Technically, the French composer Marius Constant did not set out to write the theme song for The Twilight Zone. In the 50s, CBS commissioned Constant to compose a number of short pieces for CBS stock music library, basically as musical stingers that could be used for radio shows. In 1960, when The Twilight Zone needed a theme song, an enterprising CBS employee combined two of Constant’s composition to create the iconic Twilight Zone theme.
Enjoy our short but haunting song of the day.
Happy Twilight Zone Day!
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today is Twilight Zone Day! In honor of this site’s favorite anthology show, it’s time for….
4 Shots From The Twilight Zone
Twilight Zone 1.8 “Time Enough At Last” (1959, dir by John Brahm)
Twilight Zone 1.22 “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” (1960, dir by Ronald Winston)
Twilight Zone 2.6 “Eye of the Beholder (1960, dir by Douglas Heyes)
Twilight Zone 2.17 “Twenty-Two (1961, dir by Jack Smight)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1982’s The Sword and the Sorcerer!
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, find the movie on YouTube and hit play at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! The watch party community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
See you soon!
This cover is from 1961.
It’s always good fun until someone gets pushed down a flight of stairs.
That’s a lesson for us all.
Enjoy!
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sunday, I will be reviewing the Canadian series, Degrassi: The Next Generation, which aired from 2001 to 2015! The series can be streamed on YouTube and Tubi.
This week, we have a very special episode of everyone’s favorite Canadian show. Degrassi goes there!
Episode 2.16 “Message In A Bottle”
(Dir by Bruce McDonald, originally aired on August 1st, 2003)
The school’s basketball team is finally doing well and Jimmy decides to throw a party at his apartment to celebrate. (As usual, Jimmy’s parents are out of town.) Paige is having a spa weekend so she doesn’t come. Ellie is too busy pretending to be Marco’s girlfriend to come. J.T. and Toby? Forget it. This is so not their scene that they’re not even in this episode!
Ashley come to the party with Terri. If nothing else, this reminds us that Terri is still a character on the show and she hasn’t suffered any school-ending brain damage at the hands of Rick Murray …. not yet, at least. Jimmy is excited to Ashley. However, romance will have to wait because Sean shows up drunk and accidentally breaks a liquor bottle. Jimmy throws a fit. That’s not a surprise. Jimmy’s always upset about something.
For that matter, so is Sean. Sean, however, has more reasons to be upset than Jimmy. His parents are drunks. His older brother, Tracker, cannot hold down a job, despite having a supercool name like Tracker. In this episode, Emma tells Spike and Snake that Sean will be joining them for dinner without bothering to ask Sean beforehand. Sean actually handles the first part of the dinner fairly well. But then, during the second half of the dinner, he sneaks some alcohol and becomes convinced that Spike is talking down to him. Myself, I’m more concerned about the fact that they ate a sushi dinner despite the fact that Spike is pregnant.
Emma comes to Jimmy’s party, looking for Sean after Sean storms out of dinner. Emma assumes that it’s all her mom’s fault but Sean admits that he’s been drinking and he overreacted. Sean is stunned when Emma calls her mom for a ride home. Sean can’t imagine living with a parent who isn’t abusive. That’s actually really, really sad. Daniel Clark always did a great job as Sean and that’s certainly the case here. Clark elevates this episode above being a typical anti-drinking episode. I appreciated that the episode didn’t judge Sean and that it didn’t lecture him. It’s as if the show understood that Sean felt bad enough without having every other character go off on him. At least during the early seasons, that’s one thing that set Degrassi apart from other high school shows.
The episode ends with forgiveness, which was sweet. Sean thinks Emma is going to dump him. Emma tells him that everyone makes mistakes. And that’s true! This was a good episode.
I spent most of this week working on a writing project so I didn’t watch much. But, for those curious, here’s what I did watch!
Films I Watched:
Live Tweets:
4 Scenes From 4 Films:
Scenes I Love:
Songs of the Day:
Music Videos of the Day:
Artwork of the Day:
Links From Last Week:
News From Last Week:
Links From The Site:
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.
Pembleton’s back!
Episode 5.9 “Control”
(Dir by Jean de Segonzac, originally aired on December 6th, 1996)
A drug dealer named Reggie Copeland has been murdered and word on the street is that the killing was set up by Junior Bunk (Mekhi Phifer), who just happens to be the nephew of drug lord Luther Mahoney (Erik Todd Dellums). When Lewis and Detective Stivers (Toni Lewis) arrest Junior, he immediately starts crying.
That certainly makes Lewis happy. He’s obsessed with taking down Mahoney. Junior gives the detectives the name of the man who he hired, on Luther’s behalf, to assassinate Copeland. Munch and Lewis take a trip to the worst city on Earth (Philadelphia, if you had to ask) and arrest the gunman. Even Ed Danvers thinks that they’re finally on the verge of nailing Luther….
Luther, it turns out, has got friends everywhere. Even while sitting in a holding cell, he is able to find out the name of the hotel where the police are hiding Junior. When the cops order room service, Junior makes sure that a baggie with two gold stars is included in Junior’s sandwich. (All of Luther’s heroin comes in baggies with two stars.) Junior realizes that Luther knows exactly where he is. Junior refuses to testify and recants his previous confession. And Luther … Luther goes free again!
