13 Demon Street

This swedish/american production is a pure masterpiece of horror in the genre of Alfred Hitchcock and the twilight zone. I have seen the two first volumes with each 3 episodes (guess they are hard to get).

The Black hand is about doctor Franz who has to cut off his own hand in an caraccident so he doesn´t burn up in the carwreck, then he replaces his hand with a dead mans hand who later turn out to be a serialkiller, and naturally the hand has it´s own life...:-)

Green are the leaves is about a tv-team who are going to catch a ghost "on-air" at an old castle in Sweden. Just after some hours the first person dies and of course the tv-star Henry Waller and his girlfriend decides to spent the night to investigate the ghost.

The Book of ghouls take place in Austria where Anton Lupesco are trying to get a job as a teacher and failes. He finds the book which tells that if he get a couple of things and murder a evil man his dreams will be fulfilled, so he does but who is the evil man...

A funny thing about this serie for all swedes is that Torsten Lilliecrona (or Tor Steen as he calls himself here) is uncle Melker in Astrid Lindgren´s Vi på Saltkråkan, who almost all swedish children has grown up to.

Two episodes of 13 Demon Street were released on The Veil DVD: The Vine of Death and The Black Hand. The series was unaired, but a movie was made by reediting and released as The Devils Messenger. The TV episodes themselves? Cut out characters and very poor acting (think typical Swedish B movie from the 60's) really do not help the illogical stories much. Too poor to even laugh at, and no room for the intended horror. The Vine of Death for example deals with an imported dried out vine root from Malaya, only three thousand years old. The professor is stabbed by his neighbour in a struggle over the cold emotionless wife.

Oh dear. My husband is dead. Oh dear. Instead of calling the police they bury the husband with the vine. Which grows. Later, the neighbour returns, very drunk and collapses. Onto the vine bed. It kills him. I seem to have made it sound rather better than the episode... whatever were they thinking of. Some of the actors seemed to be speaking Swedish but then dubbed into English and then Swedish subtitles added. The picture quality is good. Strictly for the collector of the really awful.

There are two preceding critiques here of this series and my opinion falls between their two extremes. I have all the episodes on DVD in English but with subtitles. The picture quality isn't the best but I have enjoyed the episodes I have seen so far. Some of the ideas are good and I did not find them all the convoluted or hard to follow, but I was aware that they were produced on a shoestring budget, which means many scenes are shot in near darkness in the manner of the old Poverty Row productions. If one bears in mind the period that these shows were made and that poor Lon Chaney Jr was struggling to survive when he took on the job of introducing these shows.

If one doesn't take them too seriously then you can enjoy them for what they are... and for me (with several exceptions) the 1955-1975 period of TV and movie making is now the most dated and pedestrian of any period, and yet often quite compulsive when you watch shows like Peter Gunn and Wanted: Dead or Alive. But with this one, watch and you be the judge...