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A Passion For Horror
DVDs
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Roald Dahl's Tales of the UnexpectedThe Complete First SeriesAnglia Televison Ltd
The first series of Tales of the Unexpected was aired in 1979 and all of the episodes are based on short stories taken from anthologies written by Roald Dahl. Some of the stories are very sinister, while others swing more towards the comical. Most of them have a twist ending and all of them are very worth watching. They are Dahl's stories and it is he who introduces each episode. After the introductory music has finished Dahl is shown sitting in a chair, with a writing board in front of him, and he delivers a short talk about the upcoming story.
The first tale is called Man from the South. It co-stars a young Pamela Stevenson, and is set in Jamaica, where an old man proposes a bet to a young American. The old man likes to bet and he wants a good bet. A good, big bet and if he loses he will give the American his car. All the American needs to do is get his cigarette lighter to light ten times in a row. Of course, if his lighter fails to light just once he will lose, but nothing, the old man tells him, that he cannot afford to lose. Just the little finger of his left hand. The old man will -- "chop-chop" -- chop it off.
Mrs Bixby and the Colonel's Coat stars Michael Hordern and Julie Harris (who you might remember as Eleanor from 1963 film The Haunting). This one is not as dark as some of the other tales, but it does have a surprise ending and rather an amusing one at that. Mr Bixby is a New York dentist and for the last four years his wife has been faithfully visiting her ailing aunt once a month. Or so she tells him. In reality it is her lover, the Colonel, who she has been spending her weekends with. The Colonel though has decided to call things off and as a parting gift he gives her an expensive mink coat. Mrs Bixby loves the coat, but is faced with somewhat of a dilemma: what will she tell her husband. She can hardly tell him that her aunt could afford to lavish such an expensive gift on her. In the end Mrs Bixby comes up with quite a clever plan to ensure that she will be able to keep the coat, but avoid all of the questions about it.
William and Mary is a strange little tale. Elaine Stritch plays Mary,who is the widow of a college professor. By the sounds of it she didn't have much of a life when her husband was still around. He had very strict opinions about things like smoking and Mary was forbidden to do it. Well, he's dead now and Mary's has got the fags out. When Mary gets a mysterious letter from one of her husband's associates, though, she discovers that her old man had some rather strange ideas about how he wanted to spend his afterlife.
Lamb to the Slaughter is a story of betrayal and revenge. The story saw its first on-screen adaptation in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where it was Barbara Belle Geddes who starred as the loving wife with a dead husband sprawled across the living room floor. I actually prefer this version in which Susan George plays the wife and Brian Blessed is one of the detectives who arrives to investigate the murder of her husband, who was one of his colleagues and died before he even had time to eat his lunch. Never mind, it doesn't go to waste.
The Landlady is one of Dahl's darker tales and one of the scariest things about it is that -- Dahl states this in his introduction -- the events in the story could very easily happen in real life. A young man takes the train to Bath where he is due to start a new job. He makes a snap decision and instead of booking in at the hotel recommended to him he takes a cheaper one at a guest house run by an unusually friendly, if somewhat strange, old lady. The young man notices in the guest book that he is the only person to stay there in quite some time and some of the names in the book seem strangely familiar to him, but he can't remember where he has heard them before. By the time he has settled in, had a cup of tea and found out about the landlady's hobby, it is too late for him. This one truly is a tale of the unexpected and it is one of my favourites from the series.
Neck is another one of my favourite episodes and it has quite an impressive cast which includes Michael Aldridge, Joan Collins, Peter Bowles and Sir John Gielgud. After his father's death Sir Basil Thaunton inherited a media empire and was suddenly quite the catch. It was the lovely Natalia who caught him. Sir Basil's main passion in life, though, is art and he is a ferocious collector. When Sir Basil invites a young man down to his estate for the weekend Natlia takes an instant shine to the young man, much to the disdain of Sir Basil's faithful and incredibly perceptive butler, Jelks.
Edward the Conqueror is the strange story of what happens between an old married couple, Edward and Louisa, when a stray cat turns up at their door. Music loving Louisa becomes convinced that the cat contains the reincarnated soul of the composer Franz Liszt. Edward, however is not so easily convinced and develops a real dislike for their feline visitor.
A Dip in the Pool stars Jack Weston as William Botibol, a passenger on a luxury cruise ship. Each evening the ship has a lottery and the person who comes closest to predicting the ships mileage for that day wins a substantial cash prize. Mr Botibol intends for that person to be him and he is willing to go to quite extraordinary lengths to make sure of it.
The Way up to Heaven is a rather nasty and very entertaining tale about a lady who hates to be late. Whenever Mrs Foster starts to worry about being late -- for anything at all -- she starts to panic and her right eye begins to twitch. To make matters worse for the old girl, her husband seems to delight in deliberately holding her up and making her late. In the end though this worm turns and Mrs Foster, sick and tired of being delayed, leaves her husband behind, takes a taxi to the airport and then flies to Paris to see her daughter and grandchildren. As you can proably guess, her actions have some unexpected consequences.
DVD Information:
Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 Sound Mono Subtitles None Runtime 225
minutes
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