Film Review
If you didn't suffer from fotografizophobia (that well-known fear of
having your photo taken) beforehand there's a good chance you will do
after watching this fourth gripping story in the
Sapphire & Steel
series. It's a return to the bleakly claustrophobic nightmare
terrain of
Assignment Two, with menace
lurking in every corner of the dreary confines of a rundown boarding
house. This time, the threat facing our heroes is far weirder,
far more disturbing than the disgruntled ghosts of their second
adventure and the vindictive mechanically-enhanced animal parts of
their third. Now they are up against a mysterious 'something'
that has allowed itself to become trapped in
every photograph that has been,
and will ever be, taken. As if that was not bad enough, this
'something' has found a way out of the photographs and has acquired a
nasty habit of taking people our of our world and imprisoning them in
old photographs. Nasty.
These are totally terrifying concepts which the writer P.J. Hammond
exploits to truly nightmarish effect. Episode Three concludes
with the most horrific cliff hanger in the entire series - a superb
example of horror by implication. All that we see before the
image dissolves into the closing credits is an enlarged photographic
still. It is what we hear that freezes our blood - the death
screams of the girl trapped in the photograph as the villain of the
piece sets fire to the original. Forget
The Exorcist and
Rosemary's Baby - this is horror of
a much higher order, the stuff of which our worst nightmares is
made. How ITV was able to broadcast it on a weekday evening well
before the 9pm watershed, when school kids across the land were sitting
in front of the telly doing their homework, is a mystery. There
is in all likelihood a generation of television viewers that was
scarred for life by this jolt of undiluted terror.
The fear factor is heightened by the fact that, for the first time
since we met them, Sapphire and Steel genuinely do look as if they are
going to be defeated. They come within a whisker of being so, and
all credit to David McCallum and Joanna Lumley for revealing a far more
vulnerable, almost human side to their characters. As in
Assignment Two, it is a mere human
that averts calamity, this time a downmarket prostitute named
Liz. Sympathetically played by Alyson Spiro, Liz is a welcome
addition to the team, one who, for once, does not end up being
callously sacrificed by Steel. When the unnamed threat takes on
its human form, it has the sinister presence of a faceless man - a
concept 'borrowed' either from Norton Juster's classic children's novel
The Phantom Tollbooth or Richard
Fleischer's film noir
Follow Me Quietly (1949). The
one mistake that P.J. Hammond made was to give this fiend a human face
(actually, two human faces) - in doing so he robs it of much of its
mystique and malevolence. On this occasion, their adversary
proves to be so powerful that Sapphire and Steel score only a partial
victory, with the menace not defeated but set to return seventy years
hence (which is a bit worrying when you consider what happens to the
duo in their sixth assignment). It's time to get out the photo
album and destroy the whole damn lot - just to be on the safe side...
© James Travers 2014
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Sapphire and Steel arrive at a seemingly deserted old building, the
ground floor of which functions as a shop that buys and sells lost
property. With so many objects from different time periods in
such close proximity the risk of a temporal breach is dangerously high
but what most concerns the duo are the montage photographs created by
the former landlord, who has mysteriously disappeared. These
provide a possible access point for a malevolent force from another
dimension. The duo's investigation is disturbed by the appearance
of young children who look as if they belong in another era. They
are in fact photographs of children who have been brought to life by
the building's present landlord. When Sapphire and Steel question
the building's only tenant, a young call girl named Liz, she finds it
hard to describe the landlord. It is as if he had no face...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.