THE FRIGHTENERS - "The Minder" (1972)

This Weird Wednesday's offering is not only weird, it's stark, tense, and taut!

"The Frightener's" was made in the early 70's, and was billed as a 'horror anthology' series, but from what I saw in this first episode, it's not the kind of horror you would expect, but deals more with the horrors of people and personalities, kind of like the world today! 

There are no monsters or vampires or flying saucers in this series, instead, these are stories of the horrors of the mind, and are more like serious depressing drama than horror!
Once again, this show is something I would never have even heard of if it wasn't for Lord Litter in Berlin! Thanks pal!

The story begins with a well-planned jailbreak, and goes South from there!

Tom (Dr. Terrible's House Of Horrible) Bell is the man they call Bender

Kenneth J. (Dr, Blood's Coffin, I, Monster, The Creeping Flesh) Warren is the bad and bald Cyril, the angry guy they're breaking out!

All seems to be going well at first!

The one slight bit of comedy is when they're wheeling Cyril out, they do run his extended broken foot into the front door, ala The Three Stooges!

From there on, it's mostly Cyril is this room pissing and moaning about everything!

The problem is this guy Bryan (Oh Lucky Man!, Alien 3) Glover as the prick named Porter. Bender has a previous run-in with him in jail, and he is expecting Bender to off Cyril for him once and for all!

When Bender ceremoniously empties his clip in slow motion, you know he has no plans to follow through on the killing of Cyril!

The last member of the main cast is Warren (A Clockwork Orange) Clarke as Bender's easy going partner Ronnie!

Two things stand out, number one is a good part of why this show is so stark is that is it totally devoid of any background music!

Number two is that if you don't have a good handle on understanding people talking with a Cockney dialect, you're not going to know half of the details of the story. Even though it's in English, they should still have sub-titles for us foreigners!

Bottom line is, everything's a mess at the beginning all the way to the end as you can plainly see! I'm going to try and watch another episode, but I'm not really expecting the general mood of me or the show to change!