Thriller (Part One)
[I wrote this post a month ago, but it took me a while to do the pictures and fix it up. I'm catching up now, though!]
I have returned to watching some Thriller installments (a 1970s ITC/ATV film anthology created and frequently written by Brian Clemens, of The Avengers and Professionals fame. It's not like The Avengers, though. Brian Clemens has clearly forgotten the possibility that sometimes women can sort stuff out themselves without being rescued by men. If they're rescued at all, this being a thriller anthology.)
Anyway, do you want to hear all about how innocent American tourists were terrorised every time they came to Britain in the 1970s? Surely, you must. I will oblige, by reviewing my viewing so far, before I forget. (This is a 16-disc set!)
Lady Killer
In which a young American tourist happens upon Robert Powell in a seaside town. A whirlwind romance ensues, but, alas, Robert Powell only wants his bride for a murderous get-rich scheme and is going to kill her! He takes her to an isolated spot, and behaves as suspiciously as he can, but she doesn't pick up on the clues. Meanwhile, Robert Powell's actual love is an evil Tara King from The Avengers (Linda Thorson), who spends a lot of time lurking nearby until it transpires that the young American tourist is an heiress, so he decides it would be better to murder Tara King instead. (It is a literal shag, marry, cliff situation.) He winds up deaded. In this series, all the villains wind up dead/locked up, or else everybody winds up dead.)
Possession
This time a young woman has married John Carson. What could go wrong? Except for the fact that there's something in the cellar and John Carson has forgotten that he was secretly a serial killer. Old habits die hard, and he murders the cool local white witch, the rotter.
Cool local medium. Doomed, though, alas.
Evil John Carson. (He had just forgotten temporarily his evilness; it can happen...)
Someone at the Top of the Stairs
Two young American students looking for digs rent a room in the weirdest shared building in London and don't, like all sensible people, run out screaming at the end of the day. After all, it's cheap, even if Alethea Charlton is being sinister and people keep vanishing and peeping Toms watch when you have a shower.
It turns out there is an evil warlock with a weird Victorian beard living in the attic and everyone else is in fact dead and only manifestations of him, which is why they all talk in the same strange catchphrases. Our American heroine (Donna Mills) winds up possessed by him. Everybody else dies.
Not put off by 100 years of black magic and murder, Donna Mills will be back to be terrorised by more Brits later this disc set.
Not a good thing to find carved into the inner door of your wardrobe.
An Echo of Theresa
An American businessman comes to England with his wife for the first time and keeps remembering having been here before. Things get pretty bad, so they call in Dinsdale Landen to help out, until it turns out the American was accidentally brainwashed one time, but nobody knew, including his captors.
Dinsdale Landen as an expensive, exclusive PI who is cooler than you. (And definitely cooler than Frank Marker, who would faint off at the mere mention of his fee. (Frank <3))
Murder in Mind
Richard Johnson is a murder mystery writer who is planning to put one of his stories into action, only a practice run accidentally leaves his wife (the planned victim, Zena Walker) to think that she has committed the murder and confesses to a young Donald Gee at the police station. Luckily for her, PC Gee can't quite leave it alone, regardless of the unlikeliness and a demotion along the way. Strangely, no Americans are involved.
The best bit, though, is that clearly both the writer and props people had too much fun creating Richard Johnson's murder novels with covers and everything. I appreciated their efforts muchly:
A Place to Die
Proof that all quaint English villages are evil, if you needed any more of it. A young American woman marries a doctor and moves into a quaint English village (TM) only to find out that she is viewed as the second coming by the local branch of devil worshippers.
Do not be deceived! This is the Village of Evil. Again.
I am always stupidly amused at this trope, though, and this one had the bonus of an ending where they arrested the whole village, so I was happy.
File it Under Fear
This has the most amazing cast, but was the worst so far. Possibly it's just because I've worked in a library and creeps/perverts in libraries are only too real, so... urgh. The amazing cast merely raised the thing from terrible to a kind of awful unholiness: Maureen Lipman, as the librarian (she accidentally kills a passing American, just in case any Americans were beginning to feel safe), Jan Francis sensibly legs it halfway through, and Richard O'Callaghan and John Le Mesurier divide up the creep-honours, but alas, the pervert of a serial killer is John Le Mesurier, for which there is not enough NOPE in the world.
