Steven Spielberg’s celebration of Rod Serling’s legendary TV show delivers mind-bending fantasy and horror, and maybe slips a bit when reaching for poignant charm and moral preaching. The stories aren’t all winners, but they build to two of the best omnibus entries of all time, Joe Dante’s It’s a Good Life and George Miller’s Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Audiences of 1983 responded much as do Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks in the spooky-spooky prologue, a Midnight Special of delighted screams. The plain-wrap release appears to be an HD reissue.

Twilight Zone: The Movie
Blu-ray
Warner Home Video
1983 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 101 min. / Street Date November 18, 2025 / Available from Moviezyng / 21.99
Starring: Dan Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, Vic Morrow, Doug McGrath, Charles Hallahan, Stephen Bishop, John Larroquette; Scatman Crothers, Bill Quinn, Murray Matheson, Peter Brocco, Priscilla Pointer; Bill Mumy, Kathleen Quinlan, Jeremy Licht, Kevin McCarthy, Patricia Barry, William Schallert, Nancy Cartwright, Dick Miller, Cherie Currie, Jeffrey Bannister; John Lithgow, Abbe Lane, Donna Dixon, Larry Cedar, Charles Knapp, Eduard Franz.
Cinematography: Stevan Larner, Allen Daviau, John Hora
Production Designer: Jim Bissell
Art Directors: Richard Sawyer, James H. Spencer
Costume Design: Deborah Nadoolman, Deborah L. Scott
Makeup Effects: Rob Bottin, Craig Reardon, Michael McCracken
Visual Effects: David Allen, Jim Danforth, Peter Kuran
Matte Artists: Rocco Gioffre, Mark Sullivan
Film Editors: Malcolm Campbell, Michael Kahn, Tina Hirsch, Howard Smith
Composer: Jerry Goldsmith
Time Out written by John Landis
Kick the Can written by George Clayton Johnson and Richard Matheson and Josh Rogan (Melissa Mathison) story by George Clayton Johnson
It’s a Good Life screenplay by Richard Matheson based on a story by Jerome Bixby
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet screenplay by Richard Matheson based on a story by Richard Matheson
Associate Producers: George Folsey Jr., Kathleen Kennedy, Michael Finnell, Jon Davison
Produced by John Landis, Frank Marshall, Steven Spielberg
Directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, George Miller

Steven Spielberg’s so-called flop  ‘1941’ didn’t slow his rapid ascent to the top of Hollywood. After a  reinvention of serial thrills, a heartwarmer about  a lovable mushroom man from outer space and an attempt at a  barnstorming horror show, Spielberg was canonized as an industry institution more powerful than any studio. He would soon branch out to TV with an ambitious ‘Twilight Zone’- type show called  Amazing Stories. Anticipating that move, he put together an ode to the original Rod Serling series, an omnibus combining four remakes of classic episodes.

Twilight Zone: The Movie came together quickly, guided by a quartet of directors with impressive hits under their belts. Spielberg took one episode for himself. Co-producer John Landis wrote his own opening story, that reportedly rearranges ideas from multiple original TZ episodes. Joe Dante and George Miller each took on a vintage classic. Both were originally penned by Richard Matheson, who ended up a main writer on the movie. Although they share some personnel, the four major segments operated almost as separate productions.

The film’s accomplishment was overshadowed by a tragic accident during the filming, which became a major industry debacle that included a lengthy trial. John Landis’s segment was altered, and (according to my information) Spielberg’s choice of TZ episodes to remake was changed. The finished feature film went on to perform decently at the box office.

John Landis’s episode Time Out echoes the kind of ironic morality play favored by Rod Serling on the original series. It stars the talented Vic Morrow as Bill Connor, an embittered bigot who blames minorities for his bad luck. After throwing racist slurs around a bar, Bill is singled out for a cosmic schooling about minorities and oppression. It takes the form of a time-warp steeplechase into several different historical periods.

Bill’s harsh moral comeuppance give him a terror-tour of horrors suffered by Jews, blacks and Asians. Bill is pursued and shot at by SS officers in Nazi-occupied France, threatened with lynching by Ku Klux Klansmen in the South, and hunted in Vietnam by American soldiers who see him as a Viet Cong enemy. The episode is decently made, but rather schematic and predictable. For his last film role Mr. Morrow must play an unfunny, mean-spirited Archie Bunker type. It comes off as an exercise in wish-fulfillment: I should think that a genuine racist bigot would simply see his punishment as unjust, and feel all the more persecuted.

