Twilight Zone: The Movie

Cult Films and Midnight Movies : "From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1 By Tom Baker

"Wanna see something really scary?"

--Tagline from Twilight Zone: The Movie (1982)

I first saw Twilight Zone: The Movie when it came out in 1982, and the sheer mind-bending spectacle of it, though I was only around six at the time, left an indelible impression on my young brain (it didn't help that the trailer for Time Bandits was played just before the movie began). It was of course the movie where actor Vic Morrow and two young children, Renee Shin-Yi Chen, and Myca Dinh Le, both six and seven years old respectively, were killed when a Bell UH-1B Iroquois helicopter lost control while the heat from explosives that were being fired off surged upward. The horrific nature of the ensuing tragedy, the sheer grisly spectacle of their filmed deaths, cast an appalling and bizarre shadow across the film. Those sitting in the theater at the old Raintree Plaza on the beautiful Marion bypass were there, I'll bet, partly just out of morbid curiosity. No such thing, I suppose, as bad press.

Morrow was decapitated. So was one of the children, Myca Dinh Le. Shin Ye-Chin was crushed by the weight of the crashed helicopter. It was a brutal, sickening way for these people to die.

Director Landis, along with five other defendants, was tried for involuntary manslaughter. Landis was responsible, in particular, for circumventing state law at the time regarding child labor. There was a fire safety specialist on the set, who worried about the proximity of the special effects explosions to the low-hovering chopper. The two children were hidden from him, as Landis didn't want to deal with any objections from authority. The aircraft was downed due to exploding shell fragments, "delaminating" due to heat, and spinning out of control and into the knee-deep water, where actor Morrow was carrying the children each under an arm. He dropped Chen, and, bending to reclaim her from the water, did not realize the damaged aircraft was upon him until it was too late. This was at a movie location called Indian Dunes, in Santa Clarita, California, a place where dangerous action sequences are frequently filmed.

The criminal charges of manslaughter were eventually, unsurprisingly, acquitted, but the civil suits for the families of the children cost Warner Bros. millions. It is also reported that Landis and others directly involved were sued. Actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, the daughter of Vic Morrow, settled for an undisclosed amount in a wrongful death suit. Unfortunately, Landis walked away poorer but relatively unscathed. Such is "justice."

The whole thing, when considered forty years later, strikes one as being just bizarre. Why was Morrow tasked to do such a dangerous stunt? Isn't that usually the province of STUNT PERSONS? And who in the hell thought it a good idea to bring along two small children, for Morrow to carry through knee-deep water, while explosives are going off around him and a helicopter is hovering just twenty-five feet overhead?

Why not, as one YouTube commentator pointed out, just use DUMMIES in place of the kids? Then at least those children would still be alive.

Insanity.

As far as the film, for this reason, it is an unpleasant little thing to watch. I honestly didn't know that the anniversary of that particular Hollywood tragedy was a day or two away when I decided at random to watch it yesterday. Bizarre synchronicity. It put me in a weird, disconnected, haunted mood all day (even more so than usual). I began to ponder tragedy, death, the nature of reality, and possible "curses"--subject matter covered on the old television series "Twilight Zone" decades and decades ago. (Its creator, Rod Serling, the iconic, cynical commentator, whose opening monologues with their steely, understated evocations of the "key to the imagination" and a door "you've just crossed over into" having now become the stuff of television legend, died of a massive heart attack at age 50, in June of 1975. As evidenced by some of his "Twilight Zone" appearances, he was a heavy smoker.)

But, getting back to it: what is the film? It's a puzzling reworking of various old "Twilight Zone" episodes, including the famous "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" which originally starred William Shatner, but whose character of a man who sees a "thing on the wing of this airplane" is taken over by John Lithgow. Who performs perfectly. The segment is directed by Mad Max director George Miller and is a nerve-wrenching flight into terror. The look of the "thing" (aerial gremlin?) is updated as a slimy demon for jaded 1980s horror enthusiasts (the original looked like a weird, manlike bear with a human face), and has sort-of Predator dreds hanging in the back of its head. It waggles a finger in Lithgow's face comically before flying off into the night.

