ISBN: 0014381081428

This is a prize DVD, obviously for television buffs -- who will get to see an otherwise (and unjustly) unaired suspense series from the late '50s -- and for fans of Boris Karloff and Patr… More...

This is a prize DVD, obviously for television buffs -- who will get to see an otherwise (and unjustly) unaired suspense series from the late '50s -- and for fans of Boris Karloff and Patrick Macnee, and of directors Herbert L. Strock, Curt Siodmak, and George Waggner. The Veil was an anthology series devoted to the paranormal and the supernatural, similar to the subsequent Karloff-hosted series Thriller, as well as to One Step Beyond; it was created and produced by Frank P. Bibas, a maker of commercials and later an Academy Award-winning documentary director, and 11 episodes were shot at Hal Roach Studios, but money problems being experienced at the time by the film company resulted in their being shelved. They sat, unseen -- except for some wholly unauthorized re-editings of four of the shows into feature-length television films -- until 40 years later, and Something Weird has now brought them out. The Veil might well have been a success, had it aired as planned: Television was filled in those days with anthology shows, and the public had developed a fixation on the paranormal, heralded by the best-seller The Search for Bridey Murphy (which spawned at least two film imitators, The She Creature and The Undead), which told of a woman's supposed regression into a past life through hypnosis. Karloff's presence and the work of several highly talented directors, along with decent production values, would have made it fully competitive. Today, these episodes are, at worst, interesting little 25-minute stories, and mostly have a good air of suspense and tension that still lingers more than 40 years later. Even Girl on the Road, a seemingly predictable ghost story, has several nice directorial touches. One of the treats for fans of Karloff is watching him essay a series of varying roles, including a comically bumbling British police sergeant, an aging man in a wheelchair hiding a terrible secret, and a psychiatrist at New York's Bellevue Hospital. Most of the stories deal with premonitions, messages from beyond the grave, and other examples of psychic phenomenon. Summer Heat, one of the better episodes, involving a tormented man (Harry Bartell, in a great performance) who witnesses a murder that, as he comes to realize, hasn't happened yet, owes a bit to Cornell Woolrich's book The Night Has a Thousand Eyes and the feature film (starring Edward G. Robinson) made from it, but its opening sequence of this show also borrows a bit from Elmer Rice's Street Scene. Paul Bryer, a working character actor (who also turned up in The Time Element pilot for The Twilight Zone), is also good as the tough detective working the case. Strangely enough, the most interesting episode of all is Jack the Ripper, which was not shot as part of The Veil but done for some British anthology series of the mid-'50s and licensed by the producers. Seeing Naill McGinnis in anything is a worthwhile pursuit, but he is excellent as the conscience-stricken man who sees the crimes of the Ripper in his dreams; this was done around the same time as his work in Curse of the Demon, and it's delightful to see him have a try at another haunted character during this same phase in his career. As a bonus, the producers have included two episodes from the supernatural anthology series 13 Demon Street, hosted by Lon Chaney Jr. and created by writer/director Curt Siodmak, which was made in Sweden and never aired in the United States (though several of the shows were chopped up and assembled in a film called The Devil's Messenger). These are interesting as historical artifacts and for the oddly disquieting mood with which the stories are told, and for Chaney's introduction, in which he looks and acts about as surly as his convicted murderer in The Indestructible Man. The menus on both discs open automatically on start-up, after a clever edit of one of Karloff's introductions from the shows, and are very easy to manipulate; a separate time readout is available for each show, all of which are divided into three chapters each. DVD>DVD>Dvd Horror,Thriller>Dvd Thriller,Horror>Dvd Horror,Thri, Image Entertainment Core >10<