Bad Dreams

By RICHARD CORLISS

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE Directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and George Miller; Screenplays by John Landis, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson and Josh Rogan

Four boys sat rapt before their television sets 20 years ago, following Rod Serling's voice into "another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind." They grew up, or at least aged, to become successful film makers: John Landis with National Lampoon's Animal House, Joe Dante with The Howling, George Miller with The Road Warrior and Steven Spielberg with half of the megahit movies of the past eight years. But they never forgot The Twilight Zone. In Steven Spielberg's E.T., one teen-ager hypes the spookiness by singing Marius Constant's ding-ding-ding-ding theme from the TV show; and Spielberg's Poltergeist is an updating of a Twilight Zone episode. Now this quartet has concocted a four-part feature that takes Serling's moral tales into a new dimension: the second, where images and characters are as crisp, bright and fiat as those in a Chuck Jones cartoon.

Twilight Zone: The Movie burst into the third dimension of real life and death last July, when Actor Vic Morrow and two children were killed when a helicopter crashed during the filming of their segment. Morrow plays a bigoted businessman who learns the True Meaning of Racial Injustice when transported to Nazi-occupied France, a Klan lynching and a G.I. patrol in Viet Nam. Landis, who also contributes the engaging prologue to Twilight Zone, would have been well advised to junk his screechy screed. Even with the helicopter sequence mercifully cut, the story hardly looks worth shooting, let alone dying for.

Spielberg's segment (based on a 1962 TV episode called Kick the Can) means to demonstrate his familiar compact with the movie audience: "If you believe, I can make you all feel like children." So speaks the endearing Scatman Crothers, presenting the gift of renewed youth to a home full of old folks. Once again Spielberg is cranking up the magic machine that has served him so well. This time the spell does not hold; one can hear only the machinery, purring like a contented windup kitten.

Dante's episode (from It's a Good Life, aired in 1961) turns the Spielberg ethic on its head and finally gets the movie moving with spooky style. Jeremy Licht plays a boy with monstrous powers, who corrals an ersatz family and bends them to his infantile wishes. In this cartoon nightmare, giant skinned rabbits pop out of hats, and people who talk back have their mouths erased. Like the best Twilight Zone originals, Dante's horror-comic homily provides an oblique moral: youth must not be served, at least not peanut-butter burgers on a paper plate.

Save the best for last: Miller's fast, funny, flat-out creepy Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (from a 1963 show). An airliner has the shakes in rough weather, and one passenger is going bananas: he thinks he sees a man-size gremlin on the wing ripping the plane's engines apart. With his sad-sack-of-potatoes face, John Lith gow brings a daft pathos to the passenger's hysteria, and Miller orchestrates it like Daffy Duck conducting Cotterddm-merung. "Wanna see something really scary?" asks Guest Star Dan Aykroyd at film's end. The Miller and Dante episodes are. So is the epic waste that informs much of this movie.

-- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.