cinema history class: three slices of harlan ellison's delirium

Session: Bring Your Own Movie Month, Week 3 (Joe)
Movie: Three Slices of Harlan Ellison's Delirium

• Demon with a Glass Hand (1964)
• Shatterday (1985)
• Djinn, No Chaser (1985)

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

As described before, Joe prefers not to simply show us a movie when Bring Your own movie month comes around. Instead, he likes to turn it into a poduction -- a theme show, generally with two or three related items. This time he chose to show us three television epiosdes, all based on Harlan Ellison's work. Joe was very clear in saying that this wasn't intended to be a "best of Ellison" type of deal, but rather, an attempt to show the variety in Ellison's work.

Demon with a Glass Hand
We started off with this 1964 episode of The Outer Limits in which a mysterious man battles time traveling space aliens in order to save humanity (which, by the way, has gone missing). He has the help of a glass hand which seems to be a very powerful supercomputer. This was a bit of tense moody sci-fi, with some incredible black and white visuals. It had some great suspense, and a great payoff.

Shatterday

Next up was the first episode of the 1985 Twilight Zone reboot. This was kind of a psychological study starring Bruce Willis as a man split in two. This reminded me quite a bit of the Star Trek episode, "The Enemy Within," although that episode made the point that we all need both our good and bad halves. Here, the conclusion is that  half a person can live quite easily without the other half. There's an interesting aspect to this that I hadn't noticed until the guys addressed it afterwards. In some ways, this seemed more like a body-snatcher type of scenario than a person-split-in-two story. And there's something eerilly cool aspect to the snatcher's demeanor. This was a decent story -- not as good as the first one, but not bad.

Djinn, No Chaser

The final installment was a 1985 episode of Tales from the Darkside, in which a young couple find themselves in possession of a lamp with a cranky genie. It did a good job of reminding me why I never liked Tales. The acting was cheesy, the dialogue was stilted. The setup (i.e., how the couple got the lamp) was handled clumsily. The male half of the married couple, with his manic delivery, made we just want to punch his face. And the whole things was basically a set-up for a bad humorous gag at the end. But the worst part was the casting of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the genie. He didn't have the charisma to pull off the role, and his voice didn't sound (for lack of a better word) genie-like. 

Reaction
This was actually an interesting program, serving to showcase three very disparate ideas that Ellison had. None of them was Ellison's best -- Joe asserted that that would be Star Trek's "City on the Edge of F0rever," though I don't know enough of Ellison's worth to opine.

Ratings:

Me: NR
Dave: 9.5 (for the presentation as a whole)
Ethan: NR
Keith: 9.5 (for the presentation as a whole)
Sean: NR