Thingmaker's Log

[thingmaker]

I am whiting out my spoilers to make them ignorable...
Well, I have only downloaded the first 500 or so episodes and I am not planning to listen to every one...
I base my listening on recommendations, plot summaries, where I can get 'em, and titles... I recognize some titles from the literary works that inspired them (Though CBSRMT has a habit of changing titles) and some I choose because they sound like SF, fantasy or horror.

If anybody has any episodes they think are really good that I am skipping - tell me. I'm skipping a lot.

I just listened to:
01 [b:9571e55d51]I Warn You Three Times[/b:9571e55d51] (chosen from summary) Seemed like a very limp noir story to me [color=white:9571e55d51]but with an attempt at a scary horror ending.[/color:9571e55d51]

I heard [b:9571e55d51]The Chinaman Button[/b:9571e55d51] previously. Moderately decent. I read the Slesar story in an anthology at some point... Episode seems to have spun it out a bit.

41 [b:9571e55d51]Blizzard of Terror[/b:9571e55d51] (chosen by title) I can understand the couple in this story falling for the deception... Unfortunately it's dead obvious to the listener. And what a plot. My, what coincidences [color=white:9571e55d51]are required to set up this bit of bizarre marital counceling.[/color:9571e55d51]
42 [b:9571e55d51]Sea Fever[/b:9571e55d51] (chosen because I like sea stories) This is another version of the story "Walking Shadows" by Alfred Noyes which was done a bit better as "The Log of the Evening Star" on Escape. A lot of good dialog in this one and none too slow but they pissed away the big shock [color=white:9571e55d51]with a filtered "ghost voice"... The simple revelation of the captain alone in his cabin, speaking as though to his wife - as seen by the last survivor - would have worked better. Then they beat us over the head with the point several times (Yes, his wife is dead. She was dead before the voyage. Yes, we got that...) before the captain follows her.[/color:9571e55d51]
Still looking for a few really good episodes.

[thingmaker]

44 [b:5b153add44]The Horla[/b:5b153add44] (chosen for original source) Well this one was pretty impressive. I liked the changes and expansions of the original story. Nice sense of period and locale. I could have asked for a more subtle sound to represent the Horla and the confrontation in the cabin of the ship lacked much of a real sense of dread...

48 [b:5b153add44]Out of Sight[/b:5b153add44] (summary ID'd this as SF) Bad SF. Sometimes bad SF is still good fiction but not, I think, in this case.
The dialog, particularly the technical stuff, is not bad. A few lines stuck with me for different reaons.
The female astronaut describes her forebodings using this phrase "I was getting the strongest ESP waves." Uh huh.
The alien states that he comes from another galaxy. "From Centauri 7... A quintillion light years away". - Now I usually figure in cases like this that the writer simply doesn't understand the scale of things but this writer seems to recognize the meaning of light years and the extraordinary distance described. I like the quintillion figure. May not be quite right but sounds ballpark in cosmic terms.
I must remember the line the alien uses to describe the accomodations for the 3 earthlings. "Two bedrooms. One for the spouses and one for the drone."
I like the alien's description of how his people had landed on our world and encountered humans but " - did not consider the the specimens quite satisfactory." Betty and barney Hill? Threw 'em back. Travis Walton? Probed his butt and threw 'im back. Whitley Strieber? Threw him back... He landed on his head. It explains a lot.
[color=white:5b153add44] Anyway the aliens subject kidnapped astronauts to some seemingly senseless tests which ultimately serve to prove that humans can be selfless and deserving of continued survival... You know, I don't think this is in serious competition with [b:5b153add44]2001: A Space Odyssey[/b:5b153add44]. I'm pretty sure Kirk and Picard both met these guys' brethren on a few occasions though.[/color:5b153add44]

[thingmaker]

