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Wow ... this is another one of these Outer Limits-episodes that is so
messed up and ridiculous at the same time that I have problems properly
recounting it ... but here goes:
Richard Bellero (Martin Landau) wants to become chairman of his
father's (neil Hamilton) company, and his wife Judith (Sally Kellerman) is
even more eager that he gets the job. But daddy hates Judith, so he
chooses someone else over his boy and tells Richard that he will
reconsider only if they break up ...
The company, by the way, produces defense systems - whatever that is -,
and daddy is dedicated to world peace.
For some reason, Richard has a giant laser cannon in his own private
lab at his home - what ? - that constantly sends a laser beam into space
... why is left to anybody's guess.
One of these days, an alien (John Hoyt) travels down on same laserbeam
- how we never learn - and claims it wants to learn more about earth.
Richard is thrilled by the prospect of speaking to an alien, but his wife
Judith is more interested in the alien's protective shield (that looks
more like a glass box) and decides to snatch the shield from it and sell
it to Richard's daddy as Richard's invention so daddy will make him
chairman after all. To that end though, she and her barefoot (don't ask
why she's barefoot) maid (Chita Rivera) have to kill the alien ...
When daddy comes, he is quite impressed to find Judith inside the
protective shield that was allegedly invented by his son ... thing is,
when Judith wants to turn off the protective shield, she realizes she has
never learned how ... and she suddenly finds herself caught inside a glass
box ... bugger.
Faced with this crisis, for whatever reason, father and son Bellero
start fighting, then, for whatever other reason, daddy finds the alien's
corpse in the cellar, and for yet still another unknown reason, Judith's
maid immediately kills daddy.
The alien though is not quite dead yet, and it creeps to Judith in her
glass box and turns the darn thing off before it dies. Judith is now free
again, but has gone completely bonkers ...
... I think that's more or less it, and in case you wonder, it's really
that silly, maybe even more so. Now admittedly, most science fiction is at
least a bit silly and I can enjoy silly concepts if they are well-written
... unfortunately, The Bellero Shield is not, the story is totally
confusing, much of it is left unexplained (or even worse, explained away
with some ridiculous excuses), and after watching the whole thing you have
not the slightest idea what the point of this episode was.
Simply put it's jsut bad, even if the direction shows some potential -
but out of a rubbish story like this not even the best director could have
made anything worthwhile at all.
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