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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
My Bride Was Abducted By Space Aliens!,
By Bruce Rux (Aurora, CO) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Outer Limits: Don't Open Till Doomsday [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Overrated but good. Screenwriter Stefano was a little pressed for time on this one, and didn't quite get to polish it off as well as he could have. Still, it's got atmosphere to spare, one of the creepier aliens of the series, and Miriam Hopkins as a demented spinster in a worse-than-haunted house.Hopkins goes crazy after her bridegroom vanishes on their wedding night, back in the Roaring Twenties. Now, many decades later, she lives in the mansion that would have been theirs, which has become a decadent shrine. Unbeknownst to anyone else, she is secretly in league with an alien monster seeking to abduct more cooperative help than her snatched fiance in its quest to blow up the universe. Along come a pair of underage eloping high schoolers... This episode has a lot going for it. Logically, it makes about as much sense as the Magic Bullet theory, but the imagery and the story are rich and unsettling. There are two fabulously creepy abduction scenes, Hopkins' groom at the beginning of the episode and the high school sweetheart later. The latter is especially unnerving, since she cannot be distinguished between experiencing cosmic terror or an orgasm in confronting the hypnotic alien abductor. Hopkins is a pre-Patty Hearst study in the Stockholm Syndrome, a woman gone round the bend in lifelong coerced service to evil. The script is weak, especially at the end, when the rather imaginative one-eyed monster-in-a-box talks too much and comes off sounding like a bass-voiced Marvin the Martian. The finale is rushed, and if you pay attention you can see the high school youth jump his cue before the special effect he is supposed to be reacting to occurs, which is pretty funny. Overall, definitely worth a look, especially for horror or Lovecraft fans.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
what's in the box?,
By
This review is from: Outer Limits: Don't Open Till Doomsday [VHS] (VHS Tape)
The creepiest component of this episode is the casting of Miriam Hopkins as a Miss Havisham bride who has been abandoned on her wedding night because of alien interference. Director of photography Conrad Hall abandons his trademark soft-focus glamour to expose the aging Hopkins in a Grand Guignol manner, aided by her flapper wardrobe, with knee high stockings. At times Hopkins' campness recalls Bette Davis particulary since she wears a black wig and uses big eyes, and she is too pitiful to be considered a drag queen. The jazz score also recalls the Robert Aldrich/Davis film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The alien plot about an invasion somehow stopped by the imprisonment of a key figure in a doomsday box is pretty silly and writer Joseph Stefano deliberately undercuts it with a non-linear narrative. We are presented with consequences before explainations which oddly works for the story. This is probably wise since the fact that Hopkins' groom could be transported into the box by the alien when it first appears, but Hopkins not, is a fatal flaw in logic. In the Outer Limits Official Companion Stefano says that he was more interested in exploring a psychology of sex, with Hopkins and then a newly married couple with the wife under the age of consent and the cob-webbed bridal suite representations of virginity, and the disgustingly feculent alien monster both male and female sex organs. The Freudian metaphors are too obscure to work, perhaps undermined by the questionable virility of Hopkin's groom and the blandness of the new one, and by setting up 3 time frames, Stefano may have over-extended himself. There is a continuity error with Hopkins closing a door then returning to find it open, an obvious overdub in the opening scene, in a supporting role Nellie Burt is hammy portend, director Gerd Oswald doesn't make enough of Hopkins in her wedding gown, and the resolution is clumsily and dismissively staged. However the human transportation into the doomsday box has a primal terror since one is attacked in the eye, with an effective cut from one person attached to the box in semi-transportation to Hopkin's laying on her bed kicking her legs in time to music, and an arresting image with the overview angle of the inhabitants of the box.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Modernism vs gothic horror in early '60s prime time TV,
By A Customer
This review is from: Outer Limits: Don't Open Till Doomsday [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Writer Joseph Stefano (author of the script for Hitchcock's "Psycho") invents a much complex intertwined tale of passionate dementia, youthful love in the face of near-incestuous, overly dominating fatherly love, time that stands still and, as if that weren't enough, a gloomy cyclopean monster-from-outer-space lurking inside a kind of "photographic" seamless box laid out as a wedding gift on a 1920's bridal suite table! And director Gerd Oswald and cinematographer Conrad Hall go all the way for it, from every angle possible within/without that disrupted surreal universe. The settings are quite lavishly creepy too. Excellent turns by Miriam Hopkins, Melinda Plowman and John Hoight. Great score by Robert Van Eps. Scary, arty AND entertaining! --Gilbert Het
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