Category: Super Recaps

Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Future Trade)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Directed by Bob Balaban

We’re back with another episode of Now That’s What I Call Twilight Zone!  You’re much more digestible and mainstream version of something good that you’ll forget about a heck of a lot faster!  Then again, we might just have a standout episode here if you can believe it as we’re talking about that one particular bug bear of internet sad boys; TOXIC MASCULINITY AND ENTITLEMENT!!  Yes, even back in 2002 the world thought you were all a bunch of losers.  ANYWAY!  Does this episode take full advantage of its premise to deliver an interesting take on the subject, or will it refuse to take off the kid gloves and give these ridiculous fools a pass for their behavior?  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins with Martin (Frank Whaley) being annoyed by the most obnoxious and stereotypical hell beast of a bad wife who is literally screaming at him for being a loser and to feed the kids.  It’s like something right out of an MRA handbook as the only thing we get to see is the haggard man while the wife and kids are just voices in the distance with no discernable personality besides spite and venom.  Oh, it gets even worse from there!  The guy goes to work at a hardware store and his boss a total control freak who feels the need to tear him down for coming three minutes late for work and then when he tries to strike up a “friendly conversation” with a female coworker, she just walks away after an awkward silence.  Seriously, give this guy six months and he’ll be found dead in an alley with clown makeup and balloon animals full of anthrax.  Fortunately for the rest of us, it looks like THE TWILIGHT ZONE is about to stop his murder spree in its tracks with some twist of ironic fate as he keeps getting pop up ads about this company called Future Trade who wants to give him a one-time offer!  Now if it was you or I who got this message, I’d assume it was just another porn site trying to get your credit card details, but I guess Martin is so far down his own self-pitying spiral of misery that he’s willing to give it a chance.  Now let’s say that you or I DID go the extra step of visiting this strange company promising to give us the future we wanted, I’m pretty sure we’d turn tail and run when we realize that it’s run by Dean Winters.  HOLY CRAP, DEAN WINTERS IS IN THIS!!

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This is all an elaborate Allstate commercial, isn’t it?

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Found and Lost)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Vern Gillum

We’re back with another episode of The Knockoff Zone which is apropos considering this is another episode of the show that JUST SO HAPPENED to be a heck of a lot like a movie that came around the same time!  So what are we “paying homage” to today?  Well it’s not QUITE an exact fit, but there’s a lot of The Family Man in this episode which if you don’t recall is the Nicolas Cage movie where he’s an obscenely rich dude who is confronted with the life he didn’t choose to live.  You may also remember it as the movie where he goes TA-DAAAA for no reason, but sadly I doubt we’ll get to see something like that in this episode.  OR WILL WE!?  I guess there’s only way to find out!  Let’s get started!!

The episode begins with some dude name Sean (Brian Austin Green) driving to work and he barely has time to lock his car and straighten his tie before Forest Whitaker is on hand to tell us what this episode is about!  I mean I’m not about to go check, but twenty seconds into an episode sounds like a record for ANY Twilight Zone series to start its monologue, right?   Anyway, what’s ACTUALLY important is that Sean is a rich business guy who has more than anyone else could DREAM of, but seems to be deeply unhappy for some reason and is about to be interviewed by a journalist (Moira Kelly).  No, before you ask, I didn’t accidentally pop in a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.  Although…

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“My name is Bianca Titanium, and you must be Shaun White.”     “Uh… nope.  My first name’s not even spelled that way.  Are you sure you’re in the right building?”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Sanctuary)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Patrick Norris

Welcome back to yet another episode of The Twilight Drone!  Not one of those flying things, I mean in terms of just… droning on.  Yeah, I’m just gonna be upfront with you; this is one of the bad ones in that it’s REALLY boringly made and has a message that… well you’ll see soon enough.  Oh well!  I’m sure we’ll get to something more interesting next time like aliens, or time travel or whatever, so let’s just burn through this one and try to make a few jokes along the way!  Let’s get started!!

