Customer Reviews

Avengers: 65 Volume 6 [VHS]

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4 star:		(1)
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Two of the best Avengers.

"Too Many Christmas Trees" is both an Avengers favorite and one of its classics. Steed is plagued by recurring nightmares of a colleague's death, which later happens exactly as he dreamed it. Emma invites him to lighten his grief at a friend's Charles Dickens-themed Christmas party, and Steed begins having more prescient dreams - this time, foretelling his own demise. A very nasty Santa Claus is in the middle of it all, and Steed ultimately squares off against the evil St. Nick in a hall of mirrors. This episode benefits from gorgeous photography and costumes, and even more impressive nightmarish surreal sets.

For some reason I've never been able to fathom, "The Man-Eater of Surrey Green" always gets short shrift from reviewers, when it's really a very well-done episode all round. The answer may simply be in the fact that some people don't like sci-fi in the series - though sci-fi is largely what made it popular. (Go figure.) "Man-Eater" is a dark and atmospheric story about a mind-controlling space plant that germinates on Earth after finding its way here via a crashed returning manned space vehicle. Steed battles the villainous vegetable - and Emma becomes one, as the plant gets its tendrils into her finely-muscled fighter's body, to combat Steed.

Both these episodes are fine examples of The Avengers at its black-and-white atmospheric best.

5 stars for Brian Clemons "Too Many Christmas Trees". Steed is having surreal nightmares- paper cutout forests, a bizarre present a picture of himself, a nasty Father Christmas- not only does he dream a fellow agent is found dead- the agent is found dead under mysterious circumstances that morning. The usual wit pervades. Emma and Steed attend a Christmas houseparty in the country. She admires Steed's four poster bed. "I've always fancied myself in one of these." "So have I," Steed says fervently! Clemons balances associations of Christmas: Christmas cards, Christmas trees and presents with a sense of menace. The Dickensian host immitates a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge, and costumed Dickens characters represent some nasty villains. Emma suspects Steed is about to be drugged. When she appeals to a psychiatrist for help he pulls a gun on her. Naturally Emma knocks him unconscious and proudly tells Steed that she knocked him out. "He's on our side!" "You might have told me!" Delightfully sinister battle in an eerie room of distorting mirrors: Emma saves Steed's life and he returns the favor. This episode is sublime. The other two are dreadful and mediocre. "ManEater of Surrey Green " concerns a man eating plant. It's wacky and strange but not funny. "Two's a crowd" is a weak script with Steed and a sleazy imposter. The only Avengers twist is that 4 sinister Russian agents, a secret agent whom no one knows what he looks like, use children's toy weapons to kill others- a toy submarine fires real bullets and a large model airplane drops mini bombs. "Trees" is first rate - mixing the charming and sinister- one of Clemons best scripts. "Maneater" and "Two's a Crowd" are dreadfully boring. The Avengers film with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, despite botched editing and a director obsessed with special effects instead of character and story, was far better than those bombs. Diana Rigg and Patrick MacNee always do their best. But why Crowd and ManEater were ever accepted for Avengers scripts is puzzling. The producers should have had writers Malcolm Hulke (toy train AVengers 1965) and Roger Marshall (Silent Dust, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Station) write more scripts.