The Outer Limits (1963)

The Zanti Misfits, directed by Leonard Horn.

First Contact is not what anyone hoped for: planet Zanti is sending its criminals to Earth and we have to manage them. No discussion and we have no choice but to cooperate.

The Zanti haven't been completely honest: what seems like a disaster and quick siege and die bug die! frenzy was just what they intended all along. We killer apes ("practiced executioners") are useful to them and we are left wondering: will there be more? Count on it.

This is a well-known episode and even those not regular fans of the series are aware of it. This is the only use of stop-motion animation in the series. It's expensive and we have just a few seconds worth, but that is effective. Quick glimpses are scary.

And that killer-hornet sound the Zanti make: every good horror story needs an evil sound.

We do cross over from SF creature feature to actual horror: we see the Zanti crawling up Bruce Dern's arm, then cut to the HQ and pan across the faces as they listen to his terrified screams as he pleads, "Get it off me!"

As a kid I did not notice the Zanti had faces so much as their large human-like eyes, which I thought was stupid. I would reconsider now: other invertebrates like the octopus have singular eyes so insect-like aliens might also. On Blu-ray the details of their faces and fringe beards are a little goofy, but at the same time unsettling.

Our cast:

• Michael Tolan -- The Enforcer (1951) -- is a journalist and historian sent to record the great event. Oddly enough, he is more aggressive than the General.
• Robert F. Simon is the General. A familiar face, although I had to look up his name. As the commander he is more of a peacekeeper than we expect, aware of how little mistakes might start an interplanetary war.
• Bruce Dern, early in his career, is one of the human misfits who collide with the alien misfits, a nice bit of symmetry. Dern was one of the great villains of the 1960s: everything about him was just wrong.
• I did not recall Olive Deering -- Samson and Delilah (1949), Caged (1950), The Ten Commandments (1956) -- as an actress, but she adds quite a bit as Bruce Dern's fellow misfit and partner in crime. She was 18 years older than Dern and is playing a woman breaking loose from her normie life and reaching for one last outlaw fling. Her breakdown monologue stops the plot cold, but moments of serious acting were required in TV drama. Her brother was familiar 1960s face Alfred Ryder, who appeared in The Borderland episode.

Notes:

• Even at that date the story has the government -- X-Files-like -- in a conspiracy to cover up the truth of UFOs and alien contact.
• The makeshift HQ -- is it an old bordello? -- shows the 1960s fascination with console lights and switches, like the bomber panels in Dr. Strangelove (1964). Message: we've got technology, we can handle whatever is coming.
• A clever reveal: we have no idea the spaceship is so small until Dern climbs up to it.
• More symmetry: the Zantis also scream when killed.
• The production makes great use of the famous Vasquez Rocks, which I will always remember as the site of Capt Kirk's battle with the Gorn in Star Trek Arena:
  
  
  
  I thought the first use of the site in film was as "Tibet" in Werewolf of London (1935), but a commentary track says it was background for Dracula (1931). I'll have to look for that.
• Director Leonard Horn returns after The Man Who Was Never Born (1963). He was a prolific TV director; this is his second of three for the series.
• Photographed by John M. Nickolaus. Written and produced by Joseph Stefano. They say a lot of the first season was just his dreams and phobias, in this case fear of insects.

The Blu-ray has two commentary tracks: dry and somewhat sparse thoughts by Tim Lucas and another where Gary Gerani and Steve Mitchell relive their boyhood viewings with joy.

Controlled Experiment, written and directed by Leslie Stevens (uncredited).

Two martians investigate "murder", a phenomenon that occurs only on planet Earth. They have a time control device and are not afraid to use it.

As the only comedy episode of the series, it has problems. Comedy is hard; maybe it should be left to the specialists. And the story is excessively, terribly, terrifically padded. With the time control they rerun a jealous women shooting her philandering boyfriend many times: forwards, backwards, slow motion and speeded up, with variations. It is a cute concept but could have been covered in a 25 minute skit rather than a 51 minute program.

