Though he'd been here before, with his previous anthology of horror shorts Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, Francis's masterstroke was in adapting the archetypically American suburban stories from William Gaines and Al Feldstein's notorious EC horror comics of the 1950s as a mirror for the growing malaise (and festering middle-class resentment of the working class) of Sir Edward Heath-era Britain. Only one of the film's uniformly strong segments, "Blind Alleys," directly deals with economic despair. In it, the inhabitants of a run-down shelter house for the blind gradually comes to the grim realization that the military Major appointed as the new director of facilities appears to have been appointed by the government to effectively shut it down, as he cuts rations, heat and keeps the residents cowering with his vicious wolf of a dog, measures that ultimately kill off one of the elderly blind men. In a classic EC turn of the tables, the men corner the Major, lock him up in a tight cellar closet and work together to build a hallway outside his door festooned with razor blades, their approach to industrial work as an act of social outrage almost presaging the impending anti-unionism of Margaret Thatcher.   Eric Henderson