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I’m excited about this one because I just saw the classic Twilight Zone episode Death Ship for the first time a few weekends ago on SciFi. The plot concerns a trio of astronauts who land on an alien planet seeking extraterrestrial life, only to find a duplicate of their ship with three corpses inside that look exactly like the explorers! The rest of the episode concerns arguments over whether or not they are seeing the future or just an alien illusion, and whether or not they should stay on the planet and die naturally or take off and perhaps end up like their dopplegangers. It of course ends in a classic pisser TZ ending.

Now DarkHorizons reports that the episode is set to be made into an action-adventure feature film entitled Countdown:

Scribe Michael Brandt will make his directorial debut on the project and will co-write with Derek Haas a new draft of Stephen Gregg and Scott Burn’s original adaptation. Brandt and Haas have worked together before on “3:10 to Yuma,” “2 Fast 2 Furious,” and “Wanted.”

Production could begin as early as late summer with a budget in the $30 million range.

Let’s hope this isn’t the second Richard Matheson story to be bastardized into a crappy action film in as many years!

2 Comments

  1. Grundy - Posted on 25/03/08 @ 2:15pm

    I Enjoyed I Am Legend, as an adaptation of the book is wasn’t perfect. But as a post-apocalyptic B-movie, it’s pretty great.

  2. Norma - Posted on 10/06/08 @ 1:59pm

    What episode of Twlight zone was the one about the little minute men that moved everything in the room from second to second?

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You are reading Classic Twilight Zone Episode To Become Feature Film Titled Countdown on Film Rotation. This article was written by Tower on 25th March 2008 in the Film categories. If you have any comments about this article, you can contact Tower by email, or leave a comment below. You can also follow comments made on this article via our RSS 2.0 feed.

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