Friday, October 25, 2019

October Horror Challenge 2019 #70: "The Doomsday Machine"



This movie was like a really long episode of The Twilight Zone, the original black and white show that I loved back when I was a kid. Like, seriously,  are we sure they didn't steal this whole plot from the show? It really would have fit in with the moralizing that show liked to do (I love it, but at times it was a bit much).

So in this movie we see some scientists unleashing what I assume is the "doomsday machine" (basically two people just like, hit the "on" button and then leave). Meanwhile, elsewhere, a crew of astronauts prepares to be sent into space on a mission. They're pissed to find out there are women on their crew (yay sexism!) and even more pissed when they find out their REAL reason to be shot into space with a crew consisting of both men and women.

I'm not sure if I can tell you what happens? Like I don't know if it's supposed to be a "surprise twist" or something,  but it happens less than halfway through the movie, and there's another "twist" at the end that REALLY drives the Twilight Zone similarity home with its preachiness. The whole movie's like they took a Twilight Zone episode, which was like, 25 minutes long, and decided to pad the running time with over an hour of pointless bullshit to pad the running time.

None of the characters are very likable, and I wasn't really rooting for them, and the boring draggy scenes were a chore to sit through. Next time, the filmmakers should find two or more other stories and film those too, then put them together into an anthology of cool short movies instead of one, long, bloated, boring piece of crap that might have made an okay story if it were an hour shorter.

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