After a brutal sexual assault, a high school girl pulls her life together and sets out to expose her attacker.Arguably the greatest era for the telefilm, the birth of the made for television genre spawned a new medium, and filmmakers churned out projects by the dozen. From the ABC Movie of the Week to NBC’s Mystery Wheel (which presented revolving feature-length series’ such as Columbo and McMillan and Wife) back to ABC’s late night Wide World: Mystery series, the telefilm was never more prominent on network TV than during this glorious fifteen year cycle.
It all began on the night of October 7, 1964, when NBC aired See How They Run, a mild actioner that featured three kids on the run from the mob. Although the rest of the sixties did not see a huge investment in small screen films (only a few dozen films were produced, which is nothing compared to the seventies when the ABC Movie of the Week was releasing over forty films a season!), filmmakers tested the waters with various genres. Everything from westerns to dramas to supernatural horror all took a shot at ratings gold, before the swinging seventies got the telefilm truly underway.
Seventies television was just as varied as the sixties, but with a heavier emphasis on horror and thrillers. There’s also topical fare, some of which is groundbreaking (That Certain Summer [1972] tackles homosexuality and A Case of Rape [1974] takes on the sexist sexual assault system), and some of which is not-so revolutionary (1971’s The Feminist and the Fuzz is cute but pure fluff). Ultimately, however, it was the B-movie-like nature of TVMs with titles such as Satan’s School for Girls (1973) and Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (1976) that catapulted some telefilms into cult success. Many of these TVMs are still sought out by collectors and nostalgia buffs.
It is because of the rampant enthusiasm for the seventies telefilm and the sheer volume of output that the bulk of the reviews in this book focus on this era. This section also includes a handful of TVMs from the sixties because it was the obvious starting point for the next decade’s incredible output.
Reviews are listed in alphabetical order.
Director: Walter Grauman
Starring: Kathleen Beller, Scott Colomby, Blythe Danner, Dennis Quaid
Airdate: September 20, 1978 Network: CBS
After a brutal sexual assault, a high school girl pulls her life together and sets out to expose her attacker.
The message TV movie is not an anomaly. Topical issues such as teenage sex (Young Love, First Love, 1979), suicide (Surviving, 1985), and even the perils of hitchhiking (Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker, 1979) were all brought to the table to various levels of success. The two most propagandistic teenage driven telefilms of this era came about in the early eighties with the antidrug hogwash (entertaining though it may be) Desperate Lives, and the compelling but absolutely outrageous “exposé” on the dangers of role-playing games in Mazes and Monsters (both from 1982). Another oft-filmed issue was sexual assault, although the victims in those telefilms tended to be adult women. Are You in the House Alone? wasn’t the first TVM to open up the subject of teenage rape, but it might have been the first to position it in a movie marketed as a horror film.
House tends to get a bad rap because of the advertising link to the horror film genre. Part of the tagline of the original ad reads, “An empty house. A mysterious phone call. Then the most terrifying words a seventeen-yearold girl can hear… Are you in the house alone?” Subsequent reruns were marketed with “A lonely teenager. A crazed youth. A night of terror.” In an attempt to tie House somewhat loosely to the then growing stalk and slash subgenre, there is indeed some decent suspense, but this telefilm based on the Richard Peck young adult novel of the same name, is, at its heart, a grittier version of the Afterschool Special.
While House is about Kathleen Beller’s character’s journey to find strength after a brutal attack, the film ends shockingly with her assailant escaping punishment, because, Beller reminds the audience, “the system is wrong.” It is a strangely powerful ending for such a film, and, in this respect, walks well among telefilms such as A Case of Rape (1974) where the viewer is forced to the realization that we are living in a victim-blaming society.
That’s not to say that House isn’t problematic. For the sake of creating a red herring, the photography teacher is portrayed as a lecherous authority figure. And, honestly, most of the men in the film are given the short end of the stick, and are either depicted as rapists or sleazebags, or are shown as emasculated by their inabilities to provide for their family. Only the boyfriend character played by Scott Colomby is drawn with any real dimension. But House doesn’t necessarily veer into man-hating territory; it just prefers to concentrate on the female characters, some of which aren’t shown in a great light either.
Far more family drama than horror, Are You in the House Alone? tackles contemporary (and somewhat timeless) issues such as loss of innocence, sexual assault and personal empowerment. So, be warned, we’re not exactly in Michael Myers territory. But House is definitely worth a watch. [Amanda Reyes]
ASSAULT ON THE WAYNE
Director: Marvin J. Chomsky
Starring: Joseph Cotten, Leonard Nimoy, Lloyd Haynes, Dewey Martin
Airdate: January 12, 1971 Network: ABC
On a covert underwater mission, a perplexed submarine commander fights tropical disease, foreign spies and the threat of mutiny.
Cut-price, splashy underwater spy intrigue from Paramount Television all about an American submarine called The Wayne, which is set to sea with a full hold of nukes, scientists, radioactive crap, talky seamen and enemy double agent/sailor Gordon Hoban (The Born Losers), who sneaks aboard to activate sleeper agents and steal electronics for the nasty Russians. Commanding the sub on its top secret journey is Leonard Nimoy, a skinny, pill-filled captain suffering from the effects of an unknown virus that warps his mind and causes him to hassle his crew à la Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny (1954).
On the way to melting down, Nimoy misses his freshly divorced wife and makes crazy demands on his men, ordering them to dismantle torpedoes, count bread rolls and polish dials in a manic bid to “cleanse” the vessel of a lax attitude—until an unexpected SOS signal forces him to park the sub at a remote island where he rescues a mysterious “injured” scientist who, once aboard, plans to aid Hoban in his dastardly mission.
Not quite action packed, there’s still murder, an explosion, some solid dialog, a Cold War twist and a few tense scenes featuring the fantastic Nimoy who’s obviously glad of the chance to forgo his Spock persona and stretch out his terrestrial acting pants.
Directed by TV series legend Chomsky (Dr. Franken) and padded out with grainy stock footage of periscopes, diving and waves, it co-stars Joseph Cotten (Frankenstein’s Daughter), Keenan Wynn (The Glove), Dewey Martin (The Desperate Hours) and a young, shaved, near unrecognizable Sam Elliott (Ghost Rider) who falls off a ladder. [DF Dresden]
Director: Buzz Kulik
Starring: Scott Jacoby, Kim Hunter, Dabney Coleman, Pippa Scott
Airdate: October 23, 1974 Network: ABC
After Ronald accidentally kills a young girl, his mother hides him in a walled up room located in the center of the house.
ABC was known for its primetime genre outings in the 1970s, and Bad Ronald is one of the best—and most disturbing. Scott Jacoby stars as the title character, a socially awkward teen who is constantly tormented by the in-crowd. When he accidentally kills one of the popular girls, his mother (Kim Hunter of A Streetcar Named Desire and the Planet of the Apes films) devises a plan to hide him in the walls of the house and tells the police he has run away. But when his mother goes to the hospital for surgery and doesn’t make it home, the house is presumed vacant and sold to another family with three daughters (two of them the ubiquitous seventies TV stars, the Eilbacher sisters). Little do they know that Ronald is still lurking in the walls.
Increasingly ensconced in his own imagination, Ronald creates a fantasy world called “Atranta,” and fills his tiny crawlspace with fantastical drawings of its rulers—idealized versions of himself and the princess he hopes to rescue, whom he associates with the new family’s youngest daughter Babs (Cindy Fisher). Needing food and his obsession growing, he starts to get sloppy and the girls sense a presence in the house. He takes to spying on the family through tiny peepholes and concocting a delusional plan to take Babs away to Atranta, to rule the kingdom with him.
Based on the 1971 book of the same name by sci-fi writer Jack Vance (one of his few horror outings), the telefilm attempts to humanize Ronald to a certain extent, presenting him as a misunderstood teen driven mad by social starvation and an overbearing mother. In the book, he’s a sociopath from the beginning, and his original crime is not an accident; he’s an overt child rapist. Actor Scott Jacoby excelled at playing these disturbed youth roles, and this film, combined with his roles in Rivals (1972), Baxter (1973) and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976) cemented his rep as the top teenage creep of the seventies.
Director Buzz Kulik had been working in television for decades (Kim Hunter had worked with him on episodes of Climax! in the 1950s), and was an old hand at the TV movie format by the time Bad Ronald came his way. Interestingly, Kulik had been replaced by John Newland (of One Step Beyond and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark) on the earlier telefilm Crawlspace (1972), which shares some of the same motifs as Bad Ronald—most notably the idea of a young man discovered living in a crawlspace. Still, Crawlspace has not enjoyed the lingering acclaim of Bad Ronald, the latter of which has gone on to be an influence on countless horror directors working today. [Kier-La Janisse]
BAFFLED!
Director: Philip Leacock
Starring: Leonard Nimoy, Susan Hampshire, Rachel Roberts, Vera Miles
Airdate: January 30, 1973 Network: NBC
After surviving a terrible car crash, racer Leonard Nimoy has the gift of premonition and is soon investigating a mystery.
Probably tired of loud American Star Trek fans shouting “Live Long And Prosper!” at him in the street, Leonard Nimoy traveled all the way to Pinewood Studios in England to shoot this logic defying pilot movie (from ITC and Arena Productions) that failed to inspire a follow-up series.
Cheap, tardy, quite daft but goofy enough to endure and giggle at, watch in dismay as hotshot race car driver Tom Kovack (Nimoy) steers his little car around a bumpy track courtesy of stock footage and absolutely awful, grade Z back projection. Without warning, his head melts mid-race and he suffers a vision that makes him spin out of control and crash through a wall. Fortunately, the wall is made of Styrofoam and he survives, but the collision has somehow opened his third eye and he now possesses the paranormal gift of remote viewing and transportation—a talent he’s soon pestered for by blonde ghost hunter Susan Hampshire (Malpertius), a supernatural fan who wants to discuss the house and people Nimoy saw while in a trance.
Within minutes, the pair are investigating a spooky mansion hotel in Devon where jumpy Vera Miles (The Hanged Man), sneaky Rachel Roberts (O Lucky Man), barely sober Valerie Taylor (What A Carve Up!) and Ray Brookes (voice of TV classic Mr. Ben) all stagger about dropping mysterious clues to a wandering, inoffensive, semi-supernatural murder plot that will leave you, much like the cast, baffled!
Graced with a killer theme tune by Richard Hill (To Kill a Clown), nice locations, rancid fashions, lots of slow motion and a hammy, hoity-toity script by Theodore Apstein (Blood Link), Nimoy does his best to not be Spock while flashing backward, forward and sideways “across the spectral planes” and there’s some stupefying bouts of heartfelt jibber-jabber that explains little, as well as flakey evil, high tea, country bitching, a haunted necklace and a car called Girly.
If you must watch it, be sure to stay tuned for the sequence where Nimoy batters a granny in a wheelchair. [DF Dresden]
From left: Scott Jacoby invites viewers into his creepy world of Atranta in Bad Ronald; and Leonard Nimoy looks into the future with Susan Hampshire in Baffled!
THE BAIT
Director: Leonard J. Horn
Starring: Donna Mills, Michael Constantine, William Devane, June Lockhart
Airdate: March 13, 1973 Network: ABC
A female undercover cop acts as sexy girl-bait to entrap a mad killer that hunts and murders young, beautiful women.
