Tonight's tale of terror is hacked from the slime filled pages of House of Mystery #282, July 1980. Many of the voices were provided by the cool people behind the Nerd Safari YouTube channel.
House of Mystery was an anthology series published by DC Comics, running for 321 issues from 1951 to 1983. The first 173 issues featured science-fiction and weird mystery stories, with recurring features including Martian Manhunter and Dial H for Hero. Starting with #174, the series switched to a horror anthology presented by Cain the Caretaker, DC's most enduring horror host. Late in the series run, House of Mystery added a new ongoing series, "I, Vampire".
So this is cool I saw someone involved with this series post up the 1st episode onto The Geek Asylum Facebook group and thought I'd check it out. The 1st episode is free, for the other 7 parts of it you have to go to Amazon Prime and I guess you have to pay if you don't have that.
This is far from being the most slickly put together show but it's still pretty decent actually, with locations, acting and story all reasonable enough for what I would guess is made on a very limited budget. Episode 1 shows Maya Hedges getting her dream job of joining the Paranormal Investigation Team, who are a branch of the police who deal with the supernatural. She worked in normal detective work before but claims she wants the challenge of dealing with the vampires, zombies and werewolves of the world. Her new boss knows that her parents were killed by Werewolves and so may have an ulterior motive but gives her the job anyway. I thought it might be kind of a bit like a Scottish version of Grimm
It seems that vampires and werewolves have been living in relative harmony together but things could be about to change. There seems to be a serial killer on the loose and a strange Svengali-like figure behind the scenes manipulating events. I'm not sure exactly what his intentions are but he seems to be called, or represent the Cult of Many Faces. He kidnaps Maya's partner/ex-lover Martin and taunts her over it causing her to go maverick in her efforts to find him. There are some behind the scenes political wrangling & double dealing as well threatening the future of P.I.T.
The episode run time varies somewhat, the pacing is a bit hit and miss, the plot, dialogue and some of the situations are a bit unbelievable too but not in a suspend your disbelief kind of way more in a that's a bit daft kind of way? There are quite a few little niggles that are detrimental to the show, I think possibly it was too ambitious and maybe it could have changed elements of the story to allow for what they were able to do with their budget. For example why make werewolves when you haven't got any special effects to make werewolves with? Why not make it something else instead. And maybe don't go with a police force idea when you don't have enough actors to give the feel of it being a force rather than just a few people sat in a room. I did like it on the whole though, it's great and adventurous to see a group of people making something new. I don't know if this team has done a lot of stuff before but this has the feel of a fledgling effort, if that's the case then it's a great start.*
I can only imagine that with experience they will grow and possibly end up with something really good. I certainly hope so anyway. The series proper is made up of six episodes it seems and the other 2 videos are both self-contained stories set inside the same universe and I think they actually worked better. The 1st Trapped was let down by a bad fight scene, werewolf effects and dialogue that was a bit clunky in my view but the story was pretty solid. The Christmas special was the best of the lot to my mind and was actually pretty poignant.
I kind of wonder if this would work better as a comedy!! It's almost as if the fact that it's trying to be serious is to it's detriment. This could be really great as a Garth Marenghi style spoof comedy, drama, cop, whatever else they wanted to add to it kind of show! Whatever they do, another series of this or another show altogether I hope they keep on going and learn and grow and refine themselves until somewhere down the line they end up making something really cool. They ain't there yet but the seeds are being sewn. This also had a couple of faces I recognised in it, Sophie Aldred who played Ace the companion of the 7th Doctor (who I was not keen on at all at the time but I quite fancied her, not that that is at all relevant... I have no idea why I mentioned it... she's still pretty hot btw) and Simon Weir who's been in a fair few things here and there looked familiar too.
*I researched a bit more after writing this and found they (Silly Wee Films) also did a movie called Night Is Day which is a Supernatural Scottish Superhero movie which is my kind of thing, so I may well check it out and review that too someday. Ooh it was £1.82 to hire but I see it is up on YouTube in full for free, result!!
************************************************************ Edit - they are looking at funding for Series two now, check out the Kickstarter campaign here
