I'm not a quitter, or at least I like to think I'm not. I have struggled myself through deadly dull and exaggeratedly long movies and tedious TV-series. However, I did quit watching "Theater Macabre" after ten (out of a total of 24) episodes. Every single story I watched was indescribably boring and, even though they only have a running time of 25 minutes each, they all felt much longer and like an incredible waste of my (not-so-precious) time.
The probably sole reason why this obscure and originally Polish series is still available on DVD, is because the producers somehow managed to contract none other than Sir Christopher Lee as the host. Like Rod Serling in the magnificent "The Twilight Zone", Mr. Lee briefly introduces every episode and mentions the authors of whose work the tales are based on. He begins every intro with "I'm Christopher Lee, how do you do?" and sits in an ugly décor. The difference with Rod Serling, or any other host, is that I'm 100% convinced that Lee never actually watched any of the episodes and only read a random text aloud. It was just a routine job for him.
What I dislike the most about "Theater Macabre" is how unbelievably pretentious it is. Every tale is supposedly adapted from the writings of acclaimed (and mostly Eastern European or Russian) authors, and Lee sophisticatedly emphasizes their names at the start. Are there many horror fanatics interested half-hour adaptations of practically unreadable books by people like Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Turgenev, or Aleksey Tolstoy? It's just namedropping for the sake of namedropping, while the short stories are abstract and pseudo-intellectual nonsense. When I feel really courageous one day, I might pick up where I left off, or perhaps start with the stories that are based on writers I'm more familiar with (there's an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson) but I'm not in a hurry.
