HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR EPISODE 12 - THE TWO FACES OF EVIL (1980)

DIRECTED by Alan Gibson

SCREENPLAY by Renald Graham

STARRING - Anna Calder-Marshall as Janet, Gary Raymond as Martin/The Doppelganger, Paul Hawkins as David.

PLOT - It is a rainy night and holiday makers Martin and Janet along with thier young son David are travelling in thier car to the cottage they are staying at.

Spotting a strange hitchhiker wearing a yellow oilskin coat and hat, Martin stops to give him a lift despite the fact that Janet finds him creepy.

Janet's suspicions are soon proved horribly right when the hitchhiker attacks Martin and causes the car to crash.

Coming round in hospital Janet learns that Martin and David survived the crash, but of the hitchhiker there is no sign.

Martin has been badly injured in the accident - glass had a been lodged in his throat and had to be removed, as a result of this Martin's vocal chords have been injured and he is temporarily unable to talk. Martin leaves hospital and goes back to the cottage with his wife and son to convalesce.

However, it soon becomes apparent that all is not as it seems - Martin is acting strangely and his fingernail appears to have grown to a long sharpened length...just like the fingernail of the man who attacked them.

Janet begins to wonder if her beloved husband has been somehow replaced by a malevolent and terrifying being...

PERFORMANCES - Ok, I'm just going to come right out and say it without any preamble - The Two Faces Of Evil is beyond shadow of a doubt the single best episode of Hammer House Of Horror that was made. In fact you could even argue that it's the FINAL good thing that the classic Hammer studios made full stop.

The reasons for this are many (as you'll see), one of these reasons is the acting. Hammer House Of Horror has a wealth of decent performances throughout it's thirteen episode run but Anna Calder-Marshall and Gary Raymond as Janet and Martin are among the best of the bunch (even the kid playing thier son is pretty decent too, which is no small achievement in an era of TV where most child actors where bloody terrible).

Calder-Marshall utterly convinces as Janet - a happily married thirty something wife and mum who's comfortable and safe life has been tainted by something that's just...wrong.

Janet goes from relieved but slightly shaken up nursemaid to her sick husband to doubtful of his true identity, all the way through to stark boggle eyed terror as the true horror of what Martin has been replaced by becomes apparent.

As good as Calder-Marshall is it's Gary Raymond in his dual role as Martin and his doppelganger that really makes this story.

We only see the real Martin in the prologue scene - he seems like a nice, everyday kind of bloke. He's on his holidays with his wife and kid, happily singing "She'll be coming round the mountain" as he ferrys his family to thier holiday destination when they have thier fateful encounter with the hitchhiker...and that's it - Martins gone, killed and replaced by whatever weird lifeform (presumably alien) that's decided to replicate him.

Raymond's performance as the doppelganger is quite simply chilling. At points he almost manages a type of Karloff-esque pity for the creature as he struggles to speak and communicate. He makes this horrible throaty gargling noise as he attempts to speak (this is due to his lacerated vocal chords) - it manages to be both pitiful and utterly repellent at the same time, it really gets under your skin and makes you feel queasy and uneasy (or it did me at any rate).

Just when you think that maybe the creature isn't so bad he suddenly starts acting like an utter psychopath, flying into a rage and chasing poor old Janet all over the place. It soon becomes a fight for life for Janet and young David and the doppelganger becomes utterly relentless and completely ruthless. It's an absolute masterclass in horror villainy.

VIOLENCE - When the hitchhiker attacks Martin in the car he scrapes his diseased and filthy looking long sharp fingernail over Martin's face. For some reason this fingernail really bothered me - it's objectively speaking nothing really THAT unusual but for some reason it just looks wrong. The thought of that nail actually PIERCING your skin in any way just evokes feelings of infection and disease for some reason.

From that point on the car crashes and from then on throughout the rest of the episode we keep seeing flashbacks to Martin's fight with the hitchhiker as he struggles to save himself and his family amidst the wreckage of his car.

At one point in the fight the hitchhiker somehow manages to gorily get his hand splattered to a pulp (how Martin - a normal guy shaken up by a car crash - manages to do this is never explained.) Not to worry though as the hitchhiker grows his hand back when he adopts Martin's form.

Worst of all, at the end of the story the doppelganger kills little David. We don't see the killing, just the end result - David's pale, lifeless corpse. Two things which really upset audiences in horror is when either children or animals are killed (adult humans are fair game), we've seen examples of BOTH in this series - The Hammer House Of Horror wasn't afraid to take it's audience out of thier comfort zones. This show had BALLS !!!

SFX - Some nice quasi-monster makeup for Martin's doppelganger.

The car crash (considering the budget) is pretty spectacular.

RATING - As stated earlier The Two Faces Of Evil is THE best episode in the entire series. It's got everything - great performances, a truly disturbing monster, a sickly and troubling atmosphere and many, many moments that will stay with you long after it's brief one hour run-time is done and dusted.

It's the way that this episode just gets under your skin. The way it makes you feel that truly elevates it miles above the rest of the (admittedly already brilliant) series.

This episode has the dubious distinction of being the only piece of horror media to have given me an actual nightmare.

I originally watched this when I was five years old, that night I had a nightmare that I was sat on the toilet and suddenly the hitchhiker in his yellow oilskin coat and fisherman's hat kicks the toilet door open and stabs me to death. I woke up screaming that night, I can still remember that nightmare as vividly as anything. Needless to say I had to have my mum sleep in bed with me for many months afterwards (this is probably why I don't have any siblings). The sheer fact that this episode bothered me so much as a kid and that it STILL holds up and retains it's power to disturb a whole forty five years later shows how extremely well done this episode is.

As I also said earlier this episode marks something of an end of an era - there was only one more episode of Hammer House Of Horror after this -The Mark Of Satan - and to be fair it wasn't that great (more on this next time), after this Hammer produced another series -The Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense - but as the title suggests that series concentrated more on the thriller genre rather than outright horror, so basically this episode was the final really, really, really good horror story that the original Hammer studios produced (I know Hammer came back in the early 21st century but I don't really consider them to be the same company or to have the same style). So even if you don't like this episode for that reason alone it deserves some kind of recognition.

5 shapeshifting hitchhikers out of 5. A stone cold classic.

Just one final note of real life horror that's tangentially related to this episode. The story is filmed near (and takes place near) Stoke Mandeville, site of the children's hospital where infamous disc jockey turned kiddie fiddler Jimmy Saville assaulted many of his victims during his fifty year reign of terror. He was probably up to his usual tricks whilst this very episode was being filmed, and if that non too cheery thought doesn't give you the chills then nothing will...

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