50 [b:2e8e30e85d]This Will Kill You[/b:2e8e30e85d] Another radio version of "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James. Better than the perfunctory Red Room Ghost Stories version... Not quite as good as the Escape episode.
[color=white:2e8e30e85d] Interestingly enough the finale mirrors that of the film "Curse of the Demon" in which the demonologist Karswell is also... hit by a train. The film is the best adaptation of this story to date.
[/color:2e8e30e85d]
The film version is "Curse of the Demon"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050766/ If anybody has missed this film, Halloween is just around the corner and that's a good excuse to add it to your collection.
In fact this adaptation is very much a combination of the film and the original story.
I can understand some of the changes but not the almost complete lack of anything to support the supposed stalking of the protagonist by a supernatural force. He says he feels like he's being stalked but it never comes across with any force. Maybe the sound effect used in The Horla was a bit weak but it was better than nothing to suggest the presence of something unseen.
A lot of characters are brought in to help solve the problem.
A psychiatrist... No help there.
An occult scholar... Aha! Single handedly unravels the whole business.
An insider... A character who combines aspects of Karswell's mother and Joanna Harrington from the film version.
A professional makeup expert... Good thinking. Very nice bit of practicality here.

[thingmaker]

I'll be better in future about avoiding spoilers or at least I'll seperate them from the body of the text as well as whiting them out to make them easier to ignore. Problem is I get a bit over-enthusiastic when my "inner critic" is twitching.

[thingmaker]

Two adequate episodes and a very good one.

52 [b:f4e86199e1]The Creature From the Swamp [/b:f4e86199e1] (chosen for the title... I like swamps, I like creatures and I particularly like swamp creatures...) This one is not bad. There are lots of neat elements. A nicely described "swamp man" of legend. A woman who might be either imaginary, supernatural but in danger or supernatural and dangerous.
The strange woman in the show is Oo-dee-nay... which could be a variant of undine.
It never seemed scary but at least was interesting.

55 [b:f4e86199e1]A Sacrifice in Blood[/b:f4e86199e1] (chosen based on recommendation) A cautionary tale about what can happen when you adopt a baby found on a pre-Toltec altar in a sealed temple... Well done and interesting but don't expect it to resolve itself in a way that actually pulls the various threads together.

56 [b:f4e86199e1]A Little Night Murder[/b:f4e86199e1] (chosen based on recommendation) Logical and credible story about a series of seemingly unrelated murders. I've just been listening to sample episodes of a number of otr mystery series and I've heard a lot of similar stories, most of them abysmal so this was a nice surprise. This one made me think of Hitchcock.

[thingmaker]

57 [b:671eab9fb3]The Fall of the House of Usher[/b:671eab9fb3] Weak. This story has been done often. (NBC University of the Air, The Weird Circle, GE Theater...) The best version is probably from Escape. Since it's primarily a mood piece, most adaptations feel it necessary to add characters or business.
Having Madeline in fear of burial alive merely makes obvious what is meant to be a nagging uncertainty.
You know, I think I'll nip out and buy the AIP film version. It's on DVD now paired with "The Pit and the Pendulum".
I'm looking forward to what CBSRMT did with other Poe stories... mostly updatings I believe. I seem to recall liking their [b:671eab9fb3]Masque of the Red Death[/b:671eab9fb3].

58 [b:671eab9fb3]Sea of Troubles[/b:671eab9fb3] (chosen, as I recall, from a recommendation but I might have just picked it for the title... "Sea". My favorite troubles come from the sea.) Nicely done but familiar "perfect crime" story. The inevitable flaw is not obvious because it derives from absolutely stupid actions... which are, nonetheless, in character.

59 [b:671eab9fb3]Frankenstein Revisited[/b:671eab9fb3] Invents a historical Baron Von Frankenstein and his legendary "terrible death" and return every century.
A mistake in the reading or a misprint in the script led to one of the characters saying he'd been posted near the castle after WWI - when it is clear that it was meant to be WWII.
The best thing about this episode is the "you are there" quality of the documentary recording sequences. Otherwise it's kinda muddled and uninteresting.
I am reminded of the 1958 film "Frankenstein 1970" in which Boris Karloff played the doctor, renting out his castle to a TV crew for the filming of a documentary on the Frankenstein legend... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051630/

[thingmaker]

62 [b:6891ca62a9]Diary of a Madman[/b:6891ca62a9] (chosen for source) Trivial exercise based on, as I recall, a very minor story. A pillar of the community is secretly commiting murders just because he wants to and because "killing is the law of nature". There's an interesting resolution that seems familiar but I can't remember where I've run into it before.

