PhantomKnight Goes Spielbergian

Yes. I’ve listened to the score regularly since the 90’s. One of my favorites.




Lion King has always been cool though.

Fair enough, I wasn't trying to draw a major connection between the public perception of the movies, so much as draw a parallel to Phantom's rewatch of E.T. with my own of Lion King. I think both of us realized the movie in question was "good" but didn't realize just how much we really liked it until giving it another look.

That was me and The Graduate a few months back.  I always thought it was eh fine but after a rewatch I dug it a lot more.

Twilight Zone: The Movie was produced by Steven Spielberg and John Landis as a cinematic interpretation of the famous Rod Serling TV series from the early 60's. The two directors essentially shepherded the project and recruited two other directors, Joe Dante and George Miller, to help round out the four main mini-stories which would comprise the film. In true Twilight Zone format, these are four standalone stories which contain twisted elements of sci-fi/horror and fantasy. Initially, according to Joe Dante, they were intended to be interconnected by having characters from one story pop up in another, but that was quickly abandoned. So how do each of these stories stack up? Let's take a look.

First up is John Landis, who directs the Prologue and the first main segment, Time Out. The Prologue itself gets things off to a decent start. It features Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks and is a quick 5-7 minute scene that's simple, but effective and ratchets up the eeriness as it goes on and it ends well. Then we get into Time Out, which sees Vic Morrow as disgruntled racist in modern times who vents to a few of his friends his frustrations in a rather inflammatory fashion, but soon finds himself catapulted through time, landing in different periods where races were persecuted the most and he himself is in the shoes of people of said races. It's an interesting concept to be sure, and Vic Morrow does good work conveying the confusion and fear one would undoubtedly feel if they found themselves in such a situation. Plus, John Landis does a decent job of keeping the intensity of each new encounter going. But there's not much more to it beyond that basic concept. Because it's so short, there's only enough time to see the character fend for his life in these various situations, and the story just has a blanket statement/moral of "walk a mile in their shoes", but doesn't offer much nuance beyond that. It simply boils down/amounts to what feels like a sort of revenge fantasy against racists, even though it's written and directed by a white guy.

Next up is Kick the Can, the story directed by Steven Spielberg, and...it's pretty terrible, in all honesty, and easily the worst segment of the whole film. It might also be one of the worst things Spielberg has directed, period. The story sees Scatman Crothers as Mr. Bloom, an elderly fellow who's just moved into a retirement home called Sunnyside. But Mr. Bloom has a secret: he possesses the power to turn all of the other residents of the retirement home back into their child shelves for one night so they can re-experience their youth and...that's pretty much it. The story really has no stakes or dark twist like you would expect from a Twilight Zone story, and is instead just this cheesy, boring nothing sandwich of a fantasy plot that really feels like a waste of time. The script for this segment has Melissa Mathison as a co-writer, and while it definitely has all of the sentimentality of E.T., it has none of the heart or charm. The point it ultimately makes doesn't seem to warrant a 20-25 minute short story, and it's a theme that Spielberg would tackle in a much more fun and engaging fashion years later in Hook. Kick the Can isn't as astoundingly awful as 1941, but it's down there as part of the worst stuff Steven Spielberg had directed up to this point in his career.

The third segment is Joe Dante's, entitled It's A Good Life, and this is where things start to get better. This is a remake of an original episode of the series and sees newly-arrived schoolteacher Helen Foley (Kathleen Quinlan) accompany a local boy back to his home, where she finds herself invited to dinner with the boy's odd family and soon discovers the boy isn't what he seems. This is the first segment that really starts to embrace the weirdness normally associated with The Twilight Zone -- perhaps because it's a remake of an episode -- and works all the better for it. In particular, there's some really cool production design and special effects that are gradually revealed here that reminded me of the afterlife scenes in Beetlejuice, plus Joe Dante makes really good use of them. He also achieves an off-kilter tone that slowly becomes more obvious as events play out, especially in the way the family members behave, and that adds to the effectiveness of it. It may not end the best, but overall, this segment works.

And finally, the fourth segment is a remake of the iconic episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, with this one directed by George Miller and starring John Lithgow. Quite frankly, this one's the best. Miller films it in the same frenetic style associated with his Mad Max films, which adds to the intensity, but also John Lithgow does a hell of a job selling his character's fear and anxiety. Even though we already largely know where this is going, it's still gripping and entertaining, as you really feel the terror and paranoia. Afterwards, there's a quick Epilogue once again directed by John Landis, but while it's kind of lame, it does nothing to sour the awesomeness of Miller's segment.

To be fair to Landis and Spielberg, Landis never actually finished his segment since, you know, he dropped a helicopter on the leading actor. I don’t know why they even bothered to include the segment in the film. They should have just asked someone else to do a whole new segment. And as for Spielberg, he pretty much disowned this movie as soon as the incident occurred. As a producer on the film he ended up in all sorts of lawsuits. I think Spielberg likes to pretend this movie never existed — and he directed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Anyway, fun fact, Richard Donner (Lethal Weapon, Superman) directed the original Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. So there’s your six degrees of Mel Gibson.

Yes.

You’re too young to have watched E! True Hollywood Story, but they did an episode on Twilight Zone, and if memory serves correctly, they too showed the footage. Or at least stills of it.

I have been meaning to check out that series, though.

Yup.  And not to worry, I'm pro-chilled monkeys' brains.

Temple of Doom was everyone’s favorite as a kid.