Cheap The Outer Limits: Don't Open Till Doomsday (Video) (James Goldstone, Felix E. Feist, Byron Haskin, Leonard Horn, László Benedek, Abner Biberman, John Brahm, Paul Stanley, Gerd Oswald, Charles F. Haas) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Outer Limits: Don't Open Till Doomsday

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.

One of the Best!
Along with "The Architects of Fear, The Man Who Was Never Born, Demon with the Glass Hand", and "The Duplicate", this one is tops. A mixture of sci-fi, gothic, and Manilow's "Copa Cabana", it succeeds despite its flaws.

Outer Limits goes 'David Lynch'
"Dont' Open til Doomsday" is an unfocused mess, yet it has so much going for it. On the plus side are the rich characterizations, the attention to atmosphere and detail, the juxtaposition of 20's period jazz with Frontiere's evocative score and of course the grotesque, over-the-top conception of the creature-of-the-week itself - which must have been Stefano's way of thumbing his nose at the ever-intrusive censorship board. The negative side: 1. there's the explanation of the creature's reason for existence which is such an incomprehensible clash of nuclear and meta-physics that it could make even a nuclear physicist's head explode 2. the episode comes to such an abrubpt and anti-climactic end - the creature out of the blue decides after 35 or so years that "if I can't destroy the world, I must un-create myself" - that it isn't clear if Stephano was playing it for laughs or again thumbing his nose at the network bureaucracy for imposing production deadlines or a combination of the two.