75 [b:6891ca62a9]Men Without Mouths [/b:6891ca62a9] (chosen by title and recommendation) Story of a retired gangster who keeps seeing people with no mouths. It's a creepy image in a decent story with interesting characters... but not much of an ending.

101 [b:6891ca62a9]An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge[/b:6891ca62a9] (chosen for source) Good but somewhat over-telegraphed expansion on the story of a man who has a miraculous escape from hanging during the American Civil War.
The film version which appeared, slightly edited, as a Twilight Zone episode is excellent.

107 [b:6891ca62a9]Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde[/b:6891ca62a9] Here's a story that's been adapted so often that it's just about impossible to come up with a new approach. This one claims to be very faithful to the original... Not really. There's the inevitable tragic love interest added. A rather odd sequence in which Hyde literally walks over Lanyon in the street - adapted from an incident in the story where Hyde trampled a child on the sidewalk. In this version Hyde also seems to be commiting a number of brutal murders of strangers... And there's a new ending...
All in all; not faithful but not too bad in it's own right.

[thingmaker]

129 [b:0b8106d578]The Picture Of Dorian Gray[/b:0b8106d578] As I remember the novel, this is a pretty faithful rendering. The original story covers a greater span of time - explicitly something like 20 years - or enough for Dorian's continued youthfulness to become apparent. I'm sure there are a lot of changes but the only thing which struck me was the scene in which Dorian states that he would sell his soul to the devil if only the picture would age while he remained the same... And the picture then falls to the floor. This seems unnecessarily obvious.
Dorian's cruel breakup with Sybil Vane is as well motivated as it was in the novel although the reason is different in this version.
Pretty good overall.

132 [b:0b8106d578]Frontiers Of Fear[/b:0b8106d578] (chosen based on... I'm not sure... I think there was something in someone's log) Jerry Stiller plays a Runyonesque down-and-out small-time con man who finds that an old typewriter first helps him to write saleable fiction and then begins to talk to him... Twilight Zone fans will not be surprised that what is typed on the typewriter then happens in the real world... And the voice has an agenda of it's own.
There are surprises and the story works from beginning to end... And Jerry Stiller is perfect.

143 [b:0b8106d578]The Imp In The Bottle[/b:0b8106d578] (chosen for source) The original story I had largely forgotten... There's a reason for that. "The Bottle Imp" by R.L. Stevenson is one of those "south seas stories" he wrote while fascinated with all things Polynesian and when I read it, I was not...
This adaptation sets the story in a more familiar framework as a young man receives the bottle and it's story from his dying uncle. The plot unfolds nicely and the central concept, that the bottle must be sold for less than it was bought, with the clever twist involving foreign currencies, is preserved.
A very satisfying entry although the voice of the imp is not good....
(NOTE: There's another CBSRMT that seems to have used elements of this story. At the end of [b:0b8106d578]Triangle[/b:0b8106d578] the preview depicts a black widow spider crawling from a broken bottle and transforming into a great, hairy man in blue jeans who intones, "I am your servant.")

[thingmaker]

183 [b:7e3f190269]The Body Snatchers[/b:7e3f190269] (chosen for source) Adaptation of the R.L. Stevenson story. It covers the same territory but, as usual, spins out the story a bit. The original story made no great impression on me but it did have a familiar structure for a horror story; with a shock at the very end.
The CBSRMT version has no shocks and instead unravels as a sort of tepid tragedy.

193 [b:7e3f190269]The Golem[/b:7e3f190269] (chosen for source) This is a modern "sequel' to the folk tale of the Golem.
Traditionally the Golem was made by Rabbi Loew (Loeb) of Prague in the 16th century... I suppose the preferred version has the Golem created to protect the Jews from the Christian majority but there's more than one version and a lot of different details. Certainly the Golem was a human-like figure of clay, animated by magic, which proved to be a great danger even to it's creators.
This story is set somewhere in eastern europe under the nazi occupation.
There is an interesting but undeveloped idea that the Golem might be a metaphor for atomic weapons... The old man fleeing the nazis is said to have been a chemist in Prague working on a formula which would "release explosive forces many times more powerful than dynamite"
Mixed in with the ethical drama about a forester who endangers himself and his family to assist the old man and his grand-daughter there is a genuine supernatural element.
A decent episode with an imperfect ending - which leaves a lot unresolved.

