An adulterer, Talmudge(John Ericson) attempting to find his hotel, instead is left by his taxi driver in the rain nearby a mortuary, it's mortician offering him refuge from the storm. While inside, our mortician relates the fates of four customers to him and we are all witnesses to what happened to them.
Low budget anthology, perhaps too cheap to really be that effective. Most of the tales presented lack strong story-telling and end way too abruptly. Clearly modeled after the Amicus chillers. I have no idea why this was called "Alien Zone." The first and second tales really leave much to be desired. A school teacher who hates children(!)finds herself besieged within her very home by those very ones she so despises. The kids(..at first wearing clown masks, evoking Michael Myers from Halloween, later carrying the appearance of possible vampiric ghouls) as they close in on their prey, cornering her as the camera distorts the frame, colors out of control, is quite thrilling, even if what leads up to it isn't. The second tale consists of a psychotic photographer who records women he kills on a movie camera. The fourth tale, which doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, displays an office employee being subjected to torture within a building complex, rooms with trap doors and walls of spikes. The wraparound story between the mortician and Talmudge won't fool anybody. Talmudge, at the beginning, is shown in bed with an unhappily married woman and inside the mortuary, he follows the mortician as he opens the coffin lids exposing the victims of the tales we watch to him(..their bodies are not shown to the viewer, but Talmudge's facial mannerisms express enough through perplexity and disgust to lend us a helping hand in how they look).
The third, and in my opinion easily far-and-away the best, is what I call, The Case of the Duelling Detectives featuring Scotland Yard's finest detective, Inspector McDowal(Bernard Fox)tagging along with New York's finest Private Investigator, Malcolm Toliver(Charles Aidman)as he pursues the identity of a specific criminal who is threatening to kill someone he knows with only a note consisting of letters cut from magazine articles as the means for solving the mystery. The two actors, Fox and Aidman, turn in delightful performances as foes, quite the egomaniacs often sparring intellectually with each other, who hurl gentlemanly insults at each other regarding which detective indeed is the very best of his profession and the result of the mystery(..although I'm sure many will know the answer)is most appropriate considering their vanity.
Low budget anthology, perhaps too cheap to really be that effective. Most of the tales presented lack strong story-telling and end way too abruptly. Clearly modeled after the Amicus chillers. I have no idea why this was called "Alien Zone." The first and second tales really leave much to be desired. A school teacher who hates children(!)finds herself besieged within her very home by those very ones she so despises. The kids(..at first wearing clown masks, evoking Michael Myers from Halloween, later carrying the appearance of possible vampiric ghouls) as they close in on their prey, cornering her as the camera distorts the frame, colors out of control, is quite thrilling, even if what leads up to it isn't. The second tale consists of a psychotic photographer who records women he kills on a movie camera. The fourth tale, which doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, displays an office employee being subjected to torture within a building complex, rooms with trap doors and walls of spikes. The wraparound story between the mortician and Talmudge won't fool anybody. Talmudge, at the beginning, is shown in bed with an unhappily married woman and inside the mortuary, he follows the mortician as he opens the coffin lids exposing the victims of the tales we watch to him(..their bodies are not shown to the viewer, but Talmudge's facial mannerisms express enough through perplexity and disgust to lend us a helping hand in how they look).
The third, and in my opinion easily far-and-away the best, is what I call, The Case of the Duelling Detectives featuring Scotland Yard's finest detective, Inspector McDowal(Bernard Fox)tagging along with New York's finest Private Investigator, Malcolm Toliver(Charles Aidman)as he pursues the identity of a specific criminal who is threatening to kill someone he knows with only a note consisting of letters cut from magazine articles as the means for solving the mystery. The two actors, Fox and Aidman, turn in delightful performances as foes, quite the egomaniacs often sparring intellectually with each other, who hurl gentlemanly insults at each other regarding which detective indeed is the very best of his profession and the result of the mystery(..although I'm sure many will know the answer)is most appropriate considering their vanity.