Hammer House of Horror (1980) - The Two Faces of Evil

Original Air Date - November 29, 1980

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 

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Hammer House of Horror (1980) - The Silent Scream

Original Air Date - October 25, 1980

Chuck Spillers (Brian Cox) has recently been released from prison for robbery. While inside he was visited multiple times by a seemingly kind old gentlemen named Martin Blueck (Peter Cushing). Upon his release Blueck gave him some money for a new start, and on his way home to his wife he stops by Blueck's pet shop to thank him and is offered a job feeding Blueck's exotic personal collection of wild animals.  Blueck claims he has trained them by keeping them in cages that are open on one side but electrically charged, which keeps them from escaping.  Certain sounds relay to the animals that the electricity is turned off and safe for them eat their food, which is put outside their cages. Chuck agrees to feed Blueck's animals but quickly falls back into old habits when he spots a safe on the wall. In an attempt to open it Chuck falls into Blueck's trap and ends up in a cage of his own!

The Silent Scream is a top notch example of gritty, thrilling, Hammer horror and suspense in which you're constantly screaming at, or along with the characters in some hope of guiding them in the right direction or preventing them from making a horrible mistake. Both a young Brian Cox and Hammer veteran Peter Cushing provide excellent performances, especially Cushing as he plays an excellent nutcase. The story also ends with a very good (although implausible) twist for both characters, and best of all the episode moves along at a very swift pace, after the first ten minutes, constantly keeping you on edge.

8/10

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Hammer House of Horror (1980) - The House That Bled To Death

Original Air Date - October 11, 1980

William and Emma Peters unknowingly purchase a house where only a few years prior a man poisoned his wife and chopped her up into little pieces.  When they move in errie things begin to happen almost immediately, the doors lock themselves, the gas turns on and blood drips from the walls!  William thinks it all simply a part of his family's imagination, but things keep randomly happening, the family cat is found killed, blood spews from the water pipes and even their neighbors across the street, start to see things when they come to visit.  Is it the ghost of the murdered wife, or someone's idea of a cruel trick?

The House That Bled To Death succeeds in adapting a creepy aspect to it yet it spends a little too long with the anticipation of the scare that it begins to drag the story down.  The fact that all these unnatural things keep occurring around the house that A) the wife (Emma) and the couple's daughter Sophie continue to stay is an utter stretch, and B) the fact that the husband continually sloughs it off as their imagination and never believes them indicates that there's obviously some short of spin to the story, and there is.  Fortunately the twist happens to be a pretty decent and quite surprising and ends up making the sometimes procrastinating story worth the watch.

6/10

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