197 [b:7e3f190269]The Premature Burial[/b:7e3f190269] Another Poe adaptation! Or is it? Well, there are elements of "The Case of M. Valdemar"... And the obsessive love for a person who is, maybe, dead... that's "Poesque".
Anyway, we have a woman who was forced by her family to marry against her will and has now died. Apparently.... The man who truly loved her... The helpful doctor friend with the power of mesmerism.
At least this episode comes to an appropriate finish. Unfortunately the episode as a whole is not very good.

[thingmaker]

198 [b:b81e797f15]The Murders In the Rue Morgue[/b:b81e797f15] More Poe. I don't know much about early mystery stories but Poe may have invented the detective story as we now understand it. And as stated in the closing narration; A.Conan Doyle may have been indebted to Poe.
This episode accurately depicts the crime and the solution as written by Poe BUT some of the most significant clues are omitted. For some reason, there is almost nothing of the strange voice heard by persons during the murders - mistaken by various people as russian or spanish or german - each witness being totally unfamiliar with the language in question. The strange voice, seeming to speak no human language at all, seems a totally perfect thing to use in a radio drama. Of course CBSRMT added characters and their development took up time so there was less time to deal with the details of the crimes.
It's true the nature of the murderer is pretty improbable and the characteristics attributed to it are not wholly accurate (Did I hear the CBSRMT version refer to "black hairs"? I don't recall Poe making that mistake.) but it's still a memorable example of detective fiction with a grotesque turn.
I like the actors, and the characters added for the CBSRMT version are not unpleasant. Overall it's a good episode.

[thingmaker]

199 [b:6edcce0686]The Oblong Box[/b:6edcce0686] Yet more Poe... This is a slight expansion on the original story - but only slight. That may be the problem here. The original is very simple, very linear and the mystery is not very significant. So it is here, with the addition of a wife for the protagonist to facilitate the story by allowing dialogue... Interminable dialogue.
This episode seems to me to be pretty much a waste of time.

200 [b:6edcce0686]Berenice[/b:6edcce0686] One of Poes shortest, ghastliest tales concerned with tragic, obsessive, necrophilic love... Not a particularly promising subject for CBSRMT. Still, despite having to write the story almost from scratch, around the slight original; this is not a bad episode. Merely mediocre.

[thingmaker]

201 [b:3bc81d68d0]The Masque Of The Red Death[/b:3bc81d68d0] Another Poe adaptation and this one annoys me more than most. Maybe they are just beating down my resistance.
A bit of muddled eco-concern accompanies this story of a wealthy man who seeks to escape a lethal pandemic by closing himself up in his inaccesable mountain-top retreat.
Simple minded, two dimensional, characters talk at one another in order to fill time till the dull and unsurprising ending.
Is it possible that Roger Corman did a better job? I think so.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058333/

[thingmaker]

202 [b:5e9b0f5084]The Tell-Tale Heart[/b:5e9b0f5084] A Poe adaptation which builds a whole new story around the bare bones of the original.
Here we have a down-at-heels city family coming to live with grasping, nasty old "uncle Jonas" on his farm. The suffering family consist of Charlie who lost his job because of a... mental problem, his wife Dora and their little girl. Not content to work them to death, the malevolent old man also lusts after Dora.
To make a long story short... The old man manages to provoke Charlie to the point where the mental instability, which is central to the story, seems irrelevant. I can't help thinking that the Poe story elements were grafted onto an existing plot outline the writer had to hand. Certainly the CBSRMT had to be written so hastily that this seems a reasonable explanation.
It may not be a good Poe adaptation but it's not a bad episode.

[thingmaker]

203 [b:dc74a73cc4]The Cask of Amontillado[/b:dc74a73cc4] Poe. Poor suffering Poe. His literary corpse subjected to further indignities. This is getting a bit painful.
OK. As per usual there is the need to pad out the story with detail and additional characters... But in this case the grim drama of revenge is turned on it's head from the first words of our host. Now the story is of revenge and the bringing to justice of the vengeful man. No spoiler here. E.G. Marshall tells us this right up front.
Pathetic.
But among CBSRMT episodes this one is average.