Based on the novel The Bait by Dorothy Uhnak, Aaron Spelling co-produced this ABC Movie Of The Week which stars Donna Mills (The Stepford Husbands) as a blonde, spunky mother-of-one/plain-clothes cop who holds her own in a police force full of smelly, sexist, wide-tied males resentful and envious of her street smarts and arrest record.
As “The Best Legs On The Force,” Mills readily threatens a random pervert on a bus, and shuts down a major heroin ring with little effort, and is soon assigned the shocking case of a killer rapist who defiles and murders young women, leaving behind a single baffling clue in the form of a small bottle of Misty Night perfume. Six bodies down, and unable to crack the case, Mills’ grouchy desk sergeant, Michael Constantine (Voyage of the Damned), caves in to her persistent, mousy peer pressure and begrudgingly allows her to become bait and go undercover posing as a vox pop researcher who strolls the city streets in search of men to question.
Endowed with some dark, late night stalking action, great L.A. street locations, effective drama, dialog and tension, the best things about it remains the blinding pant-suits and the gigantic flares, the chunky sideburns and an excellent cast that includes Noam Pitlik (Howie And Rose), Thalmus Rasulala (Cool Breeze), Gianni Russo (Striptease) and the outstandingly insane and creepy William Devane (who would later appear alongside Mills on Knots Landing). Keep watch for a very brief glimpse of Tim Carey (Speed Trap) as Big Mike the doorman. [DF Dresden]
Director: Tom Kotani
Starring: Leigh McCloskey, Connie Sellecca, Burl Ives, Carl Weathers
Airdate: January 27, 1978 Network: ABC
A young man returns to Bermuda only to be haunted by the doomed girl he once loved… and a prehistoric sea creature.
The name “Rankin-Bass” may be synonymous with the world of animated television specials, as Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass were responsible for family-friendly holiday specials that are just as enjoyable today as they were a half-century ago, including Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman and The Hobbit. They may, however, not be the first name you think of when it comes to made for TV spectacles geared for adults—heck, it’s unlikely that they’d even rank within the top hundred.
Their reputation is what makes their name on 1978’s The Bermuda Depths so surprising. A strange genre-bender of a film that never quite figures out exactly where it’s headed, Depths is all the more compelling due to its enigmatic nature, no doubt in part to the work of director Tsugunobu Kotani (billed as “Tom Kotani”), who also helmed the previous year’s Rankin-Bass production The Last Dinosaur. Primarily a romantic drama, Depths often becomes an adventure film in the Jaws mold, with both genres featuring supernatural overtones that may or may not be imagined by the lead character, making for a distinctly unique experience that no doubt became sketched permanently into the memories of the viewers who tuned in expecting a made for TV variation on The Deep.
Future soap opera regular Leigh McClosky stars as the improbably named Magnus Dens, whom we first meet in the opening sequence hanging around a beach. He’s approached by a mysterious woman (Sellecca) and dreams of his past as a young boy, when he met a similarly mysterious girl named Jennie on a similar beach. He and the girl became friends, to the point where they carve their initials into a wandering giant turtle’s shell (which sounds terrible, but is actually quite sweet.). However, this potential for blossoming love is squashed when the girl and the turtle wander into the ocean, never to be seen again.
Cut to years later, after several years of psychiatric therapy and the death of his father from an unseen critter at the family beach house, and Magnus hooks up with an old friend (Weathers) working on a small vessel while he finishes his masters in marine biology. Magnus begins working with his friend under the guidance of grizzled scientist Dr. Paulis (Ives) and everything would be hunky-dorky—if it weren’t for the strange warnings of Paulis’ spiritual servant Delia (Ruth Attaway).
Soon, the mysterious woman re-appears and introduces herself as Jennie—but due to her name being the same as an old superstition, nobody believes Magnus when he tells them of her existence. But Jennie isn’t the only eerie critter showing up, as the aforementioned turtle makes a return as well, and in a much more chaotic form than the one who allowed his shell to be used as a romantic plot device.
The Bermuda Depths doesn’t always work, as the acting is a bit on the stilted side probably due to the inconsistent tone, but it’s still an admirable, entertaining film with some impressively haunting moments. Part mythical sea romance, part adventure yarn and part monster flick, The Bermuda Depths is the Night-Tide-meets-Gamera spectacle you never realized you needed. [Paul Freitag-Fey]
BLACK NOON
Director: Bernard L. Kowalski
Starring: Roy Thinnes, Yvette Mimieux, Ray Milland, Lyn Loring
Airdate: November 5, 1971 Network: CBS
A horror/western hybrid featuring a preacher who finds himself caught up with a small town involved in the occult.
Not unlike the TV movies Crowhaven Farm or The Last Bride of Salem, Black Noon attempts to set its occult underpinnings apart through an Old West backdrop. Unfortunately, despite the interesting milieu, Black Noon is just a bit too precious to elicit much in the way of real terror. Regardless, the intoxicating, and downbeat ending almost makes it worth the trip.
Black Noon is one of those films that take its time getting to the sucker punch, and therefore risks losing its audience along the way. Certainly, it’s visually compelling (even though the paltry special effects are clunky) with its inimical Old West locale, and hostile cowboys donned in black (and named Moon!), but it lacks the brisk pacing of other TVMs, and the imagery doesn’t quite pop in the ways it should. Also, the “twist” is spoon fed to the audience, beginning from very early on. (If you can’t figure out what San Males stands for, don’t worry; it will be spelled out for you in no uncertain terms.)
Producer Andrew J. Fenady had worked on several westerns, including Chisum and the TV series Hondo, as well as horror films, such as Terror at the Wax Museum and Arnold (both of which his brother Georg directed), and he brought film screen legend Gloria Grahame into Black Noon to fill in the thankless role of Bethia, a housekeeper whose sole purpose seems to be to look judgmental. He had previously worked with her on the western Ride Beyond Vengeance and was helping her kick start her later-life career. She’s a perfect example of the restrictive but prosperous venue that television provided aging actors. She’s also just one of several prominent and welcoming faces who round out the seasoned cast, including Ray Milland and Henry Silva (who is particularly menacing as the unkillable cowboy).
Preying on several cultural threats—xenophobia and religious corruption to name two—the most interesting menace in Black Noon lies in that of the female body, which is presented as either desirous (Mimieux) or disease-ridden (Loring). The beautiful woman is a mute, and her sexuality is derived from her childlike and untouched presence. The “diseased” woman is older, married, but perhaps barren (also reminiscent of Crowhaven Farm) and is driven to hysterics when she thinks her preacher husband (Thinnes) has developed a lust for Mimieux (of course he’s helpless under the guise of voodoo, mind you). These would be serious issues, if not treated so nonchalantly, and a fantastically frenzied performance from Loring embodying all of the tropes of a woman with a major case of the vapors is inappropriately (and yet still appropriately) over-the-top. When she goes crazy on Thinnes, he totally deserves it. [Amanda Reyes]
BORN INNOCENT
Director: Donald Wrye
Starring: Linda Blair, Joanna Miles, Kim Hunter, Richard Jaeckel
Airdate: September 10, 1974 Network: NBC
A fourteen-year-old runaway is made a ward of the courts and placed in a reform school, where she must confront verbal and physical abuse.
In the early 1970s, the women in prison genre became a popular staple in drive-ins and grindhouse cinemas, with films like Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971) and Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat (1974), entertaining audiences with a heady combination of action, violence and sex behind bars. Fresh off her success in The Exorcist (1973), Linda Blair was too young to be a fully-fledged (and fully unclothed) WiP performer in 1974 (she would have to wait until her notorious 1983 film Chained Heat to accomplish that). But the NBC network managed to achieve the next best thing, casting the hot young star in Born Innocent, a telemovie about reform school girls which became the highest rated television movie to air that year, thanks in no small part to the well-placed publicity generated by the film’s theme and some of its more controversial elements.
A rather involving and surprisingly downbeat teen drama, the bulk of Born Innocent’s notoriety revolved around one scene: the infamous moment when Christine Parker (Blair) is confronted by several of the inmates in the shower stall and raped with a broom handle. Its impact is not overstated—it is an intense, brutal and disturbing sequence, especially considering it was filmed for network television. After it was blamed for inciting the rape of a nine-year-old girl (who was attacked with a glass soda pop bottle by several of her peers), the rape scene was subsequently cut from later re-airings of the movie in the USA, although it was reinstated for its home video release in the eighties, and the sequence was intact whenever I caught it on Australian television (including some airings in the midday movie slot).
Enticingly tawdry TV Guide ad for a re-run of Born Innocent.
In many respects, Blair’s performance is even more impressive here than it was in The Exorcist, as she does not have the crutch of Dick Smith’s prosthetic makeup or the vocal dynamics of veteran radio actress Mercedes McCambridge (who provided Blair’s demonically possessed voice). Strong support is given by Joanna Miles (as the one truly caring counselor), Richard Jaeckel as Christine’s highly strung, borderline incestuous father (the leering way he talks about his daughter’s tight jeans is quite creepy), and Kim Hunter (Zira in the Planet of the Apes films) as the mother and wife who has drunk herself into ignorance. The reformatory girls are all played by unknowns whom you may recognize from the odd episode of Mannix or Harry O, but they all have interesting faces and handle themselves quite well under the guidance of director Donald Wyre (1978’s Ice Castles).
Born Innocent is that rare telemovie that succeeds both as an affecting drama and a piece of grimy exploitation. It all depends on which set of eyes you watch it through. Released on VHS by several labels during the 1980s, it has since been made available on DVD. A paperback tie-in novelization, authored by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, was published in the US by Ace Books in 1975. [John Harrison]
THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE BELL
Director: Paul Wendkos
Starring: Glenn Ford, Rosemary Forsyth, Dean Jagger, Maurice Evans
Airdate: September 17, 1970 Network: CBS
Many years after joining a secret society, a successful professor is forced into blackmailing a friend.
The questions being posed by the 1960s counterculture were addressed candidly in Brotherhood of the Bell, and Paul Wendkos, who had made the first real TV horror film with Fear No Evil, turned in one of the best of the bunch with this paranoid conspiracy telethriller, starring Glenn Ford as a defected member of a powerful secret society.
Andy Patterson (Ford) has it all: a cushy academic job, a beautiful (and much younger) wife, and ivy-league connections to movers and shakers all over the world thanks to his old college fraternity, “The Bell.” Twenty years earlier, Andy pledged loyalty to that selective enclave, with a promise to pay the bill for his subsequent successes in whatever manner The Bell required. At the start of the film, Andy’s number has come up. His assignment: to blackmail one of his best friends, Professor Konstantin Horvathy (Eduard Franz), as a means of stopping him from accepting a prominent university position. As a result, Horvathy commits suicide, and Andy’s guilt drives him to speak out about the secret society—only to have his credibility shattered virtually overnight.
His sanity is not far behind, as illustrated through the exaggerated camerawork that hints at the decade of conspiracy thrillers to come: The Parallax View, The Conversation, Marathon Man, and Capricorn One. Jerry Goldsmith’s jazz/orchestral hybrid score punctuates the building intensity as Andy’s life spins out of control, the height of which is his appearance on a nasty tabloid talk show inspired by the confrontational Joe Pyne Show of the 1960s (and predating the incendiary mania of later trash TV staples Geraldo, Jerry Springer and Morton Downey, Jr.), which ends in fisticuffs.
