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John Landis' prologue beautifully crystallizes Rod Serling's metaphysics ("between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge") as a merry singalong on a dark road, with Albert Brooks unwisely asking Dan Aykroyd for a scare. His own contribution to this anthology of revamps of the show's iconic episodes, however, is dreadful: The comeuppance of the loudmouthed bigot (Vic Morrow), teleported to Nazi burg and KKK rally and Vietnamese jungle, done with a deadly mix of moralizing and sadism. Steven Spielberg's "Kick the Can" twinkle-a-ton is no better, a moist chunk of retirement-home whimsy with Scatman Crothers doing Magical Negro duty for a bunch of geriatric kvetchers. (The material is exacerbated in Cocoon, then exorcized in Hook.) But the other segments are genuine bits of magnificence. Joe Dante's take on "It's a Good Life" places the world at the mercy of a prepubescent tyrant (Jeremy Licht), the psychic product of a diet of junk food and cartoons. His family are cowering prisoners with frozen smiles, a teacher (Kathleen Quinlan) passes through and gets trapped in the deranged funhouse—the demonically saturated giddiness builds to the image of the cracked TV set excreting pop grotesqueries (cf. Russell's Tommy). If Dante's episode is a sulfurous Tex Avery cyclone, George Miller's version of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" is founded on Robert Clampett (Falling Hare). The challenge is to keep up the kinetic force of Mad Max within the cramped spaces of a quaking airplane, Miller does it with a swirling camera and John Lithgow's contorted tour de force as the only passenger who can see the gremlin dismantling the turbines. "The fifth dimension" on the other side is a straitjacket and a wink. With Kevin McCarthy, Doug McGrath, Charles Hallahan, Bill Quinn, Helen Shaw, Martin Garner, Murray Matheson, Nancy Cartwright, William Schallert, Dick Miller, and John Larroquette.
--- Fernando F. Croce |