Roald Dahl is well known and loved for his children's books.  He has written such classics as James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (filmed as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,) and Matilda.  But Dahl has also written a number of stories for adults where he puts his creative talents to creating something more macabre and unsettling.  In 1979 Granada Television created an anthology TV series based on the works of this talented writer, Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected.  This series ran an incredible nine season with a total of 112 episodes.  Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected Set 1 contains the first two seasons of the show.

This series consists of different stand alone stories that are often suspenseful without being eerie or gruesome.  Kind of the equivalent of the cozy British murder mystery for the horror world.  There is little blood in these shows, but that doesn't mean that they don't have horrific elements to them.  They do.  Many of the shows have twist endings that shock or astound, and a lot of the programs also have a thick vein of black humor running through them.

Dahl himself introduces the episodes in these first two seasons and tells a sentence or two about how he came to write the story or how he feels about it. This is a nice touch, and I enjoyed his short introductions.  It was interesting to hear that having his car stolen by someone he stopped to give a lift to convinced him to write The Hitchhiker, for example.

Overall the stories themselves are good.  The series was launched with one of Dahl's most famous stories, The Man from the South.  In this tale a man vacationing in the West Indies, Carlos (Jose Ferrer,) tempts a sailor (Michael Ontkean) on shore leave into making a wager.  Carlos bets that the sailor can't light his cigarette lighter ten times in a row.  If he can do this, Carlos will give the man his new Jaguar.  But if the sailor fails to light the lighter even once, Carlos will cut off his little finger on his left hand.  This is such an interesting story because you instantly put yourself in the sailor's place.  Would you bet your little finger against a car you could never otherwise own?  Ferrer does an outstanding job, as he often does, playing the not quite sane gambler perfectly.  The rest of the cast didn't live up to his example though.  Ontkean is never very convincing.  He doesn't seem very scared when he is lighting his lighter and is not able to convey what must be going through the sailor's head.

Another lighter episode (no pun intended) is The Hitchhiker, where a writer (Rod Taylor) picks up an odd old man (Cyril Cusak) hitchhiking on the side of the road.  The man drops hints as to what he does for a living, but the writer can't seem to guess what he does.  I really enjoyed this quiet little story that is amusing and fun.

Being an anthology show, this program is a mixed bag.  Not all of the show are great, and many of them fall far from the mark.  Some of them work well, but many of them don't.  Some of the shows just fall flat, like Royal Jelly which was just stupid.  A lot of the twist can be seen from a long way off, like in The Landlady, and being surprised is the exception rather than the rule, unfortunately.

A couple of these stories have been adapted before.  Lamb to the Slaughter and Man from the South were both done for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and those versions were better than the adaptations presented in this series.

While the stories are generally good and the guest stars fantastic, this series is just mediocre.  The problem seems to be that in most cases Dahl's stories work better on paper than they do on the small screen.  When reading his stories, I'm always caught up in what is going on at that moment in the story, but these adaptations give you time to think ahead and wonder how the show will end.  If you do that, you'll be able to guess the endings most times.  That's not to say that they programs are bad, they aren't, they just don't live up to the potential of the source material for the most part.

These 25 half hour episodes are presented on four DVDs.  Each one comes in an Amaray case and all four cases are stored in a slipcase.

Audio:

The two channel mono audio is adequate, and about what you would expect from a late 70's TV show.  The dialog is clear for the most part, though in some scenes it is a bit muffled.  While the soundtrack isn't very dynamic it fits well with the show.

Video:

The full frame video is a little less than average for a show of this age. Like many British shows, some parts were filmed while others were taped.  The filmed segments are inferior to those that were recorded on video tape, with the film having a lot more grain and some slight damage; the occasional hair or dirt on the frame.  The taped parts did not look spectacular either.  The image is a little soft, with the lines not as tight as they should be.  The black level is acceptable.  There were some digital errors visible, mostly a little aliasing and the shimmering of closely spaced lines, but these weren't distracting.  This series doesn't look bad, it just isn't spectacular.

Extras:

The only extras this set contains are some production notes, cast filmographies, and a text biography of Roald Dalh.

Final Thoughts:

These are good stories for the most part, and when they work the results are very good.  Unfortunately this series is a mixed bag, with a lot of the episodes coming across as predictable or worse, silly.  Though this is billed as a thriller show, there isn't anything that will really scare you, though a couple of shows offer a good amount of suspense.  Though I enjoyed watching a lot of these shows, I can't see myself viewing most of these shows again, and for that reason I'm going to recommend this as a rental.