214 [b:dc74a73cc4]Windandingo[/b:dc74a73cc4] I chose this one because it occurred to me that the title might be a muddling of Wendigo... Well, I suppose it is; intentionally though. It's a comedy set during the american Revolution and I had a battery failure about 1/3 of the way in. I haven't felt the desire to listen to the rest since then.

233 [b:dc74a73cc4]The Pit and the Pendulum[/b:dc74a73cc4] The stark, single character story of psychologically acute torture at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition is turned into a dull modern espionage melodrama.
Another, lamentably, average episode.

[thingmaker]

264 [b:a4d1d07bbb]The Phantom of the Opera[/b:a4d1d07bbb] Really a credible version of the story based on the novel by Gaston Leroux - which I have only read in abridged form. I'm pleased that in many ways this episode goes back to the novel rather than treading the path of the (sound) movies with their wronged composer, burned by acid.
The choice to end the story rather abruptly in a way much different from the novel was the price they paid for having character development and quite a lot of detail in the early portion. Certainly I don't miss the elaborate mechanical torture chambers of the novel. And, unlike the novel, the Phantom is not allowed to simply slink off and die.
Pretty good.

[thingmaker]

275 [b:9c5686e83a]The Rise and Fall Fourth Reich[/b:9c5686e83a] A sick, blind old man in a Mexican slum is Adolf Hitler... But dedicated men with extraordinary modern medical techniques have located the fuhrer and are restoring his health and his youthful vigor.
I liked this episode. But then I have quite a fondness for [b:9c5686e83a]The Boys From Brazil [/b:9c5686e83a]and any number of dramas, melodramas and outright fantasies dealing with those favorite villains of the 20th century, the Nazis. This one treads no new ground and I'm not wild about the ending, but some reversal of the situation was inevitable and overall it was pretty good.

305 [b:9c5686e83a]The Triangle[/b:9c5686e83a] (Chosen, I believe, based on some recommendation) Ah, good, it's not just a domestic dispute... The triangle of the title refers to the Bermuda Triangle. An entertaining story of a woman found alive and unharmed five days after the airliner she was aboard crashes in the sea. Pretty good.

310 [b:9c5686e83a]Nightmare's Nest[/b:9c5686e83a] (Chosen based on recommendation - although I'd probably have noticed the title) My copy has a lot of digital glitching but is listenable. A mathemetician with stunted emotional development takes an isolated house in the country. The house, Mare's Nest (Or maybe Mayer's Nest), is still haunted, not by a ghost but by a vampire. The details of this particular brand of vampirism are interesting and the use of a droning buzz like some giant insect for the nightmares of vampire flight are good. Mildly chilling and generally quite good.

[thingmaker]

315 [b:69526b309f]Woman From Hell[/b:69526b309f] (Chosen because I dated her once...) An inquiry into the apparent suicide of a movie diva. The secret society called the Walpugis Club is mildly interesting.

318 [b:69526b309f]Carmilla[/b:69526b309f] (Chosen for source) Hey! This is a very accurate representation of the J.Sherdan LeFanu story. If it has a problem that would be the, not entirely successful, attempt by Mercedes McCambridge to play both 19 and 70... I must admit that her framing of the story as an old woman seems to work perfectly. Succinct enough not to waste story time and a fine way to set up the drama. I hardly noticed that this sequence does remove the threat to her life. "Carmilla" was written before [b:69526b309f]Dracula[/b:69526b309f] and they share the honor of being the best and most influential vampire stories.
Sex and vampirism are inextricably linked from the time of these two stories (And the Byronic Lord Ruthven of "The Vampyre") so if anybody has any quibbles about it - They're here, they're Drear. Get used to it!
Good episode!

[thingmaker]

323 [b:ccb8070d77]The Grey Ghost[/b:ccb8070d77] (Chosen for title) Car racing... Well, I hate all sports but this one less than most. The quiet, slightly embarrassed, ghost which haunts the protagonist is a bit interesting and the characters are nice.

