kiss Me Deadly (1955)), Henry Silva (The Manchurian Candidate (1962)), Jay Novello, and a brief glimpse of Henry Darrow.

Photographed by John M. Nickolaus.

No Blu-ray commentary track for this episode.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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The Zanti Misfits, directed by Leonard Horn.

First Contact is not what anyone hoped for: planet Zanti is sending its criminals to Earth and we have to manage them. No discussion and we have no choice but to cooperate.

The Zanti haven't been completely honest: what seems like a disaster and quick siege and die bug die! frenzy was just what they intended all along. We killer apes ("practiced executioners") are useful to them and we are left wondering: will there be more? Count on it.

This is a well-known episode and even those not regular fans of the series are aware of it. This is the only use of stop-motion animation in the series. It's expensive and we have just a few seconds worth, but that is effective. Quick glimpses are scary. (Later: Counterweight has stop-motion also).

And that killer-hornet sound the Zanti make: every good horror story needs an evil sound.

We do cross over from SF creature feature to actual horror: we see the Zanti crawling up Bruce Dern's arm, then cut to the HQ and pan across the faces as they listen to his terrified screams as he pleads, "Get it off me!"

As a kid I did not notice the Zanti had faces so much as their large human-like eyes, which I thought was stupid. I would reconsider now: other invertebrates like the octopus have singular eyes so insect-like aliens might also. On Blu-ray the details of their faces and fringe beards are a little goofy, but at the same time unsettling.

Our cast:
  • Michael Tolan -- The Enforcer (1951) -- is a journalist and historian sent to record the great event. Oddly enough, he is more aggressive than the General.
  • Robert F. Simon is the General. A familiar face, although I had to look up his name. As the commander he is more of a peacekeeper than we expect, aware of how little mistakes might start an interplanetary war.
  • Bruce Dern, early in his career, is one of the human misfits who collide with the alien misfits, a nice bit of symmetry. Dern was one of the great villains of the 1960s: everything about him was just wrong.
  • I did not recall Olive Deering -- Samson and Delilah (1949), Caged (1950), The Ten Commandments (1956) -- as an actress, but she adds quite a bit as Bruce Dern's fellow misfit and partner in crime. She was 18 years older than Dern and is playing a woman breaking loose from her normie life and reaching for one last outlaw fling. Her breakdown monologue stops the plot cold, but moments of serious acting were required in TV drama. Her brother was familiar 1960s face Alfred Ryder, who appeared in The Borderland episode.
Notes:
  • Even at that date the story has the government -- X-Files-like -- in a conspiracy to cover up the truth of UFOs and alien contact.
  • The makeshift HQ -- is it an old bordello? -- shows the 1960s fascination with console lights and switches, like the bomber panels in Dr. Strangelove (1964). Message: we've got technology, we can handle whatever is coming.
  • A clever reveal: we have no idea the spaceship is so small until Dern climbs up to it.
  • More symmetry: the Zantis also scream when killed.
  • The production makes great use of the famous Vasquez Rocks, which I will always remember as the site of Capt Kirk's battle with the Gorn in Star Trek Arena:

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    I thought the first use of the site in film was as "Tibet" in Werewolf of London (1935), but a commentary track says it was background for Dracula (1931). I'll have to look for that.
  • Director Leonard Horn returns after The Man Who Was Never Born (1963). He was a prolific TV director; this is his second of three for the series.
  • Photographed by John M. Nickolaus. Written and produced by Joseph Stefano. They say a lot of the first season was just his dreams and phobias, in this case fear of insects.
The Blu-ray has two commentary tracks: dry and somewhat sparse thoughts by Tim Lucas and another where Gary Gerani and Steve Mitchell relive their boyhood viewings with joy.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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The Mice, directed by Alan Crosland, Jr.

Scientists need a volunteer for a matter transmitter experiment. They don't seem too keen to try it themselves so look for an expendable subject in prison and get one in an ex-boxer serving a life sentence. You can be sure he will be checking the doors and windows at the lab. After a while he is no longer a volunteer, but government property like one of the lab mice.

Turns out the experiment is an exchange of test subjects with aliens from a distant star who provided the technology. Like the previous episode -- The Zanti Misfits -- this is an alien deception plot. What are they really after?

