Customer Reviews

Outer Limits: Production & Decay [VHS]

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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.

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.

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....

This is one of the sillier Outer Limits episodes, written and directed by Leslie Stevens, who had done the series pilot The Galaxy Being, but is not responsible for directing the best episodes of the series. Stevens' teleplay gets swamped in scf-fi blather, in trying to explain a cluster of intensely radioactive subatomic particles pulled fresh from a cyclotron that accidently come into contact with an isotope of Nobelium-238, in a nuclear power plant's furnace reactor, resulting in a magnesium glare that kills and introduces force-creatures which threaten to cause an atomic chain reaction. As the head of the plant, George MacReady gets the bulk of Steven' verbage, jabbering about "quasistellar radio sources", and his wife Signe Hasso is given "If what you say is true, or even half of it....". MacReady and Hasso make an odd couple, with him going all Charles Laughton, grimacing and spitting over his false teeth, and her syllable-lengthening accented English. The emergency allows for Stevens to re-use the electricity that featured in The Galaxy Being, another tale of alien life form that snapped and crackled, though the animated flashes of lightning are more Frankenstein circa 1931. (The similar effect used for The Man with the Power works better because it occurs in daylight and is accompanied by a cloud formation). The plant workers use hooked gloves to access the particles source, which scores a laugh when the hook is used as a reinforcing gesture by a speaker, and the sight of numerous hooked arms connected to the source brings to mind wino's warming their hands by a lit oil drum. This contact reaches a comic climax when the workers all stand hook in hook in a daisy chain, playing a dangerous version of ring-a-ring-a-rosy. One of the lead walls brought into to contain the outbreak is toppled, but it's hard to believe that those under it have been crushed when the wall appears to have the solidity of cardboard. The sight of Signe Hasso at a control panel, turning dials frantically also gets a laugh, as does the appearance of the Frances Farmer look-alike Allyson Ames as the requisite hysterical female, who runs her hand through her hair as she screams, and needs to be carried when she faints. Stevens however provides one great image of Macready and Hasso running in long shot into a bunker of light, and uses the infamous atom bomb explosion footage complete with windstorm and shattered buildings. This episode also uses composer Dominic Frontiere's ascending scale. The Official Companion amusingly parallels the character of MacReady as a lone scientist battling impossible odds with Stevens, fighting time to produce a low-budget show at the expense of story values. This may be read as a back-handed compliment to Stevens, since other directors on the show were faced with the same predicament, in particular Joseph Stefano whose It Crawled out of the Woodwork tackles the same struggling to tame the nuclear menace idea.