George Clayton Johnson wrote 8 or 9 original TZ episodes, and his original ‘Kick the Can’ is recommended as one of the series’ best. A group of disaffected retirees in an old folks home worry about one of their own, who ‘irrationally’ insists that he can become young by simply acting young. Steven Spielberg’s remake for TZ: The Movie takes on a directing challenge with a large ensemble cast, many of whom had to be doubled as children. It’s the kind of show that reminds us of Frank Capra folksiness … but we’re not sure that even Capra could make it work.

The 1983 remake turns the tale into a literal Peter Pan story, with the outsider Mr. Bloom (charismatic Scatman Crothers) inspiring the lethargic patients to ‘think young’ and learn how to play again. After a ‘magic’ playtime one of the oldsters (Murray Matheson of  How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) chooses to remain young. Scatman Crothers’ literal ‘Magic Negro’ character moves on to his next retirement home miracle.

Spielberg gets fine performances from his veteran players, who include Peter Brocco and Priscilla Pointer, Amy Irving’s mother. Doing especially well is Bill Quinn. His sympathetic retiree feels abandoned by his son, and has difficulty re-learning how to play. Despite the episode’s attention to detail, we’re still stuck with a group of ‘cute’ old folks slowed down by generalized age-related impairments, as opposed to gnawing medical complaints. Positive thinking can be a great healer, but the spectacle of seeing these people rejuvenated doesn’t feel all that liberating. A simple brightening of attitude is what’s needed, and these nice folks aren’t stuck in the kind of elder care hellhole that many but the wealthy enjoy. The episode’s heart is in the right place, but the magic doesn’t gel.

We’ve watched the first two episodes a couple of times each, but in subsequent viewings we tended to skip from the end of the prologue and main title, down to episode #3. Remember the post-Star Wars moviegoing mantra, the 1980s promise of a thrilling rollercoaster ride at the movies?  The second half of Twilight Zone: The Movie is outstanding fantastic filmmaking with human involvement and mind-bending ideas.  ^*

Nobody ever forgets It’s A Good Life, the stone classic 1961 Twilight Zone episode written by Rod Serling. Based on a short story by Jerome Bixby of  It! The Terror from Beyond Space and  Fantastic Voyage, the original features chilling performances from Billy Mumy, Max Showalter, Cloris Leachman and John Larch. The Richard Matheson-Joe Dante remake retains the horror and adds fresh and challenging new shocks. Dante makes excellent use of optical effects and the makeup wizardry of Rob Bottin, who three years before helped Dante turn  The Howling into a horror classic.

Schoolteacher Helen (Kathleen Quinlan) meets little Anthony (Jeremy Licht) in a parking mishap. She drives him home, only to find that Anthony lives with a ‘family’ consisting of strangers he has forced to pretend are his relatives. How is this?  The immature Anthony possesses an unexplained control over reality itself. He has apparently wiped out his real family; having little or no empathy for others, he runs ‘reality’ strictly for his own pleasure. Anthony’s home is a surreal nightmare tailored to his preferences. TVs in every room show bizarre cartoons night and day. He forces everyone to eat strange meals. He’s aware of the fear and loathing in his ‘family;’ when he loses his temper all bets are off. They live in terror: will they be transformed into inanimate objects, or be flung into some tortuous alternate reality?

Joe Dante’s episode embellishes the original without distorting its meaning. The director’s inclination toward horror laced with comedy is a perfect fit, as is Dante’s growing fascination with blending the ethos of old Warner Bros. cartoons into his feature work. Anthony’s horrid warpings of reality resemble the cartoons he loves — one crazy monster could be the Tasmanian Devil reimagined by a gore-obsessed ten year-old. In the original 1961 show, Anthony’s ultimate punishment for those who displease him was to ‘wish them into the cornfield.’  Dante’s Anthony throws his victims into ‘Cartoon Land,’ to become prey for cartoon monsters. Their demise becomes a show we can watch and laugh at.

The show looks like an animated cartoon given a full nightmare treatment. The characters are framed in tight formation against bright walls, with dramatic lighting. Half the appeal is watching Anthony’s captives struggle to affect a normal composure, when they’re all but paralyzed with fear. As adapted by Richard Matheson, Joe Dante’s version goes in a different direction than the original. He does this by not letting Kathleen Quinlan’s schoolteacher succumb totally to the terror: Helen understands Anthony and may be able to influence him. That promises some hope for the world, as it appears at one point that Anthony has made all of creation disappear, except the space where he and Helen are standing.

Director Dante builds on his stock company of actors, adding William Schallert to his collaborators Dick Miller and Kevin McCarthy. Not hurting is the presence of Ms. Quinlan, who we fell in love with in  American Graffiti … her characters always exude intelligence and integrity.

Anything can happen in Anthony’s ‘crazyworld.’ At one point the show recreates a surreal shock straight out of  The Crawling Eye.  The optical wizardry, the specially-created new animations and Rob Bottin’s show-stopping makeup effects don’t crowd out the scares. We stay focused on the personal dynamics of Anthony’s reign of pre-teen terror.

