Well Karloff fans will really get their money's worth with this episode. In addition to his hosting duties, he appears in both parts of a double feature episode here, and pokes a little fun at the idea as part of the introduction when both of his characters do a quick double take at each other. Ed Nelson also does double duty in the pair of stories, and wouldn't you know it, the guy can't catch a break because he's a goner in both tales. That's the idea in 'Dialogues With Death', along with the concept that sometimes the spirit of a dead person will hang around until the fact of being dead has time to kick in.
It looks to me like the first chapter included a recycled clip from an earlier Thriller episode. The scene of Tom Ellison's (Nelson) car going over the embankment was used before in #1.19 - Choose A Victim. The giveaway are those flames that briefly shoot out from under the car as it heads down the hill, though the earlier story uses more footage including the rollover. Seeing Tom's friend Harry (George Kane) already resting on a slab in the morgue before he got there seemed a bit unusual to me, but that was part of the hook. For Pop Jenkins (Karloff), it was all in a night's work.
The second story was a little more bizarre, since Karloff's character, Colonel Jackson Beauregarde Finchess and his sister Emily (Estelle Winwood) right off the bat refer to Daniel Le Jean (Nelson) and his wife Nell (Norma Crane) as already being dead. Certainly this comes as a surprise to the Le Jean's, but doesn't deter them from searching the family estate for an inheritance left by Daniel's father. The remaining story gets really creepy as they go virtually underground to examine the family burial crypt and get trapped by an immovable door. The idea of a phone buried along with the father because of his catalepsy was a clever plot element, but as we see, comes to naught when Karloff's character answers the phone. The Colonel and his sister aren't very sympathetic to the plight of their buried nephew, but at least they didn't tell him that he got a wrong number.
It looks to me like the first chapter included a recycled clip from an earlier Thriller episode. The scene of Tom Ellison's (Nelson) car going over the embankment was used before in #1.19 - Choose A Victim. The giveaway are those flames that briefly shoot out from under the car as it heads down the hill, though the earlier story uses more footage including the rollover. Seeing Tom's friend Harry (George Kane) already resting on a slab in the morgue before he got there seemed a bit unusual to me, but that was part of the hook. For Pop Jenkins (Karloff), it was all in a night's work.
The second story was a little more bizarre, since Karloff's character, Colonel Jackson Beauregarde Finchess and his sister Emily (Estelle Winwood) right off the bat refer to Daniel Le Jean (Nelson) and his wife Nell (Norma Crane) as already being dead. Certainly this comes as a surprise to the Le Jean's, but doesn't deter them from searching the family estate for an inheritance left by Daniel's father. The remaining story gets really creepy as they go virtually underground to examine the family burial crypt and get trapped by an immovable door. The idea of a phone buried along with the father because of his catalepsy was a clever plot element, but as we see, comes to naught when Karloff's character answers the phone. The Colonel and his sister aren't very sympathetic to the plight of their buried nephew, but at least they didn't tell him that he got a wrong number.