In many ways the alien visitor is impressively disgusting, like one of those microscopic crustaceans enlarged to our size. The human legs spoil the effect, but that's the budget.

Several things I don't understand:
  • Why the alien was so violent when it first arrived.
  • The aliens have a language translator, so why isn't the visitor speaking?
  • Why they let it wander around the compound unattended.
  • What it was trying to do with the lab gear at the end.
We have a lot of running around in this story and I think the plot could have been tightened up.

Some good points:
  • It is a reflection on the worth of human life: who is expendable?
  • Our "volunteer" wonders if his soul is going to splattered all over space, suggesting our persistent uncertainty as to whether our souls or selves survive matter transport.
  • Unlike The Galaxy Being, they stipulate that the new technology uses faster-than-light physics.
Henry Silva returns from Tourist Attraction. He's the only actor I recognize apart from Dabney Coleman in a small part.

This episode has a lot of new music, a very eerie SF sound.

Photographed by Conrad Hall.

The Blu-ray commentary track has Reba Wissner on the score and the musical instruments created for the series.

She says this episode was cited in congressional hearings as an example of excess horror and violence on television, specifically the scene where the alien attacks and drowns one of the scientists.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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Controlled Experiment, written and directed by Leslie Stevens (uncredited).

Two martians investigate "murder", a phenomenon that occurs only on planet Earth. They have a time control device and are not afraid to use it.

As the only comedy episode of the series, it has problems. Comedy is hard; maybe it should be left to the specialists. And the story is excessively, terribly, terrifically padded. With the time control they rerun a jealous women shooting her philandering boyfriend many times: forwards, backwards, slow motion and speeded up, with variations. It is a cute concept but could have been covered in a 25 minute skit rather than a 51 minute program.

And yet: I like this one more than I should. Carroll O'Connor and Barry Morse are a hoot as the hyper-intelligent martians at first befuddled by the primitive human race, then amused and finally charmed by their coffee and cigarettes and love rituals.

A running gag whenever they see the couple kissing-- Phobos: "Ah, every chance they get". Deimos: "Yes, it's harmless".

It is worth noting the emergency message they get from martian HQ after preventing the murder in one of their experiments:
Male and female are now together. They marry and produce male child. Father tells child of miraculous escape. Child grows up, believes it's immortal. Child enters politics, becomes dictator. Starts atomic war in belief it cannot be killed. Atomic chain reactions explode atmosphere, blow up planet earth. Radiation affects entire solar system. Destroys ecologic balance of galaxy. Galaxy collides with Andromeda.

Computers unable to predict beyond this point due to overheating.
They are directed to put things back the way they were, but our martians have gone native.

Our featured lovers are Grace Lee Whitney who would shortly be Yeoman Janice Rand in Star Trek, and Robert Fortier who was in Star Trek By Any Other Name as the alien who Scotty drinks under the table. Scotty: "What is it? Well, it's... it's green".

It is said this was meant to be a pilot episode for a new series. I hope they intended to keep the dingy little pawn shop as the martian observation outpost.

Photographed by John M. Nickolaus with striking imagery. I don't often like a film more because of the Blu-ray presentation, but it happened here.

The Blu-ray commentary is another by Reba Wissner emphasizing the music. As always she points out where Dominic Frontiere borrows cues from his work on the Stoney Burke series, another Leslie Stevens project.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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wmcclain wrote: May 1st, 2023, 6:56 am The Human Factor, directed by Abner Biberman.

Isolated military bases in the arctic are natural locations for SF thrillers, and this one begins like a scene from The Thing from Another World (1951). But no, that's not a alien in ice they are hauling in from the storm, but an atom bomb. The major who is cracking up and seeing guilt-induced visions of a dead man really wants to know how it works.

Not a lot of Outer Limits material here, more like an episode of Science Fiction Theater. As a bonus wrinkle a base scientist is -- for some damn reason at a radar base in the arctic -- working on a mind-sharing rig. When this goes all the way to mind transfer the erratic major has a good chance of getting to his a-bomb.
This theme is remarkably similar to the "Turnabout Intruder" episode from the last season of Star Trek. I wonder if Gene Roddenberry had seen this and was "inspired."
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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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wmcclain wrote: May 9th, 2023, 6:34 am Controlled Experiment, written and directed by Leslie Stevens (uncredited).

