This anthology film based on the hugely popular television series and masterminded by Steven Spielberg and John Landis is, like all such things, is something of the proverbial curate’s egg – only good in parts. And today, it tends to be remembered more for a horrific accident that claimed the lives of actor Vic Morrow and two young child actors than for almost anything else.

The film opens with a much loved and oft-quoted vignette directed by Landis in which a pair of pop-culture junkies (played by Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd) sing songs and talk about favourite television theme tunes as they drive through the desert at night. They eventually start to discuss The Twilight Zone and Aykroyd wonders if Brooks would like to see something “really scary…” It’s a terrific opening that gives way to Landis’ benighted Time Out. Ostensibly it’s the only one of the film’s four stories not directly based on an episode from the television series though it bears some similarities to the episodes A Quality of Mercy and Back There. Bill Connors (Morrow) is a loud-mouthed bigot, regaling his embarrassed co-drinkers in a late night bar with his racism and anti-Semitism. On leaving the bar, he finds himself on a strange journey through time and space, always in the shoes of the very people he was denigrating. He ends up being pursued by S.S. officers through the streets of Nazi-occupied France during World War II, being captured by Ku Klux Klansmen in rural Alabama during the 1950s who see him as a black man that the intend to lynch, before winding up in the jungles of Vietnam being attacked by American soldiers. The episode ends with Connor in a railroad freight car being carried off to a concentration camp, unable to make his friends hear him as screams for help.

It’s simply impossible to discuss The Twilight Zone without mentioning the events of the night of 23 July 1982 when a helicopter stunt during a key sequence for Time Out when tragically wrong. Explosive charges were used to represent an all-out battle during which Connors rescues two young Vietnamese children, and one was so larg that it caused the helicopter to crash into Morrow and 7-year-old Myca Dinh Le and 6-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen, both of who had hired in violation of California employment laws. What makes it all the worse is that the scene wasn’t originally in Landis’ script but was hastily arranged when Warner Brothers executives demanded a more redemptive ending for Connor. The crash footage – seen in the moving Twilight Zone: The Movie episode of Shudder’s Cursed Films series – is genuinely horrifying, easily the most disturbing images to emerge from any 1980s Hollywood film set.

It was a disaster that could so easily have been avoided and who was to blame for the horror has been debated repeatedly and at length ever since. Landis was taken to court but acquitted and the finger of blame – often pointed by people not entirely appraised of all the known facts – have been pointed at almost everyone involved in the film and particularly that night’s shoot. In a sense, the real culprit was Hollywood itself, the “New Hollywood” era having become increasingly excessive and out of control and in the wake of the Twilight Zone tragedy, rules were tightened, safety more closely monitored. Though even that hasn’t always been enough and there have still been too many accidental deaths on film sets.

The accident cast a pall over the entire film. For audiences aware of what happened, watching Time Out inevitably comes with psychological baggage that it should never have had to carry. Spielberg ended his friendship with Landis, allegedly over some of his behaviour following the accident. Second assistant director Andy House had his name changed to the Directors’ Guild’s in house pseudonym Allan Smithee. And George Miller, director of the final story, was reportedly so appalled by what had happened that he walked away from the film altogether, leaving the post-production on his segment to others.

It seems almost churlish in the circumstances to care really, but the accident seriously compromises Time Out. Landis has claimed that the ending of the episode, a very striking image, was always there in the script and was how he wanted the story to end all along, but the scenes in Vietnam are brief and obviously curtailed and one wonders if perhaps they should have been cut altogether. Overall, it’s one of the better episodes in the film, but has its flaws – the series had already done to death the story of boorish, racist, bitter and/or angry men getting their just desserts and while the story has much to say about the nature of hatred, bigotry and racism, none of it is particularly subtle or original. And one can’t help but wonder if whatever forced are behind Connor’s torment are trying to teach him a lesson, to make him a better person, why they don’t let him life to learn those lessons. What was the point of it all otherwise?

Second up is Spielberg’s story, a remake of the series episode Kick the Can, in which the elderly Mr Bloom (Scatman Crothers) moves into the Sunnyvale Retirement Home and listens to the other residents reminiscing about their long ago childhoods. He invites them to join him in a game of kick the can during which several of the residents are magically reverted to their youths. But they soon learn that being young again isn’t all it’s cracked up to be…

Kick the Can is Spielberg at his most obnoxiously saccharine. At his best, he was capable of moments of real horror. Duel (1971), Jaws (1975), Jurassic Park (1993), Schindler’s List (1993) – even Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) has its share of terrifying moments. This was made by the other Spielberg – Spielberg the misty-eyed sentimentalist and as a consequence, Kick the Can is corny, shallow and far too whimsical. Even the potential horror of the old people having been abandoned by their families isn’t explored. There seems to be a message here about making the most of who you are and being comfortable in your own skin, but it’s delivered with all the finesse of Spielberg beating you about the head with a baseball bat.

