Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Overrated but good. Screenwriter Stefano was a little pressed for time on this one, and didn't quite get to polish it off as well as he could have. Still, it's got atmosphere to spare, one of the creepier aliens of the series, and Miriam Hopkins as a demented spinster in a worse-than-haunted house.
Hopkins goes crazy after her bridegroom vanishes on their wedding night, back in the Roaring Twenties. Now, many decades later, she lives in the mansion that would have been theirs, which has become a decadent shrine. Unbeknownst to anyone else, she is secretly in league with an alien monster seeking to abduct more cooperative help than her snatched fiance in its quest to blow up the universe. Along come a pair of underage eloping high schoolers...
This episode has a lot going for it. Logically, it makes about as much sense as the Magic Bullet theory, but the imagery and the story are rich and unsettling. There are two fabulously creepy abduction scenes, Hopkins' groom at the beginning of the episode and the high school sweetheart later. The latter is especially unnerving, since she cannot be distinguished between experiencing cosmic terror or an orgasm in confronting the hypnotic alien abductor. Hopkins is a pre-Patty Hearst study in the Stockholm Syndrome, a woman gone round the bend in lifelong coerced service to evil.
The script is weak, especially at the end, when the rather imaginative one-eyed monster-in-a-box talks too much and comes off sounding like a bass-voiced Marvin the Martian. The finale is rushed, and if you pay attention you can see the high school youth jump his cue before the special effect he is supposed to be reacting to occurs, which is pretty funny.
Overall, definitely worth a look, especially for horror or Lovecraft fans.
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