Why Can't They Ever Do Outer Limits?
What is one to do on a day where nothing's open, and nothing's heppening? Watch cable, of course. The "SyFy Channel" is putting on a "marathon" of a huge, steaming, stinking pile of videographic shit: Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. Unlike fine wine or compost, this never improves with age. I could stand three of these horrid, IQ point draining episodes.
Each one begins with that asshole, Serling, telling us what each episode is all about. Does he "think" we the audience are too fucking stupid to figure out his "brilliant" plot lines? Could he be that narcissistic and arrogant? At least He Man and the Masters of the Universe saved the goddamn sermons until after the story was brought to a conclusion. Or did it occur to Serling that these episodes were so fucking bad that each one needed Serling's help to even begin to make sense?
The Hunt
This one's about this old guy, Hyder Simpson, living in some shithole with his equally elderly wife: Rachael. A point of friction between the two is that she doesn't want Hyder's dog, Rip, inside this one-room shack. (Who knows why, the presence of one dog isn't gonna make it any more of a shithole.)
Hyder ignores Rachael's concerns over "omens", decides to go "coon" huntin' in the middle of the night (how he accomplishes this without night vision goggles is anyone's guess). You can see what's coming next from a dozen parsecs away.
Rip finds a raccoon and chases after it, the dog and raccoon fight it out in a river, and Hyder dives in to save his dog. The raccoon gets away, and Rip and Hyder both drown, but don't know it.
Raccoon: 1
Hunter: 0
YEAY!
Then some shit happens and we learn that Hyder isn't particularly swift on the uptake here. Finally, he comes to a picket fence he's sure he's never seen before and follows it until he comes to a security kiosk where a guard mans a gate. The security guard insists that Hyder can't bring Rip with him. Hyder informs the guard ijn no uncertain terms that if he can't bring his dog in, he's not going either. The guard then promises he'll sneak the dog in on the sly, but Hyder won't accept that either. So off they go down an eternal highway that never ends.
They meet another good ol' boy who informs them that that other gate led to Hell, and that Simpson could consider himself damned lucky he had Rip with him because dogs can sense evil that humans can't. So Hyder and Rip go off into Heaven. He in assured that his wife won't be accosted by the devil in disguise at the kiosk. You see, Hyder "wasn't a church goin' man". No, he was another atheist who escaped his eternal reward simply because he and Rip had a simultaneous demise. What about Hitchens and Sagan, do you suppose they got duped by the devil?
Oh, and he's told there will be a raccoon hunt and a square dance that very night in Heaven. Doesn't sound very heavenly for the raccoons now, does it?
One More Pallbearer
This episode is even dumber than the last. At least with The Hunt, you could tell where the title originated, and what it means. As for the title of this bit of idiocy, who the hell knows? It makes no sense, but neither does anything else.
A multi-millionaire, Paul Reardon, has built himself a bomb shelter 300 feet below the foundation of one of his office towers. Here, he intends to prank several people for revenge. There's Col. Hawthorne who once had Reardon court martialed for disobeying orders while he was in the military, another is Ms. Langsford, a high school teacher who once humiliated Reardon in front of the class after catching him cheating on an exam, and then trying to implicate another student who had nothing to do with it, and the Rev. Hughs who brought Reardon scandal by spilling the beans about a woman he drove to suicide.
He sets everything up to make it look like nuclear war is imminent, citing "connections" he has as a rich and powerful figure. Despite that these folks have "wronged" him, Reardon tells them he will graciously share his shelter with them if only they will do one thing: apologize on bended knee. That's it? REEEEEAAAALLLLLY?! What the fuck is the point here? What does any of this accomplish? You'll never know from watching this clusterfuck of an episode.
I was expecting this episode to involve Reardon's putting one over on these three victims, and that he was gonna seal them underground forever by convincing them he had a bomb shelter. Maybe there'd be a plot twist where Reardon got himself locked in there forever for thinking to do this evil, with a lesson that revenge is never a good thing. Silly me, expecting an episode of the Stupidity Zone to actually have an intelligent plot.
All three tell Reardon to go fuck himself, that they'd rather die with their honour intact than accept his offer. We hear the civil defense sirens going off in the background.
Since he failed, we finally see Reardon crying at the foot of a fountain that decorated the entrance to the Reardon Building. He insanely believes the nuke-fest really did happen.
That would be the easiest bluff to call ever. Remember, we're 300 feet underground, behind 18 inches of steel reinforced concrete and lead. No way in hell would the sound of those sirens ever be heard inside that shelter. So Reardon is an imbecile as well as a raging asshole. He fucked that up completely with the sound of the sirens. Dipshit.
The only point to this episode (a theme that occurs regularly) is that every businessman is really an evil PoS whose one and only purpose in life is the fucking over of the "little people" for no reason other than just because he can; just for the sadistic delight. There is not one episode that depicts businessmen any other way.
What else would you expect from a far left whack-a-doodle like Serling: a graduate of Antioch College -- the most extreme left "educational" institution in the US of A. That's all every last one of these episodes is: an occasion for far left propaganda, or the depiction of far left wet dreams about destroying the capitalist pigs. As Michael Moore would do after him, Rod Serling made himself rich by relentlessly attacking the very "ism" which allowed him to become rich in the first place. Hypocrite.
Dead Man's Shoes
Another mind numbingly stupid story, this time about magic shoes. Gangsters whack one of their rivals ir something and dump the body in an alley where a homeless man, Nate Bledsoe, sees everything. Bledsoe decides to take these really fuggly shoes for himself. Next thing he knows, he's taken over by the spirit of the assassinated gangster. Nate picks up the gangster's life, including his girlfriend, and confronts Bernie Dagget, the boss who ordered the hit.
Having learned nothing from his former life, Dagget gets the drop on Nate, and he gets a fatal gunshot wound. How the hell could this happen? Nate's supposed to be well aware of how Bernie conducts business. Before dying once again, Nate informs Bernie that he'll be back. Yeah, that's real smart, clue your nemesis in on how to defeat you once and for all: burn those shoes. Nate's body gets dumped in the same alley, and another homeless man takes the shoes. Gangsters are usually far more careful about where they hide the bodies. They still haven't found Jimmy Hoffa yet, and likely never will. But that wouldn't set up this idiotic tale either.
There was another anthology series going on at the same time: The Outer Limits. Why can't they show that instead? That was one worth seeing. The Stupidity Zone needs to get lost permanently in the Twilight Zone.
Why anything calling itself a "science fiction" channel would put on this bullshit is beyond my pay grade. Most of the Stupidity Zone has NOT THING ONE to do with science fiction, and what little does is decidedly second rate, even by the standards of the times.