The famous prolog, with Dan Ackroyd playing a hitchhiker who asks Albert Brooks if he "wants to see something really scary" seems weirdly incongruous here, as there was nothing in such a shocking horror vignette apparent in the original "Twilight Zone," which relied often on subtlety, satire, the surreal, and, most especially, O'Henry style "twist endings" to convey a sense of dread--not sudden slasher-movie shocks.

The next segment, with Scatman Crothers, whose most other famous turn has to be as Dick Halloran in Kubrick's classic film version of Stephen King's The Shining (with Jack "Here's Johnny!" Nicholson), is a saccharine story of an elderly black man at a retirement home that has a magic aluminum can you can play "kick the can" with, and suddenly grow younger. The fantasy here has little appeal for me, and so I skipped past this segment, although I do like the young boy who wants to be Douglas Fairbanks and bounds around with a cape tied around him. This warm-hearted shmaltz was directed by none other than Stephen Spielberg, whose greatest cinematic triumphs were both behind him and still in front of him, paradoxically. (Is there any film of his, besides 1941 with the ill-fated John Belushi, that didn't turn into box-office gold?)

The most spectacular segment, "It's a Good Life" directed by Joe Dante as a live-action cartoon (from a script by Richard Matheson) posits a little boy (Jeremy Licht) in a hick California town who gets abused by a local jock while playing a video game. A sympathetic woman (Kathleen Quinlan) picks him up for a lift home and must feel as if she's stumbled onto the Addams Family. The entire family (an ensemble cast that includes Patricia Barry, Kevin McCarthy, Nancy Cartwright, and Cherrie Currie, several of whom were on the original 'Twilight Zone" in the 1960s) jumps as if held at gunpoint at every whim and peccadillo of little Anthony: lavishing him with phony praise, eating revolting meals full of candy apples and other sweets, and ransacking Kathleen Quinlan's purse when she goes upstairs to see Sara (Cherrie Currie) sitting in a wheelchair with her back to the door, passively watching strange cartoons (the animation here is by Sally Cruikshank, who did the cult animated short "Quasi at the Quackadero" in 1975).

It's revealed to the audience Sara has NO MOUTH. Nice.

Anything Anthony wishes for comes to life. Uncle Walt (Kevin McCarthy) does a "pull a rabbit out of a hat" routine (he's forced into) and out comes a huge, sickening, rubber-monster rabbit with a starved, lean, skeletal body and praying mantis arms (vaguely resembling the entity reported by sleep paralysis and alien abduction experiencers).

It isn't long before televisions begin cracking open, and cartoon horrors (more rubber monsters) begin spilling out. This isn't so much horrifying, as unsettling for some strange reason; like an idol representation of a fallen or devilish god. Art imitates life for all those who would pooh-pooh this suggestion.

The segment ends with Kathleen Quinlan and the boy in a place where they seem to be double-exposures of themselves, some void, where she promises to be his "teacher as well as student" if Anthony can just learn to get his power under control. They drive off into the stark California desert, Anthony making flowers bloom.

All of this brings us to the most notorious segment, one that would still be rather hellishly unsettling even ABSENT of the tragedy that unfolded because of it. It is the segment with Vic Morrow, who plays a loud, bitter, angry racist who berates Jews, blacks, and Asians in a bar with his buddies, and is warned to quiet down by actor Steven Williams, who went on to star in shows such as "21 Jump Street," "The X-Files," etc. Morrow walks out of the dive bar and finds himself in Nazi-occupied France, where two pristine and perfect-looking S.S. men (Rainer Peets and Kai Wulff) pull up in a jeep and start barking orders at him in German. He runs into a house, is shot, crawls out onto a ledge, and falls, finding himself next in the deep south, at a Klan meeting where he is to be lynched. The Klan leader is played, strangely enough, by "Night Court" actor John Larroquette, whose other horror film credits include bit parts in Altered States (1980) and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Here, he has never looked so menacing or seemed so repugnant.