David Karp produced and adapted the teleplay from his own 1952 pulp novel The Brotherhood of Velvet, which was also the source of a 1958 Studio One episode. The 1970 telefilm tones down the sleazier elements of the book (in the book the Horvathy character—under another name—is blackmailed as a closet homosexual, whereas the film threatens him with his political affiliations in the USSR), but the primary theme remains the same—that there are one-percenters who benefit greatly from maintaining the status quo, and they don’t like their boat to be rocked. What’s brilliant about the film is that its “horror” is completely real, openly known and complacently accepted. Except we don’t call it a conspiracy—we just call it capitalism!
With supporting roles by elderly character faces Will Geer, Maurice Evans (Dr. Zaius!) and Dean Jagger (who gives a chilling performance here) as well as future CHiPs sergeant Robert Pine as a new initiate to the organization, The Brotherhood of the Bell is a classy political chiller that remains as relevant today as when it was made. [Kier-La Janisse]
CALL TO DANGER
Director: Tom Gries
Starring: Peter Graves, Diana Muldaur, John Anderson, Clu Gulager
Airdate: February 27, 1973 Network: CBS
Government spy Peter Graves enlists the “ordinary” skills of “ordinary” civilians to help him win the war on crime.
After CBS Television failed to initiate a series with 1968’s pilot movie Call To Danger, the always gray and grandiose Peter Graves (The Clonus Horror) returns in this second attempt by Paramount Television, which again, went no further.
Following the formula of the original outing, Graves plays secret agent Doug Warfield, a by-the-numbers government operative who handles cases other departments of law enforcement fail to comprehend or solve. With his higher spy budget, he’s allowed to use a supercomputer (the size of an office block) to select ordinary members of the public to be enlisted in the hope that their particular, obtuse skill-sets will help take down the bad guys.
Clockwise from left: Ronny Cox and Elizabeth Montgomery get serious in A Case of Rape; Diana Muldaur and Peter Graves are far less grim in Call to Danger; and Roy Thinnes is somewhere in between in Black Noon.
Director Gries (Helter Skelter) doesn’t hang about, so, after sparse titles we learn that a Mafia informer (in split pants) has been kidnapped by a homicidal gangster and imprisoned in a fancy, heavily fortified compound to stop him testifying at a grand jury hearing. In response, and after some high tech flashing lights and much paper has been noisily printed out, Graves recruits archer/stock-car driver/bee keeper Clu Gulager (Feast) and model/ whore Tina Louise (The Wrecking Crew) to assist him in closing the case.
As unrealistic as it all sounds, the stylish hijinks actually work, and it’s a shame the show never materialized and further explored the ordinary hero angle (which was filmed while Graves was collar deep in the Mission: Impossible series).
Worth at least one spin, watch it for the nice suits, sleek muscle cars, tepid intrigue and cut-price action, and be sure to enjoy the rest of the cast, which includes Michael Ansara (The Doll Squad), Stephen McNally (Black Gunn) and Diana Muldaur (Hog Wild). [DF Dresden]
Director: Boris Sagal
Starring: Elizabeth Montgomery, William Daniels, Cliff Potts, Ronny Cox
Airdate: February 20, 1974 Network: NBC
After a housewife is raped a second time, she becomes again a victim to the unforgiving sexual assault laws and antiquated court system.
“This woman is about to become a statistic,” an off-screen voice announces as the camera comes to rest on the image of actress Elizabeth Montgomery. “This woman is going to be raped.”
Thus begins one of the most depressing explorations of rape aftermath ever to grace the screen—big or small—courtesy of Omega Man director Boris Sagal. While not overtly graphic (television’s concepts at that time tended to be more subversive than its visual imagery), the treatment Montgomery’s character endures from friends, the police, the court, her husband—not to mention the groping paws of the rapist himself—is shockingly frank for the primetime tube of the seventies.
Montgomery plays Ellen Harrod, a housewife who takes night school classes while her husband (Ronny Cox) is away on frequent business trips. One night after class, her classmate and downstairs neighbor introduces her to a handsome young man who offers to give them a lift home. After he drops them off, Montgomery relieves the babysitter, checks in on her sleeping child, and then hears a knock at the door. Assuming it’s the babysitter having forgotten something, she opens the door, and the friendly stranger shows his true face.
Like the rapist in Tony Garnett’s Handgun (1984), the rapist is someone Montgomery is introduced to socially. He rapes her in her own home, and what makes the film much harder to watch is how much time passes before she actually tells anyone about the incident, which causes others to see it as a fabrication meant to hide an infidelity. She reports it only after her attacker rapes her a second time (a scene that was almost cut until Montgomery threatened to walk from the project), this time in her parking garage with a witness who is led by the defense to question what he saw as consensual rough sex (1976’s Lipstick would also use this argument in its harrowing court scenes). All the doctors and police officers are male, and she passively accepts their condescension as they accuse her of enjoying the rape—of having “safe sex” by denying her own lust for the attacker.
With its deliberately upsetting gender politics, the film works extremely well as an emotional instigator, making it an important contribution to the ongoing discussion on sexual predation. Airing a year before the release of Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, it remains in the highest rankings of all theatrical or telefilms ever aired on TV. [Kier-La Janisse]
THE CLONING OF CLIFFORD SWIMMER
Director: Lela Swift
Starring: Peter Haskell, Sheree North, Lance Kerwin
Airdate: November 1, 1974 Network: ABC
A bored executive allows a clone to live out his dull existence.
As in Rock Hudson’s Seconds (1966), there’s a life lesson for all of us in this quaint, confined and dreamy looking teleplay about a smart, successful man called Clifford Swimmer. A man cursed by his daily executive grind, his daft, alcoholic wife Sheree North (Maniac Cop), his lumpy son Lance Kerwin (Salem’s Lot), his rotten highly paid job and his giant house. A man who, thanks to insane lighting and a knotty coating of pancake batter makeup, gives off the impression he’s been made entirely out of plywood and blusher.
Wrapped in a demented jumper and determined to escape his own life, Clifford (Peter Haskell) goes to see a “psycho-genetic” doctor played by the great Keene Curtis (Blade), who tells him he can clone him an exact replica Clifford that will live out his mundane life at home while he’ll be left free to sex it up and pound booze with his mistress Sharon Farrell (Night of the Comet) on a variety of tiny, adjacent sets. Clifford readily agrees and undergoes the (mostly off screen) transformation. Then, he pisses straight off on holiday and sends his clone home where it acts all chilled out and loving, much to the delight of his unknowing wife and child.
Shortly after, there’s a murder, and bored of the international playboy lifestyle, the real Clifford predictably wants his old, safe life back, only to find he’s been replaced by his double, just like Roger Moore was in The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970). Conflict ensues.
Produced by ABC Television as part of their Wide World: Mystery series (1973–78), if you can ignore the ugly over-lit studio look of it and forgive the absence of any real SFX, you’ll find the hokey science and bitter exchanges by all concerned, North’s boozy ramblings, crazy interior design, nightmarish hairstyles, John Karlan (Hostage Flight) and the bizarre, threatening behavior of violent loan shark William Basset (Black Dynamite,) make it worth at least one spin. [DF Dresden]
A COLD NIGHT’S DEATH
Director: Jerrold Freedman
Starring: Robert Culp, Eli Wallach Network: ABC
Airdate: January 30, 1973
Something strange is happening in the isolated Tower Mountain research laboratory.
This is a movie with plenty of snow. Snow and isolation. When the cast eventually do arrive, it is comprised of three men, diminishing in an instant to only two: scientists Robert Jones and Frank Enrari (Robert Culp and Eli Wallach). The third man, Adams the helicopter pilot (Michael C. Gwynne), departs before the storm cuts them off.
Jones and Enrari are deposited in a freezing settlement located 14,126 feet above sea level. It is here, in the Tower Mountain summit laboratory, that altitude and stress experiments on primates are taking place for the space program. (The location of the lab is not divulged.) The first thing the team does on arrival is locate their predecessor, Dr. Vogel, whose radio transmissions had become irrational before stopping altogether five days ago. He is discovered frozen to death in front of the radio in the electronics room. Mysteriously, the door is unlocked and the window is wide open.
Things get stranger and the relationship between the two men increasingly frayed as the days wear on. Soon enough, the unwitting Jones and Enrari are headed in the exact same direction as Vogel before them. Too late Jones discovers that their lives are a mirror of the experiments they are conducting on the monkeys and chimps. It’s a dark and twisted premise, one that is carried extraordinarily well by Culp and Wallach. (Wallach, an international film star who favored the stage, may well have been attracted to the ‘staginess’ of A Cold Night’s Death.)
In TV movies, where exposition is king, it’s refreshing to find room given over to atmosphere. The panicked disembodied radio transmission at the start of A Cold Night’s Death gets the ball rolling. The soundtrack is also worth noting. Having created the innovative electronic soundtrack for The Andromeda Strain (1971), composer Gil Mellé goes much the same way here, his blips and beeps complementing shots of cheerless corridors and, in one scene, a half-frozen Jones staggering through them. The ending of the movie may not come as a surprise, nor likely to stand much scrutiny, but this is barely relevant. As a mood piece, Jerrold Freedman’s A Cold Night’s Death works perfectly.
Similarities between Freedman’s movie and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), another picture set in a remote research station, have not gone unnoticed. It seems a fair bet that Carpenter drew inspiration from the look of Freedman’s movie, from the sweeping snow-covered opening shots, through to an icy protagonist locked outside the base in crippling subzero weather. Add to this the fractious relationship between Jones and Enrari, falling prey to paranoia, and we have everything in Carpenter’s movie but the shapeshifting monster. “You’re not a man to be trusted!” Enrari accuses Jones in the final act, before shooting him dead.
Clockwise from above: Charles Martin Smith rocks out in Cotton Candy; Sheree North wonders if two Peter Haskells are a good or bad thing in The Cloning of Clifford Swimmer; and Robert Culp and Eli Wallach are at loggerheads in the chilling A Cold Night’s Death.
A Cold Night’s Death was reshown on television under the name, The Chill Factor. Some of today’s audience may find the use of caged animals, in states of agitation, uncomfortable viewing. [David Kerekes]
COTTON CANDY
Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Charles Martin Smith, Clint Howard, Leslie King, Kevin Lee Miller
Airdate: October 26, 1978 Network: NBC
Unpopular high school students George and Corky form a rock group, and must face-off against archrivals in a Battle of the Bands contest.
The sophomore directorial effort from then-popular TV star Ron Howard (Grand Theft Auto was his debut the previous year), Cotton Candy is a groovy piece of seventies nostalgia that pays tribute to that great institution of the high school rock band—a rite of passage for many teenagers, regardless of how much talent they possess or how far they get with it. In the years before instant (and usually fleeting) superstardom via the likes of American Idol, getting to play in a Battle of the Bands contest at the local mall was often the highlight of school life (and beyond), and was usually the one sure-fire way for even the geekiest of kids to land a hot date for the prom.
