JOURNEY INTO DARKNESS (1968)
Article 2511 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-18-2008
Posting Date: 6-27-2008
Directed by James Hill and Peter Sasdy
Featuring Robert Reed, Jennifer Hilary, Michael Tolan

Two tales of terror are told. The first (“Paper Dolls”) deals with a set of quadruplets, one of whom has evil powers that he can wield over the others. The other (“The New People”) is about a couple of who buy a house in the country, unaware that a suicide was committed there and that one of their neighbors may have sinister designs on them.

This is another case where two episodes of a TV series (in this case, British anthology series “Journey to the Unknown”) were edited together into a feature film. I think this sort of thing works better with an anthology series, since no one expects a single coherent story from one to begin with, and I have to admit that I liked the linking segments concocted for this movie; Patrick McGoohan projects a subtle witty irony in introducing and ending the stories. I like the first story (which hovers somewhere between VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and “It’s a GOOD Life’ in subject matter) better, though the ending is a little bit flat. The second story was written by Charles Beaumont, and it has a nice twist ending, though I do think it’s a little too slow to get going. Based on what I’ve seen here, the series itself was good but not great. It lasted for only seventeen episodes, and utilized much of the same talent that was used by Hammer. Three other movies were culled from the series, JOURNEY TO MIDNIGHT, JOURNEY TO THE UNKNOWN, and JOURNEY TO MURDER.