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THE OUTER LIMITS
Buy the DVDs! |
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When I was a young otter, one of the things my whole family agreed on
was The Outer Limits...we loved it! I was a little too young to see
the original shows, but of course it was in reruns forever, and we
caught it whenever we could, esp. on our weekend monster movie and junk
food fests.
For those of you who missed it, this was a science-fiction themed series that startd in 1963 and ran for a couple of years thereafter. Each show was an hour long (including commercials, so really about 45 minutes) and there was always a monster or bad guy or alien or something to be the antagonist...that was one of the foundations of the show. Like Twilight Zone, it had a catchy voiceover intro, and a narrator at the beginning and the end, and like Twilight Zone, it got wierd and moralistic at times...but damn, what fun to watch! The whole first year of the series has been released on DVD, and Mr. Otter and I are in the middle of watching it...so no, it's not a movie, but I'm putting down comments on episodes anyway because it's my web site and I can do as I please...
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The Galaxy Being
Off to a promising start...an interesting alien, Cliff Robertson is good, some nice 'berserk scary monster destroying stuff' shots, and not too moralistic.
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The Hundred Days of the Dragon
OK, this one was just plain silly...the Evil Chinese have a process that lets them duplicate facial features and fingerprints by making skin malleable...and it evidently works on hair and eye and skin COLOR as well? hah. This one did give me the opportunity, when the President had been replaced by one of these people, of turning to Mr. Otter and singing "Secret Asian Man"...so it was worth watching for that.
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The Architects of Fear
This one was really dumb. Robert Culp, kinda a honey, is turned into a scary alien to unite the peoples of the world and make them stop playing with nukes. But no! it's not a 'people shouldn't be afraid of something different' story, it suddenly veers off into 'things science shouldn't meddle with' land! Wow! Totally idiotic on so many levels. His wife recognizes him? They have all this advanced technology inc. disintegrating laser guns and yet are still worried about nuclear weapons? Nobody notices what they're doing? How many people supposedly knew about this top secret project? give me a break. | ||
The Man with the Power
Donald Pleasance (and all I have to do is tell you that much, and you know he's going to be killed by the end...right? Isn't it true?) is a nebbishy professor who is bossed around by everyone, but Wants To Make A Difference...so he somehow volunteers to have a little electronic thing surgically inserted into his brain, and now has amazing mental powers that will let the earth harvest heavy metals from asteroids and save the planet...but Donald's subconcious has other ideas...A nice riff on the whole Forbidden Planet thing. | ||
The Sixth Finger
David McCallum, who was kinda cute back then, is a simple coal miner wanting a better life, who volunteers for scientist Edward Mulhare's genetics experiments...he ends up "evolving", gets a big head :-) and then is brought back to his previous state by his girlfriend. I'm not sure if he is supposed to be dead at the end or not...not real clear...but even so, not a bad episode. | ||
The Man who was Never Born
Gets into that wierd 'change the past to change the future' area. Martin Landau ends up going into his past to keep the world from being destroyed by a scientist studying a plague, but things don't turn out quite as he thought they would. Silly premise, good ending...but why would he evolve the power to make people think he looks like a 'normal' human being of our time, if everyone there looks like him? | ||
O. B. I. T.
Silly cold war paranoia story, a 'big brother' machine that can see everything, and keeps showing a 'scary' monster...it's really really obvious who's behind it all...although interesting parallels with recent current events, maybe aliens have taken over? | ||