JOURNEY TO MIDNIGHT (1971) *
I love how this movie starts off with a little title card that reads, “In Color”; as if we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves. Then Sebastian Cabot appears onscreen as a fat ass British dude (AKA: Himself) who hosts two episodes of a Twilight Zone wannabe TV show from Hammer Studios. You know it’s not a good sign when he says, “You’ll be praying for it to end!”
The first episode is “Poor Butterfly” (*) Chad Everett gets invited to a costume party and shows up dressed like Jesse James. He has no idea why he’s there or who invited him, but he decides to mingle anyway. He meets this semi-decent looking broad and he falls in love with her but she blows him off and he leaves in a huff. Later, Chad learns from an old couple that everyone at the party had died in a fire… in 1929.
Poor Butterfly is fucking slow as molasses going uphill. It’s long on talk and short on anything resembling watchable. To make matters worse, you can immediately tell where it’s heading right from the get-go.
Usually I like Everett but he’s woefully miscast here. On top of that, he seems out of place with the mostly stuffy British cast. Bernard (“M” from the James Bond films) Lee is also around to provide lots of lengthy exposition at the end.
The second episode is called “The Indian Spirit Guide (* ½). Julie Harris stars as a wealthy woman who hires a psychic detective to learn more about her husband’s death. The guy is basically a con man who tries to bilk her out of her money by exposing fake mediums as frauds; thereby making himself seem genuine. Eventually he meets his match in a little old lady with the titular guide.
This episode isn’t quite as bad as it’s predecessor but it’s still rather dull. All the séance scenes get repetitive after a while and it takes forever for something vaguely supernatural to happen. It’s hard to believe that this sequence was directed by Roy Ward Baker and written by none other than Robert Bloch.
The lone bright spot comes from the scene where they bust up a transvestite medium’s séance by ripping his wig off. That part was kinda funny. Other than that, this movie is more like a Journey into Slumber.
AKA: Journey to the Unknown.