"Prisons without walls, cages without bars..."
This is an interesting episode- clever, imaginative, ingenious, with a strong central concept, and anchored superbly with performances from Brian Cox and none other than Peter Cushing himself, however cheap it must have been to film: this is quite blatantly the season cheapie. Either that or Cushing's slary took half the budget.
It's 1980. The wine is awful. A concentration camp guard could be of an age to be running a pet shop. Fairy liquid bottles look different. And attitudes to keeping big cats captive, forty years before Tiger King, are somewhat different. There's also an element of "this entire building is surrounded by film" in the stock footage sequences. Yet all this period charm, as well as the presence of Cushing and the bizarrely young presence of Cox, keeps us watching.
It's not a bad piece of telly. It certainly holds the attention and is both intriguing and well made. Yet it doesn't manage to be scary, and comes across more as a weird thriller than anything to do with horror. It doesn't quite work, yet it doesn't quite fail. It is, regardless, interesting.
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