Cheap One Step Beyond - Collection 1 (DVD) (John Newland) Price

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Customer Reviews of One Step Beyond - Collection 1

John Newland's creepy world is "One Step Beyond"
Okay, so some of the prints aren't the best in world, but so what? It's "One Step Beyond" and we are finally getting to see more than a scattered episode here and there on DVD.
VCI Entertainment did an excellent job of putting this DVD package together and I love the spooky DVD "landscape" created by VCI between the episodes. It's not just your average cheapie compliation of "here's the episodes with no money spent to set the mood."
"Ordeal on Locust Street" is worth the price of admission alone, and John Newlands deadpan intos and outros run a close second to Rod Serling's.
Sure, "One Step Beyond" has always been considered to be the poor man's "Twilight Zone," but that's part of it's charm. It's like a night of cheap thrills at a 1950's drive-in.
I just hope VCI Entertainment is true to it's word and makes available future collections.
So buy this set, sit back, and enjoy Collection #1 of "One Step Beyond."

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Five Stars, Sight Unseen!
The CLOWN!? THE CLOWN is on this set!?!?!?! I am SO buying this right now.

I saw that on tv when I was five or six. I couldn't look into a mirror for YEARS afterward... which the crueler among us would say was beneficial.

I saw it on a couple of years ago as a patchy, chopped up rerun. From an adult (reasonably) perspective, the episode moves somewhat slower than a drunk snail in a tub of molasses -- and it still scared the bejeezus out of me.

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One Step Too Pricey?
This series is of the same genre and timeframe as Twilight Zone and this reviewer remembers watching the series when originally aired. Yet while many of the episodes of Twilight Zone are permanently etched in this writer's memory, not a single episode of this series rings a bell, except the presence of John Newland and the very haunting theme score.
Here are synopses of the 12 episodes and ratings (5 stars possible), which aired between 9/15/59 and 11/11/60, each episode being about 24 ½ minutes long.

Disc #1 - Delusion - 1 star. Blood donor with a problem. Pretty feeble.
Disc #1 - Ordeal On Locust Street - 1 ½ stars. Birth defect. This writer can conceive several alternative plot developments which would have been much more satisfying!
Disc #1 - Brainwave -2 stars - WWII ship captain wounded. Very predictable.
Disc # 1 - Doomsday - 2 stars - Family curse on first born. Very predictable.
Disc # 1 - The Inheritance - 2 stars - Diamond necklace with a nasty disposition.
Disc # 1 - The Explorer - 2 stars - Three guys lost in the desert. A fourth shows up...

Disc # 2 - The Clown - 2 stars - Just don't look in a mirror afterwards.
Disc # 2 - Delia - 3 stars - Apparent time mismatch for love-lost. Twilight Zone quality.
Disc # 2 - House of The Dead - 3 ½ stars - Searching in Hong Kong for love-lost. Twilight Zone quality.
Disc # 2 - Tidalwave - 0 stars! Shrieking (and shrieking and shrieking) woman in distress.
Disc # 2 - Anniversary of A Murder - 2 stars - Crime really does not pay!
Disc # 2 - To Know The End - 3 stars -Precognition predicament of disaster. Twilight Zone quality.

The two DVDs are contained in a standard plastic-sheathed DVD case, DVD #1 mounted inside the front cover, DVD #2 the back cover. A laid-in folded glossy pamphlet discusses the series. DVD picture quality is so-so, likely transferred from video tape, with the fuzziness one would expect of a black and white 1959 vintage TV episode. (Vci/Ffi gives no clue.) Sound ghosts are faintly audible with 2 to 3 second delay, bleeding over from adjacent tracks in the first two episodes of Disc #1. Anniversary of A Murder had several significant picture defects. There were occasional jumps and other sporadic picture defects throughout. Sound was consistent with that vintage.

One more thing. This DVD is put out by an outfit called VCI Entertainment (Vci/Ffi, vcientertainment.com). As a DVD collector and purist, this reviewer was horrified to find one of those plastic anti-theft strips glued INSIDE the DVD case in close proximity to the DVDs. Such a practice is totally unnecessary and indeed unacceptable to this collector because of the sticky hazards it poses to contamination of that DVD and other DVDs. Such practice may preclude any further purchases from such an offending outfit, depending on their response to this writer's email!