Directed by Boris Sagal, Steven Spielberg (really), and Barry Shear
Starring Roddy McDowall, Ossie Davis, Joan Crawford, Barry Sullivan, Tom Bosley, Richard Kiley and Sam Jaffe
First things first - I've done plenty of lazy things here on the blog. One thing that I HAVEN'T slept through, though, is some kind of Twilight Zone retrospective/top 10 list. Maybe it's because it's been so ingrained into the pop culture, maybe it's because they replay all of the best episodes every July 4th and New Year's Eve on the SyFy channel, but, really, any kind of top 10 list for TZ is redundancy for redundancy's sake. All of the episodes that I would list are pretty much the exact same episodes that anyone else would, so it's pointless. Kind of like my "Top 10 horror villains" list from a few Halloweens back.
Which brings me to Night Gallery. Rod Serling's sophomore series, and while everyone's milage varies, I love the hell out of the thing. As opposed to Twilight Zone, this series - while dealing with much of the same when it came to presenting thought-provoking morality tales - was much more horror and suspense-oriented. To say nothing of the style. I don't know this for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me in the last bit if Serling instructed his directors to smoke, inhale, inject and absorb rectally every foreign substance on the planet before filming, because there are times when this can be one damn trippy show. In the good way. There's this bizarre, surreal, dreamlike quality to the show, the kind that can make some of the twists and final freeze-frames crop up in your mind at some inopportune moments. Verbal orgasm over.
No, folks, we're not doing a top 10 list, although I WILL be doing some kind of retrospective on the series sometime in the future. What we're looking at today is the 1969 TV movie that pre-dated the series by a little over a year. I'm not sure if the original plan was for the TV movie to turn into a series, but it certainly set a good precedent. It begins with a great title sequence, followed by Serling introducing viewers to three different paintings representing three different stories (all written by Serling himself), making this officially an anthology film. This was the motif of the series, by the way, as these bizarre, abstract paintings served as the intro image before the story would start.
It kicks off with a vengeance in Story #1 - "The Cemetery." Roddy McDowall is Jeremy Evans, black sheep of a wealthy family who needs only for his old man uncle to croak off before he inherits a fortune. Well, wouldn't you know it, soon enough the uncle turns up dead, and Jeremy is left in the creepy country house along with family servant Osmond Portifoy (Ossie Davis). Folks, McDowall just owns in this segment. Everything about his performance, from the overly flamboyant gestures to the vocal inflection just screams Douchebag with a capital D, and by the time the climax of this segment rolls around, you REALLY want this dude to get what he has coming to him.
See, there's a painting of the house and the surrounding grounds on the main staircase. And as the days tick by, Jeremy notices that the painting seems to be changing. First, his uncle's tombstone is added to the family graveyard (and I always love family graveyards in these types of stories). Then, it opens. Then, a specter emerges. And I think you know where we're going from here. It's also a got a slam-bang double-twist at the end that surprised the holy fuck out of me, so three cheers on that front.
Story #2 - "Eyes," where we get the directorial debut of one Steven Spielberg. It starts Joan Crawford as a woman who has been blind her entire life and has what is truly one of the more insidious schemes that I've seen in any movie of this type. For the mere price of $9,000, she is going to steal the vision of some sad-sack gambler, bamboozling and blackmailing her doctor in the process as well. The catch? She will only have vision for 12 hours, but she doesn't care. In her own words, she will be taking enough pictures with her eyes to last a lifetime.
Reportedly, Crawford - an old-school actress all the way - wanted a more experienced director and was very wary of Spielberg, but Universal backed their guy, and it shows in just how well-handled this segment is. Despite how unlikable Crawford is here, fate plays truly one of the most cruel pranks that I've seen in any movie, and the way this handled from a visual perspective is disorienting and invigorating at the same time. Oh, and if anyone wants the ending to the Crawford-Spielberg dilemma, they got along famously on the set to the point that they actually stayed in contact for the remainder of Crawford's life.
Story #3 - "The Escape Route." This one takes us to South America, where former Nazi war criminal Joseph Strobe (Richard Kiley) has been hiding out since high-tailing it from Germany in 1945. A chance meeting with a Holocaust survivor (Sam Joffe) is the lynchpin event that sets the plot in motion as all kinds of bad memories begin cropping up for Strobe, and the dialogue clues us in on just how much this guy enjoyed some of the atrocities that he had a hand in at Auschwitz.
As opposed to the later TV series, the actual paintings that Serling introduces actually play a part in the stories themselves, and this one is no different as Strobe escapes from his reality by visiting a local art museum. This leads to an appropriately wicked ending twist that, while maybe a little predictable, is very good poetic justice and gives us one of the better ending-shot stills that the series would become famous for. And it's got a really funkadelic sequence where Joffe runs away from pursuers utilizing some pretty unintentionally hilarious freeze frames.
I think it's pretty apparent, but I was a huge fan of this flick on the whole. I've seen the vast majority of the Night Gallery episodes in syndication, but these stories never crop up on the rotation, and seeing them for the first time in pristine quality was a real treat. The three stories compliment each other very well; you've got your eerie ghost story stuff, your wicked human evil and your internal mindfuck horror all rolled out in a convenient row. The stories themselves might be a little individually lacking in certain areas, but as a collective, they're awesome. If you've got eighteen bucks to spare, the first-season DVD of Night Gallery is worth picking up just for this movie alone.
**** out of ****. For the record, that's the first perfect rating that Dave Meltzer has awarded since Punk-Cena at Money in the Bank!
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