325 [b:ccb8070d77]The Master Computer[/b:ccb8070d77] (Chosen for title) Ah, one of those stories where "the hereafter" is run as a beauracracy or business and mistakes are made "A Guy Named Joe", "Always", "Here Comes Mr Jordan", "Heaven Can Wait"... If this was supposed to be a mystery to us, they shouldn't have given it away 10 minutes in. This sort of story annoys me but this one is not badly done with the whole world suddenly unable to see or hear a couple who just returned from vacation.

331 [b:ccb8070d77]Terror in the Air[/b:ccb8070d77] (Chosen for title) I hope it's not a spoiler but the villain of the piece is the chiffon pumpkin pie. A good old fashioned airliner in distress story with the pilot and co-pilot incapacitated and a burnt out professional placed under stress to save the day... In this case the burnt out professional is a doctor who must treat the sick men as well as deliver a baby - not a traumatized pilot who's still not "over Macho Grande".
Good performances and generally believable technical dialog improve matters. Pretty good if you can forgive the overly familiar plot.

[thingmaker]

334 [b:f88405a31d]Night of the Howling Dog[/b:f88405a31d] (Chosen based on some reccommendation) This is supposed to be based on a story by Algernon Blackwood. I haven't read much of his work and I'm guessing it might be one of the John Silence stories... There's one titled "The Camp and the Dog". Dwayne Carter the, psychiatrist, is described as having an "uncanny sixth sense" so maybe the name has been changed... I have got to get a copy of the Dover collection of John Silence stories.
A camping expedition to a small, wooded island in the Baltic is threatened by a werewolf among them. The whole business is not scary but it is interesting... A different take on werewolves.

[thingmaker]

338 [b:0c506c52a3]The Special Undertaking[/b:0c506c52a3] I'll have to get back to this one... Digital glitching makes it unplayable on my portable.

343 [b:0c506c52a3]The Ghost Plane[/b:0c506c52a3] A diverse group of people find themselves on an airliner... They don't know where they are going or how they got on the plane. It's just what you think. Ho hum. Not badly done though.

351 [b:0c506c52a3]The Black Whale[/b:0c506c52a3] Story of a slave in the old south who is more than he seems... He's a person. This drama takes the brave stance of opposing slavery. It's better than it might have been but still merely adequate.

358 [b:0c506c52a3]Five Ghostly Indians[/b:0c506c52a3] Nice little old fashioned ghost story. Lacks mystery and really never actually scary but decent use of sound effects and some intrigueing imagery keep it worthwhile.

359 [b:0c506c52a3]Who Made Me[/b:0c506c52a3] Dystopian SF drama (gets my attention starting off with a bit of Jerry Goldsmith's music from "The Invaders" episode of TZ) with enough idiosyncracy to be a bit more than just a pale imatation of [b:0c506c52a3]Brave New World[/b:0c506c52a3]. Society is, of course, rigidly stratified and the elite are expected to be emotionally stunted and live a controlled, carefully monitored, life... The threat of interplanetary war, with one of the characters in the position of being able to start an apocalyptic war, is an interesting added element. Not bad.

[thingmaker]

362 [b:979c5287fa]The Kiss of Death [/b:979c5287fa]Another of those changed titles... This is based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter". And, in my opinion, it's a fine adaptation. Good acting and dialog that sounds, at times, like it was lifted straight from the story make this a very worthwhile epiode. Even the modified ending is not a terrible flaw even if it does blunt the author's moral -- which, after all, may be nothing more than "Man shouldn't meddle in the works of God." or something like that.

364 [b:979c5287fa]Never in This World[/b:979c5287fa] Through a nifty bit of folklore a man finds himself changed physically by spirit possesion. The story doesn't have any simple resolution and it's very interesting right through to the ending...

368 [b:979c5287fa]A Living Corpse[/b:979c5287fa] Hmmm. Another adaptaion of Poe's "The Case of M. Valdemar"... sorta (See also 197 [b:979c5287fa]The Premature Burial[/b:979c5287fa]). This version really reminds me of the sort of plot that might have turned up in a Roger Corman adaptation... As if Corman adapted the story for a feature rather than just a segment of [b:979c5287fa]Tales of Terror [/b:979c5287fa]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056552/. The episode is nothing special. Curiously, the host narration at the end purports to demonstrate that the story might be true.

