The “Twilight” in Twilight Zone: The Movie is a perfect explanation for the movie. Twilight is when the sun is below the horizon but there’s still light disappearing into the darkness. Intended as an anthology displaying the various talents of several directors including Steven Spielberg and John Landis, who were also producers, the movie has been overshadowed by the events of one segment that led to the death of Vic Morrow.
The story surrounding the segment titled “Time Out” has become more notorious and infamous as years have gone by. Now, that we have access to the Internet, the footage of Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen is more available and it’s horrible. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I first saw it on an HBO special back in the mid-1990s.
Filming was on July 23, 1982 in Indian Dunes, a film ranch located near Valencia, Calif. Morrow plays a middle-aged racist businessman Bill Connor, who is carrying the two actors through a waterway when the helicopter crashes right on them. Morrow and Le were decapitated by the helicopter’s top rotor blades and Chen was crushed by one of the struts.
The incident came about because Landis and his producing partner George Folsey Jr. violated California child labor laws which prohibits child actors from filming night scenes past a certain time. Le and Chen were paid reportedly under the table and the parents said that Folsey had told them not to tell the firefighters the children were being used for the scene. The children were also hid when a fire safety officer inspected the scene.
The helicopter pilot, Dorcey Wingo, later said he was trouble navigating through the pryotechnics used for the scene when a technician on the ground detonated two charges close together. In October of 1984, the National Transportation Safety Board issued this report stating “The probable cause of the accident was the detonation of debris-laden high-temperature special effects explosions too near a low-flying helicopter leading to foreign object damage to one rotor blade and delamination due to heat to the other rotor blade, the separation of the helicopter’s tail rotor assembly, and the uncontrolled descent of the helicopter. The proximity of the helicopter (around 25 feet off the ground) to the special effects explosions was due to the failure to establish direct communications and coordination between the pilot, who was in command of the helicopter operation, and the film director, who was in charge of the filming operation.”
Sadly, the child rescue scene was never initially included in the shooting script but added at the behest of Warner Bros. executives Lucy Fisher and Terry Semel who felt Connor wasn’t sympathetic enough. The segment begns in present time with Connor stopping by a bar after leaving for work. He’s upset about being overlooked for a promotion and begins a rant against Jewish people, black people (upsettling a table of black men nearby) and Japanese people using racial slurs. He leaves when a bar patron (Steve Williams) tells him to hold it down for a second time.
When Connor steps out of the bar, he finds himself in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II and mistaken for a Jewish man. After being chased by the Nazi soldiers and Gestapo, he finds himself in the Deep South during Jim Crow surrounded by Ku Klux Klan members. One of them played by John Larroquette isn’t wearing a robe or hood. They intend to lynch Connor but he gets away but then finds himself in Vietnam being mistaken for a Viet Cong by an Army platoon.
Even though Connor was supposed to save the children, he finds himself back in Nazi-occuppied Europe and the children being taken away and shot, according to Landis. In the end, Connor goes back to be mistaken for a Jewish person and being loaded in a freight car with other Jewish people arrested by the Nazis and in a freight car off to be shipped to a concentration work camp and possibly his own death. Connor looks out the freight car through and opening and sees his friends, Larry (Doug McGrath) and Ray (Charles Hallahan), leaving the bar. He screams at them for help but they can’t hear or see him.
It’s a true Rod Sterling-like ending with a bigot seeing true discrimination and racism while he argues “reverse racism.” Connor is upset that things in America in 1983 are changing and things aren’t like they used to be, you know when white men like Connor were the only ones that mattered. Connor has a lot of Trumpian MAGA mentality. This shows this rhetoric hasn’t just popped up in the last 10-15 years. Connor also hits on a young waitress while the implication is he has a wife and probably children at home.
The segment is hard to watch especially if you know what happened. And while it does have a nice story about being critical of other people, the story is disjointed and doesn’t really have anything new to say. The concept is great but the execution plays too much like a morality play where you can tell where every scene is going. None of the footage with the Vietname children was used.
My suspicion was the movie was supposed to be edited differently than what we got. The movie starts with two men in a car on a lone road at night. It’s implied the passenger played by Dan Aykroyd is a hitchhiker and the driver played by Albert Books is a kindly man who picked him. They are listening to his Creedence Clearwater Revival tape when the car player eats it and they talk about different TV shows and theme songs before discussing Twilight Zone.
The passenger has the driver pull over to show him something “really scary.” Then, he turns into a demon creature and attacks the driver, presumably killing and eating him. The movie is rated PG before the PG-13 rating was created. It’s a nice start but even the revalation the passenger is a demon goes against the old TV show. It’s more in line with the 1980s revival that had more scary elements.
The helicopter accident and Landis’ way of handling it led to Spielberg severing all professional and personal ties to Landis. They had been friends for years and working closely. Spielberg even had a small role as a county assessor clerk in The Blues Brothers. Some people have accused Spielberg of using his pull to keep himself out of the criminal trial that followed. But it was later determined that Spielberg and the other directors (Joe Dante and George Miller) had no involvement in filming the scene nor know what Landis and Folsey were doing. Spielberg wasn’t on set that day either.
Spielberg issued this statement afterwards. “No movie is worth dying for. I think people are standing up much more now, than ever before, to producers and directors who ask too much,” he said. “If something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell, ‘Cut!'” Miller was reportedly so angry that he left post-production on his segment “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and Dante was brought in to complete it. (In an odd coincidence, Miller’s production partner Byron Kennedy, would be killed in a helicopter crash of which he was piloting on July 17, 1983 in South Wales. Kennedy had been scouting locations for the upcoming Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.)