Two martians investigate "murder", a phenomenon that occurs only on planet Earth. They have a time control device and are not afraid to use it.

As the only comedy episode of the series, it has problems. Comedy is hard; maybe it should be left to the specialists. And the story is excessively, terribly, terrifically padded.
Definitely padded, but I didn't mind seeing Grace Lee Whitney over and over in a tight outfit.
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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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Don't Open Till Doomsday, directed by Gerd Oswald.

In the little town is an old house. In the old house is a shut up room with a table of dusty wedding presents. One of the boxes emits an unearthly droning sound. Behind the lens in the box is a little one-eyed alien waiting for anyone to look in, after which they are never seen again.

Well, that's different!

Part of the eerieness of this is because both time frames -- 1929 and 1963 -- involve wedding nights, a time of privacy and intimacy between two people. Interference from a malevolent outside force is unsettling.

Other creepy elements:
  • The alien noise is like the low outside howling Davis Lynch would later use; also the moaning wind.
  • When Daddy is taken inside the box, he is so terrified he forgets to care about his eloped little girl.
Miriam Hopkins is the 1929 bride who -- like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations -- has "lost" her husband on the wedding day. Time stops, the presents are never opened, the bridal suite and house fall into decay. Like Havisham, our bride has a generous exterior but hidden malevolent intent. Thirty-four years later, she has plans for getting her groom back.

When I first started writing reviews I don't know Golden Age star Hopkins, but since I have seen:Familiar faces: John Hoyt (always the hatchet-faced intimidating man) and Russell Collins ("nervous old man with guilty secrets").

Photographed by Conrad Hall.

The Blu-ray commentary is the third in a row by Reba Wissner giving insight into the score.

She also fills in useful background on the plot, presumably from the written screenplay: the little alien is an extra-dimensional being whose reality is colliding with our universe of time and space. He and his fellows have come to destroy us. In 1929 the Professor captures the alien in its magic box but is ridiculed and his life ruined by rich man Kry. As a malicious prank the Prof delivers the box as a present at the wedding of Kry's son, and our story begins.

She also finds much sexual symbolism in the story but won't spell out the details.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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ZZZZZ, directed by John Brahm.

How do you pronounce that?

A queen bee somehow transforms into a mysterious, sexually alluring young woman. Object: cross-species breeding to advance her race.

The professor has been developing advanced bees so maybe this is his fault. He has developed a language translator that understands their buzzing and has a microphone to speak back to them. Note the symmetry: he has inserted an artificial bee microphone into the hive, and the hive has sent out an artificial human probe into his world.

His wife doesn't like the strange "Regina" at all. Without accusing her husband of infidelity, she recognizes the young woman as a threat to the household, without knowing exactly why.

It's a goofy premise that works surprisingly well, maybe because we like looking at the exotically beautiful Joanna Frank. With those over-made eyes and fall of hair across her face, she looks like a character from later Japanese anime.

I don't recall seeing the actress before; she's Steven Bochco's big sister. At the time she had a poor self-image and -- quite unnecessarily -- stuffed nylon stockings into her bra for padding. You can see how over-developed she looks in some of the thumbnails. When shooting one scene when she was lying on a table, Conrad Hall found her chest was blocking his view of her face. "Can you do anything about your... tits"? So she pulled out some of the stockings.

Marsha Hunt -- Pride and Prejudice (1940) -- is the wife, a beauty of the Golden Age.

Written by Meyer Dolinsky and directed by the under-appreciated John Brahm, who like so many directors had moved into television by this time. Some of his feature films:Conrad Hall uses the same strange lens filtering as for The Man Who Was Never Born.

