Boris Karloff's Thriller: Pigeons From Hell

Dogged by critical derision and in danger of cancellation from abysmal ratings, the producers of Boris Karloff's Thriller began to ease their big-budget Hitchcock copycat finally into the realm of the gothic horror more befitting the Karloff name. Probably the best-remembered of these mini-horror-movies was the curiously-titled Pigeons from Hell, an adaptation of Robert E. Howard's supernatural whodunit of the same name. The episode has the look of Universal's stock-and-trade horror classics, even featuring the Universal Mansion (seen in many a horror film), dressed up to look like an overgrown plantation. It's uncommonly atmospheric and cinematic for the television medium and well deserves it's reputation as one of the most chilling hours in '60s TV.

Two college-student brothers, Johnny and Timothy, find themselves stranded by car-trouble in a dark swamp in front of (typically enough) an ominous, and apparently uninhabited, decaying manor. The gloomy estate seems to be infested with unusually aggressive pigeons and the almost hypnotic chorus of their trills. Inside the house, the boys find only cobwebs, shadows and the remnants of a hastily-vacated household, including the haunting portrait of a woman. The brothers decide they might as well put down their bedrolls and sleep there until morning when they can find help. But Johnny is awakened in the middle of the night by a strangely mesmerizing singing voice in the darkness. Under the spell of the unseen siren, he mounts the stairs into the shadows and after a moment his blood-curdling scream shatters the silence. Timothy wakes in a start to find his brother walking back down the steps, wielding a bloody hatchet. Tim realizes Johnny is one of the walking dead, his head split by the very hatchet clutched in his hand.  Further, his zombified brother seems intent on burying the hatchet in Timothy's skull, too.

Fleeing the mansion in terror, Timothy soon collapses from exhaustion and is wakened in a shack by the local sheriff, to whom he vainly struggles to describe the mysterious events at the old house. The sheriff suspects Timothy has murdered his own brother and convinces the young man to return there with him to investigate. After the two experience unusual phenomenon in the house, the lawman is forced to reconsider his theory, explaining to Tim that it used to be inhabited by the cruel Blassenville sisters, who abandoned the mansion without a word fifty years earlier. The intrigue deepens when they come upon an old diary written by one of the sisters, hinting that the apparently ill-fated women never made it off the premises. The diary mentions an old black hermit, named Jacob Blount, who was once a servant of the abusive sisters. It's decided that they should pay Blount a visit at his remote shack, and there get to the truth behind the terrible secret of the Blassenville house and the pigeons from hell. 9/10

Trivia: Actor Brandon De Wilde, who played Timothy in Pigeons from Hell, is most famous for his role as the little boy Joey in the classic Western Shane. He also appeared with Vincent Price in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery called "Class of '99".  It would be one of his last roles. In 1972 De Wilde died in a car accident in Denver, Colorado at the age of 30.

Trivia: Pigeons writer Robert E. Howard was the famous creator of the Conan the Barbarian series of stories, as well as Solomon Caine. He is credited with originating the Sword and Sorcery genre. Howard committed suicide in 1936 at the age of 30.

Boris Karloff's Thriller: Well of Doom

A welcome foray into gothic horror territory for Thriller, Well of Doom is fairly well crammed with atmosphere, from it's bleak foggy landscapes to it's torch-lit dungeon to it's otherworldly antagonists. Waylaid on route to his wedding ceremony, a wealthy bachelor finds himself and bride to be captive of a pair of highwaymen, the ghastly Squire Moloch (Henry Daniell) and his hulking stooge Master Styx (played by Richard"Jaws" Kiel in a very early role). After taking the hapless groom to a dungeon on his own late father's estate, Moloch claims to be the father's murder victim and demands, if he wishes to escape torture, he sign over the deed to all of his holdings in recompense. Threatened with the murder of his bride, the hero finally agrees to the extorter's demand and is subjected to Moloch's final treachery before discovering that all is not as it seems.