Morrow escapes, only to find himself in Vietnam, where, mistaken for a Vietnamese by U.S. troops, he is fired upon. The segment ends where it began, with him in Nazi hands, and eventually, in a cattle cart. Turnabout is fair play.

This of course was Morrow's final role. By implication, he DIES at the end of the segment. Making one wonder again if life imitates, so to speak.

And can a film be cursed?

John Lennon, Poltergeist, and An Andalusian Dog.

People have spoken for years about the tragic occurrences surrounding the film Poltergeist (1982), which saw the death (or more properly in the case of Dominique Dunne, MURDER) of its two young lead actresses. Heather O'Rourke, the doomed little moppet who played "Carol Anne" in three sequels, died in 1988 suddenly, of a misdiagnosed bowel ailment. She's buried quite close to her co-star, Dominique Dunne, who met HER fate at the hands of jealous boyfriend John Sweeney, who had a burgeoning career as a chef at upscale Hollywood nightspots. Sweeney attacked and strangled Dunne in a fit of rage, but basically skated with a slap on the wrist. Again, "justice."

Actor Will Sampson, who was also in Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, played in Poltergeist 2. He died of Scleroderma shortly after completing his work on the sequel. He was 53.

Perhaps one of the most shocking deaths outside that of Dominique Dunne was that of minor Poltergeist actor Lou Perryman, who was also in such films as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Boys Don't Cry with Hilary Swank. Mr. Perryman, on April 1st of 2009, was killed by a man WEILDING AN AX (shades of some of his movie work, perhaps?), a man named Sean Christopher Tatum, who was fresh out on parole, fresh off of his meds, and freshly drunk when he committed the robbery/murder. He later received a life sentence.

Many strange occurrences reportedly happened on the set of Poltergeist. Electrical malfunctions, equipment mishaps, and one of the actors was later involved in but survived a plane crash. A medium was brought in to "cleanse" the movie set of any disturbed spirits, but Spielberg later confessed that, in the scenes at the end of the film where the dead "burst through" from beyond, they had used REAL anatomical skeletons--human remains in other words, from a medical supply company, as it was more cost-effective. He postulated that, perhaps, they had "disturbed" the owners of dem bones.

We have written, several years ago, of Simone Mareuil, the lead actress in Bunuel and Dali's seminal surrealist short "Un Chien Andalou" ("An Andalusian Dog," from 1927) and how Mareuil unaccountably committed suicide in Périgueux, France in 1954, by literally dousing herself with petrol and striking a match...Her role in "Un Chien" saw her holding a death's head moth in her palm at one point, and the film relentlessly presents us with bizarre, murderous images, including the burial of bodies and a severed hand in the street. The images breakthrough from a hidden dimension of the mind, seeming like a subconscious blast from a netherworld. As Andre Breton said in "The Surrealist Manifesto": "Surrealism will lead you to death, which is a secret society."

"Surrealism will lead you to death, which is a secret society."--Andre Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto (1924)

Mareuil's co-star in the film, Pierre Batcheff, died of a possible intentional drug overdose in Paris in 1931. When a mind opens up such a psychic vortex of malevolence and confusion as "Un Chien Andalou," one should NOT be surprised when a demon stalks out, Death on two legs, for anyone with a Death's Head Moth in the palm of their doomed hand.

(Simone Mareuil, by the way, for the unknowing, begins the film with the famous scene of her eyeball being sliced open by Bunuel. A scene that sparked outrage in 1927. Again, prefiguring dismemberment, tragedy, and death.)

The strangest circle of coincidences and tragedies surrounding a film is that of Sharon Tate, John Lennon, the Dakota Arms, and Rosemary's Baby (1967), another supernatural horror thriller that had markedly strange things happen on set. And off of it, as well.