Scott (Rob Estes) is a hot shot sports agent who’s having a rather tough start to his day as he got a flat on his tire and is about to lose one of his biggest  players if he doesn’t stop him from singing with someone else.  While waiting for a tow truck to get there, he wanders off into the nearby woods to pee on a tree (as you do), and ends up getting lost; finding not his car but a beautiful home in the middle of nowhere.  Inside he finds a woman named Marisa (Elizabeth Berkley, yes THAT Elizabeth Berkley) who similarly has to be somewhere soon but wandered into the forest for whatever reason (perhaps the SAME reason) and ended up here.  This place by the way has bad reception even by 2002 standards and their watches have stopped working as well.  The house has no light switches, no electricity, no clocks, and no cars.  Now to ME this sounds like an unbearable hell to live in whether or not there’s a good view and pretty throw pillows, but I don’t want to get TOO ahead of myself here, and it also turns out that Marisa is familiar with the area and KNOWS that no idyllic looking mountain ranges or sparkling clear ponds are anywhere close to where the two of them got lost, so they’re kinda stuck as far as finding their way back; wherever “back” even is at this point.

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“DARN YOU NATURE!!  WHY MUST YOU BE SO IDYLLICALLY SAMEY!?”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Mr. Motivation)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Deran Sarafian

We’re back with another episode of The Twilight Zone Saga: New Millennium, and boy do we have something new for you all today!  This episode is unlike any other we’ve seen so far as it is a… wait for it… COMEDY!!  That’s right!  Not an unintended comedy like that one about the guitar or watching Katherine Heigl try to kill baby Hitler!  This one wants you to chuckle right along with it instead of directly at it!  Does this series know how to loosen up and have a genuine sense of wit about itself?  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins with what might be the most attended office birthday party that wasn’t catered as everyone and their mother apparently left their stations to go to a cubicle and sing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.  Wait, what?  Is the birthday song copyrighted or something?  Hold on.

…

HOLY CRAP, IT IS!!  Apparently that song has had some sort of copyright on it since 1935 with Warner/Chappell music acquiring a company that claimed to have owned it back in 1985 and have been collecting royalties on it since!  That is until 2016 when a court ordered that their copyright was not valid for reasons that I’ve only skimmed now and will surely take up an afternoon of your time if you wish to look into it, and Warner/Chappell is required to refund the royalties they’ve collected for it.  Darn you, Warner Bros television!  If you had stuck to your guns and used the CORRECT song, you would be getting your seven hundred bucks back anyway!  Who looks like a fool now, Warner Bros Television?  Who looks like a fool now?

…

Did I really take this recap completely off the rails because of the Birthday Song?  Let’s see if we can somehow get back on track.  So anyway, the cubicle in question belongs to Charlie (Wallace Langham) who is one of many office drones in this building that does… stuff, and is having a rather joyous little celebration at his desk complete with trick candle on his cupcake, but all that comes to a SCREECHING halt as soon as The Boss (Christopher McDonald) comes through and tells everyone to get back to work; something they do with great gusto and more than recommend amount of abject terror.  The Boss by the way looks like a cross between Thomas Haden Church, Clancy Brown and Biff from Back to the Future, so it’s no wonder everyone is terrified of him!  Oh but he can’t be ALL bad, right?  After all, he got Charlie a gift for his birthday which is some sort of dime store talking statute called Mr. Motivation who spouts useless buzzwords and aphorisms whenever you bop it on its little bobble head.  Just the pick me up Charlie is gonna need of since The Boss follows up this magnanimous gesture with a neigh impossible task and his job security as the sword of Damocles hanging over his head.  He needs to pull up basically all documentation over the last several months (hard copies no less), and search for any that contain the name of a specific product their developing.  If he can find whatever vaguely sinister thing The Boss is looking for, he gets a promotion.  If not, well… at least the economy in 2002 is better than it is now but it would STILL be a pain in the butt.

