Customer Reviews

Outer Limits: Don't Open Till Doomsday [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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

Between its title, its cyclopean blob-like monster, and its plot premise, this is one of the most pulp-inspired episodes of the original Outer Limits' fabulous first season. As often as not, Outer Limits' aliens were inhuman good guys, reflecting or embodying the higher virtues of humanity, a la "Day the Earth Stood Still". This is one of the few occasions on which the show indulged itself (and why not?) in the luxury of a little inspiration from the lower-concept scifi movies of the 1950's and '60's: alien bad guys entering our universe (from Outside, almost Lovecraftian!) to destroy it; and not so much from malice as from just being callous--impinged upon or inconvenienced by our space-and-time continuum. But grafted onto this time-honored hokum is a much more psychologically elaborate and human-centered storyline than is normally seen in such a plot, involving the desperation and frustration of its dramatis personae. The aging bride, whose 1929 marriage was only a few hours old (and "still unused") when her groom mysteriously disappeared, has been slowly and steadily driven to dementia by the strain. She still makes herself up (further and further over the decades since, one detects) as a flapper with cosmetics by the trowel-full, to a horrifying extent bordering on psychosis, offering an interesting counterpoint to the alien as an object of repulsion. As for her husband, he has been snatched away by the alien, into its little dimensional craft, within which space and time seem to be suspended--exactly the opposite of the frozen "flapper world" of his bride's delusions, in which time has marched on against her denial. And the alien won't release him until he agrees to assist with the plot to destroy the universe--which he won't agree to, because he is a "heartless mountain of good" (much to the resentment of his bride, aging outside the box). She is well aware of what's going on, and concerned only with her own unfulfillment. This episode has one of the most cryptic and labyrinthine story-telling styles of all OL episodes. Because of its subtlety, one has to watch closely and carefully, putting two and two together from a trail of little clues. No character explains it all at the end. Especially, one has to recognize by facial features alone, a picture in a newspaper seen but briefly. Its of a fellow who, at the beginning, we see delivering the dimensional craft, disguised as a wedding present, to the house of the newlyweds. Likewise with the headline of the newspaper story accompanying his picture, in which we learn by implication about the character motivations that set this whole ball rolling. But these elements function almost as a mere backdrop, with the nightmarish and incomprehensible events that unfold, centering around the arrival into this weird tapestry of a young couple who have troubles of their own. This is one of OL's many "finest episodes", and with my attention nailed to the TV screen, I felt an uncanny identification with the poor guy whom we see from inside the alien's box, with his eye uncontrollably glued to its lens-like window. Chilling, unforgettable, and unique--Outer Limits has done it again.

"Dont' Open til Doomsday" is an unfocused mess, yet it has so much going for it. On the plus side are the rich characterizations, the attention to atmosphere and detail, the juxtaposition of 20's period jazz with Frontiere's evocative score and of course the grotesque, over-the-top conception of the creature-of-the-week itself - which must have been Stefano's way of thumbing his nose at the ever-intrusive censorship board. The negative side: 1. there's the explanation of the creature's reason for existence which is such an incomprehensible clash of nuclear and meta-physics that it could make even a nuclear physicist's head explode 2. the episode comes to such an abrubpt and anti-climactic end - the creature out of the blue decides after 35 or so years that "if I can't destroy the world, I must un-create myself" - that it isn't clear if Stephano was playing it for laughs or again thumbing his nose at the network bureaucracy for imposing production deadlines or a combination of the two.

I can't add anything more than what has already been said from the reviewers below. This is the most different episode of the series and one of it's best.

"The Outer Limits," like "The Twilight Zone," is one of those series that was too much for its time. The show was the perfect marriage of sci-fi, incredible ensemble acting for the week's guest stars, and a marvelous score for the first season from Dominic Frontiere. "Don't Open 'Til Doomsday" is one superb hour of television. From its unusual storyline, crisp cinematography, and flawless performances from the prinicipals, chiefly Miriam Hopkins as the long-suffering "bride-to-be" and movie/TV stalwart John Hoyt as an overprotective father, the episode shines from start to finish. Along with "The Zanti Misfits," "ZZZZZ," "It Crawled Out of th Woodwork," "The Man Who Was Never Born," and "The Bellero Shield (featuring another stand-out Hoyt performance)," this is the one that belongs in the Television Hall of Fame.

Overall this was a great movie. Couple gets doomsday device for wedding day gift. This movie has both horror and suspense!!!

A man on his wedding night receives a package marked, 'DONT OPEN 'TILL DOOMSDAY'