Ghost Stories
The makers of this would-be made-for-TV series claim to "use the full impact of image and sound to place the viewer right in the midst of every frightful experience." What this means in practice is ear-wrenching sounds will assault you, one simulating a highly amplified creak of a rusty gate opening torturously slowly within your inner ear. Vertiginous video effects track and tilt ceaselessly along corridors of old houses and stone castles, swooping and cross-fading with other bits of video. The packaging might well have boasted this: Shot in Spectral Ghost-O-Vision! The target audience for this product apparently can't sit still for a shot that lasts more than three seconds. That's how hectic these video techniques are. The swirling montage phantasmagoria had me reaching for the Dramamine. Not that the discs are completely worthless. Hosted by the estimable Patrick Macnee (The Avengers), the series relates many stories of ghostly sightings, accompanied by interviews with eyewitnesses, all of which feel factual. This is clearly the show's strength. It's unfortunate that they feel compelled in several places to mount experiments to "prove" certain places are haunted, because the results are laughably inept. A note on the discs themselves is in order, since the very poor sound (the discs I viewed had an annoying buzz in the left channel) and the atrocious visual quality conspire to make them practically unwatchable. One wonders why it was ever necessary to transfer this show to DVD at all. And at 45 minutes per volume, this could easily have fit on one disc with much better quality.--Jim Gay