(This put me right off the series for a bit.)
Jan Francis
Maureen Lipman. (Who's such a terrible, frumpy, spinster librarian blah blah blah, did I tell you how much I hated this episode?)
And Maureen Lipman's mother was Madame Fanny (Rose Hill).
The Eyes Have It
Some assassins plan to shoot a Famous Man (unnamed, but he was pretty much the saviour of the world according to the episode) and set up in a blind college, cos, ha, they won't get much resistance from a group of blind students, right?
Wrong. The blind students include Gerry and Brian from New Tricks (aka Dennis Waterman and Alun Armstrong) and Sinead Cusack, who manage to turn the tables and stop the assassins (Peter Vaughn, Leslie Schofield, and William Marlowe). This was not exactly brilliant on the PC treatment of blindness, but great for wee Dennis Waterman, Alun Armstrong, Sinead Cusack, and anything was better than the library episode with pervert John Le Mesurier.
(There were no Americans. Unless the Great Man was American. It's entirely possible.)
This cap tells you all you need to know about the treatment of blindness in this, really.
Gan turns up for five minutes as a police inspector. He has a dodgy 'tache and is hopeless. ("Ha ha, like assassins would be lurking in here! lol." The poice in this series are frequently useless, as are boyfriends. ("Women, they get these strange fancies about people trying to kill them all the time. Take no notice!")
Because Leslie Schofield is in everything ever.
Spell of Evil
A witch (Diane Cilento) who marries rich men and then kills him, sets her sights on Edward de Souza, first offing his wife and then marrying him. Luckily, he has a particularly great secretary called Liz (Jennifer Daniel), who knows when to call in random magic experts from the British Museum (I'm sure they have loads of them) to break the spell and save him.
(Americans are still giving Britain an understandably wide berth.)
Liz, aka Awesome Secretary. If you find yourself in the clutches of a centuries old witch, you need an Awesome Secretary.
The rescuing obviously isn't completely effective, though, because he still winds up as a Transient Being.
Only a Scream Away
Hayley Mills gets married to a nice bloke, only to get terrorised by a childhood playmate, the spawn of Satan, possibly. He cunningly went away to America and came back sounding American, thus disguising his evil Britishness. He killed her excellent Auntie Liza, (up there with the crime of killing the cool local white witch) and then tried to lock her in a converted windmill, but luckily Jeremy Bulloch came to her rescue for no reason whatsoever unless he was stalking her himself.
Still do not be deceived: all quaint villages are evil! So are all the character actors!
Spawn of Satan.
Once the Killing Starts
An American professor at Oxford goes on a killing spree, after murdering his wife. I mean, that's the plotline, but we all know he's just trying to cull some of these murderous Brits before they terrorise any more innocent Americans who only wanted to visit the Tower of London. A reasonable plan, but he starts off with Michael Kitchen and Angharad Rees, which seems misguided.
"Yay, am totally going to murder all the Brits before they get me!!"
I mean, going by this set alone, it's not young Inspector Foyle and Demelza Carne you need to get rid of, it's Robert Palmer, Michael Jayston, and John Carson. And, generally, you can't go wrong with targeting Peter Jeffrey, Julian Glover, or Jerome Willis. I'd add Bernard Archard, but he's usually undead, so there's not much point.
Eventually Gary Watson decides he's had enough fun and arrests him. I think he could have arrested him a bit sooner, though, but the police have strange priorities in this series.
Kiss Me and Die
All Quaint Villages are Evil, did I not tell you that? An American detective (George Chakiris) in search of his brother winds up in a quaint English village where the locals are cagey about talking to outsiders and there's a lord of the manor who won't have visitors and who has a sinister gamekeeper. Inexplicably, he stays on despite these obvious signs of Evil, and still doesn't run away even after it turns out that the lord of the manor is Anton Diffring with an Edgar Allan Poe fixation who is keeping Jenny Agutter shut up away from other men, and his gamekeeper is Travis I. You could only get more obviously sinister if you changed the village name sign to "Village of Evil: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here." (Maybe this is why it's the Americans who get terrorised? The Brits run for the hills; the Americans think it's some quaint little old English custom until they find themselves chained up in the cellar...)