Kellerman would be upset, except for the fact that he’s still under suspension. (They’re really dragging this story out, aren’t they?) Kellerman is in such a bad mood that he even kicks Brodie off of his house boat for being too happy. However, at the end of the episode, Dr. Cox shows up at Kellerman’s houseboat. I’m going to guess that she’ll be allowed to stay on the boat.
However, the main event of this episode is that Pembleton is working his first case since his stroke. A woman has been found dead in her home, stabbed twenty times. Meanwhile, her two young sons were both shot execution style. Bayliss may be the primary but Pembleton is determined to take charge. Pembleton thinks that the murderer was the woman’s boyfriend, a sleazy musician named Jimmy Sutter (Andrew DeAngelo). Bayliss thinks that the murderer was the woman’s rigid ex-husbad, Lt. Commander Alex Clifton (Michael Gaston).
From the start, it’s pretty obvious that Clifton’s the murderer. He’s too cold and unemotional when he is told about the murderers. He’s very tightly wound. The fact that the woman was killed in a fury but her children were killed “cleanly and efficiently,” (as Pembleton put it) indicated to me that the murderer was driven by rage against the mother but, in his twisted way, he felt he was sparing the children an even worse fate. Clifton is obviously the killer and Pembleton, to his credit, eventually comes to realize it.
Unfortunately, the case nearly falls apart in the Box. Pembleton and Bayliss have lost their rhythm as partners. Bayliss gets frustrated when Pembleton suddenly starts asking Clifton about the blood pressure medicine he takes. “Do you get any side effects?” Pembleton asks. Outside of the interrogation room, Bayliss admits that he’s scared Pembleton is going to “stroke out” and die. “Everyone dies!” Pembleton says.
Finally, Bayliss and Pembleton make it work. They turn up the heart in the Box and when Clifton takes off his jacket and very carefully folds it, Bayliss presumes to sit down on the jacket. Clifton keeps taking the jacket back and refolding it. Bayliss spills water on the jacket. Clifton finally loses it, yelling and admitting that he killed his ex-wife and his two sons.
Wow, this was a good episode. Michael Gaston give a chillingly believable performance as Clifton. Erik Todd Dellums was, as usual, magnetically evil as Luther. Best of all, it was good to see Kyle Secor and Andre Braugher working a case together. Pembleton is back and it’s about time!
As soon as I finished watching COLD WAR (2012), I went to the fridge, grabbed myself a refreshing beverage and immediately started up COLD WAR II (2016). The original film ends on a cliffhanger, so I was excited to see what happens next!
COLD WAR II opens right after the events of the first film, resolves its pressing cliffhanger in the first 20 minutes, and then doubles down on the intrigue and political power plays that defined the original. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, so as not to take away some of the fun surprises. I will say that most sequels go bigger by doubling body counts or explosions, but in this film the conspiracies just get a lot deeper, and the political manipulations start reaching for much broader power. I still found the situations to be interesting thanks to the intense atmosphere of the film and the strong performances of the cast.
In the roles of Sean Lau and M.B. Lee, Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Ka-fai continue to excel, but circumstances quickly erode some of the goodwill that was created between their characters at the end of the first film. This temporarily creates the risk that this follow-up could end up feeling like a retread of their heated rivalry in part 1. Higher, even more personal stakes helped alleviate some of that concern.
The best thing that happens for COLD WAR II is the addition of Chow Yun-fat to the cast in the important supporting role of Oswald Kan. Kan is a former judge and brilliant legal mind who leads a special committee investigating the fallout from the events of the first film. The middle section of the film features a series of scenes with Chow in intense confrontations with both Tony Leung and Aaron Kwok. It’s especially fun seeing Chow mix it up with Tony as their careers go way back to working with each other in classics like PRISON ON FIRE (1987) and A BETTER TOMORROW III (1989). These scenes freshen up the material, but they also connect us emotionally to Hong Kong cinema of the golden years through one of its biggest, most honorable stars. Chow gives the film a moral center as Oswald Kan seems free from the ethical compromises that our other main characters are having to make. It’s an impressive and charismatic turn from Hong Kong’s all-time greatest leading man.
Just as in the first film, there aren’t a lot of action scenes, but the ones we have are bigger and even more impressive. There’s an action sequence in a tunnel about an hour into the film that blew me away with its execution and intensity. Its resolution also surprised me, which is not always easy to do. Still, this incredible scene serves the plot well, providing clear and obvious motivation for the actions of each of the main characters throughout the remainder of the film.
COLD WAR II follows the motto of most sequels to box office smashes… “Go big or go home!” While the plot becomes even more complicated this time around, the continued excellence in the performances, especially with the addition of Chow Yun-Fat, helps to provide the solid emotional payoffs needed to keep the series moving forward. With the excellent action set pieces also adding to the fun, the filmmakers have managed to create a sequel that I rate just as high as the original. Now, bring on COLD WAR 1994!
COLD WAR II is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Tubi, PlutoTV, Plex, and the Roku Channel!
Through the Shattered Lens 