Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Aedonerre I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Kev11sky Recently this little gem of a movie showed up on CometTV (basic cable).At first I thought I was watching a Twilight Zone episode. Sure, it was made ten years earlier, but it has some familiar tropes.I went to IMDB and saw that it's a film from 1953, based on a short story by Henry Kuttner, a mid-20th-century sci-fi and fantasy writer.

soulexpress "A twonky is something that you don't know what it is."So says college football coach Trout (Billy Lynn) to his colleague, Professor Kerry West (Hans Conried), whose wife is away and bought a TV set to keep her husband company. There's just one problem: the set is ambulatory, has a mind of its own, and is hellbent on micromanaging every aspect of Kerry's life. It lights his cigarettes, empties the dishwasher, answers the phone, removes the cap from his Coke bottle, does the vacuuming, and prevents any harm from coming to Kerry—even if it means emptying the minds of police officers, U.S. Treasury agents, a TV repairman, and Coach Trout himself.There's also a female bill collector who refuses to leave Kerry's house until he pays her. The Twonky zaps the woman with a laser that burns her clothes off, causing her to run screaming into the streets naked. It also has a powerful self-preservation impulse, as a college football team learns when they try to destroy the set with axes, hammers and crowbars.Some three decades before "Poltergeist," this film attempted to make a TV set look intimidating. Given the limited special-effects technology available at the time, it failed to accomplish that goal. Instead, it looks quite silly when this 1951 Admiral walks across Kerry's living room, climbs the stairs, and gets into the front seat of Kerry's car.For the most part, "The Twonky" is a comedy—though the humor is dated and corny. There is, however, a ten-minute segment near the end when the film takes a dark turn. Alas, it quickly abandons the darkness and reverts to cornball humor. That said, Hans Conried rises above the dippy screeenplay. Already a seasoned professional, he delivers a credible portrait of a man whose electronic slavemaster takes a toll on his mental state.From the beginning, some people worried that TV would isolate us all and lower our collective IQ. Despite its frivolity, "The Twonky" is an intriguing time capsule of that period.

grizzledgeezer I'd only heard of this film, and by great chance stumbled on it last night on the "Comet" sub-channel. (It never occurred to me to look for it on YouTube, where it's currently available.)I haven't read the Kuttner/Moore short story, but Oboler's alteration, making the Twonky a television (rather than a radio-phonograph) is ideal, creating a metaphor that should have been obvious even in 1951.Human beings are basically visual animals, making television addictive in a way radio cannot equal. There's no point in showing vapid TV programming turning people into intellectual zombies, because the Twonky itself isn't a television. It's a shape-shifting household robot a future civilization uses to control the way people think and act.To the extent that TV watching distracts people from their own inner dialogs -- and dialogs with other people -- it serves the purpose of those who wish to twist "democratic" society to their own ends -- politicians and businessmen. *Hans Conried is a great actor (I'm aware of what "great" implies), in full control of his performance. He's the perfect choice for a philosophy professor beset by a machine determined to destroy his independence and individuality.Oboler's direction, too, is solid. The film's principal problem is its Really Cheap animated effects, which look like Really Cheap animated effects.Strongly recommended.* Douglas Sirk makes a similar point in "All That Heaven Allows".

poe426 Arch Oboler's LIGHTS OUT is one of the handful of radio shows I've listened to over the years that was genuinely worth listening to. (One of my all-time favorite writers, Harlan Ellison, mentioned Oboler's show somewhere along the line, and that's how I came to it. In DEMON WITH A GLASS HAND, one of Ellison's two episodes of the original black and white series THE OUTER LIMITS, one of the characters is called "Arch." I'm guessing he was named after Oboler.) Likewise, his end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it feature, FIVE, was watchable. THE TWONKY, while maybe not as watchable as FIVE, is nonetheless not bad for what it is (or isn't). As pointed out elsewhere, it could've fit right in with the rest of the episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Once the one-eyed monster gets its hooks in you, you're as good as finished. (Just look around you.) Both NETWORK and VIDEODROME would go still further in their depictions of a medium gone mad, but Henry Kuttner and Arch Oboler were there first. And funniest.