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Post by MS on Jun 2, 2020 11:31:08 GMT -5
I'm the Girl He Wants to Kill: Season 3, Episode 2. The girl is Ann Rogers played by Julie Sommars and there is an unnamed man who wants to kill her. The highlight of this episode is a lengthy sequence in the building of where Ann works as she is trapped inside it with the man. This has her going up and down in her efforts to evade her would be killer as well as making an unsuccessful attempt to call outside. This building sequence makes this episode worth viewing alone as it is brilliantly done. However just as things seems resolved when Ann finally got out of the building, the man gets dealt with when both are outside!
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Post by MS on Nov 19, 2020 6:07:59 GMT -5
Death to Sister Mary: Season 3, Episode 3. Starring Jennie Linden as the said Sister Mary. However she doesn't play a nun but an actress playing one in a TV show. Co-stars Robert Powell as a crazed fan of Sister Mary to the extent that he refers to her when meeting her as her character's name rather than her real name of Penny Stacey. The Powell character Mr Rook has formed an image of her that is not a reflection of reality. He has attacked or killed people associated with her and the show based on an image that he wants to preserved. All this sets up the denouement when Rook invites Penny to officially open the Sister Mary Fan Club and guess how many members this club has. A superb episode from series creator Brian Clemens.
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Post by MS on Jan 21, 2021 4:48:54 GMT -5
In the Steps of a Dead Man: Antepenultimate episode of season 3. Surprised to see a minor appearance by Christopher Benjamin as Medical Officer. An elderly couple and their perspective daughter-in-law await for the return of the son who has been honourably discharged from the military when tragedy strikes and the son dies. Some months has passed and the now former perspective daughter-in-law Sheila who is living near her former perspective-in-laws has an American friend Grace visiting. Not long after Grace's arrival, the elderly couple gets a visit from Marty Fuller who says he was their son's best friend from the military. Marty's impresses them by telling them how much he knows about them and their home, knowledge that came from the son. This intimate knowledge had the couple to convince Marty to stay with them for the long-term and in the process he romances Sheila. However Grace is suspicious of Marty especially with Sheila's late perspective husband never mentioning Marty in his correspondences to Sheila. In the course of this episode Marty has proved a sinister figure especially the real reason why is no longer with the military and Grace was certainly justified with her suspicions. The denouement to this was certainly chilling by what happens to Marty which was worsened what he had done against the couple that kindly took him in and what Grace decides to do with Marty.
Playing Grace is Skye Aubrey and I watched this episode on January 21 2021 and looked up on her afterwards. In a sad coincidence I found she died almost two months previously on November 27 2020 just 24 days before her 75th birthday on December 21.
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Post by MS on Jan 25, 2021 5:29:37 GMT -5
Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: Penultimate episode of season 3. Starring Lynda Day George. I first saw Day George as one of the operatives in the original Mission: Impossible and this came some years after the end of that series. Day George plays Cathy More who has been staying at a motel when she says that she can't find her cousin as they came in this motel together. However the proprietors denied that the cousin was ever here saying that they have only seen Cathy coming here. Feeling that she wasn't getting anywhere with the proprietors Cathy calls in the police. Quite an intriguing mystery on the missing cousin and even the question whether there was a cousin to start with. Especially intriguing when a certain revelation came around and then flashbacks of how all this came about. The ending comes with two twists the last of which certainly came close of succeeding in a task at hand.
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Post by MS on Jan 28, 2021 2:18:10 GMT -5
The Next Scream You Hear: Season 3 finale. Starring Dinsdale Landen as private investigator Matthew Earp. Unusually for an anthology series Landen previously played Earp in the first season's An Echo of Theresa. Unlike An Echo of Theresa where Landen as Earp had a supporting role, The Next Scream You Hear has him headlining it. Landen is superb as the episode's headliner. This has Earp investigating a case in which a Bernard Peel has been arrested for murdering his wife but he claims innocence on this. A brilliant mystery in which everything wasn't clear cut and an instance in which the obvious answer is the real answer but just presented in quite a different way. Came across a review in which the reviewer says that based on The Next Scream You Hear there is no reason why Landen as Earp wouldn't have given his own series with The Next Scream You Hear being a backdoor pilot and notwithstanding his previous supporting role in An Echo of Theresa. Ultimately however this is the last we see of Earp and that is a shame due to Landen's brilliant performance.
Due to Bernard Peel's surname this meant that his wife Jennifer is refer to Mrs Peel. This was written by series creator Brian Clemens and this is not first time that a Mrs Peel has something to do with Clemens as Clemens had previously worked on The Avengers and that too had a Mrs Peel, albeit Emma Peel. Given that Jennifer Peel was murdered, makes me wondered whether Clemens ever thought of killing off Emma Peel but wouldn't dare to do so and in a way fulfilled this desire by killing off a different Mrs Peel! Jennifer Peel is played by Marian Diamond and she had guest starred on The Avengers in Build a Better Mousetrap and that too was written by Clemens. However that is a Cathy Gale episode and Diamond narrowly missed Emma Peel as she made her debut six episodes later A Town of No Return.
