The Shadow Man

MOVIE #1,893 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 08.16.24 As we head into the weekend of “Seven Days of Dante,” we enter his foray into the small screen (TV, for the layperson). In 1985-86, at the height of his success, he directed three episodes within a pair of anthology serieses, one for The Twilight Zone and two for Amazing Stories. This short, “The Shadow Man” — from the first of three revivals of Rod Serling's acclaimed 1959–64 television series — aired on CBS. This Twilight Zone reboot featured a slew of notable directors, including Wes Craven, Robert Downey Sr. and William Friedkin. Each episode featured 2-3 shorts of varying length and this Joe Dante effort from Season 1 clocks in at only 19 minutes. It’s pretty blah and the ending twist is dumb/uninspired. I’m sure there are some gems within this series but this isn’t one of them.

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The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series which aired from September 27, 1985, to April 15, 1989. It is the first of three revivals of Rod Serling's acclaimed 1959–64 television series, and like the original it featured a variety of speculative fiction, commonly containing characters from a seemingly normal world stumbling into paranormal circumstances. Unlike the original, however, most episodes contained multiple self-contained stories instead of just one. The voice-over narrations were still present, but were not a regular feature as they were in the original series; some episodes had only an opening narration, some had only a closing narration, and some had no narration at all. The multi-segment format liberated the series from the usual time constraints of episodic television, allowing stories ranging in length from 8-minutes to 40-minute mini-movies. The series ran for two seasons on CBS before producing a final season for syndication. It was released on November 29, 1985.