In 1953, the movie studios were terrified by the threat television posed to their livelihoods. I have seen many films from that era that took satirical jabs at the medium, but that year’s The Twonky is the first time I have seen an anthropomorphic TV set appear as a villain.
Hans Conried is perfectly cast as the lead here. Between this, and the even more bizarre The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, he seems to have been the go-to person for a particular breed of weird cinema at that time.
When the film begins, he is receiving a long list of last-minute reminders from his wife (Janet Warren), who is getting in a cab. She’s rushing off to stay with her sister, who is going to give birth soon. To prevent him from getting lonely, she has gifted him with a television. In a good example of the quirky humor of this picture, he tells her, “by the time you get back, I promise you I’ll know all the latest wrestling holds.” Her list of to-do’s and to-don’t’s include him wearing a hat if he goes into the dining room, as the ceiling plaster is falling.
But the television is not what it appears. In lieu of showing programs, it can shoot a laser beam from its screen, which it uses for all kinds of mayhem. At first, it is simply insistent on lighting his cigarettes. For some reason, it also wants to zap into shrapnel any coffee cup he holds. And yet, it puts his cleaned dishes back in the cupboard. It can even zap people in the head, making them change their minds. In one very funny scene, it has inexplicably made Conried deviate from a planned speech to instead detail the plot of a steamy romance novel.
It can even literally make money, though those bills will later draw attention from the police for being counterfeit. Still, that doesn’t stop Edwin Max’s hilariously dim TV shop delivery and repair guy from scooping up the bills from the living room floor. That the bills are laid out in a neat grid in front of the TV would likely give me pause, but not Max. Never mind how strange it is that he believes he is entitled to what one would assume is Conried’s money, regardless of the bizarre manner in which he appears to have stored it. The way Max goes after the cash despite all this has me convinced he would have eaten food right off the floor if displayed in the same manner.
One way this film is different from how most others would handle the subject is this otherworldly appliance does not hesitate to flex its powers in front of people other than our protagonist. Especially curious is William H. Lynn, as Conried’s friend and coach of the university’s long-losing football team. He’s the one that bestows the designation of the title upon the set: “I had Twonkies when I was a child. A Twonky is something you do not know what it is.”
The coach is a fascinating character, and possibly the real star of the show. He is a running tap of non-sequiturs, sharing such bizarre insights as: “In 1906, I personally lifted 500 pounds…and two French women.” Maybe that’s how he made this memorable connection to French-fried potatoes: “Women—they confuse me. All my life, when I think about them, I think of French-fried potatoes”. Wait, is Billy Bob Thornton’s obsession with French fries in Sling Blade a sexual metaphor?
Unusual beverages also have a slight recurring theme in the film, what with coach whipping up his own concoction that is yogurt, molasses, grapes (which he crushed with his feet in his basement), Tabasco sauce and a dash of Benzine. The last must have been a thing at the time, as Max has a curious idea of what the kids were drinking then: “They mix Benzine and that uranium stuff and they call it a cocktail.”
We never learn for certain the true nature of the Twonky, though it claims to be a robot. Maybe it travelled from the future, as speculated by the coach, but for what purpose? It seems to exist only to torment Conried. It is very determined to not be removed from the house, yet it never seems to have an apparent greater goal. It even does things to get the professor in trouble with his school and with the law, which seems contrary to it keeping its hooks into its alleged owner. One particularly surprising ruse, given how uptight audiences were at that time, is it calls a phone switchboard to try to solicit a prostitute for Conried.
When faced with a great enough threat, the Twonky will use its ray to zap a person unconscious. This seems to happen to roughly 70% of all people who set foot in the house, a curiously large number of such people for a cast with so few speaking parts. When a zapped person comes to, they inevitably say in a stunned manner, “I…have…no…complaints. I…am…going…home.”
That is pretty creepy. Actually, despite the sitcom-level humor of the material, the picture overall scanned as a horror film to me. The inane soundtrack reinforced that off-ness in my esteem. Then there’s the Twonky’s “walk”, which is basically puppet legs that clearly are not whatever is really advancing it forward. Watching that thing move around the house is far creepier than any of those stupid things walking up walls and around on ceilings in too many horror films from their century.
My only complaint about The Twonky is the way I watched it, and that was a rip of what I suspect was a VHS tape. The image had a high amount of artifacting, to the point of distraction at times. We have so many films that are nowhere near as good as this one, but which have had multiple releases of various disc formats already. It is astonishing this hasn’t even been released on DVD yet, and I wish somebody would rectify that.
Dir: Arch Obeler
Starring Hans Conried, William H. Lynn
Watched on YouTube, as there were no other options available