Filmed in Dallas, Texas (at the Lake Highlands High School and Town East Mall), Cotton Candy wallows in a sense of innocence and apple pie Americana that could so easily be off-putting and overbearing, but is endearing thanks primarily to fine performances from Charles Martin Smith (Toad in American Graffiti) as George Smalley, Leslie King (as the female drummer George falls for), and Ron Howard’s remarkably oddball younger brother Clint as Corky Macpherson, George’s best buddy and the perfect person to manage the fledgling supergroup this bunch put together in their garage. Mark Wheeler is also great to watch as Torbin Bequette, the cocksure leader of Cotton Candy’s rival band, Rapid Fire (a clearly KISS-inspired outfit, with a lot of flash but little substance and an audience of screaming girls at their feet). Wheeler would go on to work with Ron Howard in several of the director’s big projects, including playing Neil Armstrong in 1995’s Apollo 13. But it’s definitely Clint Howard who owns the film, giving not only a great performance but also a co-screenwriter credit with his brother. Howard gives himself some great lines of dialog, and he clearly used his character here as the template for his more well-known role as Eaglebaur in the following year’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.
Mark Ridlen, who played one of the members of Rapid Fire, recalled in an online interview a few years back: “Before it aired on October 26, 1978, all the parents of Rapid Fire purchased VCRs to record it. Home video recordings was then a new and wondrous thing”.1
Initially conceived as a pilot for an unrealized series, Cotton Candy has unfortunately never appeared legitimately on video or disc (Disney apparently own the rights and have it locked away), though some public domain sellers have offered it up over the years (usually dubbed from television transmissions of varying quality). Despite (or perhaps because of) its rarity, Cotton Candy has developed a cult following and has even inspired a few indie bands (such as the Suite Sixteen, who recorded a song titled Hot Rash—named after one of the potential band names suggested by Eaglebaur—which features snippets of dialog from the film). An illustrated paperback tie-in authored by the Howard brothers was published by Signet in 1979. [John Harrison]
Director: Walter Grauman
Starring: Hope Lange, Paul Burke, Lloyd Bochner, John Carradine, Cindy Eilbacher
Airdate: November 24, 1970 Network: ABC
An on-the-rocks married couple move into a seemingly idyllic farmhouse only to be confronted by the occult.
Broadcast just in time for the 1970 Thanksgiving Holiday, this American gothic tale of puritans and witch hunts stars Hope Lange (fresh off the haunted house sitcom The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) as Maggie Porter, a middle aged woman who inherits—along with her explosively jealous artist husband Ben (Paul Burke of Naked City)—the isolated New England property of Crowhaven Farm, when its original beneficiary dies in a sudden “accident.”
Maggie immediately takes a dislike to the place, disturbed by her ability to predict what will be around every corner in a house she’s supposedly never been to before. Not to mention she notices that the local handyman is John Carradine, which is never a good sign. But Ben is thrilled with the vast expanse of their new estate, feeling that it will refuel his failing art career, and possibly his marriage. You see, Ben and Maggie are childless; a fact Ben takes very much to heart and which—combined with his inability to provide for Maggie financially—leaves him feeling emasculated and short-tempered. But when a terminally ill neighbor proposes that they adopt her ten-year-old niece Jennifer (Cindy Eilbacher of Bad Ronald and The Death of Richie), the couple is ecstatic. That is, until the little girl starts to act threatening in that obliging, smiling kind of way characteristic of seventies pedophobia films.
After being visited by a local historian who tells her of Crowhaven Farm’s background as an early pilgrim settlement complete with witches and witch trials, Maggie’s visions of Crowhaven’s dark past become clearer and more frequent; she is convinced that in another life in the seventeenth century, she was accused of witchcraft and killed by the townsfolk, buried alive under the weight of giant rocks. When she suddenly becomes pregnant, after being told for years that they can’t have children, it seems that some terrible history is repeating itself…
Hope Lange in a newspaper promotion for Crowhaven Farm.
Director Walter Grauman had been working in television since the fifties, but it was really in the seventies that he hit his stride, with not only a handful of TV movies under his belt but also a good run with Streets of San Francisco and Barnaby Jones (and later Murder, She Wrote in the eighties). TV mainstay John McGreevey provides the original script, which manages to be a dense psychological examination of repression and guilt in the face of changing gender roles that were allowing women more independence. [Kier-La Janisse]
CRUISE INTO TERROR
Director: Bruce Kessler
Starring: Frank Converse, John Forsythe, Hugh O’Brian, Ray Milland
Airdate: February 3, 1978 Network: ABC
After salvaging a cursed coffin from an underwater tomb, a ship’s passengers and crew battle the son of Satan.
Aka Voyage Into Evil, writer Michael Braverman (M.A.D.D: Mothers Against Drunk Driving) packs this enjoyable supernatural clunker with chunks of Irwin Allen-esque disaster lore, an Egyptian curse, a haunted coffin and even a spot of arcane history that involves Mexican pyramids and Mayan hexes and sends it all off on a trip to the gulf of Mexico aboard a small, scruffy cruise ship ominously named after an obscure church of African voodoo—Obeah.
Oblivious and also aboard are tired captain Hugh O’Brian (The Shootist), mechanic/valet Dirk Benedict (Ruckus), sexed up divorcee Stella Stevens (Hell to Pay) and archaeologist Ray Milland (The Uncanny) who all end up calling on the help of deranged priest John Forsythe (Cry Panic) to do battle with a hellish demon after something goes splat on the poop deck, a cat meows and they all realize that the cursed, haunted looking baby coffin they just plundered from the sea and placed in the hold… is haunted.
Thanks to its low budget, most of the shenanigans are filmed at the dock or on threadbare sets that seldom resemble the location they cut to, and padded out with fog, flashing lights, hammy dialog, mismatched stock footage of lagoons, sharks, wavy horizons and a coral reef—all of which do nothing but add silly charm to the laughably plotted goings-on.
Co-produced by Aaron Spelling, press PLAY to see O’Brian “fight” a shark, Stevens in a bikini, a haunted engine room, bubbles, thunder, the son of Satan, mild terror, a little cruising, a small fire, a cheese-filled explosion, decent chanting and Christopher George (Graduation Day) and Linda Day George (Panic on the 5:22) as the real-life smoochy love-sick couple who get possessed and turn bad.
Responsible for episodes of The Monkees, Ironside, Get Christie Love!, Diagnosis Murder, The Commish and Baywatch, Bruce Kessler began life directing the grindhouse favorites Killer’s Three (1968), Angels From Hell (1968), The Gay Deceivers (1969) and Simon, King of the Witches (1971). [DF Dresden]
DAUGHTER OF THE MIND
Director: Walter Grauman
Starring: Don Murray, Ray Milland, Gene Tierney, Ed Asner
Airdate: December 12, 1969 Network: ABC
After his deceased daughter makes a ghostly appearance, a respected professor seeks the help of a paranormal expert.
Based on Paul Gallico’s 1964 novel The Hand of Mary Constable, two “other sides” are unraveled in Daughter of the Mind. The first speaks to the supernatural otherworld where apparitions are triggered by a tragic loss, and the other other side is that of Communist Russia! The combination may sound strange, but the result is gripping, and often thoughtful, thanks to Ray Milland and (in her TV movie debut) Gene Tierney’s heart wrenching turn as grieving parents. This 1969 ABC Movie of the Week marks an early foray into the supernatural, and while the paranormal would go on to become a staple of both the big and small screen throughout the seventies, Daughter provides an interesting mix of Cold War paranoia and personal grief.
Regarding this era of the made for TV movie, Daughter ventures into what was then mostly uncharted terrain. It doesn’t seem all that farfetched that the filmmakers would attempt to mix genres, as a way to test the audience’s taste for small screen horror movies while still keeping them on established ground. And, Daughter does its best to work both the espionage angle and the common tropes of a supernatural thriller. Sure, audiences love things that go bump in the night, and much of what is seen in Daughter is signature to the genre now: séances, creepy kid apparitions (who say eerie things like “Daddy, I hate being dead”), ESP and, of course, the debunker (here portrayed, ironically enough, by a paranormal expert). The cloak and dagger angle isn’t quite as fleshed-out, and it is a bit difficult at times to remember which character is doing what, but the effort to combine real-life paranoia with a fear of the unnatural is appreciated.
Luther Davis’ teleplay adaptation won an Edgar Award in 1970 (it was nominated alongside episodes from Night Gallery, Mod Squad and Mannix). And, directed by Walter Grauman in one of his earliest TVM works, Daughter’s story and direction rely heavily on clichés, but to great success, with much credit going to both the filmmakers and the incredible cast of familiar and soon-to-be familiar faces.
Don Murray is the lead actor in this thriller, but he’s really part of a much larger, and frankly incredible, ensemble that features a few great faces from classic films, including Tierney and Milland, as well as soon-to-be household names like Ed Asner and Murray himself, who would become a fixture in the telefilm genre in the 1970s and beyond. Pamelyn Ferdin is especially creepy as the ghostly Mary, and petite Barbara Dana puts in an off-kilter turn as Tina.
Daughter doesn’t break into new terrain, even by late sixties standards. But it does its best to take the formulas into moody and wondrous places, and is definitely worth a look. [Amanda Reyes]
DAWN: PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE RUNAWAY
Director: Randal Kleiser
Starring: Eve Plumb, Leigh J. McCloskey, Bo Hopkins, Georg Stanford Brown
Airdate: September 27, 1976 Network: NBC
A fifteen-year-old girl escapes her dead end life and heads to Los Angeles, where she finds love and heartache as a teenage hooker.
In a bold attempt to remove herself from her squeaky clean image as the put-upon tween Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch, Eve Plumb took the role of a lost youth turned Hollywood hooker in the gritty drama Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. While she is never not good, Leigh McCloskey, who plays Alexander, the male hustler with the potential to be Prince Charming, easily outdoes Plumb in every shared scene. His tortured and haunted performance warranted a sequel, which came out the year after Dawn’s release (Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn), and only featured Plumb in a few pivotal scenes.
Dawn was written by Dalene Young, the screenwriter who brought so much realism to teenaged sex in Little Darlings. To round out her main character, Young interviewed several young prostitutes, and despite the protagonist’s dire situation, Dawn ultimately longs for love and idealizes her relationship with Alexander. The script does its best to expose the dirty world of juvenile prostitution, while also keeping some sort of handle on the romanticism of adolescence. When Dawn is able to finally get the electricity turned on in the apartment she shares with Alex, she calls the florescent lighting “bottled sunshine.” Even in the depths of her narcissistic destruction, Dawn manages to preserve some sense of virtue and secretly hopes that someone will save her.
Made to cash in on the success of the infamous TVM Born Innocent which aired two years prior, Dawn adapts much of the same nihilistic overtone, but to lesser results. Dawn’s irresponsible mother (Lynn Carlin) is obviously an alcoholic, but her overbearing nature doesn’t seem to warrant the protagonist’s desperation to leave home, and life is easily much worse on Hollywood Boulevard. She seems more stubborn and senseless than sympathetic, although her turn from an innocent fifteen-year-old to streetwise hooker is still a shocker.
Bo Hopkins is particularly good as the menacing pimp named Swan (it is interesting to note that his name rhymes with Dawn, perhaps as a way to express the yin and yang relationship of the agreed upon but destructive relationships of the streets). He shows little mercy, openly beating his “girls” and knifing Alexander. Dawn does show restraint in the underage sex scenes (which really don’t exist at all in the film) but seemingly trades them in for violence and degradation. All is handled in a very TV-PG fashion of course, but the film still shocks in its subject matter and browbeaten setting.