Travis. More effective than Gan, though.
You just can't help some people. George Chakiris nearly gets to re-enact some favourite scenes from Poe for real, while poor Russell Hunter and his pet rat Sally get murdered by Travis. Luckily there is gunpowder enough to bring the house down at the end.
Poor Russell Hunter, he and Sally are doomed! Tragic.
I suppose, to be fair, Jenny Agutter is worth staying for. But still. If you ignore all the signs of evil you deserve to be forced to re-enact Edgar Allan Poe!
One Deadly Owner
A young American fashion model buys a haunted Rolls Royce. She's played by Donna Mills, who was already terrorised and killed once in Someone at the Top of the Stairs (and my cover details tell me she's going to return twice more. Some Americans just love being terrorised by British character actors, what can you do?) In compensation, she gets to go out with Jeremy Brett, but alas! He is, of course, the murderer. Luckily Laurence Payne likes wandering round the woods with his gun and bags him in time.
Ring Once For Death
Nyree Dawn Porter is the rich widow of an American who moves back to England and employs Michael Jayston. He is the most perfect butler ever, except he slow poisons his employers, makes them sign over their money to him, and then finishes them off. Nyree Dawn Porter is not signing anything, though, and eventually gets rescued from his clutches, but not before her American suitor gets murdered and buried somewhere in Somerset, because obviously Thriller wouldn't be Thriller if unfortunate Americans weren't getting murdered by sinister Brits.
"Women, lol, so unaccountable, they make desperate phonecalls to say they need help, which are then mysteriously cut off ALL THE TIME!" (As I said, strange priorities and random sexism, that's the police for you.)
The perfect butler, if only he weren't so inclined to kill you.
And that is where I am up to so far. That only takes me to Disc 5! (I missed out one episode called The Colour of Blood because it looked grim and I was tired of serial killer eps.)
This post is flippant and pic-heavy because I don't think Thriller deserves more from me; also horror is not my genre, so I can't tell you were Brian Clemens nicked all his ideas, but I can't imagine he came up with 16 DVDs worth of weekly horror scenarios without nicking them from somewhere. Answers on a postcard...?
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Please click through to comment. -- Current comments:
I have returned to watching some Thriller installments (a 1970s ITC/ATV film anthology created and frequently written by Brian Clemens, of The Avengers and Professionals fame. It's not like The Avengers, though. Brian Clemens has clearly forgotten the possibility that sometimes women can sort stuff out themselves without being rescued by men. If they're rescued at all, this being a thriller anthology.)
Anyway, do you want to hear all about how innocent American tourists were terrorised every time they came to Britain in the 1970s? Surely, you must. I will oblige, by reviewing my viewing so far, before I forget. (This is a 16-disc set!)
Lady Killer
In which a young American tourist happens upon Robert Powell in a seaside town. A whirlwind romance ensues, but, alas, Robert Powell only wants his bride for a murderous get-rich scheme and is going to kill her! He takes her to an isolated spot, and behaves as suspiciously as he can, but she doesn't pick up on the clues. Meanwhile, Robert Powell's actual love is an evil Tara King from The Avengers (Linda Thorson), who spends a lot of time lurking nearby until it transpires that the young American tourist is an heiress, so he decides it would be better to murder Tara King instead. (It is a literal shag, marry, cliff situation.) He winds up deaded. In this series, all the villains wind up dead/locked up, or else everybody winds up dead.)
Possession
This time a young woman has married John Carson. What could go wrong? Except for the fact that there's something in the cellar and John Carson has forgotten that he was secretly a serial killer. Old habits die hard, and he murders the cool local white witch, the rotter.
Cool local medium. Doomed, though, alas.
Evil John Carson. (He had just forgotten temporarily his evilness; it can happen...)
Someone at the Top of the Stairs
Two young American students looking for digs rent a room in the weirdest shared building in London and don't, like all sensible people, run out screaming at the end of the day. After all, it's cheap, even if Alethea Charlton is being sinister and people keep vanishing and peeping Toms watch when you have a shower.
It turns out there is an evil warlock with a weird Victorian beard living in the attic and everyone else is in fact dead and only manifestations of him, which is why they all talk in the same strange catchphrases. Our American heroine (Donna Mills) winds up possessed by him. Everybody else dies.