Poor Scatman Crothers – who is as charming as ever – gets lumbered with a role that Spike Lee categorised in 2001 as “the magical negro”, a non-threatening black character, often elderly or somehow disabled, but possessed of mystical supernatural powers that they use for the betterment of the white people around them. He heads a cast of old-timers (in some respects, the episode anticipates Ron Howard’s Spielbergesque Cocoon (1985)) who are sold short and shunted aside when the “magic” kicks in and a group of younger actors get to take centre stage.

Joe Dante takes the reins for the third segment, a remake of the episode It’s a Good Life based on the short story by Jerome Bixby. It isn’t as sickly sweet as Spielberg’s piece but suffers from a surfeit of (deliberately) cartoony effects and a burst of sentimentality towards the end. Helen Foley (Kathleen Quinlan) is driving to a new job and calls in at an out-of-the-way bar looking for directions. Inside, a young boy, Anthony (Jeremy Licht), is playing a computer game and being picked on by brutish barfly who’s trying to watch a boxing match on television. After rescuing the boy, Helen accidentally backs into Anthony with her car and offers to drive him home. There she meets his eccentric family: Uncle Walt (Kevin McCarthy), sister Ethel (Nancy Cartwright), and mother (Patricia Barry) and father (William Schallert), all of who seem far too eager to please Anthony and seem to be living in a 50s soap opera (The Twilight Zone is the product of that generation of directors raised in the 50s and who seem obsessed with it). It turns out that Anthony has some ill-defined psychic abilities that he uses to force the family into giving him what he thinks of as the perfect life – and he doesn’t want Helen to leave.

Shot with Dante’s usual exuberance, It’s a Good Life suffers from the rubbery monsters that pop up here and there, the scourge of 80s horror and science fiction films. When people bemoan the passing of physical effects, they often forget just how many latex abominations we were subjected to throughout the decade – the pages of Fangoria were positively awash with blood, guts and rubber monsters. Sadly though, very little is made of the real horror of the situation. Everyone is scared of Anthony and with good reason, but he had the potential to be much scarier still. He comes across as a precocious brat with a nasty sadistic streak rather than a really terrifying supernatural monster. Amid all the cartoonishness, there is one nightmarish image, a brief shot of Anthony’s sister Sara (Cherie Currie, one-time lead singer with The Runaways) watching television with her mouth having been magically removed (“she had an accident”).

Things finally click into place with the fourth and final story, George Miller’s remake of the episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet in which John Lithgow gibbers and twitches admirably in a role originally played by William Shatner. John Valetine is a nervy flier and as the aircraft he’s on passes through a violent storm, he spots a gremlin (Larry Cedar) on the wing of the plane, systematically ripping up one of the engines. Valentine panics but no-one else can see the gremlin, leading him to be ostracised by his fellow fliers and, in desperation, he reaches for a sky marshal’s gun… At the end of the story, Aykroyd turns up again as an ambulance driver asking: “Heard you had a big scare up there, huh? Wanna see something really scary?”

Now this was more like it. Miller was a hot property after the worldwide success of Mad Max 2 () but he was very much the junior partner in this team. And yet he comes up with the best of the stories. Lithgow’s twitchy, rapidly unravelling performance alienates some – we first meet him cowering in the airliner’s toilet, already in a bad place and he just gets worse from there – but he’s good value (isn’t he always?) His madness is perfect for the increasingly paranoid and claustrophobic tale that finally delivers just what the film had been missing all this time – proper horror. A creepy little girl (Christina Nigra) and her unsettling W.C. Fields ventriloquist’s puppet is scarier than almost anything else in the film, but the real highlight is Valentine lifting the curtain to find the gremlin staring straight at him through the window.

Miller at least ensures that the film goes out on a high, but overall the film is a disappointment. Fans of the TV show would be right to feel just a little short-changed by it all. Even those stories directly adapted from originals lack the feel of their small screen incarnations, though Time Out (severely compromised as it is and requiring more of a leap of faith from its audience than would have been necessary had the accident not soiled its reputation) and Nightmare at 20,000 Feet are the real winners though overall, the film could have done with a lot more science fiction and horror and a lot less of the whimsy.

And yet despite that and all the negative publicity – or even, perhaps, because of it – the film was a box office hit and one suspects that producers Warner Bros. might have been eyeing up a possible franchise. The accident put paid to that, the lengthy investigation dragging Warners, the film and all involved very publicly through the mud for some time afterwards. The series was instead revived on television a few years later running for 3 seasons between 1985 and 1989 and there were two subsequent revivals (2002-2003 and 2019-2020) of a brand that refuses to lie down and die even when people will insist on not quite getting it right…