Directed by Kleiser with a sense of edgy despair, it’s hard to believe this same filmmaker would bring the bubble-gum bright Grease to the theaters in 1978. [Amanda Reyes]
DEATH CAR ON THE FREEWAY
Director: Hal Needham
Starring: Shelley Hack, George Hamilton, Frank Gorshin, Peter Graves
Airdate: September 25, 1979 Network: CBS
A female reporter investigates several road rage incidents targeted at women drivers on the highways of Los Angeles, against the wishes of both the police and her estranged husband.
Death Car on the Freeway must have one of the most ridiculous monikers for a killer in the history of film: how the cast kept a straight face while talking gravely about “The Freeway Fiddler” is a mystery to me. The Fiddler is the sinister driver of a Dodge van who spends his time terrorizing any women of Los Angeles that make the mistake of cutting into the traffic in front of him. On such occasions, he dons his leather gloves, puts on his personal chase music (a horrendous disco/country amalgamation, hence the nickname) and attempts—usually successfully—to run the woman off the road.
Death Car isn’t your usual women-in-terror film, however. Up against the Fiddler is KXLA News reporter Jan Clausen (Shelley Hack), who is keen to prove both her independence and her professional worth after separating from her husband, Ray Jeffries (George Hamilton). As reporter for a rival station, Ray is clearly threatened by his wife’s developing career, warning her not to make “a crusade” out of her search for the Fiddler and suggesting that she may as well resign, go home, and be a good little girl before she gets fired by her station managers. Jan is having none of it, spurred on by the messages of the Women’s Liberation Front—who were gaining ground in the US at the time the film was made, and are directly referenced in a television interview in which a spokeswoman (spokesperson?) aligns increasing car ownership with greater freedom for women.
This is, essentially, a feminist film. Though it may have been advertised on the strength of its spectacular car crashes and the search for a serial killer, it’s relatively slow-paced (the opening scene, looking down at a complex freeway system from above, is particularly uninspiring). The real interest lies in the messages the film contains, with the attacks on women’s cars seemingly analogous to rape. That the crimes are motivated by sexual frustration is suggested by a psychiatrist (Gloria Stroock) interviewed by Jan, and the blacked-out windows of the Fiddler’s van evidently serve a voyeuristic purpose, allowing him to watch without being watched in turn. The incompetence of the police is frequently highlighted—one issues a ticket to a woman caught speeding in her attempt to escape the Fiddler—and the classic defensive responses to rape are adapted accordingly (“Women can help themselves by not making themselves candidates for the Fiddler”). The testimony of a surviving victim is questioned in light of her career as an actress, and local women—Jan included—begin taking “defensive driving” classes. Unfortunately, the cast aren’t brilliant (though there is a brief appearance by Sid Haig as a shady biker type); Jan and her newsreader colleagues are at times somber to the point of woodenness. However, it’s the idea rather than its execution that provides the film with its originality: at a time when women’s rights were frequently being discussed in the press, adapting that discourse into something subtler was a clever way of expanding the debate into homes that might not usually engage with feminist issues. [Jennifer Wallis]
THE DEATH OF ME YET
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
Starring: Doug McClure, Meg Foster, Richard Basehart, Darren McGavin
Airdate: October 27, 1971 Network: ABC
When a Russian agent shows signs of switching sides, the KGB call in a hitman to end his life.
First broadcast by ABC during October of 1971, part-time chair Doug McClure (Tapeheads) stars in this quirky little spy sham as a Soviet KGB agent sent to the USA to bring about the downfall of the capitalist pig-state from within.
Trained in a replica American town (built in the middle of Mother Russia) and brandishing a .38 and a fine quiff, Doug unexpectedly falls in love when he arrives in the States, and is soon completely assimilated into the Yankee way of life, establishing himself as a successful newspaper owner, complete with a blonde, freshly pregnant wife (Rosemary Forsyth) and a penchant for cherry cola, scuba diving and muscle cars.
Clockwise from top: Promo art for Death Car on the Freeway; Eve Plumb grows up quickly in Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway; and Don Murray and Ray Milland bewitch in the supernatural thriller Daughter of the Mind.
After six Cold War years undercover, Doug is offered his target job managing a secret underwater missile project headed up by menacing and homophobic FBI agent Darren McGavin (Captain America), who thinks Doug is not what he seems.
Add to the mix hitman Allen Jaffe (Cutter’s Trail) as a Russian sleeper agent sent to put bullets into Doug’s defective head, and you get a more than passable potboiler full of limp intrigue, wood paneling, big sideburns and nice cars—although, sadly not much else.
Based on a thin novel of the same title by Whit Masterson (writer of Touch of Evil), keep watch for the mad eyes of beautiful Meg Foster (Shrunken Heads) and the red Russian mustache of bad guy Richard Baseheart (Flood!). [DF Dresden]
THE DEATH OF OCEAN VIEW PARK
Director: E.W Swackhamer
Starring: Mike Connors, Diana Canova, Perry Lang, Caroline McWilliams
Airdate: October 19, 1979 Network: ABC
Mike Connors tries to save his failing, haunted amusement park business from going under, killing his patrons in the process.
Welcome to Virginia, USA, home of the Ocean View Amusement Park, a place of fun, excitement, popcorn, clowns, joy and huge fucking explosions, fire and collapsing rollercoasters—well, according to “psychic” mother-tobe Diana Canova (Peking Encounter), who has scary visions that predict the park’s demise, much to the annoyance of park owner Mike “Touch” Connors (Panic Button).
Also, there’s a hurricane on the way, and it’s nearly the fourth of July and Connors’ evil, money hungry partner Martin Landau (Black Gunn) wants to keep the attractions open to stop the business hemorrhaging cash so he can sell it for profit to a large corporation—but, that’s not going to happen because “There’s a storm on the way! And my trousers are on fire!” (How’s that for dialog?)
Not only is nature forming an orderly queue of rainy disasters to roughly dismantle the park (via stock footage of wind and storms), there also seems to be an unexplained supernatural element of destruction going on, as bumper cars and assorted rides tremble and move by themselves; scaring the bejeezus out of the park patrons, who gasp, choke on candy floss and turn dementedly into director Swackhamer’s lens in some hilarious scenes when the cursed (?) park eventually implodes in an extended goofball sequence packed with cracked neon, falling cars, broken rails, unscrewed bolts and popped balloons.
Originally broadcast on ABC and produced by Playboy (!), it’s more than enjoyable for all the wrong reasons and crackles along at a colorful, sparkly pace, touching on such wide-ranging subjects as possession, lost love, impotency, precognition and even haunted sandcastles. Toss in some plot points from Hurricane (1974), Jaws (1974) and Rollercoaster (1977) and you have a near classic of minimum proportions you’ll watch more than once. [DF Dresden]
Director: Paul Wendkos
Starring: Robby Benson, Ben Gazzara, Eileen Brennan, Lance Kerwin
Airdate: January 10, 1977 Network: NBC
A teenager turns to drugs and finds himself in a whirlpool of despair and violence, leading to tragic consequences.
The small screen lent itself especially well to adapting tabloid tales and true stories, and when Thomas Thompson wrote an article for the May 5, 1972, edition of Life about a father who shot and killed his drug-addicted son, it wasn’t long before the article was extended into a novel—Richie, also by Thompson—and later adapted into a teleplay for NBC by lifelong television writer John McGreevey. Paul Wendkos, one of the most prolific and reliable directors of the TV movie boom, capably handles the story of a once-supportive father (Ben Gazzara) pushed to the edge by his son’s (Robby Benson) unpredictable drug-fuelled outbursts. Eileen Brennan, while not given much to do in the script besides act out the complacent housewife role, is nevertheless fantastic as the increasingly unraveled mother, and even preteen poster boy Lance Kerwin makes an appearance as Richie’s younger brother Russell.
As the title implies, it’s clear from the outset what the troubled teen’s fate will be, and the film reconstructs the events that led up to Richie’s tragic demise. After the opening shot of Richie’s funeral, we cut to the interior of a car that is careening down the road as a jive-talking Richie and his stoner pals—including a young, mutton-chopped Clint Howard, Harry Gold (William Katt’s diminutive friend in Carrie) and character actors Charles Fleischer and Barry Miller (Fame)—demonstrate the negative effects of barbiturate abuse. Richie’s volatile relationship with his father—who is patient but tough, demanding that he drop the deadbeat friends—is fuelled further by Richie’s own feelings of guilt and self-doubt about succumbing to peer pressure, which he projects onto his father, enabling him to demonize his father even more. He escapes into a secret strobe-lit room behind a panel in his closet, immersed in the hypnotic effects of the glimmering lights and the wailing guitar solos that blare from his turntable.
When his father files a wayward conduct petition against his own son, to get the support of the system in policing Richie’s drug use, Richie has a temporary wake up call. He manages to get clean and get a job at a burger joint. But his recovery is short-lived; when he’s rejected by the girl he likes (TV movie staple Cindy Eilbacher of Crowhaven Farm and Bad Ronald), he responds by O.D.ing on reds (aka Seconal—he takes nine, the same amount that led to Jimi Hendrix’s demise). It just goes downhill from there, as Richie never stops using long enough to even hold up appearances. His recreational drug use becomes a fulltime crutch, and for the last quarter of the film he spends a lot of time walking into things and falling down stairs, while the camera adopts his wobbly POV. Eventually dad’s patience wears thin and the combination of hatred and pity he feels for this miserable creature who was once an extremely bright young kid, wins out in a controversial final scene that revels in the very right wing morality characteristic of most anti-drug films. The ending of the film was reportedly censored; the sound of Richie screaming following the gunshot was cut out after the initial broadcast, and does not appear in any subsequent version of the film. [Kier-La Janisse]
DEVIL DOG: THE HOUND OF HELL
Director: Curtis Harrington
Starring: Richard Crenna, Yvette Mimieux, Kim Richards, Ike Eisenmann
Airdate: October 31, 1978 Network: CBS
An oblivious family adopts a cute puppy possessed by the destructive dark spirit of Satan’s own bag-rat Barghest.
Sniffing around the same damp tree in the park as Dracula’s Dog (1978), Mongrel (1982), Cujo (1983) and Monster Dog (1984), here’s yet another killer canine movie sure to curl the unwashed hair of any pet lover.
This time, the dog is from the Lakeland Kennels of L.A. The type of place where fuzzy bundles of woof can be purchased by the likes of evil Satanist Martine Beswick (From Russia With Love), who, along with her hooded coven and haunted hay barn, plan to infuse an Alsatian bitch with a puppy that’ll contain the satanic soul of Satan’s mongrel, Barghest. A demon dog that will reign on Earth for 1000 years—neutered or not.
Across town, cheery husband Richard Crenna (Intruders) and Tupperware wife Yvette Mimieux (The Fifth Missile) discover the tire-marked corpse of their family pooch Skipper on the road home, and on request of their kids, get a new dog from cult member and evil fruit and veg seller R.G Armstrong (Dick Tracy). Barely in the house five minutes and now christened Lucky, the evil pooch is scaring people with its face and making its eyes glow green—a hellish display nobody seems to consider an actual threat until, that is, the housekeeper bursts into flames and burns to death.