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“I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do, sir!  I’m gonna invest in HOUSING!  There is nothing more stable in this, the greatest country on Earth, so you can take your job and shove it!”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Hunted)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Patrick Norris

We’re back with another episode of 3rd Twilight from the Zone, and boy do we have a fun one today!  Where previous episodes were about boring things like death personified, video game DLC, and killing baby Hitler, this time we get to hunt ourselves a MONSTER IN THE WOODS!  The original series had its fair share of fantasy creatures to terrorize the likes of William Shatner, so why not this series as well!?  Can they possibly match the level of quality that Rod Serling delivered with his fantastic creatures, or is hiring a guy in a rubber suit completely outside this series’ budget?  Let’s find out!!

Ahem.  IN THE YEAR NEW-THOUSAND, we see a couple of joggers running in a forest with the utmost of horrifying expressions (that cable TV will allow) etched across their faces as they try to escape from some unseen threat; one that likes to use that Evil Dead vision thing to maximize its victims horror before turning their skulls into another trophy for its collection.  Now given that this is far into the future where we somehow learned to be more civilized towards each other (snark), the Nu-National Guard are being called into the woods to find whatever this creature is and fill it with more hot lead than Murphy at the beginning of RoboCop!  Our main Terrestrial Marine is Jeffrey Freed (Scott Bairstow) which is actually quite lucky for him as he’s got a wife and a newborn child, which means if he WASN’T our protagonist then he’d be first on the chopping block when the squad gets to the forest.  His wife Kelly (Michelle Harrison) doesn’t see it that way however (I guess she hasn’t seen enough movies), and makes sure to give us quite a bit of exposition while making her trepidation known.  It turns out that Jeff is a doctor in his day job which I bet will come in handy later when they need someone to fill out the death certificates, and the monster in question appears to be some sort of creature known as a Kreetor which was a species that got wiped out over fifty years ago.  Now you’d think that with so few of them around that we would have PROTECTED them and put them on the endangered species list, but I guess even THESE jerks are scarier than Lion and Tigers and Panda Bears, especially if they hunt their prey like a freaking Slasher!  The wife also refers to them as “Genetically Mutated Beasts” which is probably what ignorant people fear that GMOs will morph into, and it seems that Jeff’s grandfather was MURDERED by one of them back before they were all wiped out, so he’s got a bit of skin in the game as well.

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“My grandfather was SLAUGHTED by one of these creatures!  Was he lost in the woods or did he get hurt when the Kreetor was looking for food?”     “No, the monster poisoned his morning coffee!”     Oh.  Um… who told you this story?”     “My grandma.  She also told that to the police.”     “Uh… huh.”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Sensuous Cindy)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by John Kretchmer

We’re back with another episode of The Zone Who Twilighted Me as our journey through the least popular reboot of this series continues to mildly amusing and mostly bewildering!  Of course the last episode was mostly the latter in the sense that it had no idea what it wanted to do, but hey!  That’s what you get when you try to make a show as experimental as this; or at least trying to live up to a much BETTER experimental show.  Does this episode get things back on track to Fun-ville, or are we stuck at Tedious Junction for the foreseeable future?  Let’s find out!!

