Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)
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Four distinct stories explore the surreal and unsettling boundaries of reality in this anthology film.
The story
Twilight Zone: The Movie is an anthology film featuring four distinct stories. The first segment, 'Time Out,' follows a man who finds himself transported through various historical eras after a confrontation in a bar. The second, 'Kick the Can,' involves a group of elderly residents in a retirement home who are magically transformed into their younger selves. The third, 'It's a Good Life,' centers on a woman who discovers a boy with immense, reality-warping powers. The final segment, 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,' depicts a passenger on a plane during a storm who becomes convinced that a creature is attacking the aircraft.
Full plot (contains spoilers)
The film opens with a prologue where a man transforms into a monster and kills his companion. In 'Time Out,' a bigoted man named Bill Connor is transported through time, experiencing Nazi-occupied France, the Jim Crow South, and the Vietnam War before ending up in a train car. In 'Kick the Can,' Mr. Bloom uses magic to turn elderly residents into children, leading to a realization about the joy of life. In 'It's a Good Life,' Helen Foley meets a boy named Anthony who possesses reality-warping powers; he keeps a 'family' of puppets and eventually takes Helen into a different plane of existence to be his student. In 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,' John Valentine panics during a flight, believing a gremlin is attacking the plane. He fires at it, and the creature eventually reveals it was only 'having fun.' The film ends with the prologue's monster appearing as the ambulance driver to ask Valentine if he wants to see something 'really scary.'
- First release year
- 1983
- Runtime (minutes)
- 101
- Production countries
- United States
- Original languages
- English; Vietnamese
- Directors
- John Landis; Steven Spielberg; Joe Dante; George Miller
- Writers
- John Landis · screenplay; George Clayton Johnson · screenplay; Richard Matheson · screenplay; Melissa Mathison · screenplay; John Landis · story; George Clayton Johnson · story; Jerome Bixby · story; Richard Matheson · story
- Cast and characters
- Dan Aykroyd; Albert Brooks; Scatman Crothers; John Lithgow; Vic Morrow; Kathleen Quinlan; Burgess Meredith · narrator
- Genres
- science fiction; fantasy; horror
- Themes
- time travel; reality; power; prejudice
- Tone and mood
- surreal; macabre
- Premise and plot tags
- anthology; multiverse; supernatural
- Source material / true-story basis
- Rod Serling's 1959–1964 television series
- Franchise connections
- The Twilight Zone
- Reception
- The film received mixed reviews, with praise for the segments by Dante and Miller, but criticism for those by Landis and Spielberg. Despite this, it was a commercial success.
- Reported review scores
- Rotten Tomatoes · score: 57% · scale: percentage · review count: 42; Metacritic · score: 44 · scale: 100
- Awards and nominations
- Saturn Award · winning films · win
- Production trivia
- A fatal helicopter accident during filming led to new safety standards in the industry.; The film was a commercial success, grossing $42 million on a $10 million budget.
Film metadata comes from the open sources listed in Credits & Contact. Catalogue details may be incomplete.
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