After concluding “That dog’s just not right,” Crenna decides to get rid of it and save the day via wonky psychic battles in the backyard and slow zooms to nothing in the house; all of which are accompanied by a fab flute riff that signals satanic danger and/or the onset of yet another pointless red-tinted dolly shot through the garden.
Written by Stephen and Elinor Karpf (Gargoyles) and directed by the often great Harrington (Night Tide), there’s little in the way of graphic violence or action and it’s never fully explained why Beswick bothered or why Crenna’s family is chosen in the first place—just two of several plot holes riddling the tubby screenplay.
If you have the patience, you’ll be rewarded with a fast peek at the (admittedly cool) hellhound when it eventually shows up, some mild terror and brightly colored outrage as the kids become enchanted and evil, mom gets horny, and the house goes mad. [DF Dresden]
DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK
Director: John Newland
Starring: Kim Darby, Jim Hutton, William Demarest, Barbara Anderson
Airdate: October 10, 1973 Network: ABC
A couple inherits a mansion, only to discover that something else is already living there.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) is the quintessential made for TV thriller of a type they just don’t make anymore. The best part of seeing movies like this when young is having the bejeezus scared out of us in an innocent and ultimately memorable way. Years later, we can recount where we were and what we were doing when we first saw these films because fear evokes such a strong emotional response.
Kim Darby and Jim Hutton star as Sally and Alex Farnham respectively, a couple who move into a house that Sally has inherited. The house is enormous, sporting an ornate lamppost at the foot of the driveway and really neat architecture. Jim is the typical workaholic and is anxious to become a partner at the firm he works for. He comes off as stern and loud, and never seems to have enough time for Sally, who is meek and tries her best to please him. The manse is too large for them, and the handyman (Demarest) does his best to keep the place in order.
Sally is bored and inspects the bottom of the fireplace, noticing that the opening has been sealed closed. When she questions the handyman about it, he evasively responds that it was necessary… and offers no more than that. This is the part where a red flag goes up as Sally now begins to see multiple pint-size, prune-faced creatures scurrying about when she tries to sleep, as she hosts a party for her husband’s boss, and as she takes a shower. As children, we’re all afraid of things that go bump in the night, and this film preys on that fear. The handyman knows all about the creatures and is complicit in trying to keep their existence secret.
Alex concludes that the house is somehow responsible for his wife’s condition and suggests that she see a doctor. She’s the only one who happens to see the creatures and therefore is labeled half nuts. By the end of the film, Sally is a mess and is practically incapacitated due to her mental state. The creatures begin to drag her across the floor and she plays James Stewart to their Raymond Burr, using a flash camera to momentarily blind them. The creatures, however, overpower Sally and pull her away into the depths of the fireplace. Viewing as a young child, this was likely frightening but to adult eyes it seems illogical and silly.
The film benefits from atmospheric cinematography and music from Billy Goldenberg who provided the bone-chilling minimalist score to Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971). Screenwriter Nigel McKeand also lends his vocal talents to the creatures, providing some truly creepy voices for them.
Part of the creepiness of this film is attributed to the filmmakers’ refusal to explain what these creatures are and what their purpose is. Like Billy and Agnes in Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), and Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), they are never explained. [Todd Garbarini]
DUEL
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Dennis Weaver
Airdate: November 13, 1971 Network: ABC
In his car, David Mann accidentally aggravates a truck driver. The driver takes the term “road rage” to epic heights.
It takes one strong talent working at full capacity to place their mark on the world. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet playing in the late 1920s changed the face of music. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in the 1760s, expanded and altered what a book could do. And, in 1971, Steven Spielberg made Richard Matheson’s script for Duel into a tense, nerve-wracking TV movie that would raise the bar for all TV movies.
Spielberg brings his entire arsenal of cinematic knowledge and style to Duel, including wide-angle lenses, elaborate tracking shots, razor-sharp cutting and the perfect placement of the camera for maximum suspense. Everything Spielberg does well (and when it comes to action and suspense he is one of the best) is in this movie.
David Mann is presented in the barest possible terms. He’s a middle aged man in a small red car, driving through the desert to a business meeting. He has a wife and two children. He seems to get a kick out of the talk radio that one can hear in the desert. Then, he encounters a rusty old rig with “FLAMMABLE” painted in big letters across the back. When the truck begins to get in Mann’s way, it is initially presented as two people who happen to be going the same way and accidentally bother each other. Unfortunately, the truck driver gets mad. The film becomes a series of ever-escalating encounters that draw David Mann very close to madness.
One of the most intriguing elements of the film is the location used: the desert. The writer and director have chosen a potentially limiting location. Why not choose (budget aside) the heart of a city? More places to hide and more chances for peril. A desert has long stretches of nothing with the occasional hill. The chances for a variety of incidents seem limited. But not when creative minds become involved. Duel is filled with endless variations on themes. Trucker in front of Mann. Trucker behind Mann. Trucker sitting ominously still. Trucker going crazy. If he kills Mann, being deep in the desolate desert, Mann would die alone and sweaty.
The fear that Duel taps into the strongest is the fear of really profoundly pissing someone off, however accidentally, and having to deal with their unwarranted wrath. This film takes the crazy behavior of a person who feels wronged to its logical conclusion. All Mr. Mann can do is try to keep alive. It is the thought that there are people in the world who act like this that force the horror into reality.
Duel is Richard Matheson at is most stripped-down imaginative. Duel is a young Spielberg showing off his bag of tricks and thrilling a nation, then the world. And, Duel is poor Mr. Mann. He fights a big rig to the death. May the person you anger be a pillow salesman in a Pinto. [Daniel R. Budnik]
EBONY, IVORY AND JADE
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
Starring: Bert Convy, Debbie Allen, Martha Smith, Donald Moffat, Lucille Benson
Airdate: August 3, 1979 Network: CBS
A trio of spies, under the guise of a singing duo and their manager, search for a stolen and volatile explosive.
In an interview in 1979, Debbie Allen claimed that while no airdate had been set for the pilot movie Ebony, Ivory and Jade, CBS had ordered four more episodes. However, despite such a promising beginning, if these episodes were actually shot, they never aired and the telefilm was relegated to a mere footnote in the world of “jiggle-TV.”
Along with Allen, who plays Ebony, Martha Smith (as Ivory) and Bert Convy (as Mick Jade) round out the cast of bumbling would-be spies. Jade is a rich guy who dabbles in everything from professional tennis to covert snooping. He uses his contacts as a talent manager as a front to get him into hot nightclubs and casinos where he can do his sleuthing in the most glamorous ways possible. Ebony and Ivory provide his cover, and he can usually be found going through things while the two lovely ladies are performing. As you can imagine, this leads the ragtag crew toward all sorts of low-rent adventures.
Honestly, Ebony, Ivory and Jade does not make a lick of sense, but it’s innocuous, and so silly and fun that it becomes completely watchable. Convy, who dazzles in monochromatic polyester chic, is good as Mick Jade, although it’s almost impossible to separate the character from the actor’s real-life goofy charm. As one of the more genial but sometimes-awkward game show hosts (he often gave away the clues and answers on Super Password) Convy was an absolute comic delight. Mick is far more serious, but he bumbles around almost as much as the real Convy and that makes him perfectly suited to approach the action-hero stereotype with a sense of humor, even if it’s mostly unintentional. The girls don’t fare quite as well, but look gorgeous in their sexy costumes, and Allen shakes her moneymaker splendidly in the second dance number.
Ebony, Ivory and Jade also features real-life celebs palling around with the prying threesome in an effort to make Mick Jade look like a believable nightclub manager. Both Frankie Valli and David Brenner show up as themselves to tell the girls they are fabulous performers before quickly disappearing from the scene. Among the bubbling pink explosives, the cameos only serve to enforce the surreal feeling. However, the standout here is Lucille Benson as the sexagenarian bad guy. She works as a maid by day, hitman by night!
Slickly directed by the small screen master Moxey, this TV movie should not to be confused with Cirio H. Santiago’s 1976 big screen martial arts flick with the same title (aka She Devils in Chains). This Ebony, Ivory and Jade is probably best thought of as Charlie’s Angels with one less angel and one that imagines a Charlie/Bosley hybrid as a curly headed tennis bum millionaire. Sold. [Amanda Reyes]
ELVIS
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Kurt Russell, Shelley Winters, Bing Russell, Pat Hingle, Season Hubley
Airdate: February 11, 1979 Network: ABC
From childhood to his comeback in 1969, this is a chronicle of the king of rock’n’roll’s tumultuous life.
Are you loathsome tonight? Alejandro Jodorowsky has said that the concept of the cage is that when you escape from it, you find you’re still trapped in a bigger cage and so forth to infinity. So it was with Elvis Presely, who escaped the Deep South and went from poverty and obscurity to stadia and world domination: a rise and fall that ended in Las Vegas in a purple haze of drugs, fear, loneliness and despair, outlandish costumes, regrets and sideburns; a lonesome, boisterous cowboy, alone with millions of fans.
In 1969, after nine long years away from the stage, Elvis is uncertain about his future, both as man and artist. Still handsome, the king is wild and sexy, but more lost than ever, locked in the International Hotel, reminiscing about his past in postwar Tupelo. Back in those days, young Elvis, traumatized by the death of his twin brother Jesse Garon and worn out by endless money problems, started out from the Sun Studios and imposed his style and music on the ages, from Graceland to Hell.
Whatever you think of Elvis as a singer, the man was never very lucky with his movie career: out of eighteen films, only three or four can be viewed without embarrassment or terminal boredom. But even in his best movies, say Heartbreak Hotel and Love Me Tender, Elvis, who dreamed of being a “real” actor, looks uneasy in his job of poster child to boss Colonel Parker.
On the other side of the fence, it really takes a special sort of person to play the part of Elvis, he who barely dared to be himself. Future Snake Plissken, Kurt Russell (with Ronnie McDowell singing) seems the only guy for the job (with the peculiar exception of Bruce Campbell years later in Don Coscarelli’s Bubba Ho-Tep). Like most biopics, Carpenter’s Elvis (made two years after Elvis’ death) tiptoes around its subject when it should grab it firmly by the hips, but it certainly does it justice. Carpenter, then thirty-one-yearsold—rising to fame with Assault on Precinct 13 in 1976 and establishing his reputation as master of horror with Halloween in 1978—successfully gives flesh and blood to Elvis. He portrays the rise and fall, the twenty years of sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, the dreams and nightmares of a white man with a black voice and blues spirit, to provide a glimpse of how Elvis became—and still is—Elvis, over the course of this three-hour biopic (the cinema version runs ‘only’ 120 minutes). But we are left wanting more, with some characters and situations barely touched on.
If you think a ‘real’ film about Elvis the fiction is still to be made, rewatch the old movies or simply close your eyes and travel back, listening to the records. You’ll be all shook up. Generous, egomaniacal, charming, fucked up, paranoid, lunatic, larger than life… tonight, nine years after his last show, Elvis is gonna kick some ass. [Jean-Paul Coillard]
ESCAPE
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
Starring: Christopher George, Marlyn Mason, William Windom, John Vernon
Airdate: April 6, 1971 Network: ABC
Kurt Russell shakes his moneymaker in John Carpenter’s Elvis.
Christopher George wants to take you on an Escape.
