The good news is, one of the finest short fantasy films ever made is finally available on DVD this week. The bad news is, it's part of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
First the good: Joe Dante's magnificent It's A Good Life relates an encounter between disaffected teacher Helen and a boy named Anthony. He invites her into his house, where she eets his suspiciously high-strung family.
But all is not as it seems. Anthony is no normal kid; he has the ability to create or destroy whole worlds at will. His "family" is made up of random strangers he has met, people he holds hostage in an attempt to create a family unit he's never known. These stangers are terrified of Anthony and the capricious, candy-colored world he has created for them. But maybe Helen can understand him...
It's A Good Life (never identified by this title in the film itself) is like the polar opposite of Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, films in which a child's imagination is the only thing to save them from terrible reality. Here, Anthony's fantasy world is the cruel reality, a child's id run amock. Yet Dante doesn't judge him too harshly; any kid who loves Chuck Jones and Max and Dave Fleischer can't be all bad!
The film is note-perfect in every way, from the performances (Kathleen Quinlan as Helen and Jeremy Licht as Anthony are controlled, the actors playing the extended family go over the top, particularly the wonderful Kevin McCarthy), to the cartoon-styled production design and John Hora's eye-popping camerawork. Throw in Rob Bottin's amazing make-up designs (so much more impressive than CGI), and...a minor masterpiece.
Unfortunately, the crap surrounding it diminishes its impact. Twilight Zone: The Movie is most notorious for the on-set helicopter accident that killed Vic Morrow and two child actors, but it 's most lasting legacy is as a symbol of the stasis that infected Hollywood moviemaking in the 80s. Conceived by then-superstar directors John Landis and Steven Spielberg, top talent signed on, but when the time came to actually deliver the goods, nobody bothered.
Landis' segment, the only one not adapted from an episode of the Twilight Zone TV show, has only one point to make: racism is bad. Thanks, I didn't know that. George Miller's redo of the fondly remembered Nightmare At 20,000 Feet is utterly pointless, and way too full of the frantic camera movement and whiplash editing we're all sick and tired of.
The worst thing here is Spielberg's Kick The Can, the first evidence that Spielberg's natural talent had curdled, displaying the underline-every-point subtlety and maudlin overkill that creeped into The Color Purple and Empire Of The Sun, and would reach critical mass with Always and Hook.
(By the way, allow me to vent for a bit here: Hook. Is this the worst movie ever from a major filmmaker? Sure, Brian DePalma made Mission To Mars, Sam Peckinpah made Convoy, Peter Bogdanovich made...well, too many to mention. But Hook deserves a special place in Movie Hell. Terrible acting--Robin Williams in full-out ManChild mode, and Dustin Hoffman indulging in some of the most irritating mannerisms you'll ever see--and a surpassingly ugly physical production, but the worst thing is its underlying attitude; it's the work of extremely wealthy people telling us common folks to relax and not work so hard.)
Twilight Zone: The Movie has the feel of far too many movies you see these days, churned out by people who are paid well but simply don't care, executed with a level of professionalism but utterly devoid of soul or purpose. Happily, on DVD you can bypass all that and skip to the good stuff.