The Blu-ray commentary track is by Tim Lucas, who gives many intriguing reflections:
  • This is an Eden setup --garden included-- with the prof and his wife as Adam and Eve and Regina as Lilith, who in folklore was a seductress who tempted Adam. (An aside: I recall a quip from years ago. The reason men and women are uneasy with each other is that men still yearn for Lilith while women miss the Serpent).
  • He proposes thinking of the story as a fable, where Regina is the prof's muse. Unable to have children, he pours his creative energies into his work. His subject: the notoriously fecund bees.
  • Some dark waters: the couple had a baby girl who died. She would be about Regina's age. Perhaps the prof sees her as the daughter who might have been, but she wants him as a mate. Temporarily: the drones die after mating.
  • In a nighttime scene Regina is observed in the garden, embracing the flowers and erotically licking from a water lily. Joanna Frank said this was unscripted, she just did it as part of her character. Lucas said the scene would have been perfect if she were naked.
  • He says the lens Conrad Hall used was a "Sparkle Plenty", which I can't find on the net, apart from a character in the Dick Tracy comics.
  • He dwells on the unexpected horror moment of the final scene, when Regina appears in a wedding dress, having no idea of the evil she has done. It is shocking: from a distance she looks like zombie bride.
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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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The Invisibles, directed by Gerd Oswald.

The "Invisibles" are alien parasites covertly infiltrating positions of power. Where did they come from?
We were conceived in the nothingness of space... Sired by a satyr of cosmic energy... Formed by the coming together of sick, nameless nuclei that waited a billion billion years for that precise, ungodly moment. We fell to earth, and the velocity of that fall quickened the seed of intellect... at the same time that it stunted the evolution of our primitive form.
They are truly horrific hairy, twitching crab-like things that make awful roaring and howling sounds, a tribute to the consistently eerie sound design of the series. They attach to the bare back of the victim, who sometimes achieves an ecstasy of self-loathing:
Monster! Monster! We are horrid. We are horrid. We are horrid. Monster!
Failed infestations produce a humped-back effect, a clear influence from Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, which has a very similar plot.

This is an odd combination of genres. We have the nightmarish SF horror element, with secret agent police operations familiar to 1960s TV, the strange marriage dynamics of the General and his wife, and reflections on friendship and betrayal that all double agents have to deal with. The Invisibles compound has the stark, minimalist look of a prison or death camp. The whole is disorienting, a good thing in a paranoia story.

It would have benefited from feature film expansion. The covert operations and deception plots seem compressed.

Familiar faces:
  • Don Gordon: seldom the lead, but always a reliable presence.
  • George Macready: patented aristocratic villainy.
  • Richard Dawson: here a very swishy member of the conspiracy.
  • Walter Burke: my favorite leprechaun; I have never seen him so damned before.
  • Neil Hamilton: soon to be Commissioner Gordon in the TV Batman.
Conrad Hall again uses his detail-destroying lens filtering in some scenes, but not in others which are crystal clear. Frankly, I find this visually confusing.

The Blu-ray commentary track is another by Tim Lucas. He confirms the Heinlein Puppet Masters connection and says the book was influential in others 1950s alien infiltration films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

He makes much of the homo-erotic nature of the secret society, with implications of rape by the alien attachments.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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The Bellero Shield, directed by John Brahm.

Experimenting with laser weapons, a scientist pulls a being from some other-dimension realm of light into his house. His wife, Lady Macbeth-like, is eager to exploit any opportunity to advance her husband's fame. Murder and madness follow.

She calls the laser beam shooting into the sky their Bifrost, a mythological usage even more familiar now from the Marvel Thor films. Electronic humming permeates the story, the sound of contact with another dimension.

This could easily be a play: five characters, limited set, a plot driven by the characters' motivations.

The result is modestly creepy-ass. The alien itself is inoffensive, and like the visitor in The Galaxy Being sacrifices itself for the humans, who are dark and sinister. It had been warned: "This is a world ruled by Fear". And he takes precautions: the Shield.

Have done murder the lady of the house is forgiven, but will remain imprisoned in her mind until she forgives herself.

John Hoyt (Don't Open Till Doomsday) returns, unrecognizable in face, figure and voice:

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Others returning:Chita Rivera looks so familiar but I don't know where else I've seen her. She is kind of witchy here: barefoot, armed, and utterly devoted to her mistress. With that long necklace chain and key I think of here as the "chatelaine".

The wikipedia cites speculation that this episode did much to promote the Little Gray Men image of alien contactee lore and fiction.

Photographed by Conrad Hall, playing with light and shadow, showing a creature of light on this dark planet.

