Uneven With The Selling Point Being The Studio Name

Theo Robertson

Anthology series featuring stand alone episodes centered around supernatural and horror themes weren't all that common in television in the 60s 70s and 80s and the longest running one was the often dire TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED sarcastically referred to by some people as Tales Of The Bloody Obvious . They do however stick in the mind of a people of a certain age often down to the fact we remember good ones and quickly forget he bad ones . they're often very variable and my personal opinion is that the best anthology show was JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN a syndicated British show produced by Hammer films . Hammer were the world kings of horror film making in the 60s and 70s and mindful of their output they produced this well remembered show which was broadcast in 1980

What struck me about watching this series after a gap of many years is how parochial everything is . Unlike JTTU which due to finance constraints had to shoe in a American lead in to each and every episode , and to a lesser degree Brian Clemens THRILLER from the mid 1970s there's no real attempt to make characters identifiable to an audience outside Britain and the cast are almost exclusively those actors and actresses who you instantly recognise even though their names don't come readily to mind . Possibly the best known actor - and with a nice touch to the studio's past - is Peter Cushing in THE SILENT SCREAM where he appears with a totally unknown Scottish actor called Brian Cox . . This parochial thinking shouldn't be taken as a criticism however and the stories do have a strong though slightly quaint feeling of Britishness rather than trans Atlantic gloss

The episodes themselves are some what variable the outstanding episode being The House That Bled and the clear wooden prize winners jointly being held by the very predictable Visitor From Beyond The Grave and demonic child Growing Pains according to opinion here but my own opinion is Children Of The Full Moon being the worst down to it's rather silly storyline . Interesting too that episodes seen divided between macabre mystery and out and out horror tale . Watching the show you're struck by how limited the horror genre is . We thankfully don't get any horny teenagers in peril type stories but much of the themes here have been done before and probably better . This seems to have split opinions on this page quite markedly judging by the comments and I suppose to enjoy this series in the spirit it was meant you'd have to be home every Autumn Saturday in 1980 . A second series was planned for broadcast in 1982 but a behind the scenes production deal led the series to mutating in to HAMMER HOUSE OF MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE which was financed by 20th Century Fox which meant we had shoe horned American characters and very hap hazard scheduling in Britain which meant that show became very obscure

score 6/10

Theo Robertson 9 September 2013

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2866350/