Also in The Next Scream You Hear is Hendry (Frank Wylie). No doubt Clemens named this character after original Avengers lead Ian Hendry (Dr David Keel).
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Post by MS on Mar 10, 2021 9:47:22 GMT -5
Screamer: Season 4 opener. Starring Pamela Franklin. Written by series creator Brian Clemens, Franklin had earlier starred in the 1970 TV movie And Soon The Darkness also written by Clemens although based on the story by Dalek creator Terry Nation. In Screamer, Franklin plays Nicola Stevens who got attacked by a man. Afterwards she sees the image of her attacker on the faces of virtually every man that she sees. Quite enthralling piece to start the fourth season delivered brilliantly by Franklin and such a tragedy on the character that she portrays. I didn't fail to notice however that Screamer operates on a similar premise to the Alfred Hitchc(o)ck Presents episode Revenge which came many years before and Screamer came way before the remake of that Alfred Hitchc(o)ck Presents episode. Screamer has a lady cop played by Carinthia West who I found pretty. Incidentally I found that Franklin was born on February 3 1950 exactly 15 years before my wife Kathleen Kinmont.
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Post by MS on Mar 18, 2021 10:59:26 GMT -5
Nurse Will Make It Better: Season 4, Episode 2. Featuring Patrick Troughton. Troughton's name however is not included in the title sequence despite the fact that his character Lyall provides a resolution to this episode. Also in it was Wendy Williams. This episode came on February 24 1975 and viewers had recently seen her as Vira in Doctor Who: The Ark In Space, the final episode of which came just nine days earlier on February 15. Starring Diana Dors as the said nurse who came to the residence of a diplomat due to one his daughters becoming paraplegic after an accident. There is something very sinister about this nurse and Dors played her superbly. Almost from the moment when she first appears it becomes clear that this nurse making it better is not because of any benevolence from her. It is certainly shocking who this nurse turns out to be and the way Lyall acts in the resolution. The nurse's main adversary is Ruth, one of the diplomat's other daughters and played by Andrea Marcovicci who I found to be beautiful and acted as a perfect foil against the nurse. On seeing this, it felt like The Omen and incidentally this came out a year before that film and Troughton was also in that.
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Post by MS on Apr 16, 2021 5:05:18 GMT -5
Night Is the Time for Killing: Season 4, Episode 3. Starring Judy Geeson and Charles Gray. Another cast member is Edward Burnham who appears briefly at the beginning. Coincidentally shortly after seeing this I rewatched The Avengers 5.2 The Fear Merchants and that too has Burnham briefly at the beginning and The Avengers is a previous show that Thriller creator and Night Is the Time for Killing writer Brian Clemens had worked on. Judy Geeson plays a bereaved widow who still mourning the death of her husband who had died the year before who has trip on a train when she witnessed the dead body of the Gray character. However when she reported this death, the Gray character turns up alive. Quite enthralling episode set on a train and how the resolution is achieved after the main characters are off the train.
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Post by MS on Jun 30, 2021 9:23:40 GMT -5
Killer with Two Faces: Antepenultimate episode of season 4. Starring Ian Hendry. Hendry was the original lead actor of The Avengers and Thriller creator Brian Clemens had also worked on The Avengers. Clemens later brought Hendry back into Avengers territory in The New Avengers 1.3 To Catch A Rat not as his old Avengers character Dr David Keel but the different character of Irwin Gunner. Also starring Donna Mills in the last of three appearances in the series and still before Knots Landing for her. This is definitely a fine Thriller swansong for Ms Mills. We first meet the Hendry character in what I initially thought was a prison when he got treated by a doctor. It is then the Hendry character knocks off the doctor and steals his clothes as he makes his escape. It then turns out that it isn't a prison but an asylum for the criminally insane. We then see the Hendry character in the residence of a woman who he then kills. After that Hendry is on a train where he meets Patty Heron (Donna Mills). Hendry says that he is an architect and the two hit off well and agrees to her request to look into with her a house that she wanted to buy and wants his expert opinion on it. It soon dawns on me that Hendry is playing two characters and ultimately revealed that he is playing identical twin brothers. The title is therefore misleading as only one of the brothers, not both of them, is a killer. The architect Bob Spelling reads from the paper that his said brother Terry has escaped from the asylum. Bob goes to the asylum to follow up on Terry's escape. At the same time Terry got to Bob's place when he picks up the call from Patty about their date with the house which Bob had forgotten about when he read Terry's escape. The climax has Patty encountering the two brothers together and has to be convinced which is which. Extremely good this climax with the way it wrap the episode up for this superb episode.
