Arch Oboler worked in media for decades and was the secret influence for many of the 20th century’s major mavens of weirdness. Rod Serling and Stephen King both cited him as a major influence. He worked in radio since the mid ’30s, mainly in creating short scripts of unadulterated horror. His most famous play was Chicken Heart, an absurd, and absurdly effective story of a resuscitated chicken heart that grows until it is covering city blocks and eating living flesh for sustenance.
Buy The BubbleHe moved on to making a few films, always with a weird gimmick. I’ve seen two of his movies, including this one. The Twonky (1953) is about a man who get a walking television set from the future, which attends to his every need. It just believes that his needs include erasing liberal democracy from his life, because it’s a tool of a totalitarian future.
It’s a twist from a seemingly benign fantasy to something more serious, and The Bubble does that, as well. A pregnant woman and her husband are on an emergency flight because she’s in labor and have to land in a strange town. She gives birth without a hitch, but as she recuperates her husband goes around town and finds everything is odd. At night, the streets are empty. During the day, everyone wanders in a loop, doing the same things over and over. No one directly responds to him and just repeats stock quotes. “Paper, morning paper.” “What’ll it be, gents?” And the like.
The Bubble is like a feature-length Twilight Zone, where the happy couple are presented with a very unhappy scenario. The town seems to be cobbled together from several places in America with people who have no agency of their own.
They try, with their pilot friend, to get out. But after driving miles out of town, they find an invisible barrier. That’s the bubble from the title. They’re all caught in a trap with a bunch of apparent automatons, and no way to get out.
It’s an eerie scenario, and the movie plays it out rather relentlessly, over a perhaps too-long 1 hour and 52 minutes. Oh, and the movie is shot in… SPACEVISION! That’s old 3-D anaglyph technology. The Blu-ray comes with a set of red and blue 3-D glasses. It takes a while before the film takes advantage of 3-D. The first effect is when first a tray of glasses magically floats towards the audience. Later, brooms and ladders try to poke you in the eye. The 3-D is silly, but 3-D has always been silly. The disc includes the anaglyph version and a Blu-ray 3-D version, for anyone who still has a 3-D TV. I had one, a nice plasma TV, but some circuit board burned out on it, and I never had a chance to watch anything 3-D on it. There’s also a 2-D version of the movie.
I liked The Bubble a lot. I liked its commitment to a weird scenario, even if it lingers on more than it needs to. It takes the characters a little too long to figure out what’s going on, so some of the early going can get a touch tedious. The 3-D is kind of fun, though I had to watch the movie in segments because those dumb glasses give me a headache after too long. It’s far from perfect, but The Bubble is an interesting artifact from the past.
The Bubble has been released on Blu-ray by Kino Cult. The disc contains three versions of the film – the anaglyph 3D version, a Blu-ray 3D version, and 2D. A pair of red and blue anaglyph glasses are included. Extras include an alternate intro, some 3D demo footage, and an episode of Arch Oboler’s radio show, Lights Out.
