The Bubble (1966)

Unusual but not very interesting little sf feature from director Arch Oboler, about a small community encased inside an impenetrable bubble and the citizens behaving like robotized zombies. Is it the work of aliens? - that would be my guess. The main characters are a young couple (Michael Cole and Deborah Walley) who end up inside the bubble after making an emergency landing in a single-engine airplane late at night. The wife is pregnant and gives birth right after the landing (though everyone in the township behaves totally 'out of it,' it seems that the doctors are still competent enough to deliver the baby). Thereafter, the husband encounters very puzzling behavior, frustrating him to no end - it's as if everyone is "stoned" as he puts it, just repeating short statements.
When I first watched this, I thought it was an early TV movie; it does remind me of an extended, colorized Outer Limits episode. Originally intended as a 3-D feature, a lot of footage was removed from later versions, cutting the length down to about 90 minutes. I have a DVD from Rhino Video and there are 3-D glasses inside but I don't remember if these glasses came with the case or I put them in there; the DVD version does need to be watched with the glasses; the glasses are not superfluous now because even though it is assumed that all the 3-D footage of something going at the camera is gone, there are still numerous 3-D effects. Also of interest to those who want to see actor Cole pre-The Mod Squad. Overall, I found it to be slow. BoG's Score: 5 out of 10
Bubble Trivia: Over 40 years later, horror writer Stephen King utilized a very similar premise for his very long novel, Under The Dome.
Star Trek TOS actor alert: actor Vic Perrin appears as a cab driver who just says "Cab, Mister?" for the whole film; he appeared in the episode Mirror, Mirror and also supplied his voice in several episodes.