For starters, the film used the exterior of the famous Dakota Arms hotel in New York City for the exterior of the "Black Bramford." It was in 1980, while staying there with his wife Yoko Ono, that Lennon was approached by crazed fan Mark David Chapman (said to be partly influenced by his obsession with the novel Catcher in the Rye) and murdered, after Chapman had previously asked for his autograph. Lennon, of course, penned the famous song "Helter Skelter" with fellow Beatle Paul McCartney. The song was claimed by Manson prosecutor Vince Bugliosi, author of the book Helter Skelter, to have partly inspired Charlie's nutbag apocalyptic fantasies of racial war and his daydreams of the mastership of the world at the end of it all. To that end, Charlie sent his minions out to kill that night of August 8, 1969, slaying the wife of Rosemary's Baby director Polanski, Sharon Tate, as well as socialite Abigail Folger, hairstylist Jay Sebring, writer Voytek Frykowski, and the luckless Steven Parent, who just "happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The next night, Rosemary (!) and Leno LaBianca were killed.

One of the Manson girls later said, in an interview, "These people were putting out an image to be murdered...making films like Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion..." Maybe not an exact quote, but perhaps not too far off the mark.

If one consistently meditates, puts out a particular vibration, perhaps on death, sorrow, or decay, can one, in the manner of the Biblical Job (who declared, "The thing I have feared greatly has come upon me! Job 3:25) "curse" oneself? Or, is a film, an imitation of the subconscious act of "dreaming awake," an illusion, as it were, of illusions (insomuch that we are all simply atomic particulates floating in the void)? Can a book, a song, a film, even an inanimate object, vibrate with a frequency that is somehow simply "wrong"? Malevolent? Do certain predators wear an amorphous form, disguised behind the thin veneer of something as innocuous as a movie scene, and manage, through dint of their predation, to somehow drain their victims, kill their devotees, batten on the psychic sustenance of others? Do certain vortex pools of the mind drag those who get too close to their maelstrom of waters down, down to a watery psychic grave?

As far as Twilight Zone: The Movie, the film is obviously one meant to thrill and frighten horror and science fiction fans who look back with nostalgia on the old, classic television series. But it is unsettling in other ways as well, ways less apparent. The thrills are there, but they seem curiously flat at times, as if the film is hiding something, some secret thing, some alien hunger (yes, laugh if you will but there it is). It seems to put me in a haunted, empty place, where there is no entertainment, just a kind of sleazy, ugly con that is lurking, like a hideous gremlin on the wing of an airplane, there to rip the guts out of our fantasies and dreams.

The film begins with Morrow stepping out of a bar in 1982 and into the narrow cobbled streets of occupied France. It ends with him, doomed, placed aboard a cattle cart, headed presumably to Auschwitz or Buchenwald. His last cinematic moment is one portraying his inevitable demise. When you see the film of him in his REAL final moments, carrying the doomed children beneath both arms, explosions ripping the sky around him, and the helicopter that will in mere moments plunge on top of him, killing him instantly--you begin to feel as if this real killing is simply an extension of the fictional one. It's as if you've been sucked into hell.

Some things are just very black, very shaded in the dark force that animates the universe, as the magnetic opposite of the All. But finally, one thing must emanate from another, correct?

"The Twilight Zone" wrestled in a real, powerful way that television never had before, with issues of memory, reality, illusion, morality, and mortality; as well as human perception in the grand scheme of things. This film is like the ugly being invoked by that speculation, given a visual form and allowed to go about, feasting, as it were, on the remnants of the viewer's happiness and good cheer. Even a horror film shouldn't leave you feeling this unusually disturbed.

I was unaware that I was watching the film a day or two shy of the anniversary of this famous Hollywood tragedy. It called to me. I answered the call. And I was left haunted. Not by a message from the Twilight Zone, but by a signal from the world we perceive and identify as "real."

And that's an even more frightening place.

The Tragic Twilight Zone Movie Disaster