And yet: I like this one more than I should. Carroll O'Connor and Barry Morse are a hoot as the hyper-intelligent martians at first befuddled by the primitive human race, then amused and finally charmed by their coffee and cigarettes and love rituals.

A running gag whenever they see the couple kissing-- Phobos: "Ah, every chance they get". Deimos: "Yes, it's harmless".

It is worth noting the emergency message they get from martian HQ after preventing the murder in one of their experiments:



They are directed to put things back the way they were, but our martians have gone native.

Our featured lovers are Grace Lee Whitney who would shortly be Yeoman Janice Rand in Star Trek, and Robert Fortier who was in Star Trek By Any Other Name as the alien who Scotty drinks under the table. Scotty: "What is it? Well, it's... it's green".

It is said this was meant to be a pilot episode for a new series. I hope they intended to keep the dingy little pawn shop as the martian observation outpost.

Photographed by John M. Nickolaus with striking imagery. I don't often like a film more because of the Blu-ray presentation, but it happened here.

The Blu-ray commentary is another by Reba Wissner emphasizing the music. As always she points out where Dominic Frontiere borrows cues from his work on the Stoney Burke series, another Leslie Stevens project.

ZZZZZ, directed by John Brahm.

How do you pronounce that?

A queen bee somehow transforms into a mysterious, sexually alluring young woman. Object: cross-species breeding to advance her race.

The professor has been developing advanced bees so maybe this is his fault. He has developed a language translator that understands their buzzing and has a microphone to speak back to them. Note the symmetry: he has inserted an artificial bee microphone into the hive, and the hive has sent out an artificial human probe into his world.

His wife doesn't like the strange "Regina" at all. Without accusing her husband of infidelity, she recognizes the young woman as a threat to the household, without knowing exactly why.

It's a goofy premise that works surprisingly well, maybe because we like looking at the exotically beautiful Joanna Frank. With those over-made eyes and fall of hair across her face, she looks like a character from later Japanese anime.

I don't recall seeing the actress before; she's Steven Bochco's big sister. At the time she had a poor self-image and -- quite unnecessarily -- stuffed nylon stockings into her bra for padding. You can see how over-developed she looks in some of the thumbnails. When shooting one scene when she was lying on a table, Conrad Hall found her chest was blocking his view of her face. "Can you do anything about your... tits"? So she pulled out some of the stockings.

Marsha Hunt -- Pride and Prejudice (1940) -- is the wife, a beauty of the Golden Age.

Written by Meyer Dolinsky and directed by the under-appreciated John Brahm, who like so many directors had moved into television by this time. Some of his feature films:

• The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
• Hangover Square (1945)
• The Locket (1946)
• The Lodger (1944)
• The Mad Magician (1954)
• The Undying Monster (1942)

Conrad Hall uses the same strange lens filtering as for The Man Who Was Never Born.

The Blu-ray commentary track is by Tim Lucas, who gives many intriguing reflections:

• This is an Eden setup --garden included-- with the prof and his wife as Adam and Eve and Regina as Lilith, who in folklore was a seductress who tempted Adam. (An aside: I recall a quip from years ago. The reason men and women are uneasy with each other is that men still yearn for Lilith while women miss the Serpent).
• He proposes thinking of the story as a fable, where Regina is the prof's muse. Unable to have children, he pours his creative energies into his work. His subject: the notoriously fecund bees.
• Some dark waters: the couple had a baby girl who died. She would be about Regina's age. Perhaps the prof sees her as the daughter who might have been, but she wants him as a mate. Temporarily: the drones die after mating.
• In a nighttime scene Regina is observed in the garden, embracing the flowers and erotically licking from a water lily. Lucas said this would have been perfect if she were naked.
• He says the lens Conrad Hall used was a "Sparkle Plenty", which I can't find on the net, apart from a character in the Dick Tracy comics.
• He dwells on the unexpected horror moment of the final scene, when Regina appears in a wedding dress, having no idea of the evil she has done. It is shocking: from a distance she looks like zombie bride.

The Bellero Shield, directed by John Brahm.