The episode begins like a mediocre porno with cheesy synth music and piano jams as we fade in on a couple in bed.  What ISN’T like a mediocre porn film (and not in the sense of an IMPROVEMENT) is that the couple in question do NOT have sex; rather the guy wants a bit of morning fun but is rebuffed by his fiancé who reminds him that they agreed not to have sex until the wedding which is SIX MONTHS AWAY!  Okay, so… I have thoughts.  Probably not great thoughts, but thoughts nonetheless.  Is it any of my business what they want to do (or not do) in the bedroom?  No.  What DOES seem a bit concerning here is just how out of sync the two are in regards to this as the guy Ben (Greg Germann) seems to only be doing it because his fiancé Samantha (Tiffany Lyndall-Knight) is making him, and while I get the frustration of him making moves on her in the morning after making this arrangement, she leaps straight to questioning his commitment to marriage because of it.  I mean it’s STILL not really my business, but I think this is a plan that IS working, just not in the way she anticipated.  If this kind of arrangement is her barrier for commitment then more power to her, but it seems clear even in the first three minutes of knowing these two that he’s not gonna clear it by a country mile and that even if he’s putting up a brave face now it’ll only last for so long before he finds a… creative solution to what he perceives to be a problem.  Case in point, Ben goes to work with balls bluer than Dr. Manhattan and since he’s a photo editor working at what I assume is a modeling magazine, he ends up running into a bunch of beautiful women just standing around the lobby which causes his tongue to hang out like a thirsty dog.  Are we sure she doesn’t just want to break up with him and is looking for the most roundabout way to do it?

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“Hi, I’m here for the interview-”     “I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND!!”     “That’s… nice.  So about the interview-”     “BE GONE, TEMPTRESS!!”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (To Protect and Serve)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Joe Chappelle

We’re back with another episode of The Twilight Groan, and boy do we have a rough one here today!  So last time around we got a GOOD example of the show taking a chance on darker subject matter and I definitely appreciate the show’s attempt to put a bit of edge back into the series.  Today’s episode however is NOT a good example of them using dark subject matter, at least in my opinion, and it’s not even in a particularly compelling way as so much of it is just a total downer.  But we’re not here to feel sorry for ourselves and lament the difficulty of recapping something so unabashedly sad, now are we!?  We are here to show appreciation for a series that passed a lot of people over and make a few cheap jokes along the way, so let’s get started!!

The episode begins on a rather dark note for such a lightweight series, but whatever tension is built here is somewhat undercut by just how cheesy it all is.  Okay, watching a dude emotionally berate and physically threaten a woman isn’t a breeze to sit through, but the dude doing the threatening is the most clichéd pimp imaginable with a leather duster, a crushed velvet shirt, and a spring loaded knife to intimidate his top earner with.  The guy playing him (Dione Johnstone) is doing a darn fine job and looks almost EXACTLY like Denzel Washington which is fun in its own right, but there’s a bit of a disparity here in terms of tone.  Luckily this tension is cut, not with a knife, but with HOT LEAD as super cop Eric Boggs (Usher; yes THAT Usher) comes onto the scene and shoots A Pimp Named Throwback right in the heart; proving that his proclamations of being The Power, The Glory, The Darkness, The Hyperbolic, were perhaps somewhat overstated.  OR WERE THEY!?  In the aftermath, while the EMTs are carting the body away, Office Boggs gets a call from The Pimp mocking him for not finishing the job and promising a swift return from the land of the dead!  TWILIGHT SHOCK!!

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“SEVEN DAYS, SUCKA!!”     “Until what, you blow hot air while I fill you full of buckshot?”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Chosen)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ 1 Comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Winrich Kolbe

We’re back with another episode of The Milquetoast Zone!  Now as much as I enjoy this series for all its goofy early 2000s charm, the big problem with this iteration, and perhaps why it doesn’t stick in the public consciousness, is that it feels rather sanitized with most episodes lacking a lot of bite.  Unintentionally stumbling into problematic territory?  Absurd premises with just as absurd resolutions?  Sure, but aside from Azoth and perhaps One Night at Mercy, none of the episodes I’ve covered so far have had a strong point to make or Rod Serling’s righteous fury behind it.  That’s about to change however as for the first time in this series we are getting something genuinely dark with an ending that does justice to the original series’ sense of cosmic justice!  I’m certainly excited to see it again, so let’s not waste anymore time and dive right in!