On the plus side of Well of Doom, at the top of the list might be the brilliantly ominous Jerry Goldmith score, which mimics the lumbering zombie-like gate of Kiel's Master Styx. Aside from the score and excellent set decoration, the episode also boasts the unnerving performance of callow-faced Thriller-regular Henry Danielle as the diabolical Squire Moloch, whose vampiric appearance resembles that of Lon Chaney's in Todd Browning's London After Midnight (beaver hat and all) which this episode of Thriller brings to mind in more ways than one. 7/10

Boris Karloff's Thriller: Hay-Fork and Bill-Hook

In spite of bearing the name of the legendary bogeyman, Boris Karloff's Thriller was intended by it's producers (Universal) as a competitor to Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a show that had risen to prominence for the edgy stories of crime and murder that Hitchcock had made famous. One regrettable result of this business decision was that the majority of the show's episodes were pale imitations of the Hitchcock formula: tales of dark motives and nefarious plots, each ending with an ironic twist, and all with nary a whiff of the supernatural. There is little doubt that this feeble replication of Hitchcock led to the show's demise after only two seasons, in spite of the great screenwriting talent at Universal's disposal. Though not exactly a classic episode of the show, Hay-fork and Bill-hook was one of a handful of stories better fitting the name of Boris Karloff, insofar as dealing in some manner with the paranormal.

An inspector from Scotland Yard is dispatched to investigate a murder in a remote Welsh village with a charming history of burning witches at an ancient megalithic circle where once Druids sacrificed Christians. With his young wife in tow (it's their honeymoon) the detective struggles to turn up leads to the grisly pitch-fork killing and has scarcely begun questioning the backwards, clannish villagers when the infamous stone circle becomes the site of another witch-burning (the first in 70 years). To make matters worse, his wife's sighting of a terrifying black dog (traditionally an omen of impending death) breeds speculation among the superstitious villagers that she is herself a witch. Will our hero put down his adult beverage long enough to collar the killer before his witchy wife is consigned to the flames?

I'll not spoil it, but just for giggles here's a shot of that terrifying black hellhound:

Sit! Good Boy. 5/10.

Boris Karloff's Thriller: The Hungry Glass

William Shatner's pre-Star Trek work doesn't get as much attention, obviously, but the Shat made a staggering number of television appearances leading up to his career-defining role of James T. Kirk, in a wide variety of shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 77 Sunset Strip, The Man from Uncle, Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff's Thriller. The casual Shatner fan is probably aware of the classic Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 feet, about a man with a little "problem" who no one will believe (even his wife) when he witnesses a monster on the wing of the jetliner they are all passengers on. One of my favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone, Nick of Time, has Shatner under the thrall of a fortune-vending napkin dispenser in a a small-town diner. In both episodes, Shatner's character is suggested to have some nebulous sort of mental issue and has a doting wife to help restrain his destructive self. For a time, apparently, Shatner endured being typecast as this edgy, bewildered emo-type, mothered by a stereotypical, staid television spouse.

Shatner's character in The Hungry Glass, Gil Thrasher, falls roughly into this category: a Korean-war veteran with PTSD (and possible junkie--it's left a bit vague) who moves into a creepy seaside cliff-house with his alluring young wife. Though here, at least, the Shatner wife (played by Hungry Glass director Douglass Heyes' wife Joanna Heyes) is played with a little more dimension. It's intimated that Marcia Thrasher has a flaw of her own--a benevolent sort of vanity, the love of her own image--which conveniently plays into the central theme of The Hungry Glass. But this isn't posed very convincingly. She doesn't come across as particularly vain, we're just supposed to trust a clumsy charicterization. Her real flaw is in not being able to reassure her tormented husband with much conviction. Weariness is evident in her eyes as Gil begins to lose his grip on himself. She starts to come around to his way of thinking before it's over.

Unfortunately, an excess of the dialogue in The Hungry Glass is composed of other characters trying to reassure Shatner (or each other) that his new house isn't really haunted, while simultaneously trying to assure him that he isn't just going nuts. Not that this somewhat tiresome exposition prevents The Hungry Glass from being a classic Thriller episode. It just pads out the story, which is a bit sleight for an hour-long slot. Basically, the house was once inhabited by an extremely beautiful but vain woman (Donna Douglas--Elly May Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies) who grew into an old hag enraptured with the sight of her own image in her gallery of mirrors, and finally died by crashing through one in her ardent self-admiration. Over the years, numerous people mysteriously died from broken glass at the house and naturally the locals think it's haunted. An old geezer cryptically mentions the house has no mirrors in it, setting the story to unfold. The story is traditional and the setting atmospheric. The scene where the wife finds the lost mirrors in the attic is especially effective. The ghosts are sufficiently spooky, given the low budget, and the climax is actually kind of shocking.

William Shatner's performance is just fine, by the way. The plot certainly gives him plenty of opportunity to stretch his acting legs. Gil Thrasher is alternately brooding and severe but Shatner makes him likable, if not likely. The Shat went on to star in another Thriller episode, The Grim Reaper, which is frequently touted as the greatest episode of Thriller's brief two-season run.