At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I refuse to rate this show.I'm watching this on a marathon hosted in May 2016 on the Decades Channel. I didn't care for the show when it first aired, because I found Rod Serling scary as a child, and I disliked horror. It took years to get over the apprehension I had about "The Twilight Zone." "Night Gallery" didn't help.But watching the show, it's clear the series is uneven. Some of the episodes aren't so good. When there is a good episode, though, I have to say it hits a home run.While I don't care for the horror, it's still fun to watch so many of the actors involved. By 1971, Rod Serling was able to get such notables as Edward G. Robinson and Dana Andrews. He also drew upon Twilight Zone performers such as Donna Douglas, Susan Oliver, Burgess Meredith and Patrick Macnee.And yes, it's dated, but back in the early 1970s, TV was all about color. The medium would not start becoming more experimental for at least a decade.Overall, when it's good, it's excellent. When it's not so good, it's bad.

I was feeling nostalgic recently and began re-watching episodes of "The Night Gallery". As a kid, I loved it--and it often scared the crap out of me. But now, 40 years later, I can sure see the limitations of the show--limitations that only became more obvious the more shows you've seen. While I ADORE the idea of a horror anthology series, this one was undone by bad writing and too much re-tooling of a basically good idea.The series is alternately called "Rod Serling's Night Gallery"--and this leads to the biggest problem with the show. While Serling's name is at the masthead, he actually only wrote a few episodes here and there--and wrote less and less as the series continued. Why the execs would NOT want Serling writing as much of the show as possible is beyond me--he was brilliant in all his previous work and you'd think a shelf full of Emmy Awards for writing would convince the high muckity-mucks to make him THE writer for the show. But, instead, it seemed like practically anyone (talented or not) could write for the show--and this became VERY obvious in season two.This brings me to the next biggie damaging the show. It's rare to see a show's writing go downhill so fast as it did between season one and two. While season one was no masterpiece, some idiots thought the format needed retooling--and comedy shorts were added to the show in addition to the scary stuff. Some of the comedy was funny--most was not. But the big problem is that it totally disrupted the serious mood of the show and cheapened it. In effect, the series jumped the shark in season two.The final big problem is that even if you ignore the comedy infused into "Night Gallery", you can't deny that the quality of the serious scripts dropped considerably. Many episodes were now pretty awful--so bad that I simply couldn't continue watching the shows. My time is too important to watch any more.

If your anything like me, you've probably (to quote Marcellus Wallace) scoured the Earth for "Make Me Laugh," the second of two stories the young Spielberg shot for "Night Gallery." Not wanting to spend the 50 dollars on the DVDs, I patiently waited to find and record a re-run of the anthology.Before I review "Make Me Laugh," I'd like to say that Night Gallery is, for better or for worse, its own show made by many other talented directors and their casts and crews."Make Me Laugh" is not Spielberg's nor Sterling's finest hour. The story is very trite and the acting is weird and self aware. Sterling has written much better episodes than this unoriginal and pointless story of a down and out comedian granted the ability to make people laugh. The late great Godfrey Cambridge (Friday Foster) adds depth to the jaded jokester with extreme melodrama that is so over-the-top its kind of enjoyable. The same can't be said for Jackie Vernon, who played the genie. The genie character is dull, flat, and totally unreal. This is only made worse by bad makeup and a ridiculous costume. The pacing of the episode is minimal (surely due to time factors) but well done. And the lighting is natural. Professional, but not ground breaking.Spielberg wasn't given much wiggle-room on this one. A strict contract gave him almost no creative control, and this terrible script didn't help either. But it is an impressive effort for someone as young as Spielberg was. His visual style was still in the cooker, but there are compositions that are unique to television at the time and early heeds of Spielberg's natural-yet-abnormal frame. In the end, this episode was based on such a lame story that it never really had a chance no matter who was behind the camera. It is worth watching for its historical value, and for the strange performance of Cambridge. However, Spielberg's other Night Gallery outing "Eyes" is a much better example of an early version of Spielberg's framing and his excellent exposition.

At least a dozen users have brought up Spielberg's participation, as if it were a revelation each time. Enough, already. Also, it would be nice if people would place a *spoiler* warning, when they describe plots, ad naseum.This series DOES beg a comparison to Serling's earlier "Twilight Zone," of course. And, it does NOT fair well. While a few classic episodes do pop up, "Night Gallery" is a major misfire from the first season.Ridiculous "twist" endings, with no logical basis, are mistaken as being "scary." Some episodes don't even make sense, even after repeated viewings.The hour-long show should have been reduced to thirty minutes, as it was in syndication. Apparently, many users don't realize that a separate show, "The Sixth Sense," was incorporated into "Night Gallery" in syndication, with Serling creating new wrap-around intros. The two were never intended to be "one," and it is evident. Any episode with Gary Collins was not originally a true "Gallery."