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Post by MS on Aug 7, 2021 1:38:23 GMT -5
A Killer In Every Corner: Penultimate episode of season 4. Starring the beautiful Joanna Pettet and Patrick Magee. Joanna plays Sylvia Dee, one of three students who got invited to the house of a prestigious professor played by Magee for a stay for a study he is conducting. It turns out that the professor is housing an asylum of killers which saw Sylvia's fellow students being killed and she fights for her life to get out of there. A magnificent episode carried beautifully Joanna and Magee being sinister as the said professor.
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Post by MS on Oct 7, 2021 2:34:22 GMT -5
Where the Action Is: Season 4 finale. Intriguing story about a gambler being brought to a billionaire's house to face a gambling duel and literally a duel at that as a gun is involved. Quite enthralling this episode and somehow I should not surprised there was cheating on the part of the billionaire.
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Post by MS on Dec 3, 2021 5:31:00 GMT -5
If It's a Man, Hang Up: Season 5 opener. Starring Carol Lynley. Sadly Lynley passed away in 2019. Among the other cast members is Gerald Harper who amazingly is still around as he turned 90 earlier this year. Another cast member is John Cater whose character's occupation is not that dissimilar to the one his character had later on in Duchess of Duke Street (1976-77). Lynley plays Suzy Martin a model who gets stalked when a man persistently calls her on the phone. What makes this episode truly works is that it presents red herrings on who the perpetrator could be but immediately realised that they couldn't be the one. It soon presents a suspect who convincingly could be the one only for the suspect to be someone quite unexpected. A very well suspense of an episode.
I had a teacher Maria Kanakis who claimed to have gone through the same experience Suzy had but turned out that she made it all up. If It's a Man, Hang Up had Suzy get a visit from her brother who says that he had been at a fraternity dinner. On the subject of a fraternity, this episode came on April 12 1975 exactly ten years before the release of the movie Fraternity Vacation which has a scene I revisit very often due to how it was performed by my wives Barbara Crampton and Kathleen Kinmont.
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Post by MS on Apr 7, 2022 14:41:30 GMT -5
The Double Kill: Season 5, Episode 2. Got a shock when I saw Peter Bowles' name in the credits as he had recently died on March 22 2022 as I saw the previous episode If It's a Man, Hang Up, quite a while before that. Bowles plays a police superintendent who rightly believes that a man had made an attempt on his wife's life. To be more precisely it was a burglar that he paid to have her killed. However the man's alibi did not hold up making him to look like the suspect. For much of the time that we see the Bowles character, a colleague expressed his outrage with the method that he used in this investigation. We the viewer do not know what he was referring to until it is revealed that the wife isn't dead. She is instead alive in the hospital. The Bowles character lied to the man about the death of his wife hoping this would help revealed that he is the murderer. However the wife could only identified that the burglar had attempted to kill her. This would put the man in the clear if it weren't for the fact that he went to the burglar's place and killed him. The man had just stepped out of the burglar's place when the Bowles character and his colleague to arrest the burglar and informing the man that he is off the hook. That is where it ends as the said cops approached the burglar's doorsteps. The viewer therefore presume that the man killed the burglar for nothing and is therefore gets arrested for this murder unless he miraculously found a way to get out of this. Oh my what a twist this presents.
At the beginning of this episode there was another burglar and he was played by Griffiths Davies and years earlier he was in the Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks (which by coincidence I am seeing the animated version of) in which his character Kennedy does some burglary only to be exterminated by a Dalek.
Well there are no Daleks in The Double Kill and we last we see the burglar as played by Davies alive.
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Post by MS on May 2, 2022 13:40:46 GMT -5
Won't Write Home Mom - I'm Dead: Season 5, Episode 3. Starring Pamela Franklin and she previously strred in the season 4 opener Screamer. Here Franklin plays Abby, a young American woman who comes to the UK to stay with her half cousin who she hasn't seen in a long time. She also there to look for her boyfriend but the cousin denies that he has ever been here. It becomes apparent that something is off with the cousin and that he is hiding something. The mystery of this is well maintained leading to a very good resolution to this.
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Post by MS on Jun 26, 2022 12:49:20 GMT -5
The Crazy Kill: Season 5, Episode 4. Starring Denholm Elliott and Anthony Valentine. An enthralling episode in which a couple has been taken hostage by a couple of escaped prisoners. The problem is compounded when a visitor for the wife came by and the prisoners had to pretend to be the couple's servants for a little while. These prisoners are ultimately caught but a shock came afterwards by what one of the couple had done before all this happened and this situation was used to its advantage. Quite well done how this new revelation got handled from there on in.
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