When criminals kidnap a famous scientist along with his daughter and his formula, a professional escape artist investigates the case.
Endowed with a fantastic opening credit sequence, it’s such a shame this pilot movie from Paramount Television and writer Paul Playdon (Visions) never kicked off a series, as it has a supercool protagonist who uses kung fu, charm and escapology to solve crimes.
Christopher George (City of the Living Dead) is playboy/professional escape artist Cameron Steele, a classy private investigator who lives above a bar used as a watering hole for stage magicians called The Crystal Ball. One day, while out showing off in his fancy car, he is interrupted by the case of missing scientist William Windom (Raising Dead), a boffin working on a futuristic GM organism/virus to cure disease, end famine, help breed a master race and clean toilets.
Before the nice professor can gift his discovery to the world for free, he and his daughter Marlyn Mason (Harpy) are kidnapped by Windom’s “dead” brother, supervillain John Vernon (Animal House) and imprisoned in his top secret lab HQ deep below the Happy Land Amusement Park.
Having none of it and out to get the girl, George hankers for the chance to punch the half melted Vernon in the head, and is soon descending elevator shafts and ladders, solving puzzles and escaping from trap after trap as he battles henchmen on his way to the heavily protected lair to save the day.
Low budget, fast paced, a tad 007 and a flaccid joy to view, this has rubber gloves, lab equipment, nice suits, jeopardy, Huntz Hall (Bowery Blitzkrieg), a car phone, fist fights and a roller coaster finale. Be sure not to confuse it with the other Escape (1980)—a TV movie starring Timothy Bottoms (Parasomnia) as real-life drug mule Dwight Worker, a man caught and imprisoned à la Midnight Express (1978) for smuggling drugs into Mexico. [DF Dresden]
THE FACE OF FEAR
Director: George McCowan
Starring: Ricardo Montalban, Elizabeth Ashley, Jack Warden, Dane Clark
Airdate: October 8, 1971 Network: CBS
San Francisco detective Ricardo Montalban protects a woman who has set herself up as a hitman’s next target.
Based on the novel Sally by E.V. Cunningham (a pseudonym for Howard Fast), Quinn-Martin produced this CBS Movie of the Week which stars ditzy, paranoid Elizabeth Ashley (The Cake Eaters) as Sally Dillman, a ditzy, paranoid school teacher who flees to San Francisco from her Idaho home to further consult with doctors who have informed her she has leukemia and only four months left to live.
Convinced of her oncoming demise, desperate and depressed, she pays $5,000 to a stranger in a random bar and hires an unknown hitman to kill her before the illness puts a full stop to her young life.
After meeting with yet another medical specialist, she’s told she’s been misdiagnosed and is fitter than most girls her age—news that should delight her, but instead fills her with dread as she has no way of cancelling her own hit.
While literally planking it on a trolley car, she fortunately bumps into the “Doo as I saay!” hairdo of suave police detective Ricardo Montalban (Joe Panther), who quickly assumes the role of white knight protector. Believing her odd story and a bit gooey-eyed at all the excitement, he convinces her to retrace her steps in order to identify the acne covered “face of fear” and stop the assassin before he can complete the job.
Nicely shot, well-acted, interesting and peppered with solid dialog, great cars, nice suits, suspicious bit players, a bout or two of cut-price gunfire and a taut plot line, there’s some fine SF locations on show; as well as Dane Clark (Blood Song), Burr De Benning (Cruising) and Jack Warden (Night and the City) who can all be seen booking it in several chase scenes scored with bouncy music by Morton Stevens (composer of the Hawaii Five-O theme). [DF Dresden]
Director: Paul Wendkos
Starring: Louis Jourdan, Lynda Day, Bradford Dillman, Carroll O’Connor
Airdate: March 3, 1969 Network: NBC
After a mystifying mirror brings back a young woman’s dead lover, a psychiatrist, specializing in the occult, steps in to unravel the mystery.
Airing as part of the NBC World Premiere Movie series, Fear No Evil is a hyperstylized supernatural yarn that was intended to be a pilot movie for a series titled Bedeviled. It was to have featured the stunningly handsome and suave Louis Jourdan as Dr. David Sorrell, a psychiatrist whose strange caseload leads him to the bizarre and supernatural on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, the series never materialized, but this telefilm is gorgeously late sixties in design, features much in the way of eerie imagery—and a surprising amount of eroticism—and remains an excellent example of how to bring elegance, charm and terror to small screen horror.
Jourdan is perfectly cast as the reserved, but ultimately compassionate, psychiatrist who attempts to help the lovelorn Barbara (Day), a bride-to-be who lost her fiancé (Dillman) just days before their wedding. The dead lover returns to Barbara at night, through a gothic mirror he had purchased the day before his death. It is here, in the simple but surreal imagery that the film finds its strangest and strongest moments. Underneath the mourning, Barbara is all about sex, sex, sex, which include moments of bloodletting! (And, although subtle, probably unlike anything seen on television at this point!) The flashbacks of Dillman during his initiation into the dark side are also compelling and surreal, sometimes recalling images from Simon, King of the Witches and The Last House on Dead End Street (check out those masks).
Paul Wendkos adds a lot of aesthetic oomph to the proceedings, and tried his hand at a similar version of Fear No Evil in another pilot movie in 1979 titled Good Against Evil, starring Dack Rambo. The latter failed because by the time 1979 rolled around it had all been done before. The 1969 Evil has the benefit of getting there early on, and incorporating a lot of heavy grooviness into the proceedings. Everything from Cubist art (i.e. looking at things from all perspectives) to the softly sexy undertones, helps elevate Evil’s admittedly slow pacing.
Making his TV movie debut, the iconic small screen composer, Billy Goldenberg (credited here as William), provides Fear No Evil with a creepy and epic soundtrack. The love scenes between Barbara and her ghostly fiancé are made all the more disturbing through Goldenberg’s echoed chants and off-kilter strings. The simple mirror imagery only heightens the effects.
While Fear No Evil did not become a series, it did spawn a sequel the following year, titled Ritual of Evil, that features Jourdan on a similar supernatural journey, as he tries to uncover what was behind the death of one of his young patients. Ah, what could have been! [Amanda Reyes]
FIRE!
Director: Earl Bellamy
Starring: Ernest Borgnine, Vera Miles, Patty Duke, Alex Cord
Airdate: May 8, 1977 Network: NBC
The lives of the innocent are threatened by a raging fire when a prison convict intentionally sets a verdant mountainside ablaze.
Practically a Xerox of Flood! (1976) and produced by Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno) for Warner Bros. Television, an all-star cast of TV movie royalty infests this smoky, plodding and bog-standard disaster epic—all about a forest in Silverton, Oregon, which bursts into flames when malicious chain-gang convict Neville Brand (Killdozer) sets fire to his work detail with a carefully aimed cigarette butt.
Thanks to some small scale, but convincing FX by Cliff Wenger, things burn quick here, so it’s less than twelve minutes before the flames are sky high and hassling the clouds—which unfortunately gives director Bellamy naught to do but slowly introduce, and then maul, the usual grab-bag of cookie-cut characters. This time they include a retired doctor, a hotshot helicopter pilot, a divorcing professional couple, a missing child, a lovelorn logging boss, a bus packed full of stranded kids, escaped prisoners, countless law enforcement agents and some slightly charred and overwhelmed firemen.
Each character is given a simple treatment and all are either trapped within the woodland inferno, or heading toward its center to rescue a loved one, look at footage of scampering bears, worried frogs and fleeing deer… or to simply fail in their task and slowly roast amid the crackling pines.
Far more enjoyable with many beers and a full room, the main (and possibly only) reason to watch it, is again, the cast, so say “Hi” to Ernest Borgnine, sexy Donna Mills (Runaway Father), the great Lloyd Nolan (Galyon), punchy Eric Estrada (Visions), Patty Duke (No Child of Mine), wailing Vera Miles (Psycho 2) and moody Alex Cord from Inn of the Damned. [DF Dresden]
A FIRE IN THE SKY
Director: Jerry Jameson
Starring: Richard Crenna, Elizabeth Ashley, David Dukes, Joanna Miles
Airdate: November 26, 1978 Network: NBC
Authority is questioned and panic erupts when Richard Crenna discovers a deadly comet on a collision course with Earth.
A tiny disco ball explosion in outer space unleashes a killer comet that threatens to smush the city of Phoenix, Arizona, in this lethargic, dialog driven disaster clunker directed by the wonderfully hit and miss Jerry Jameson (Terror on the 40th Floor).
Originally broadcast in two parts over two nights by NBC, it was made to cash in on the forthcoming release of the much hyped, but equally weak and watery space waster Meteor (1979), and so tells the same tale of scientists and observatory staff who discover a comet on a collision course with Earth and their efforts to divert its path—before good manners completely evaporate, society breaks down and everybody panics themselves into the morgue.
Shot mostly in cramped offices and badly decorated home sets, the usual line up of archetypes take their sweet time explaining the who and what in long, wordy belches in the hope that you, the viewer, will connect with one or more, and then root for them and their lousy lives when the comet eventually lands and goes bang.
Hard to like but watchable, bearded astronomer Richard Crenna (Jade) labors over dull calculations with assistant Joanna Miles (Blackout); cheating husband David Dukes (Rawhead Rex) and his porno mustache get laid; young runaways Michael Biehn (Aliens) and bubbly Cindy Eilbacher (Forces of Evil) coo and kiss; and publicity shy, partially corrupt governor Nicolas Coster (Golden Girl) and smug president Andrew Duggan (It Lives Again) try to keep the whole situation quiet for fear of causing a human stampede of doom.
Toss in some dozy campers, brat teens, crying wives, a fallout shelter, stock footage of rockets, army recruits, martial law, crappy destruction SFX and a plot premise ignored or possibly re-imagined in the likes of Deep Impact (1998), Armageddon (1998) and even Impact (2008), and you have a long haul, red-eye flight to a ho-hum finale. [DF Dresden]
FLOOD!
Director: Earl Bellamy
Starring: Robert Culp, Martin Milner, Barbara Hershey, Richard Basehart
Airdate: November 24, 1976 Network: NBC
A town mayor risks the lives of many by ignoring calls to open the floodgates of a rapidly crumbling dam.
If you can excuse the barren pun, this here is a dry run for producer Irwin Allen’s Fire!, which followed a year later in 1977, and it’s so similar in premise and intent, you’d be correct in assuming the birth certificate of both featured the word “conjoined.”
In this disastrous Warner Bros. Television outing we have the usual cast of TV movie regulars subjected to the damp demands of a mammoth killer puddle when a dam wall cracks open (after an hour!), flooding the scenic countryside and town of Brownsville, Oregon.
For a hero, we have “Irish” helicopter pilot Robert Culp (Spectre, 1977), who talks fast and flies low, delivering wealthy fishermen like Roddy McDowall (It’s My Party) to a fish-bloated lake that supplies and threatens to pop open the dam—a disaster hoping to be averted by the half-assed efforts of dam engineer Cameron Mitchell (Demon Cop), who tries to plug the leak, save the day and appear sober.
On the slow way to the eventual torrent of lethal and destructive H2O, you’ll find soggy Martin Milner (Nashville Beat), Barbara Hershey (Frogs for Snakes), Francine York (The Doll Squad), Whit Bissel (Psychic Killer) and young Leif Garrett (Skateboard) playing typical roles in a partially interested fashion, which won’t add to your enjoyment, nor stave off the indifference inspired by the ho-hum antics.
