DVD REVIEW - TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED SEASON ONE
**This review contains big spoilers**
Roald Dahl will forever be remembered for his best-selling books for children such as The Twits, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Danny The Champion Of The World and James And The Giant Peach and countless others which have delighted children for several years and will continue to do so. I myself read these stories and was excited by them as I was growing up so I just had to check this series out. Dahl was equally successful with Adult fiction and his prolific output of short stories about the macabre, the mysterious and sometimes gruesome formed the basis for this long running and highly successful TV series. This two-disc package that I picked up in the sales at one of the megastores contains all nine episodes of the first season (originally aired in 1979) with each of them introduced by their author himself. Like most short story collections, the stories are of varying quality, but there are a few notable exceptions which I shall elaborate on in a bit more detail in the next few paragraphs.
The Landlady is a genuinely terrifying tale of terror in which a young insurance clerk in the form of Leonard Preston is sent to Bath on business by his employer. He stays at a B&B ran by an eccentric middle-aged lady (played delightfully over the top by Siobhan McKenna) who hides a gruesome secret in that she kills her guests and stuffs them and their bodies are preserved as lifelike statues in their rooms. Even though there is no graphic violence here and the horrors are implied, it still sent a shiver down my spine and it reminded me of something which the late but great Boris Karloff once said of horror movies -"It's what they don't see that frightens people more" and in this case his words are only too true.
Neck is true class as it is set in one of those lovely English stately homes and features a top notch cast of British acting talent and it is black comedy of the first order. Newspaper mogul Sir Basil Turton (Michael Aldridge) has long suffered at the hands of his wife, Natalia (Joan Collins), who not only runs his business with an iron fist but she also flaunts her lovers in front of him. Sir Basil is a lover of modern art and he buys this strange wooden masterpiece with a big hole through the middle and one day Natalia is messing around in the garden with one of her boyfriends, Major Haddock (Peter Bowles), and her head gets stuck in this object. After all efforts to free her fail, Sir Basil's Butler, Jelks (John Gielgud), who disapproves of Natalia's flirting and carrying on brings an axe and a saw out to the garden. Sir Basil goes for the axe and raises it above his head with an expression of anger and trumph on his face and Natalia lets out a grisly scream. Will he chop up his beloved art work or will he cut off Natalia's head?
Mrs Bixby And The Colonel's Coat concerns a bored housewife, the Mrs Bixby of the title played by Julie Harris who is married to dental surgeon Cyril Bixby (Michael Hordern). Every three months she goes to visit her Aunt Maud. Well at least that's the excuse she gives to her husband. In reality she is having an affair with a retired Colonel (played by Richard Greene) who suddenly decides to end it all. He gives her an expensive mink coat as a present and Mrs Bixby has to explain how she came by it to her husband since the fictitious Aunt Maud could not have afforded such a coat. She decides to pawn it for fifty-pounds but sees to it that there is no name or description on the pawnbroker's ticket. Her husband comes across the ticket and decides to go and collect the item for himself. Mrs Bixby then goes to her husband's surgery where he presents her only with the mink scarf that came with the coat. She cannot understand what happened to the coat. But on her way out she gets into the lift and his good looking secretary is the one who is wearing the coat! This one contains an element of irony since we thought that it was the wife who was bored and seeing somebody else behind her husband's back but then it looks very much that the husband had little interest in his wife either apart from reminding her to "brush her teeth" every night before they went to bed. In addition, judging by the husband's character, you would not have thought that he would have been the type to have had an affair so this one is very surprising and a true tale of the "unexpected".
At times, though, I felt disappointed since some of the stories started off promisingly and lead you up to thinking that there would be something very shocking at the end. But the final twist lead me to think yeah, so what? The Man From The South is a perfect example of this. The former is set in Jamacia and concerns a young sailor who is persuaded into taking a bet with the mysterious Carlos (Jose Ferrer). Carlos says that if he can make his cigarette lighter light up ten times without failure then he will win his brand new Jaguar saloon car. But if he fails then he will lose a finger. The suspense is really tense during the sequence where the bet is taking place but the final twist proves rather feeble in that the proceedings are interrupted by Carlos's wife who reveals that her husband has taken a finger off forty-seven men in similar circumstances and that in the end she won everything he had to bet with holding up her hand which is missing a finger and a thumb. I don't know, but somehow that ending leaves me with a feeling of unfulfilled promise.
In conclusion, when this series really hits the mark, it does, as I have described in the above paragraphs but at times some of the stories seemed weak as if they were just written in order to pad the series out with little thought or imagination. But this collection is still worth checking out for the stronger stories (three of which I have just mentioned) and some of the big name stars that were attracted to do this series really are astonishing. Network DVD have also released some of the subsequent seasons of this show, which I may check out in due course though I feel that in terms of the stories it will be a case of hit and miss throughout as it is here.