Our hero this time around is Vince played by Jake Busey (yes, son of Gary and he does indeed looks distressingly like his father) is… THAT GUY.  We all know a THAT GUY.  Dude who’s in his late twenties or early thirties who never really grew up, always has a chip on his shoulder, and whose plight MIGHT be sympathetic if he wasn’t such a raging a-hole about everything.  Nowadays we see this kind of guy on Reddit and Incel forums, but back before THE INTERNET was what it is today, they just hung around the neighborhood and you always avoided eye contact when they came by.  While raging on the phone about his credit card being cut off, Vince gets a visit from two people wearing dorky leather jackets (Kim Hawthorne and Andrew Moxham) and telling him that he’s been chosen for some very vague form of salvation and that there’s still good within him that makes him worthy of a second chance at life.  Now we know that in The Twilight Zone there’s more to it than just some hucksters selling happiness in exchange for bank account numbers, but Vince is sadly lacking that knowledge and naturally tells them to get off his yard.  They agree to leave but offer him a free gift, and since Vince is not one to pass up such a sweet bargain, he takes it and rushes back inside.  The gift turns out to be a DVD with his name printed on it which he decides to put in on a lark and some dude with a bad haircut (Ken Tremblett) and even worse production values reminds Vince of how much his life sucks and how his girlfriend left him, but that there’s hope if he just opens himself up to it.

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“Be your better you, with the power of Shrim!”     “Huh.  Kinda sounds like Shrimp.”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Upgrade)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Joe Chappelle

We’re back with another episode of Whitaker Explains it All, though at least in this case he doesn’t do it all that well.  I’ll be honest with you right up front.  This isn’t a particularly good episode and is probably the kind of safe, carbon copy, mindless filler that you were probably expecting when you first heard they remade The Twilight Zone during the Bush administration.  BUT, at least we can try to get a few cheap laughs out of it!  Let’s get started!!

The episode begins with Annie (Susanna Thompson) and her family moving into their dream home which will hopefully be a fresh start for all of them.  Then again, her two kids are teenager who fight constantly so it’s unlikely that a change of scenery is gonna do much about that, and their dog Czonka pees on the floor almost immediately so I guess that New House Smell is already out the window.  Sigh… you know, it’s frustrating when everyone around you is complaining or not being careful with their living spaces… it’s almost as if it’d be nice if they were to… change?  Uh oh!  Well SOMETHING certainly heard that little wish, and not an hour after they move into their new house her dog has been replaced with an entirely different breed that’s much less prone to pee unless it’s in the backyard.  You just HAD to have very reasonable complaints, didn’t you? Just HAD to say that you didn’t like pee stains everywhere!  LOOK AT WHAT TERROR YOU HAVE WROUGHT!!

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“This is not my beautiful house!  This is not my beautiful dog!  How did I get here!?”     “Oh!  I know the answer!  It starts with a T and ends in Zone!”

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Super Recaps: The Twilight Zone (Azoth the Avenger Is a Friend of Mine)

~ Matt Vetrano ~ Leave a comment

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The Twilight Zone and all the images you see in this recap are owned by Warner Bros Television and based on the series created by Rod Serling

Episode directed by Brad Turner

We’re back with another episode of the Old New Twilight Zone!  Yes, before Jordan Peele reimagined the series for the modern age, THIS was the most up to date version; and yet it still manages to feel much more dated than the one from the fifties.  Go figure.  Anyway!  We’ve got an odd one today which is certainly saying something considering the last few episodes has been glories bits of sci-fi cheese, but you’ll see what I’m talking about soon enough!  Let’s get started!!

The episode begins with a setup we’ve seen in many movies that Dan Olson has a strong fascination with; namely a young kid dealing with a bad situation through childlike whimsy and a severely uneven tone.  More specifically, Craig (Rory Culkin) is a young boy who has a comically abusive father (Peter LaCroix) and in order to escape and deal with his trauma, he reads Conan knock offs and paints figurines.  Said Conan knock off is the titular Azoth who would be a MUCH better dad than the one Craig is stuck with, but it’s not like he’s gonna leap off of the pages and be his best friend, right!?  What do you think, Forest Whitaker?

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“Get a job, nerd!”

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