'Way Out

I was seven years old when I saw this episode, and these many many years later it still is in place as one of the creepiest concepts and images I have ever experienced. Hope to see this one day on DVD, or on TV someplace. Far scarier and more unsettling -- at least this one episode that has stayed alive in my head -- than anything else, except perhaps some segments of "Thriller" with Karloff. Glad to see other people remembering this with the same intensity as I have! Obviously there were lots of us kids staying up and devouring this material, and funny that of all these, basically only "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits" still resonate in any major way. "T Zone" because of the number of episodes became a classic, "Outer Limits" because of its sheer excellence despite a low # of episodes. Almost no hope for something like "Way Out" to have a life in syndication, which obviously it didn't. Hopefully this will resurface for us soon!

In one of the few extant episodes of the long defunct, "Way Out" actress Constance Ford takes the audience on a roller coaster ride not soon to be forgotten.

Though accomplished at all types of portrayals, Miss Ford's stock in trade was the vulpine proletariat tart--a woman who will stop at nothing to get where she's going, and doesn't make any bones about it! Consider her a more cerebral, subdued, and streamlined Shelley Winters type.

In "I Heard You Calling Me" she holds the audience in the palm of her hand all the way--it's a real tour de force, inasmuch as she's doing it "live on tape." As the telephone calls from beyond exert their growing menace over her, we watch her go from casual indifference, to hard nosed annoyance, to trembling rage, to nauseated panic, and finally to whimpering, resigned, child like submission--pathetically assuming a fetal position as she drops the receiver to the floor in anticipation of her impending doom.

At a recent screening, all attendees were impressed, most especially an astute 16 year old boy. "We don't have anything this good on now," he remarked as Mr. Dahl sardonically concluded the teleplay.

No, we don't, and the loss is ours. Another forgotten jewel in Mr. Susskind's crown.

This certainly would make a nice DVD box set. Actors and crew on this show are a who's who of Television in the 1960's. I've only seen 5 episodes all were odd in the best sense of the word and none of these five sound like the best of the series even.

The show features eerie electronic music in part by Robert Colbert who went on to to Dark Shadows and The Night Stalker. Title sequence of hands sticking up like trees out of sand is also memorable.

The show, like Roald Dahl's fiction, has heavy doses of dark dark humor, so much so that it's hard perhaps to call it horror but also hard to accept as just comedy either. This sets it apart from the lighter comedy episodes of other fantasy shows of that, or any, era, and perhaps left a mass TV audience confused and abandoned. It certainly had a good lead in time slot right before Twilight Zone and would make a nice lead in to those shows.

So it's too bad, though maybe not too much of a surprise, that the show didn't catch on. Someone bring these to DVD to be rediscovered as they deserve to be. Seems like a show ahead of it's time. Looks to have been shot on video, though copy I saw was so murky it was hard to tell.

This T.V. show aired when I was 9 years old. All I can remember about it was that the first episode scared the heck out of me, the second episode scared the heck out of my grandmother and the third episode ( having to do with nuclear war, I believe) scared the heck out of my parents. After that, we weren't allowed to watch it anymore, and I wish it was available on tape or DVD so I could see for myself what I missed. Now that I look back, after seeing everything in the horror and sci-fi field that's come out since, I wish I could see these episodes and compare them to all the shows I've loved since then, like Twilite Zone or Outer Limits.

This is a sadly overlooked anthology series which only ran from March to July 1961 (14 episodes). Although it had the low budget look of the early drama anthologies, it was quite unique and twisted. It often contained dialog that was both creepy and amusing. The series was hosted by Roald Dahl and he did an excellent job of setting up the mood for the stories. His monologues were clever, somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock. The stories themselves included such diverse plots as a man who has a chemical that can change facial features by touching up photos, an actor who can't remove his Quasimoto make-up, a new neighbor who can turn people into frogs, a married man who falls in love with a decapitated woman kept alive by electricity (with a light bulb for a head!), a woman who keeps waking up from nightmares only to find she is still dreaming, an undertaker who seems willing to help murderers "dispose of the body", an actress who discovers that during night rehearsals actors are really murdered & a dying old professor who is given an offer by a doctor to keep his brain alive in a tank after his body is dead. This show aired the 1/2 hour before The Twilight Zone on Friday nights. Seeing them as a child was quite frightening. Now seeing the only 5 stories that I could find as an adult, I can see how well written they were. I am really hoping this series shows up on DVD. At only 14 episodes, the whole series would make a great set.