(1968)
Dir - Robert Stevens
Overall: MEH
Though far from a landmark bit of television, the debut episode "Eve" for Hammer's Journey to the Unknown at least has a fetching premise that does not merely rely on the studio's previously established Gothic horror tropes. Based on John Collier's short story "Special Deliver", it concerns a solitary young man falling in love with a window mannequin, which gives the story a one-note trajectory. Yet the script from Paul Wheeler and Michael Ashe has some twits and turns to it, especially during the finale where our doomed protagonist flees London after a violent episode in fear of the authorities taking away his plastic love interest. Dennis Waterman is ideally cast as the introverted romantic, but Carol Lynley gets little to do besides look lovely as his mostly mute object of obsession. At least Michael Gough shows up doing what he usually does, which is playing an asshole that gets his just desserts. Not that he particularly deserves his fate here, but again, something had to happen to get our troubled lead on the run.
(1968)
Dir - Alan Gibson
Overall: MEH
Taking a short story from Cornell Woolrich for its basis, Journey to the Unknown's "Jane Brown's Body" once again boast and interesting and singular premise, and once again comes up short of memorably executing that premise. We meet Stefanie Powers' title character who has just committed suicide for reasons that are eventually divulged in the finale, only to be resurrected by a scientist's experimental treatment. From there, she has lost all of her previous memories and has to be educated again from scratch, prompting her tutor David Buck to fall in love with her, convince her of who she actually is, and cue everybody in on the traumatic circumstances that lead to her demise. It is well performed and properly melodramatic when need be, but besides its one uncanny plot point, the story barely qualifies as a science fiction one and raises no interesting philosophical questions, let alone enticing set pieces. Instead, it just ends up being a predictable doomed romance played out for forty-nine minutes.
(1968)
Dir - Roy Ward Baker
Overall: GOOD
Amicus regulars Roy Ward Baker and Robert Bloch join forces for Journey to the Unknown's "The Indian Spirit Guide"; another fetching concept that does a better job at maintaining interest. Julie Harris plays a rich widow who made a pledge to her dead husband to try and contact him in the afterlife, prompting Tom Adams scheming "private investigator" to stage a series of phony seances in order for her to keep paying him. Adams eventually takes his ambitions too far, which irritates his co-conspirator love interest and ultimately puts him in the hands of legit supernatural interference, or so we are lead to believe. Debunking spiritualism had been a well-established trope by this point, and we get several sequences where Adams exposes all of the tricks. Though this deliberately takes the mysticism out of the proceedings, it forgoes merely being a Scooby-Doo styled ruse in its closing moments, which delivers some satisfying comeuppance while still leaving things open-ended.
(1968)
Dir - Robert Stevens
Overall: MEH
One of the more disturbing pieces of small screen fiction to emerge in the 1960s, "Miss Belle" takes its cue from Charles Beaumont's shorty story "Miss Gentilbelle", which presents an icky gender-manipulation scenario where a bitter and odious seamstress insists on raising her nephew as her niece. Its depiction of child abuse is not as exploitative as it could have been considering that this is a television program after all, but it is still eyebrow raising and uncomfortable. Much of this hinges on Barbara Jefford's appropriately vile performance, an actor with a face that spits her cruel manipulation and tormenting with determined coldness instead of outright diabolical glee. George Maharis' drifter who knocks down the house of cards is also morally dubious, but he comes off as a saint next to Jefford. Though comeuppance is mercifully delivered, the story is too one-note and relentlessly unpleasant to recommend, merely presenting us with a horrible person doing horrible things to a child for nearly an hour. Maybe some ghosts or something would have helped.
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