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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Pit and the Madman,
By
This review is from: Outer Limits: It Crawled Out of Woodwork [VHS] (VHS Tape)
"His name is Warren Edgar Morley. For the past six months, he has guarded this gate from eight in the morning until six at night, at which time he is replaced by another just like himself. These are the last few moments of his life." At NORCO (energy research commission) a cleaning woman accidentally creates an energy cloud monster. The head of NORCO decide to study and use the monster in order to control his staff research with the help of pace-maker boxes. Don't miss the fantastic opening scene with the cleaning woman. Pre-"The Invaders" Kent Smith, as Germanic Dr. Block, is really terrifying ("Some people are long time dying."). There is a famous shot of Kent Smith, with the close-up of his turning hand, saying : "Not insane... at worst, obsessed." And finally, his pro-Adam bomb statement : "The wonderful questions are always answered at the cost of human life. Remember how we wondered about the atom bomb." The look of the long corridor that leads to the pit is scary. The extreme close-up, shot with a wide-angle, of Ed Asner's sinister face, watching the energy monster, is totally weird. This is the perfect example of a typical episode made with Joseph Stefano's taut writing, Gerd Oswald's Caligari-like direction and Conrad Hall's somber photography. Please watch "Production and decay of strange particles" with this one. "The Conservation of Energy Law-a principle which states that energy can be changed in form but that it cannot be either created or destroyed. And this is true of all energy-the energy of genius, of madness, of the heart, of the atom. And so it must be lived with. It must be controlled, channeled for good, held isolated from evil, and somehow lived with, peaceably."
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nightmare In Lightning,
By Bruce Rux (Aurora, CO) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Outer Limits: It Crawled Out of Woodwork [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Joe Stefano scripted this nightmarish horror offering. His scripts are often short on logic, this one particularly, but make up for that failing by being long on unsettling or downright frightening imagery. And the imagery in this one is downright frightening.The "it" of the title is an impossible energy force, explosively brought into existence by an accident involving a vacuum cleaner at an energy plant. How exactly this occurs is never pondered, since frankly it doesn't matter - any more than it matters how a mad scientist can so skillfully control and use the thing to terrify employees to death, and then resurrect them with pacemakers in order to create fully complient slaves. What matters is the theme and the imagery, and those convey themselves most effectively in this scary little sci-fi thriller. Ed Asner does an early pre-Lou Grant turn as the police inspector unfortunately drawn into a murder investigation at the plant. Michael Forest gets to chew the scenery quite delightfully in two (count 'em, two) death scenes. Joan Lamden is a convincing tortured soul. Scott Marlowe and Barbara Luna are wasted as young lovers in a subplot that exists only to provide the suspicious death report to Asner that furthers the plot and yawningly pads the episode. Kent Smith gloriously chews more scenery than Michael Forest in either of his death scenes, as the mad German scientist (is there any other kind?) responsible for all the mayhem.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
the energy of genius/madness/the atom,
By
This review is from: Outer Limits: It Crawled Out of Woodwork [VHS] (VHS Tape)
The title of this Outer Limits episode is said to be taken from a cleaning woman who unwittingly gives life to a strobing growling chaotic cloud of lethal energy, that resembles the power from The Man with the Power episode. Directed by Gerd Oswald and written by series producer Joseph Stefano, the treatment is schizophrenic since it divides our time between Norco, the energy research commission which is attempting to break or change the Conservation of Energy Law, headed by a Bela Lugosi accented Kent Smith, and the apartment of brothers Michael Forest and Scott Marlowe, without a conclusion that brings the halves together satisfactorily. There is an inconsistency in what constitutes research which may be attributable to Smith's state of mind, since although he has contained the Id-like atomic force in a multiple sealed chamber known as The Pit, which has self-contained power generators, the Pit is also used as a spider's web where victims are lured to feed the cloud. While Oswald goes in for expressionist close-ups, with a notable extreme long shot of the lab as the energy passes through it, Stefano's teleplay is written in a literary style that draws attention to itself. Whilst this may be preferable to the sci fi gobbledegook that can intellectualy alienate (no pun intended) the viewer, it sometimes reads as static naval-gazing, with a rememberance of a childhood trauma bordering on psychobabble. A description of a woman as being beautiful is clearly innaccurate but rationalised by the speaker having a "misplaced sense of word value", there is a repeated reference to an female's legs which may categorise Stephano as a legman, and an odd line presumably an in-joke of it's time "If he'd been in any better health, they'd have given him a morning show on television". Oswald doesn't make much of the cardiac pacemakers that are strapped to the chests of the inhabitants of Norco, except when he begins a scene with a bath being run to create an expectation. He upstages a dialogue scene between the brothers with stripes of reflected light over their faces, has a funny cut from a description of someone's smile to the same person's tortured face, a cut using the verbal reaction to "police headquarters", and composer Dominic Frontiere uses a harp, as well as his ascending scale once again. Intentional or not, the brothers are Stephano look-alikes, and also use Sinatra smooth talking voices. Marlow would be used as the playboy in the future Forms of Things Unknown episode, and while he is given a girlfriend (the one with the legs), his manner also suggests bisexuality. As a detective Ed Asner gets some unusual for him action scenes, which he gives a nice lack of hysteria panic to, and understates amusingly "Are you insane?!".
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