Roald Dahl will forever be remembered for his best-selling books for children such as The Twits, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Danny The Champion Of The World and James And The Giant Peach and countless others which have delighted children for several years and will continue to do so. I myself read these stories and was excited by them as I was growing up so I just had to check this series out. Dahl was equally successful with Adult fiction and his prolific output of short stories about the macabre, the mysterious and sometimes gruesome formed the basis for this long running and highly successful TV series. This two-disc package that I picked up in the sales at one of the megastores contains all nine episodes of the first season (originally aired in 1979) with each of them introduced by their author himself. Like most short story collections, the stories are of varying quality, but there are a few notable exceptions which I shall elaborate on in a bit more detail in the next few paragraphs.The Landlady is a genuinely terrifying tale of terror in which a young insurance clerk in the form of Leonard Preston is sent to Bath on business by his employer. He stays at a B&B ran by an eccentric middle-aged lady (played delightfully over the top by Siobhan McKenna) who hides a gruesome secret in that she kills her guests and stuffs them and their bodies are preserved as lifelike statues in their rooms. Even though there is no graphic violence here and the horrors are implied, it still sent a shiver down my spine and it reminded me of something which the late but great Boris Karloff once said of horror movies -"It's what they don't see that frightens people more" and in this case his words are only too true.
Neck is true class as it is set in one of those lovely English stately homes and features a top notch cast of British acting talent and it is black comedy of the first order. Newspaper mogul Sir Basil Turton (Michael Aldridge) has long suffered at the hands of his wife, Natalia (Joan Collins), who not only runs his business with an iron fist but she also flaunts her lovers in front of him. Sir Basil is a lover of modern art and he buys this strange wooden masterpiece with a big hole through the middle and one day Natalia is messing around in the garden with one of her boyfriends, Major Haddock (Peter Bowles), and her head gets stuck in this object. After all efforts to free her fail, Sir Basil's Butler, Jelks (John Gielgud), who disapproves of Natalia's flirting and carrying on brings an axe and a saw out to the garden. Sir Basil goes for the axe and raises it above his head with an expression of anger and trumph on his face and Natalia lets out a grisly scream. Will he chop up his beloved art work or will he cut off Natalia's head?
Mrs Bixby And The Colonel's Coat concerns a bored housewife, the Mrs Bixby of the title played by Julie Harris who is married to dental surgeon Cyril Bixby (Michael Hordern). Every three months she goes to visit her Aunt Maud. Well at least that's the excuse she gives to her husband. In reality she is having an affair with a retired Colonel (played by Richard Greene) who suddenly decides to end it all. He gives her an expensive mink coat as a present and Mrs Bixby has to explain how she came by it to her husband since the fictitious Aunt Maud could not have afforded such a coat. She decides to pawn it for fifty-pounds but sees to it that there is no name or description on the pawnbroker's ticket. Her husband comes across the ticket and decides to go and collect the item for himself. Mrs Bixby then goes to her husband's surgery where he presents her only with the mink scarf that came with the coat. She cannot understand what happened to the coat. But on her way out she gets into the lift and his good looking secretary is the one who is wearing the coat! This one contains an element of irony since we thought that it was the wife who was bored and seeing somebody else behind her husband's back but then it looks very much that the husband had little interest in his wife either apart from reminding her to "brush her teeth" every night before they went to bed. In addition, judging by the husband's character, you would not have thought that he would have been the type to have had an affair so this one is very surprising and a true tale of the "unexpected".
At times, though, I felt disappointed since some of the stories started off promisingly and lead you up to thinking that there would be something very shocking at the end. But the final twist lead me to think yeah, so what? The Man From The South is a perfect example of this. The former is set in Jamacia and concerns a young sailor who is persuaded into taking a bet with the mysterious Carlos (Jose Ferrer). Carlos says that if he can make his cigarette lighter light up ten times without failure then he will win his brand new Jaguar saloon car. But if he fails then he will lose a finger. The suspense is really tense during the sequence where the bet is taking place but the final twist proves rather feeble in that the proceedings are interrupted by Carlos's wife who reveals that her husband has taken a finger off forty-seven men in similar circumstances and that in the end she won everything he had to bet with holding up her hand which is missing a finger and a thumb. I don't know, but somehow that ending leaves me with a feeling of unfulfilled promise.
In conclusion, when this series really hits the mark, it does, as I have described in the above paragraphs but at times some of the stories seemed weak as if they were just written in order to pad the series out with little thought or imagination. But this collection is still worth checking out for the stronger stories (three of which I have just mentioned) and some of the big name stars that were attracted to do this series really are astonishing. Network DVD have also released some of the subsequent seasons of this show, which I may check out in due course though I feel that in terms of the stories it will be a case of hit and miss throughout as it is here.
posted by Michael Harris | 3:16 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home