The Blu-ray commentary track is another by Tim Lucas. He gives much biographical information, praises the visual design and tends to Freudian interpretations of the plot.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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The Children of Spider County, directed by Leonard Horn.

Four brilliant young men in key fields have vanished. All were born in Spider County and share a strange early history. A federal agent suspects interference from planet Eros in the Krell (!) galaxy. He's going to check on a fifth young man, still at home but jailed for murder.

It's a good premise, similar to John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, filmed as Village of the Damned (1960), but this is a stiff reading of the story, lacking the thrills and sense of wonder we expect from the series.

One imaginative effect: when the alien exerts his mental powers we see strips of cloud passing across the screen. The characters in the program see them, too.

Familiar faces: Kent Smith (It Crawled Out of the Woodwork), Dabbs Greer, John Milford.

Photographed by Kenneth Peach, the first of his 25 episodes for the series. He will be the most common cinematographer from this point forward.

No commentary track on the Blu-ray.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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Specimen: Unknown, directed by Gerd Oswald.

Researchers on a space station discover organisms on the hull, little "space barnacles" like mushrooms, which grow into toxic, fast-reproducing flowers. With the entire crew becoming ill, they ask that their shuttle be destroyed before returning to Earth and contaminating the entire planet.

Ground control gives this serious consideration but decides to bring them back. Damaged and off course, what will happen when the space ship crashes?

I am torn on this one. I remember the episode fondly, but now it seems I saw only the post-crash ending when I was young. That still seems like a fine little short-short SF horror story, with the deadly flowers multiplying every time we turn around. Like a zombie apocalypse or The Birds (1963), where numbers themselves become terrifying. Or like the plants of Day of the Triffids (1962), except these don't need to walk because they spread so insanely quickly.

Invasive species, indeed! At that rate the Earth is gone in hours.

On the other hand the nuts-and-bolts rocket ship adventure is not really Outer Limits material, but more like something from the single season Men into Space series. In fact, footage from that series is used in this episode and others.

Now, I was nuts for that stuff as a kid. Show me a space helmet or the old Wheel in Space design and I was happy. Combine that with the alien infestation final act and it was a good episode at the time, but now seems considerably more padded and clunky. Lots of talk and agonizing over what to do.

The cast:The story reuses older SF tropes and anticipates later ones:Photographed by Conrad Hall. His odd experiments in lens filtering are absent this time and we get sharp images of Gail Kobe.

The Blu-ray commentary track has Craig Beam ridiculing the episode. He finds only the space funeral scene has the expected Outer Limits SF gothic horror, with the rest being terribly weak. His comical disdain becomes tedious.

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Re: The Outer Limits (1963)

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Second Chance, directed by Paul Stanley.

"Do not be afraid. You have nothing to lose but your life" -- the Empyrian.

The setup is like something from Ray Bradbury: a carnival spaceship attraction has been converted into the real thing by an alien visitor. He plans to abduct a set of human beings for a one-way mission in space. He has selected those who might appreciate a second chance at life, but humans are unpredictable.

The execution is more like The Twilight Zone than The Outer Limits. The plot is more or less an excuse for psychodrama subplots and overwrought speechifying. It would be a better episode if they could have found something stranger to do with that time.

I recognized his voice before I realized the bird-like alien is played by Simon Oakland:

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The Empyrian is actually understanding and "humane", but takes his mission seriously and kills when he has to.

Notes:
  • Don Gordon returns from The Invisibles. He is friendly and intellectual this time.
  • First of three episodes directed by Paul Stanley. He was a prolific TV director, and I remember him best for Sole Survivor (1970). "What was that one about ghosts around a crashed bomber in the desert...?"
  • Photographed by Kenneth Peach, like Conrad Hall experimenting with lens filtering. Sometimes the image is divided in half, one side filtered and the other sharp.
  • The alien is never filtered, as if we are dared to examine the makeup job.
  • My heart goes out to the night watchman at the carnival. It is always a dangerous job when weirdness is afoot, like the watchman at the greenhouse in Day of the Triffids (1962).
  • The SF description of off-course colliding planets is dumb. They did it in Controlled Experiment but that was a comedy.
  • No Control Voice ending narration this time.
The Blu-ray has no commentary track.

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