he wasn’t due for another month,” insists Mark (Michael Cole), a Central Electric employee, as he flies his wife Catherine (Deborah Walley) in a small, private plane back from a trip to the mountains, hurrying as she continues to have stronger and stronger contractions. The pilot, Tony (Johnny Desmond), attempts to calm them down, though a turbulent storm doesn’t do them any favors. Fortunately, even with a seeming electrical blackout and no communication from the Redlands tower below, they manage to land, though it’s shockingly on a regular city street, lit by a couple of lamps.

“Just hold it in, please!” Despite a nearby cab driver repeating himself and speaking with a blank expression, Mark and Cathy make it to a hospital, but the doctor there is equally stone-faced and uncommunicative. Nevertheless, a baby boy is born and placed in an incubator. But when Mark joins Tony in a saloon to collect himself as his wife sleeps, he makes additional, eerie discoveries – including a barman who stares off in the distance while cleaning a glass and asking what their order will be, as if a broken record; a dancing girl who goes through the motions on stage, without musical accompaniment; and a public telephone that doesn’t work. No one will tell him the name of the town, and no one seems to say anything individualistic; everyone appears to be some sort of zombie or robot programmed to remain tightlipped.

It’s a considerable mystery, though the sense of tension is slow to grow into anything appropriately unnerving; many of the early scenes are approached with a distinct levity that only works to deaden the suspense rather than amplify it. Could this setup be an early vision of the main concepts in “Westworld” or “The Stepford Wives”? Is it all a dream? Or is it altogether more sinister? Either way, it takes entirely too long before the leads start asking questions in earnest, and before they recognize how exceptionally bizarre the denizens of their newfound environs are. “Ever see a screwier place in all your life?”

Though the premise is alluring, the progression of the plot is simply too slow, as the characters refuse to handle their situation with the proper amount of alarm – or realism, considering that the new parents make few demands concerning their baby, and Cathy is up and about, anxiously strolling through the city less than a day after giving birth (all of their subsequent misadventures don’t seem to be physically taxing on the woman, and the newborn doesn’t seem to make a peep). And when Tony undergoes a distressing psychological transformation, Mark essentially just shrugs it off. “What do you mean it isn’t important?” Still, there’s a historic importance to “The Bubble,” as it was the first picture to feature Space-Vision 3-D, which used a single movie camera, as opposed to the two-camera, two-projector designs for the 3-D features of the ‘50s. And the gimmick is obvious, with characters regularly thrusting objects at the camera, such as a dancer’s leg kicking toward the screen, Cathy’s arms jutting outward, a floating tray hovering ever closer to the viewer, and more, often having absolutely no bearing on the story, but taking up conspicuous seconds of screentime.

Also of interest are some psychedelic occurrences, levitating items, otherworldly behaviors, the conspiratorial nature of the various citizens, theories about extraterrestrial interferences, and the plastic-like titular containment device itself. Yet even as the primary trio find themselves captives in an inexplicably artificial setting, struggling to find a way out – let alone answers – it feels as if not much is happening (or, perhaps, it’s impressive how such a minimalistic approach to filmmaking can produce routine entertainment). This gives it a postapocalyptic flavor, brimming with desolation and isolation (absolute solitude being the most terrifying), though the vividness of the sets and the use of mostly daytime exteriors soften potential scariness. Despite the picture not having quite enough complexity to keep things riveting (commentary on shades of freedom and the horrors of the unknown are amusingly existential), the weirdness of Mark and Cathy’s situation is entirely watchable (like a feature-length episode of “The Twilight Zone”); the film’s insistence on withholding revelations (all of which are morbidly ambiguous in a Hitchcockian way) until the very end is thoroughly effective. “There has to be a rational reason for everything that happens.”

– Mike Massie