Some brilliant directorial bits are on view. Joe Dante’s unsung masterstroke is a dialogue scene between parallel copies of Anthony and Helen, accomplished with a simple double exposure. It expresses perfectly a spatial limbo where the rules of time and matter are no longer in force. It’s a clever yet subtle and organic bit of visual expression, the most original bit of fantasy creativity of the decade. The episode capper is a magical matte painting trick by artist Rocco Gioffre.

Equally in command of his fantasy filmmaking is director George Miller, whose episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet delivers the knockout horror finale the omnibus film needs. The director of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior applies all of his skill to make us share the clammy, shivering terror of his woeful airline passenger. The fluid camera ignores the conventions of ‘in-flight’ movies. Forget lame shots that say ‘air cabin mockup’ … we’re jammed in there to sweat right along with the guy.

The Joe Dante episode guaranteed viewer sympathy with Kathleen Quinlan; John Lithgow does the same with Nightmare, registering an unrelieved 20 minutes of white-knuckle hysteria. When not cowering in the airliner’s lavatory, Lithgow’s John Valentine squirms and twists in his seat, his face bloodless and his fingers twitching. And this is before he sees the creature on the wing, the famous gremlin that terrified William Shatner in the original 1963 TV episode. Most of the action is focused on John’s window. Only he sees the monster tearing away at engine number one.

This time around, writer Richard Matheson had the luxury of refining his own work. Poor Valentine flips out at least three times, but the reactions of passengers and crew are never exaggerated. Abbe Lane is the most soothing, professional flight attendant imaginable. Valentine takes rational steps to prove his hallucination, like trying to photograph the gremlin with a Polaroid swiped from a little girl. In one excellent speech, Valentine talks himself down with calming logic … only to go ballistic when again confronted by the demon outside his window port.

George Miller’s camera is as nervous as the editing; the segment’s mini-climaxes build to a ‘fight or flight’ panic situation. As crafted by makeup artist Craig Reardon, the gremlin is an acrobatic air demon with horrid teeth and claws that rip through the aircraft’s metal skin. He’s not pretty — all he wants is to make that plane crash.

The new bits of action and chaos — a cabin window gets blown out — ratchet the tension two or three notches higher. With Reardon’s help, Miller pulls terrific little subliminal effects with Valentine and the gremlin nose-to-nose through the window glass. In the middle of a flurry of short cuts, Valentine’s eyes pop to twice their size, just for a flash. The makeup artist concocted the gag in just a few hours; Allen Daviau’s lighting and the handheld camerawork sell the effect. John Lithgow’s claustrophobic hysteria is appropriately BIG, and quite an acting achievement. The episode is the kicker that the show needed, putting Twilight Zone: The Movie over the top.

Craig Reardon was also called in at short notice to concoct a horror-face for John Landis’s prologue, in which Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks sing songs and play word games on a long-distance drive. Each story begins with a tilt-down from the sky accompanied by a portentous voiceover, as in the original show. Handling the inter-episode voiceover narration is Burgess Meredith and, at the finale, Rod Serling himself.

At one point the plan was to make the stories interlock with some framing device, perhaps sharing some characters, like the classic English film  Dead of Night … but the plan settled into more or less straight remakes of favorite episodes.

Warner Home Video’s Blu-ray of Twilight Zone: The Movie still plays extremely well; our only disappointment is that we were hoping for a 4K remaster. The Blu-ray instead appears to be an unchanged reissue of an earlier release. The image is very good throughout, with the colors in the Dante segment a standout. The prologue seems a bit too bright and grainy than we remember … or is that how it always looked?

Jerry Goldsmith’s music score comes through nicely. It reprises the original Marius Constant TV title theme, but Goldsmith contributed a lot of music to the original series as well. He, Bernard Herrmann, and Fred Steiner did 7 episodes each. Van Cleave provided music for 12.

The disc is entirely plain-wrap, without a real menu page. On my player, hitting the menu button brought up a page with a choice of playing a trailer, or the movie. The movie button was non-functional, while the trailer prompt took us to the movie. Three minutes into the ‘trailer,’ I was still thinking, “this is such an odd idea — the trailer starts the same as the movie …”

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Twilight Zone: The Movie
Blu-ray rates:
Movie episodes: Fair, Good -, Excellent, Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: none.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: January 6, 2026
(7450zone)

^*  Were I to assemble a cherry-picked lineup of horror omnibus segments, I’d start with the Dante and Miller episodes from this show, add the Fellini segment  Toby Dammit, and maybe the Mirror Story from Dead of Night …. what other short films would serve as good horror companions?  What are the best Amicus episodes?

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