User Reviews

This is a modern day remake/reboot of The Monsters are due on Maple Street, and one of the first TV dramatic depictions related to 9/11, as this was screened in 2003.

I say it's more realistic in that there's no aliens from outer space mucking around with the electrical grid in their downtime in the flying saucer. Here it's an army unit that has set things up. I wonder what happened to the people in the house that got burned down? I suspect because they were part of the army experiment, they managed to get out the back I guess.

Interestingly, none of the neighbors raised the ethnic issue of the mysterious neighbors if you know what I mean. That would have been incendiary and almost kind of profiling if you know what I'm getting at.

The title of this episode is probably a little more apt than that of the original Twilight Zone story, which was called 'The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street'. In this one, the monsters are already here in the form of distrusting neighbors whose fears are put to the test after they hear an explosion and all forms of power suddenly go out. Will Marshall (Andrew McCarthy) is the voice of reason in this story, just as Claude Akins was in the earlier version. I thought the alien gimmick used in the 1960 episode took something away from the impact of that episode. It would have been much more effective to have one come away with a personal meaning that didn't rely on a strategy like that. A Maple Street simply left in chaos would have challenged the viewer to come to their own conclusion about how things might have worked out. Same thing here, even if this story opted for a more rational explanation with a military unit testing a theory being played out in other communities at the same time. It seemed like a wicked thing to do to pit neighbor against neighbor just to see what would happen.