No matter how far I go into the bowels of unknown television programs of the world, I am always surprised by what I find.
Many times, 'unknown TV' is defined as 'something that aired for about five episodes and was quickly forgotten.' But what I never figured that, at the advent and popularity of the genre, that there were some things so incredibly dull, boring, or effective that they escaped the general populace's notice. Or as in today's experiments, were never aired Stateside. And perhaps for a very good reason.
Something Weird Video is partially to blame for this: ever since their DVD release of Hershell Gordon Lewis's Blood Trilogy (the real forebearers of gore and slasher films), they have been one of the best companies to release anything onto DVD. Armed with tons of rare movie prints and millions of trailers and assorted cinematic minutia, they have released the most insane and entertaining things to disc with the added bonus of extras. Extras that include anything from musical numbers from other movies they have yet to release, trailers for movies that played in any kind of theater, little shorts that range from 1942 Army sex reels to educational shorts that MST3K used to skewer on a fairly constant basis.....and sometimes episodes from a certain series called 13 Demon Street.
13 Demon Street is a true oddity: filmed in Sweden, it was a anthology show in the spirit of 'One Step Beyond' and hosted by Lon Chaney, Jr. who played the Host: a mysterious man who is 'doomed' to live at 13 Demon Street and show the audience stories featuring horrible crimes in the vain hope that one of these stories will be worse than his and he will be freed from his torture. In short, he was like Barry Sadler's Casca except that he looked a lot like a disheveled and fat Shemp Howard. He's not as menacing as he is drunk. Badly drunk. You can really see that this is between his stint in the Inner Sanctum films of the '40s and the career-ending Dracula vs. Frankenstein Al Adamson flick which he closed his career on.
Imagine Rod Serling intro- and outroing Twilight Zone with slurred speech and about sixty pounds overweight and you'll get the idea. But to be fair, the man did have a hard life and looking like a tortured soul was required for the part. You can't have Boris Karloff doing the 'trapped demon from hell' spiel...he was off doing the Hal Roach-produced (but never shown) episodes of The Veil.
Which is also available from Something Weird. Go fig.
Since there are only three episodes of Demon Street out so far, I can't cover the entire 13 episode run as yet. Sadly, the prints that SWV has have burnt in Swedish subtitles so a possible DVD release might be delayed because of that. I hope not. If SWV could release all 10 episodes of The Veil (another series I should do...Karloff is good in anything) on a double disc set, surely they could entertain the notion of giving us the whole Demon Street. Well, if they read their email they will. And I'm a glutton for punishment.
To simply matters I'm going to break up the reviews into three pages. I hope you enjoy....