RAY BRADBURY THEATRE
PRESENTS: THE UNKNOWN
Inconsistent, as half expected
What this is, is the first three episodes of the "Ray Bradbury Theatre" TV series produced by HBO - as you might imagine, three unrelated, half-hour tales based on his work. A trip to the IMDb made my heart skip a beat when I saw that my future bride, Drew Barrymore, was in one episode, but I was disappointed to see that not only was that episode not on this tape, but she'd have been all of eleven years old at the time, and not quite the superfox she is today. Ah, well. Gotta review the tape I've got, not the tape I want.
Anthology films are rarely consistent - like short story collections and CD samplers, they usually come from a variety of sources and are united only by being aimed at the same audience. Here, it's all Bradbury all the time, so one would expect more consistency. Yeah, you'd think that.
The first tale is called "The Crowd", featuring Nick Mancuso as a guy who gets into a car wreck and is displeased to note that the crowd that gathers around the site of his accident seems to want to subtly hasten his demise. He survives, but with video camera in hand, he finds the very same crowd gathering around accidents all over town! This one's pretty good all around, and didn't have the ending I'd expected, which is rare for one of these half-hour made-for- cable TV series.
The second is "Marionettes, Inc.", which stars James Coco as an unhappy computer salesman who buys a duplicate of himself to do the drudgery (go to work, deal with his wife, etc.) while he goes out and lives it up. It's all pretty routine and predictable, only notable for a peek at just what "state of the art" was for computers circa 1985. And Leslie Nielsen as an Italian named Fantocelli? Gimme a fuckin' break!
The third is called "The Playground", with William Shatner as a man with a phobia of playgrounds. His wife keeps demanding that he take their son to the local playground (why she doesn't consider doing this herself, I don't know) before the little guy turns into a big dysfunctional freak like the one she married. It's actually a lot better than it sounds, but the ending lets it down - both in the fascinating things that the story doesn't do with the final twist, and in William Shatner's previously restrained William Shatnering.
Overall, marginally recommended, and I do wonder if more are available - and if so, how widely. My video store here only had the one (I call it "my" store as if I had some hold on the damn place). But Jesus, Leslie Nielsen with an Italian accent?