Experimenting with laser weapons, a scientist pulls a being from some other-dimension realm of light into his house. His wife, Lady Macbeth-like, is eager to exploit any opportunity to advance her husband's fame. Murder and madness follow.

She calls the laser beam shooting into the sky their Bifrost, a mythological usage even more familiar now from the Marvel Thor films. Electronic humming permeates the story, the sound of contact with another dimension.

This could easily be a play: five characters, limited set, a plot driven by the characters' motivations.

The result is modestly creepy-ass. The alien itself is inoffensive, and like the visitor in The Galaxy Being sacrifices itself for the humans, who are dark and sinister. It had been warned: "This is a world ruled by Fear". And he takes precautions: the Shield.

Have done murder the lady of the house is forgiven, but will remain imprisoned in her mind until she forgives herself.

John Hoyt (Don't Open Till Doomsday) returns, unrecognizable in face, figure and voice:



Others returning:

• Martin Landau -- The Man Who Was Never Born
• Sally Kellerman -- The Human Factor
• Neil Hamilton -- The Invisibles
• Director John Brahm -- ZZZZZ

Chita Rivera looks so familiar but I don't know where else I've seen her. She is kind of witchy here: barefoot, armed, and utterly devoted to her mistress. With that long necklace chain and key I think of here as the "chatelaine".

The wikipedia cites speculation that this episode did much to promote the Little Gray Men image of alien contactee lore and fiction.

Photographed by Conrad Hall, playing with light and shadow, showing a creature of light on this dark planet.

The Blu-ray commentary track is another by Tim Lucas. He gives much biographical information, praises the visual design and tends to Freudian interpretations of the plot.

Specimen: Unknown, directed by Gerd Oswald.

Researchers on a space station discover organisms on the hull, little "space barnacles" like mushrooms, which grow into toxic, fast-reproducing flowers. With the entire crew becoming ill, they ask that their shuttle be destroyed before returning to Earth and contaminating the entire planet.

Ground control gives this serious consideration but decides to bring them back. Damaged and off course, what will happen when the space ship crashes?

I am torn on this one. I remember the episode fondly, but now it seems I saw only the post-crash ending when I was young. That still seems like a fine little short-short SF horror story, with the deadly flowers multiplying every time we turn around. Like a zombie apocalypse or The Birds (1963), where numbers themselves become terrifying. Or like the plants of Day of the Triffids (1962), except these don't need to walk because they spread so insanely quickly.

Invasive species, indeed! At that rate the Earth is gone in hours.

On the other hand the nuts-and-bolts rocket ship adventure is not really Outer Limits material, but more like something from the single season Men into Space series. In fact, footage from that series is used in this episode and others.

Now, I was nuts for that stuff as a kid. Show me a space helmet or the old Wheel in Space design and I was happy. Combine that with the alien infestation final act and it was a good episode at the time, but now seems considerably more padded and clunky. Lots of talk and agonizing over what to do.

The cast:

• Stephen McNally: Winchester '73 (1950), Violent Saturday (1955).
• Richard Jaeckel: 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Dirty Dozen (1967), Sometimes a Great Notion (1970).
• Gail Kobe: dozens of TV shows.
• Russell Johnson: It Came From Outer Space (1953), This Island Earth (1955), The Space Children (1958), Gilligan's Island.
• John Kellogg: Twelve O'Clock High (1949).
• Dabney Coleman: uncredited, because his part was shot months later to fill out the too short running time.

The story reuses older SF tropes and anticipates later ones:

• The human-seeking flowers that fire spores and gas were used in Star Trek This Side of Paradise.
• Our spacemen use sunlamps for tanning as in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
• The blood-spilling plants cry out just as the blood-drinking embryonic plants do in The Thing from Another World (1951).
• Just as in The War of the Worlds (1953) the invaders are defeated by a common Earthly phenomenon.
• Life (2017) is a mashup of this, Alien (1979) and Gravity (2013).

Photographed by Conrad Hall. His odd experiments in lens filtering are absent this time and we get sharp images of Gail Kobe.

