“Don’t worry, old chap. We’ll have you out of here in a jiffy.”
Janet, Martin and their son David are off on their holidays when they decide to pick up a mysterious stranger clad in a yellow raincoat and sou'wester. No sooner is the man out of the storm and inside their car is he trying to tear Martin’s throat out, resulting in a brilliant car flipping stunt sequence.
After this lesson in why not to pick up hitchhikers, Janet awakes in a creepy and overly stylised hospital. Little David is fine, Martin is banged up and can’t speak, and the doctor and nurse deny any knowledge of seeing the man who tried to kill them all. Frustrated and sensing fishiness afoot, Janet takes her husband and son to a holiday cottage (which will look very familiar if you just watched ‘Visitor from the Grave’) to convalesce. But, as Martin heals and memories of that dark rainy night start to return and fill in the gaps, Janet begins to realise her injured husband may not be quite the man he used to be…
A real doppelbänger of a ‘Hammer House of Horror’ episode, ‘The Two Faces of Evil’ is a mystery box with plenty up both sleeves. With great production design enhanced by some unsettling lenses and a very technically clever POV sequence, it ratchets the suspense and distrust up to 11 and a half before revealing its earth-shattering truth.
“What are we to make of such an apocryphal story?”
Brain surgery is probably stressful enough without the patient waking up mid-cerebral fiddle to scream “Leave my soul alone!”, but so begins the final ‘Hammer House of Horror’ episode: ‘The Mark of Satan’.
Edwin is a new mortuary assistant who,...