It's a rainy evening and a family is traveling in the country on a holiday. With the darkness drawing closer and the rain pouring down what better idea is there than to pick up a mysterious hitchhiker!?! Obviously not bothering to think of the safety of his wife and son the husband offers the guy a ride. When they proceed down the road he's quickly attacked by this mad man, causing the car to flip over and crash. The wife wakes up in the hospital, her son is alright and her husband sustained serious by not life threatening injuries to his throat. It's when she's requested to identify a body that may be that of the hitchhiker that her world begins to spiral, the body looks just like her husband!
The Two Faces of Evil starts off extremely well, jumping into the suspense right away with the hitchhiker's attack and keeping you guessing as to whats really going on when the wife awakes and finds the hospital staff acting very strange towards her. As the episode progresses it begins to get a little more bizarre as she begins to have suspicions that the man who survived the crash is not really her husband. The revelation at the end simply stumped me. I understood what was going on but there seemed to be no purpose to all the madness, thus the twist at the end was less of a surprise and more of a "so what" moment. Still overall the story managed to sustain a good level of suspense even though the payoff was a little weak.
7/10
The Two Faces of Evil as my favourite story of the Hammer series. It's as spooky now as when I first saw it 30 years ago.
ReplyDeleteI think the revelation at the end is that there's an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing going on - one of the characters even refers to pod people.