Not put off by 100 years of black magic and murder, Donna Mills will be back to be terrorised by more Brits later this disc set.
Not a good thing to find carved into the inner door of your wardrobe.
An Echo of Theresa
An American businessman comes to England with his wife for the first time and keeps remembering having been here before. Things get pretty bad, so they call in Dinsdale Landen to help out, until it turns out the American was accidentally brainwashed one time, but nobody knew, including his captors.
Dinsdale Landen as an expensive, exclusive PI who is cooler than you. (And definitely cooler than Frank Marker, who would faint off at the mere mention of his fee. (Frank <3))
Murder in Mind
Richard Johnson is a murder mystery writer who is planning to put one of his stories into action, only a practice run accidentally leaves his wife (the planned victim, Zena Walker) to think that she has committed the murder and confesses to a young Donald Gee at the police station. Luckily for her, PC Gee can't quite leave it alone, regardless of the unlikeliness and a demotion along the way. Strangely, no Americans are involved.
The best bit, though, is that clearly both the writer and props people had too much fun creating Richard Johnson's murder novels with covers and everything. I appreciated their efforts muchly:
A Place to Die
Proof that all quaint English villages are evil, if you needed any more of it. A young American woman marries a doctor and moves into a quaint English village (TM) only to find out that she is viewed as the second coming by the local branch of devil worshippers.
Do not be deceived! This is the Village of Evil. Again.
I am always stupidly amused at this trope, though, and this one had the bonus of an ending where they arrested the whole village, so I was happy.
File it Under Fear
This has the most amazing cast, but was the worst so far. Possibly it's just because I've worked in a library and creeps/perverts in libraries are only too real, so... urgh. The amazing cast merely raised the thing from terrible to a kind of awful unholiness: Maureen Lipman, as the librarian (she accidentally kills a passing American, just in case any Americans were beginning to feel safe), Jan Francis sensibly legs it halfway through, and Richard O'Callaghan and John Le Mesurier divide up the creep-honours, but alas, the pervert of a serial killer is John Le Mesurier, for which there is not enough NOPE in the world.
(This put me right off the series for a bit.)
Jan Francis
Maureen Lipman. (Who's such a terrible, frumpy, spinster librarian blah blah blah, did I tell you how much I hated this episode?)
And Maureen Lipman's mother was Madame Fanny (Rose Hill).
The Eyes Have It
Some assassins plan to shoot a Famous Man (unnamed, but he was pretty much the saviour of the world according to the episode) and set up in a blind college, cos, ha, they won't get much resistance from a group of blind students, right?
Wrong. The blind students include Gerry and Brian from New Tricks (aka Dennis Waterman and Alun Armstrong) and Sinead Cusack, who manage to turn the tables and stop the assassins (Peter Vaughn, Leslie Schofield, and William Marlowe). This was not exactly brilliant on the PC treatment of blindness, but great for wee Dennis Waterman, Alun Armstrong, Sinead Cusack, and anything was better than the library episode with pervert John Le Mesurier.
(There were no Americans. Unless the Great Man was American. It's entirely possible.)
This cap tells you all you need to know about the treatment of blindness in this, really.
Gan turns up for five minutes as a police inspector. He has a dodgy 'tache and is hopeless. ("Ha ha, like assassins would be lurking in here! lol." The poice in this series are frequently useless, as are boyfriends. ("Women, they get these strange fancies about people trying to kill them all the time. Take no notice!")
Because Leslie Schofield is in everything ever.
Spell of Evil
A witch (Diane Cilento) who marries rich men and then kills him, sets her sights on Edward de Souza, first offing his wife and then marrying him. Luckily, he has a particularly great secretary called Liz (Jennifer Daniel), who knows when to call in random magic experts from the British Museum (I'm sure they have loads of them) to break the spell and save him.
(Americans are still giving Britain an understandably wide berth.)
Liz, aka Awesome Secretary. If you find yourself in the clutches of a centuries old witch, you need an Awesome Secretary.
The rescuing obviously isn't completely effective, though, because he still winds up as a Transient Being.