Spielberg’s own segment, a remake of the episode “Kick the Can,” which has the same name, is the worst one of the movie. This is a common problem when dealing with anthology movies is there’s always at least one weak segment. I’m sure a few minutes into the segment, a lot of theater goers got up to go get popcorn and soft drinks or to visit the restroom. They didn’t miss much if they did.
Mr. Bloom (Scatman Crothers) has just moved into the Sunnyvale Retirement Home where the residents live boring, dull lives. Bloom tries to get the other residents to engage in more fun activities as they watch the young people outside doing. Leo Conroy (Bill Quinn) is the fuddy-duddy who says they can’t because they’re too elderly. Conroy reminds me of Jeff Dunham’s Walter puppet and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t base the character on Quinn.
Bloom gathers all the other residents up at night and they go out in the courtyard to kick the can and then turn into younger versions of themselves when they were kids. And that’s about it. Quinn eventually comes around and it’s revealed Bloom is a possible a supernatural being that travels around from retirement home to retirement home encouraging the elders to still act lively.
It’s a nice attempt to move away from the darker other segments. I think I heard that “Kick the Can” was supposed to end the movie rather than being stuck in the middle. I’ve read that the segment was filmed after the helicopter accident and quite possibly Spielberg was having to deal with the fallout. Even though Spielberg has been criticized for having more of a magical feel to his movies, this one seems like someone trying to impersonate Spielberg. It’s probably one of his worst directing duties, if not, the worst.
The third segment “It’as a Good Life” rebounds wonderfully with a young boy, Anthony (Jeremy Licht), who has magical powers and comes in contact with a woman Helen Foley (Kathleen Quinlan) at a bar/restaurant when she stops to ask for directions. She backs into Anthony as she’s backing out damaging his bicycle and thus gives him a ride home.
But at the house located in a barren desolate area, she notices a lot of things are off. The mother (Patricia Barry), father (William Schallert), Uncle Walt (Kevin McCarthy) and sister, Ethel (Nancy Cartwright) are all excessively happy to Anthony and Helen. That is until she notices that they act more fearful of Anthony because he can basically do anything including harm them.
Dante directs this segment with a playful macrabe feel. While the original episode featuring Bill Mumy in the role of Anthony is most famous, Dante adds his own touch to it as Anthony is a fan of cartoons and creatures come alive and even people are transported into the cartoons. It’s even better knowing that Cartwright would later go on to voice Bart Simpson in the long-running series which parodied this concept in a Treehouse of Horror episode. You can see a lot of the style Dante used in The Howling and would perfect in Gremlins.
The final segment “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” is probably the best as it’s a remake of the famous episode featuring William Shatner as an airplane passenger who thinks he sees a creature on the wing but no one believes him. John Valentine (John Lithgow) is a businessman and writer terrified of flying and worse the plane is traveling during a thunderstorm. When the segment opens, he’s having a panic attack in the lavatory, but the flight attendants get him back to his seat.
However, he sees a gremlin out on the wing destroy one engine and try to destroy the other. Miller and writer Richard Matheson style this to make the claustrophobia and intensity of the segment build. The flight attendants (Abbe Lane and Donna Dixon) don’t believe him. There’s a young girl (Christina Nigra) who becomes a constant irritation. And a sky marshal (Charles Knapp) is also critical as Valentine tries to light up a cigarette. (Yes, that was a thing 40 years ago.)
Even though the segment is meant to be scary, there’s the comedic elements sprinkled throughout that give it the kick it needs to stick, such as Valentine trying to relax while reading the paper only realize the headline is about an airlane disaster. At one point during a scene of turbelence, the sky marshal is praying while clutching the girl’s dummy.
But it’s Lithgow who really sells the segment. He’s one of these actors who can jump between playing nice guys and bad guys and in between with a great ease and a lot of believability. You can see how close he is from totally freaking out. And since no one can see the gremlin which disappears and no one really believes it, it adds to the tension that. I’m glad they ended the movie with this segment which has Aykroyd reappearing to give the movie a final jolt.
Aykroyd and his wife, Dixon, don’t appear together on screen. But they would get married in 1983 after meeting on the set of Doctor Detroit. They have reportedly separated in 2022. It should also be noted that Larroquette and his Night Court co-star Selma Diamond are both in the cast even though they don’t appear in the same segment. Martin Garner, who appeared in four episode of Night Court, as a newstand vendor who tried to date Diamond’s character, plays her husband in the segment. Larroquette would later say that he had been invited to watch the helicopter sequence being filmed but had his car stolen the day before and didn’t have a way to get to the set.
Landis, Folsey, Wingo and Paul Stewart (stunt coordinator) and Dan Allingham (production manager) were all criminally charged but later acquitted. Landis was charged with voluntary manslaughter with the others charged with involuntary. The trial caused so much stress on Folsey, he never worked with Landis again. It also caused tension between Landis and Eddie Murphy following the success of Trading Places. Landis said he wanted Murphy to appear as a character witness, but Murphy was unaware of this. They would be tension on the set of Coming to America between the two with Murphy vowing never to work with Landis again, even though they did Beverly Hills Cop III.
Reviews on the movie were mixed with the helicopter accident overshadowing it. It still made $42 million against a $10 million budget. Incidentally, Morrow had a fear of dying in a helicopter a decade earlier while filming Dirty Mary Crazy Larry that he took out a $1 million life insurance policy. The Twilight Zone did have a revival in the 1985 and ran for two seasons on CBS before moving to first-run syndication its third and final season. Episodes were a little more darker and dealt with more horror/thriller stories.
At the same time, Spielberg had gone to NBC to do a more lighter tone anthology series Amazing Stories. But it ran for only two seasons as well before being canceled in 1987 and then revived on Apple TV in 2020. Reviews were mixed to negative and the series had the misfortune of premiering during the early days of Covid-19 pandemic in March and April 2020. It died a slow, quiet death.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 