The Golden Years (1991)

Rating: C-

Dir: Allen Coulter, Kenneth Fink, Michael Gornick, Stephen Tolkin
Star: Keith Szarabajka, Felicity Huffman, Ed Lauter, R.D. Call

[12] This American TV series is repackaged here as one massive four-hour tape. Which is the main problem. It’s unwatchable in one chunk, and barely palatable in a couple – I took three sessions over nine days. Based on a Stephen King story, it’s about a janitor at a research establishment who gets blasted by radiation and starts to grow younger, provoking interest, unsurprisingly, from “agencies”. He’s forced to go on the run with his wife, helped by a renegade agent. The first two hours are nearly redundant (Steve missed them, but still sussed the plot) and it could, and should, have been cut down to feature length. Apart from that, it actually has decent performances from Huffman, Call and Frances Sternhagen plus some humour, weirdness and things-mankind-was-not-meant-to-know, tho’ the ending is bizarre – the originally planned ongoing series didn’t catch on, so it tries to tie up the loose ends, and fails.