TV Reviews : O’Toole a Slick Villain in ‘The Dark Angel’

Peter O’Toole, playing a wan, gaunt, opium-addicted, utterly depraved country squire, casts a Gothic spell over “The Dark Angel” on PBS’ “Mystery!” tonight (Channel 50, 8 p.m.; Channels 28, 15 at 9 p.m.).

O’Toole, in a comparatively rare appearance on television, takes a conventional evil role and invests it with a serpentine veneer that’s almost charming. This BBC-Television New Zealand co-production is overlong at 2 1/2 hours, but it’s a deliciously hyper production, with a fainting virtuous damsel, sinister kinsmen, a macabre French governess, and a brooding ancestral mansion staked out with enough gargoyles to scare the horses.

The material could be a pure Harlequin Romance except it’s based on a 19th-Century Gothic novel by Sheridan Le Fanu entitled “Uncle Silas” (1864), which “Mystery!” host Diana Rigg incorrectly calls “literature’s first psychological thriller,” as if Edgar Allan Poe had never existed.

The sensual, innocent heroine (Beatie Edney) is constantly running in the woods, hurling herself down dark, long hallways or crumbling into a heap at the foot of stairs.

O’Toole, the heroine’s sickly, demented uncle whose open-mouthed familial kisses only confuse the young woman, imbibes his “medicine” from an opium bottle. His grotesque companion (Jane Lapotaire’s governess) wears a black wig and is more frightening than O’Toole.

Director Peter Hammond’s style, suffused with Fun House mirror effects, often suggests a psychedelic movie from the ‘60s. Don MacPherson’s script is wafer-thin, genre period melodrama. But the nightmare is salvaged by O’Toole and production designer Oliver Bayldon’s sickly rich decay.