Only a Scream Away
Hayley Mills gets married to a nice bloke, only to get terrorised by a childhood playmate, the spawn of Satan, possibly. He cunningly went away to America and came back sounding American, thus disguising his evil Britishness. He killed her excellent Auntie Liza, (up there with the crime of killing the cool local white witch) and then tried to lock her in a converted windmill, but luckily Jeremy Bulloch came to her rescue for no reason whatsoever unless he was stalking her himself.
Still do not be deceived: all quaint villages are evil! So are all the character actors!
Spawn of Satan.
Once the Killing Starts
An American professor at Oxford goes on a killing spree, after murdering his wife. I mean, that's the plotline, but we all know he's just trying to cull some of these murderous Brits before they terrorise any more innocent Americans who only wanted to visit the Tower of London. A reasonable plan, but he starts off with Michael Kitchen and Angharad Rees, which seems misguided.
"Yay, am totally going to murder all the Brits before they get me!!"
I mean, going by this set alone, it's not young Inspector Foyle and Demelza Carne you need to get rid of, it's Robert Palmer, Michael Jayston, and John Carson. And, generally, you can't go wrong with targeting Peter Jeffrey, Julian Glover, or Jerome Willis. I'd add Bernard Archard, but he's usually undead, so there's not much point.
Eventually Gary Watson decides he's had enough fun and arrests him. I think he could have arrested him a bit sooner, though, but the police have strange priorities in this series.
Kiss Me and Die
All Quaint Villages are Evil, did I not tell you that? An American detective (George Chakiris) in search of his brother winds up in a quaint English village where the locals are cagey about talking to outsiders and there's a lord of the manor who won't have visitors and who has a sinister gamekeeper. Inexplicably, he stays on despite these obvious signs of Evil, and still doesn't run away even after it turns out that the lord of the manor is Anton Diffring with an Edgar Allan Poe fixation who is keeping Jenny Agutter shut up away from other men, and his gamekeeper is Travis I. You could only get more obviously sinister if you changed the village name sign to "Village of Evil: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here." (Maybe this is why it's the Americans who get terrorised? The Brits run for the hills; the Americans think it's some quaint little old English custom until they find themselves chained up in the cellar...)
Travis. More effective than Gan, though.
You just can't help some people. George Chakiris nearly gets to re-enact some favourite scenes from Poe for real, while poor Russell Hunter and his pet rat Sally get murdered by Travis. Luckily there is gunpowder enough to bring the house down at the end.
Poor Russell Hunter, he and Sally are doomed! Tragic.
I suppose, to be fair, Jenny Agutter is worth staying for. But still. If you ignore all the signs of evil you deserve to be forced to re-enact Edgar Allan Poe!
One Deadly Owner
A young American fashion model buys a haunted Rolls Royce. She's played by Donna Mills, who was already terrorised and killed once in Someone at the Top of the Stairs (and my cover details tell me she's going to return twice more. Some Americans just love being terrorised by British character actors, what can you do?) In compensation, she gets to go out with Jeremy Brett, but alas! He is, of course, the murderer. Luckily Laurence Payne likes wandering round the woods with his gun and bags him in time.
Ring Once For Death
Nyree Dawn Porter is the rich widow of an American who moves back to England and employs Michael Jayston. He is the most perfect butler ever, except he slow poisons his employers, makes them sign over their money to him, and then finishes them off. Nyree Dawn Porter is not signing anything, though, and eventually gets rescued from his clutches, but not before her American suitor gets murdered and buried somewhere in Somerset, because obviously Thriller wouldn't be Thriller if unfortunate Americans weren't getting murdered by sinister Brits.
"Women, lol, so unaccountable, they make desperate phonecalls to say they need help, which are then mysteriously cut off ALL THE TIME!" (As I said, strange priorities and random sexism, that's the police for you.)
The perfect butler, if only he weren't so inclined to kill you.
And that is where I am up to so far. That only takes me to Disc 5! (I missed out one episode called The Colour of Blood because it looked grim and I was tired of serial killer eps.)
This post is flippant and pic-heavy because I don't think Thriller deserves more from me; also horror is not my genre, so I can't tell you were Brian Clemens nicked all his ideas, but I can't imagine he came up with 16 DVDs worth of weekly horror scenarios without nicking them from somewhere. Answers on a postcard...?
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Please click through to comment. -- Current comments: