Thriller: The Complete Series (Image)

“As sure as my name is Boris Karloff, this is a thriller.” Hosted by Boris Karloff (who plays it straight with theatrical flourish grounded in easy-going dignity and knowing humor), this television horror anthology of the early 1960s began as an awkward mix of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Naked City, favoring psychological dramas and crime stories over tales of terror.

“The Twisted Image,” the first episode of the series, is in fact a pretty interesting (if a little outré) piece of genre TV, with Leslie Nielsen bringing a touch of smarmy arrogance to his role as a business executive and family man picked out by an obsessive young woman (Natalie Trundy) with piercing eyes and delusions of a relationship. As she transforms from nuisance to would-be homewrecker hounding his wife with phone call confessions, the tale gets tangled in the parallel story of a mailroom employee (George Grizzard) who is equally disconnected from reality as he passes himself off as Nielsen’s character. As a thriller it’s a bit clumsy and overworked and the climax can’t really sell the concept, but as a portrait of early sixties social culture twisted up by suspicion and psychosis it’s downright fascinating.

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Look on the back of the case of Eagles Over London (Severin) and you’ll see this Italian World War II action adventure identified as a “Macaroni Combat.” This rather clumsy moniker is a recently coined phrase in the “spaghetti western” vein but hardly expressive of this military caper thriller from Italian genre specialist Enzo Castellari (of the original The Inglorious Bastards fame). The plot is quite clever: a squad of Germans don British uniforms and identities and infiltrate Britain through the chaos of the evacuation of Dunkirk, while a British Lt. (a colorless Frederick Stafford with a thick European accent) stumbles upon the plot and tries to track them through London before they can execute their missions. Castellari is not an elegant director, but then that’s not what makes a World War II adventure like this work. Made in the shadow of The Dirty Dozen and The Battle of Britain, this film straddles both genres, delivering impressive spectacle—from the evacuation of Dunkirk (shot on the coast of Spain) to the air combat of the Battle of Britain (largely shot on soundstage in Rome)—and espionage action. There’s a lot  of dubbing (most of the Italians are replaced on the soundtrack) and a cacophony of unlikely accents (the aforementioned Stafford, whose accent is justified by his Hungarian origins, and Van Johnson as a British Air Marshall right out of middle America), but it’s still quite entertaining, like an energetic B-movie with a lavish budget (you can see the money poured into the Dunkirk scenes, with its epic vistas filled with extras and a strafing run by a German fighter) and energetic direction.

The Germans in London in "Eagles Over London"

Originally titled La battaglia d’Inghilterra (“The Battle of Britain”) and also known as Battle Squadron, this film never received an official American release according to Quentin Tarantino (a big fan of the film and of Castellari’s oeuvre). Severin took a cue from QT to give the film its American DVD and Blu-ray debut and they got Tarantino to participate in the extras: a 14-minute interview with director Enzo G. Castellari (the discuss the film and the oddities of the Italian movie industry of the time) and an appearance hosting a rare film screening in L.A. with Castellari, gushing on stage while a woozy handheld video camera records the occasion. Also features a brief deleted scene with the German High Command discussing the invastion (in German with English subtitles).

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