DOOMWATCH (vhs) is a pollution watchdog and 50 similar items

Unique widescreen display box can be set on it's spine, back is laid out the same way. Oversized box has been cut to fit a white, hard plastic clamshell display case. A little text has been cut off on both the front back as a result. Most of the synopsis is legible on the back. Cassette is nice and clean with a small narrow 'rewind' sticker across the bottom edge of label. The movie itself is not widescreen but is based on a British TV series of the day. Played fine on my JVC s-vhs deck except it had a few lines on the opening credits and went black screen (in the sourceprint?) for a second. It starts out with Dr. Del Shaw (Ian Bannen) being dispatched to an H.P. Lovecraft type island with a remote secretive fishing village shrouded in fog, to investigate the effects of oil pollution on the wild life. He is greeted with glowering hostility and suspicion by all the locals--growling ferryman George Woodbridge (who has an authentic Cornish accent), rude cop Percy Herbert, snappish vicar Joseph O'Connor, mean shopkeeper Shelag Fraser--except schoolteacher Victoria Brown (Judy Geeson). Later, he glimpses misshapen figures lurking in upstairs rooms or behind trees and a mysterious burial in the woods at night. He discovers a body in the woods, but it's inevitably missing when he brings Herbert to investigate. When attacked by a man with a face like a sponge, he catches on that the islanders are suffering an epidemic of acromegaly, the distorting disease made famous by actor Rondo Hatton. Then, it's up to the DOOMWATCH team to work out whose fault it is by harassing Admiral George Sanders, industrialist Geoffrey Keen and waste disposal specialist Norman Bird. It turns out that the Navy has legitimately dumped barrels of a mildly radioactive waste off the coast of Balfe in an ominious area known as Castle Rock (did Stephen King see this back in the '70s?) and that Bird has sneaked in canisters of Keen's failed hormone mix which have exploded, thanks to the radiation and contaminated the fish which constitute the islanders' main diet. The film was a TV spin-off and at the end of the day it ends up feeling like one of those modern Hammer films, which is a good thing.