Product Details

• Actors: Vic Perrin, Bob Johnson, Ben Wright, Robert Culp, Robert Duvall
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
• VHS Release Date: September 1, 1998
• Run Time: 51 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6301977130
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #447,331 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Better the first time I saw it..., February 5, 2001

By 

Timothy P. Scanlon (Hyattsville, MDUSA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Outer Limits: Production & Decay [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Like the previous reviewer, I remembered seeing this once before on network television--when black and white TVs were the rule rather than the exception. I was young--too young to notice the lead character's reference to "nucular" physics, for example, but I remembered bits and pieces of how scary it was. The radioactivity takes over the technicians in the suit, one of them I didn't recognize at the time but would in a year or two: Leonard Nimoy.

I still like it, despite its weaknesses, despite the short time and the limited budgets and techniques they had for the special effects. The time-reverse--just the film of the nuclear explosion run backwards--is a tad corny, but, given those limitations, it's passable. I think each time I see it, I'm able to put a different sort of meaning to it, e.g., technology's dominance over the humans who created it, in addition to any number of anti-nuclear themes.

I'm still a fan of nearly all the old Outer Limits episodes, and this is one I'm glad I have.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Light at the End of the Cyclotron, March 29, 2002

By 

Bruce Rux (Aurora, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Outer Limits: Production & Decay [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Unless you're a physicist, you'll quickly get lost in Leslie Stevens' technobabble script. But this episode more than makes up for it with "electrifying" visuals. For as talky as it is, it's surprisingly creepy and suspenseful, dramatic and action-packed. I'd give it an extra half-star, if the ratings allowed.

George Macready gets to play the good guy for a change, the head of a nuclear power plant gone apocalyptic. He bombards quasar particles in the plant cyclotron, and initiates a chain reaction that ends up doing something worse than building to critical mass - it's being stabilized from another dimension, by intensely radioactive particle-beings, to open a permanent doorway to Earth. The intelligent particles consume human matter inside the technicians' radiation suits, commandeering the suits themselves to serve as their robotic arms and legs in our dimension.

This is a real sturm-und-drang melodrama, with stormclouds and lightning flashes galore, and a highly-charged (though believable) emotional tenor throughout. The radiation suit-monsters and wild visuals steal the show, the suits being especially unnerving: Frankensteinian golems, with claw-hands and literal lightning-faces, that seize fallen humans and drag them to the cyclotron to "convert" them, itself a cleverly-done bit of business with the suits first deflating and then slowly ri-i-ising up to become more lightning-faced freaks.

The ending is odd but interesting, and quite dramatic. This episode is one of the moodiest of the series, creating a palpable atmosphere of dread and terror that never really lets up. It may not be logical, but it is the stuff of which nightmares are made.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Spock speaks!, March 11, 2000

By 

"jjs-world" (Kansas City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Outer Limits: Production & Decay [VHS] (VHS Tape)

If I'd written a review for "The Production and Decay of Strange Particles" the first time I saw it, I would have given it 5 stars - easily! However, it was also the first time this Outer Limits episode was shown on broadcast TV (around the same time when many Americans were searching the night sky for the radioactive cloud, made by the Red Chinese' first big nuke, to pass over head.)

History aside, the story takes place in a nuclear research lab. Experiments in the creation/control of radioactive compounds lead to the birth of a new isotope which promptly begins its own experiment - upon the lab techs. As the new life form is busily extending and replicating itself - with all the technicians, assistants, and janitors try to contain the 'monster' - the big-brained project head, an aging scientist, struggles to find the answers and the courage to help the research team and stop the monster before it's too late!

Like all Outer Limits stories, you have to swallow hard to accept some of the premises, still, two points make this episode special.

1. The characters in the script were ahead of their social time. Our cowardly hero is an educated man and knows he has already absorbed more than a lifetime's worth of 'safe' rads - his wife, strong-willed and out-spoken. Many (if not most) Americans at that time were quite the opposite. "A woman's place was (still) in the home" just like "Duck and Cover" was the best way to survive "The Bomb"! (Few were beginning to accept, though not fully understand, the M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) scenario.)

2. (IF I remember correctly) This is the first of two Outer Limits episodes in which He appeared, and (again, IF I'm correct) it was the first time he spoke (one line, all four words) on any TV show. 'He' being Mr. Spock - Leonard Nimoy. ?noteworthy? maybe, maybe not....