Twilight Zone: The Movie

The revered TV half-hour The Twilight Zone, which originally aired 1959-65 and told different sci-fi and fantasy-tinged morality plays each week, inspired this big-budget movie anthology. Three parts remake favorite TZ episodes, but the first is original, about a bigoted businessman (Vic Morrow), ranting about losing a job promotion to a Jew, who instantly finds himself knocked about the whole 20th century, suffering the same persecutions as blacks in the Jim Crow South, Jews in the Holocaust, and Indochinese during the Vietnam War. The second story has a magical visitor (Scatman Crothers) to an old-folks home, giving the seniors a chance to start life over as six-year-olds -- if they want to. In the third tale a stranger stumbles into the captive household of Anthony (Jeremy Licht), a cartoon-crazed kid with awesome psychic powers to make his every whim come true, but who isn't truly happy. In the finale, a computer scientist (John Lithgow) with a crippling fear of flying is on a storm-tossed airliner when he sees a sadistic monster outside, seemingly tearing up the wing.