[thingmaker]

185 [b:59add5f6fa]The Damned Thing[/b:59add5f6fa] Based on the story by Ambrose Bierce. The adaptation mixes in a dose of Rashoman and a dose too much of soap opera. So, another potentially scary idea is squandered... Furthermore, there's a problem with the story that is caused by the new material. The variant versions told of the death of the man, whose horribly mutilated body lies before the witnesses, covered only by a sheet (Interesting Bierce chapter heading from the story: "A Man Though Naked May Be In Rags") seem impossible to explain. And the rural coroner seems to have done a very thourough and sophisticated autopsy if he can not only rule out drowning but also snakebite... Not that either would explain the mutilation of the corpse.
Interestingly, the electronic sfx used to suggest the presence of the unseen Thing is slightly better than the one used in The Horla.

215 [b:59add5f6fa]Night of the Wolf [/b:59add5f6fa] A rather silly story about a series of incidents relating to an old indian artifact in a museum. There's a mildly interesting idea but the episode is dull and the characters uninteresting.

246 [b:59add5f6fa]The Velvet Claws[/b:59add5f6fa] A man happens into a stange French town which turns out to be inhabited by... people who seem to know him and have an odd affinity for cats (I write, trying to avoid a spoiler).
Yet another retitled adaptation.
This episode is based on the story "Ancient Sorceries" by Algernon Blackwood... A story which was adapted somewhat more effectively on [b:59add5f6fa]Escape[/b:59add5f6fa]. This version is, perhaps, closer to the original in detail and structure than the Escape version but it's simply dull.

[thingmaker]

249 [b:2466c63c5f]The Killer Inside[/b:2466c63c5f] Stars Ann Meara as a thirty year old woman with a domineering mother, a dull fiance and, overall a dull life... When she wins a raffle and travels to London; within a few hours she meets a fascinating man and is accused of murder.
It may not be perfect but this is a very entertaining episode, well written and perfectly cast.

[thingmaker]

250 [b:7a82fadd3e]The Garrison of the Dead[/b:7a82fadd3e] This has such poor sound that it is not listenable.

279 [b:7a82fadd3e]Markheim Man or Monster[/b:7a82fadd3e] I recognized the name from the title of the Robert Louis Stevenson story "Markheim". This adaptation, starring Kevin McCarthy, is one of the better I've heard. CBSRMT adaptations of short stories usually add a great deal of business in the form of mediocre soap opera and manage to lose the point of the original.
In this case the expansion is quite reasonable and maintains the thrust of the original while providing McCarthy with the opportunity for some wonderful dialog...
Karl Markheim is an evil character who sets out to have a grand time while doing the maximum harm to those around him. Behind a facade of decency he works toward his stated intention to commit all seven deadly sins and break all ten commandments... But there is a mysterious figure which keeps appearing to him in mirrors.
Very good.

[thingmaker]

297 [b:9848c16442]The Mask of Tupac Amaru[/b:9848c16442] The mild story of an archeologist, her lover, who is of Inca descent, and various other persons involved with the discovery of an accursed Incan death-mask. Unimpressive.

319 [b:9848c16442]The Onyx Eye[/b:9848c16442] Story of a young couple who come into posession of a curious stone which brings good fortune at the price of greater ill fortune. Probably the best thing about the episode is the reaction of one character who is touched by the ill fortune but perceives it as positive.

352 [b:9848c16442]Assasanation in Time[/b:9848c16442] I've always thought that the Titanic was actually sunk by the sudden weight of countless time travellers materializing aboard to witness the tragedy... This episode is about that other favorite site for time travellers; the assasination of Lincoln. Nice bits of historical authenticity improve this one and you can hardly quibble with the details of how time travel functions... it is, of course, impossible. All in all, a pretty good episode.

354 [b:9848c16442]The Other Self[/b:9848c16442] Really interesting story of an unusual man who seems to enjoy his grindingly dull factory job because he is more connected to his other life as a soldier at the Battle of Shiloh.
A good one.