Boris Karloff's:Veil

Rating:
Summary: The Best TV series that never aired!
Review: This is another DVD I bought at The Bargain! Shop at the same time I bought "House On Haunted Hill". This release was distributed by Madacy Home Video. The quality of the video is nearly perfectt, with only a few spots of grain. The audio, which is in 2.0 Dolby Digital, is also excellent. The Veil was a pilot project of 10 episodes that never made it to air, because Hal Roach Studios went bankrupt just at the time they were getting ready to sell it to the networks. Since that time, it has been called "The best TV series that never aired".

All 10 episodes in this 3 disc set were entertaining but some were more entertaining than others. Some of the best episodes (in my opinion) are: Vision Of Crime, Summer Heat, Girl On The Road, Food On The Table, Destination: Nightmare, Genesis, and Jack The Ripper. This DVD has also been released by Platinum Disc Corporation (as a two-disc set) and Something Weird Video (a three-disc set) and I imagine the video quality is the same on these as only one master copy exists.

Among the "Bonus Features" on the back of the DVD box is a slide show . At first, I couldn't find it as a separate feature, but if you look in the fireplace behind Boris Karloff in the menu screen you can see the "slide show". Some now famous people appeared in early roles in this 10 episode pilot project. Look for future stars such as Robert Hardy (All Creatures Great and Small), Patrick MacNee (The Avengers), and George Hamilton (Love At First Bite, Zorro, The Gay Blade). You can also read text bios of Patrick MacNee and Booth Colman in "Guest Star Spotlight", and finally, there is a two part text bio on Boris Karloff spread over the first two discs.

Finally a warning: If you choose the play all arrow, it will skip the opening credits of the second episode! To avoid this, choose the episodes separately on the menu, then after each episode ends it will revert back to the menu, where you can choose the second and third episode on the disc. Not only will you get the opening credits of the show, you'll also enable scene selection and be able to access specific chapters of that episode. One thing that I realized as I watched these 10 episodes, of which Boris Karloff appears in 9, (He doesn't play a role in "Jack The Ripper") is how good an actor he was in his day! I highly recommend this disc set for everyone who is a fan of Boris Karloff or early horror films from the 40's and 50's.

Rating:
Summary: Well-mounted versions of often-hokey scripts
Review: This package, which may take the place of the earlier Something Weird offer, uses similarly pristine copies of the filmed television series, which apparently wasn't picked up on either side of the Atlantic (though at least three cobbled versions of the episodes have been circulated as anthology movies THE VEIL, DESTINATION NIGHTMARE, and JACK THE RIPPER over the years). As with ONE STEP BEYOND, the stories are pointlessly offered as true accounts, or at least being based on true accounts, which results mostly, I suspect, from their being based on folktales (one is clearly a version of "The Vanishing Hitchhiker," for example). But Karloff is more than game, as others have noted in reviews of the SW set; this series isn't nearly as good as THRILLER at its best, but a reasonably-priced set will probably not disappoint fans of anthology horror and suspense series nor of Karloff.