Horrorfest 2015: Cravenfest - The Twilight Zone: Chameleon

CHAMELEON is probably the least exciting of Craven’s TWILIGHT ZONE offerings. It gets off to a rough start, using stock footage of a real space shuttle mission to help tell the story. Pretty cheap,  if you ask me. I mean, it’s cool to see the footage, but kind of lame to see it in a TWILIGHT ZONE episode.

This one’s a little sci-fi horror story about an alien being that is brought back to Earth from a NASA space mission and promptly causes the disappearance of a crew chief (John Ashton, the dickhead seargent from BEVERLY HILLS COP).

So, the NASA scientists group together to try to figure this out, only to be faced with the sudden return of Ashton, who they now suspect has been taken over by the alien.

There’s not much to this one, though there are a couple well-written sequences. The first is when one of the scientists uses a neat logic trick to stump the alien and the second is when the alien takes the form of a nuclear bomb and one of the scientists has to try to convince the alien why it shouldn’t destroy everyone, as the clock ticks down.

This segment is an example of how the 1980s TWILIGHT ZONE might have been a little better if it allowed an entire episode length to tell a story, rather than trying to tell multiple stories in one episode. Even though CHAMELEON is kind of boring, it’s ultimately unsatisfying because it rushes to its conclusion, which ends up being a philosophical one.

But you need time for philosophy, to set a mood and a tone. You can’t rush it.