The Blu-ray commentary track has Craig Beam ridiculing the episode. He finds only the space funeral scene has the expected Outer Limits SF gothic horror, with the rest being terribly weak. His comical disdain becomes tedious.

Moonstone, directed Robert Florey.

Moonbase personnel dig up a mysterious orb. No idea what it is or how long it has been there. Turns out to contain five aliens fleeing the tyrants of their home world. They are carrying "all knowledge of the universe" and don't want to hand it over to the tyrants, but will give the humans a copy.

Our folks want to help but the aliens' rescue ship is not coming and the tyrants are.

It's not a bad concept but is pretty much straight SF, becoming more typical for the series as it approaches the second season. It lacks the Outer Limits horror tone that we love.

And as is too often the case we waste time in soap opera subplots. The drama of relationships is legitimate but omits the sense of wonder we want in this series. Actors seem to like the duller bits and it must be easy for writers to fall back into it.

Our big star this time is Ruth Roman: Strangers on a Train (1951), The Window (1949), Three Secrets (1950).

Notes:

• Another plot where the noble aliens sacrifice themselves for the greater good.
• They transfer "all knowledge of the universe" by reciting it into tape recorders.
• Our explorers initially think the mystery orb must be a Russian mystery orb.
• They walk in slow motion on the lunar surface but normally inside the lab.
• The men wear boots but the female scientist has heels and huge eyelashes.
• Director Robert Florey's final project.

Photographed by John M. Nickolaus.

The Blu-ray has no commentary track.

The Guests, directed by Paul Stanley.

The convertible driving hipster -- "Drifter", they call him -- turns out to be ok because he stops to help a very old man -- Burt Mustin -- who has collapsed on the road. We have seen the man desperately escaping from an old mansion which sometimes looks like a giant brain on the hillside.

When Drifter goes to the house for help the story becomes something like experimental theater. Four eccentric residents in antique clothes who can't leave, or don't want to. Upstairs is a blob monster scientist -- recycled from The Mice -- researching human beings, trying to balance an equation.

What is that human emotion that cannot be calculated, the one that orders all the others and harmonizes two people? What's that called again?

Doorways and windows come and go and the house has strange geometry. The eerie implication is that the mansion is inside the blob's brain and the residents are now just dream people who cannot exist outside -- for very long.

And how much of the story is inside Drifter's mind? We have much confusion of inside and outside.

Our star this time is Gloria Grahame, playing a silent film star from decades past.

Luana Anders is our love interest and wears 19th century clothes. I remember her from Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and she had a prominent role in Dementia 13 (1963).

Returning: director Paul Stanley from Second Chance.

Ominous pounding score, like a headache or being stalked by a large invisible being.

Photographed by Kenneth Peach.

On the Blu-ray Craig Beam and David J Schow provide a chatty commentary track about the production and cast and crew.

We have no Control Voice opening or closing narration; they suggest this is because the blob scientist explains everything.

The Special One, directed by Gerd Oswald.

A secret alien visitor claiming to be from a government office is tutoring a young boy because he is a "favorable mutation", mom and dad having worked in an atomic lab. The boy develops strange knowledge and stranger powers. The parents find this unnerving and eventually intolerable.

A slow moving SF thriller, this doesn't have much going for it. A cheap alien technology effect is actually pretty good: it looks like an overlay of swirling soap flakes, very 3D.

Macdonald Carey is a famous face, last seen in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Marion Ross would become well known as Mrs Cunningham in Happy Days. Edward Platt returns from The Man with the Power. Also with familiar hard case Bert Freed.

Photographed by Kenneth Peach.

The Blu-ray commentary track is by Gary Gerani and Michael Hyatt. They point out that this is the only episode to bring the uncanny into the viewer's living room, a normal domestic setting when Dad wore a suit and tie at home.

They also say that Hyatt has been working on a restoration of Day of the Triffids (1962) which is at the top of my want list. I've been hearing about restorations for literally decades and no longer believe it will happen. Hoping I'm wrong.