Flatly filmed by TV series legend Earl Bellamy (Speed Trap), if you have to watch it, be prepared for water. More water. Appalling interior design, sand bagging, lots of dialog, dire miniatures, hardly any large-scale destruction FX, mismatched stock footage and a scene where crazy mayor Richard Basehart (City Beneath the Sea) bangs a table. [DF Dresden]
GARGOYLES
Director: Bill L Norton
Starring: Cornel Wilde, Jennifer Salt, Bernie Casey, Grayson Hall, Scott Glenn
Airdate: November 21, 1972 Network: CBS
In the New Mexico desert, an anthropology professor and his daughter stumble on ancient gargoyles preparing to dominate humankind.
One of the most beloved genre telemovies of the seventies, Gargoyles is perhaps best known today as the first film to feature the work of future Oscar winning makeup and special effects artist Stan Winston (Aliens, Predator, Jurassic Park, the first three Terminator films). In fact, Winston would share an Emmy (with Del Armstrong and Ellis Burman) for his work on Gargoyles, when the film won the Outstanding Achievement in Make-Up category at the 1973 awards.
Opening with a narrated sequence featuring a collage of gargoyle statues and inspired art, Gargoyles has the feel of one of those chintzy but strangely eerie seventies documentaries like Chariots of the Gods (1970) and The Mysterious Monsters (1975). Though it quickly settles into a routine telemovie structure, it moves along at a cracking pace, introducing us to Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) and his spunky young daughter Diana (Jennifer Salt from De Palma’s Sisters), who are heading off on an anthropological expedition across New Mexico as research for the doctor’s new book, Five Thousand Years of Demonology. A pit stop at a tacky roadside oddity museum soon leads to the discovery of a family of gargoyles living in the mountain caves, who try to stop the pair from exposing them before the thousands of eggs they are incubating have the opportunity to hatch.
While the great makeup and costume designs are the clear highlights of the film, Gargoyles has a lot of other positives going for it. Cornel Wilde, a former matinee idol who also directed several interesting films including The Naked Prey (1965) and Beach Red (1967), has a great screen presence and makes a rugged hero for a man pushing sixty. Also fun to watch is Grayson Hall as the boozy, hysterical motel manager (never without a drink in her hand), and Bernie Casey projects great menace as the lead gargoyle with his creepy, modulated voice and graceful sense of movement (helped by some slow motion cinematography). Scott Glenn also has an early role as the leader of a gang of young mountain bikers whom the local sheriff tries to blame the gargoyles’ chaos on.
Filmed on location in the Carlsbad Caverns area of New Mexico, Gargoyles conveys a nice haunting atmosphere and effective sense of isolation, and it’s a credit to director Bill L. Norton that he was able to do such a good job at short notice and with very little time (he was brought on board at the last minute after the original director balked at the eighteen day shooting schedule). Norton would have a prolific career in television, directing many telemovies and episodes of shows like Tour of Duty, Profiler and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Featuring an optional audio commentary by director Norton, Gargoyles was released on DVD by Hen’s Tooth Video in 2011. [John Harrison]
THE GIRL IN THE EMPTY GRAVE
Director: Lou Antonio
Starring: Andy Griffith, Jonathan Banks, James Cromwell, Mitzi Hoag
Airdate: September 20, 1977 Network: NBC
Despite being buried by her family months before, a dead girl surprises everyone by turning up in town again.
Claude Earl Jones (Bride of the Reanimator) shares screen time with James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential) and Andy Griffith (Go Ask Alice) in this failed pilot attempt by MGM Television that was supposed to initiate a series that never transpired.
For a plot, we have small-town Chief of Police Andy digging to the bottom of a vaguely mysterious case involving a “dead girl” (Deborah White) who miraculously shows up driving a car on main street one day— much to everyone’s amazement, as she’d been officially pronounced dead and entombed in a grave a few months earlier.
Is it a ghost? An insurance scam? Or is it a collective hallucination induced by the boredom of the town? And just who did they box up, bury and mourn? If anyone can solve the conundrum, it’s Andy, and this he does in typical, talky TV movie fashion; casually questioning the town’s sleepy and often evasive inhabitants with a low key, cheery manner till the truth slowly emerges.
Devoid of violence or action, director Antonio (The Chinese Typewriter) practically ignores the impressive Big Bear, California, locations, choosing instead to fill out the running time with Lane Slate’s brisk exchanges of homespun detection, which are as stodgy as an unbaked apple pie. A real shame too, as in spite of being well played and gifted with a great title, it sadly lacks a single memorable scene to separate it from similar seventies fare—deservedly relegating it to near obscurity. [DF Dresden]
THE GIRL MOST LIKELY TO…
Director: Lee Philips
Starring: Stockard Channing, Ed Asner, Jim Backus, Walter Berlinger
Airdate: November 6, 1973 Network: ABC
After a bullied ugly duckling is transformed into a beautiful swan, she seeks hilarious revenge on those who did her wrong.
Lee Phillips’ black comedy is a showcase for the comedic talents of a pre-Grease Stockard Channing, who stars as Miriam Knight, a portly, homely girl (achieved by a fat suit, fake eyebrows and a prosthetic nose) who has been through five colleges trying to find anyone who can see past her physical appearance. But every new start leads to more disappointment; as the film opens, she’s just enrolled at a new school and despite being outgoing, funny and even bravely flirtatious, she quickly becomes the butt of campus jokes. From college jocks (including CHiPs’ Larry Wilcox as a dumb football player named Moose) to a cruel junior MD (The Love Boat’s Fred Grandy) to a conniving cheerleader roommate (the hilariously vacuous Susanne Zenor) who is threatened by Miriam’s one success—landing the lead in the school play—the chips are stacked against our heroine and eventually she attempts to kill herself in a reckless driving accident.
Miraculously, she survives, but requires reconstructive surgery, and her figure is slimmed down by a restrictive hospital diet. When the bandages are removed (after a great scene through which Channing emotes her trademark sarcastic humor without the benefit of a face or voice), her doctor revels in his handiwork: she looks like a young Elizabeth Taylor. Sensing her new appeal to men—and to society at large—Miriam decides not to complacently accept her good fortune, but instead to seek vengeance on behalf of all homely girls everywhere, who are never given the opportunities of their better-looking counterparts.
Here is where the film gets really interesting—it could easily have gone with a series of pranks through which its villains get some poignant but restrained comeuppance. Instead, with her little red book/kill list on hand, Miriam dons a series of voluptuous disguises and concocts elaborate schemes to get rid of them all—for good. Meanwhile the cop investigating these bizarre deaths (Asner) is becoming increasingly obsessed with the mastermind behind them; while not quite what she planned on, Miriam may meet her match after all.
Conceived and co-written by the late Joan Rivers (one of very few things she wrote outside of comedy specials), directed by Lee Phillips (who also helmed the Linda Blair/Martin Sheen TV team up Sweet Hostage), and featuring familiar faces in many of the bit parts (Annette O’Toole, Reb Brown, Larry Manetti, Dennis Dugan, Jim Backus, Chuck McCann and more), The Girl Most Likely To… is an unusual film whose silliness often veils how dark and sad it really is. [Kier-La Janisse]
Newspaper promotion for the controversial adaptation of Go Ask Alice.
Director: John Korty
Starring: Jamie Smith-Jackson, William Shatner, Ruth Roman, Julie Adams
Airdate: January 24, 1973 Network: ABC
A young woman chronicles her desperate battle with drug addiction.
To fully appreciate Go Ask Alice means placing it in its correct cultural context. When the manuscript first hit bookstore shelves in 1971, it was dropped as an “anonymous diary” penned by a drug addict who died a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday. For the next three decades, the book was essential reading for many impressionable tweens and teens, and the telefilm was shown in various health classes throughout the country. Many were haunted by this cautionary tale, even though it was outed as a work a fiction in the late seventies. “Edited” by therapist Beatrice Sparks, it is believed that Go Ask Alice is the intertwining of various stories told to Sparks by her patients. Her book is still in print today. Our modern eyes tend to view Go Ask Alice with a sense of cynicism, but during the turbulent seventies, it held our attention in a way that few other young adult novels had.
The telefilm aired just two years after the book’s publication, and although much of it was played down for television (obviously the infamous line “Another day, another blowjob” was excised from the adaptation), some of the imagery remains disturbing, to say the least. While the protagonist in the novel is never named (the title Go Ask Alice refers to a line from the Jefferson Airplane song, White Rabbit), she is called Alice in the film, and is played by Jamie Smith-Jackson in her film debut. Alice’s move from alienated youth to casual drug user to addict to pusher to hooker to recovering dopehead is head spinning. Skipping through the novel, the story jumps as though it was itself snorting coke. The overall effect displaces the viewer and, at times, it seems we are a part of Alice’s terrifying trips. Where the “diary” analyzed the whys and hows, the telefilm effectively drops you off in the middle of the madness and confusion.
Somehow Smith-Jackson maintains sympathy—no easy feat, especially when she’s pushing dope on junior high school kids. But her performance is moving, and after a bad acid trip (not her fault, someone dosed her soda!), where she tries to claw her way out of closet (!) her tormented struggle with sobriety seems almost impossible.
However, the story had two different effects: Some took the moral message to heart and swore themselves to living the straight life, while others felt the protagonist became exponentially cooler after she dropped a tab of acid. The physical change is undeniable. Although the lead actress is obviously attractive, her drug induced softly ironed hair, floppy hats and bell-bottoms look so much cooler on her.
William Shatner and Julie Adams play the parents, and Andy Griffith shows up for one scene (predating his team up with Shatner in 1974’s Pray for the Wildcats). A young Robert Carradine plays a stoner and Mackenzie Phillips—an actress with her own substance abuse struggles—makes her debut as a shoeless “baby hooker,” and starts off one of the most harrowing segments in the film. [Amanda Reyes]
THE GOLDEN GATE MURDERS
Director: Walter Grauman
Starring: David Janssen, Susannah York, Lloyd Bochner, Tim O’Connor
Airdate: October 3, 1979 Network: CBS
When several people plunge to their deaths from a bridge, a policeman and a nun team up to investigate.
According to this Universal Television production, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco claimed the lives of fifteen construction workers before its completion in 1937. One of the dead riveters was the brother of Father John Thomas (Regis Cordic), a priest who visits the structure with his young, attractive, Irish nun/nurse assistant Susannah York (Yellowbeard). But only for a minute, as the gloomy father is soon over the rails and assumed to be a drowned suicide in the cold waters below.
Assigned to the case is David Janssen (Man Trap) who plays grumpy detective David Silver, an impolite and jaded grouch who mumbles and barks his way through a lot of raspy dialog in pursuit of a psycho who may, or may not have slain old John Thomas. And maybe a few others too, as it soon emerges there’s a masked killer in a cape called The Specter pushing random strangers off the bridge.
After several more bodies go splash and sink, the police are left clueless, so it’s up to the unlikely pairing of “mad nun” York and “mad cop” Janssen (who has a cat called Dirty Harry) to bring the killer to justice—which they predictably do without much fanfare or excitement. Meaning, you’ll need a lot of coffee to help you stay awake to see the end credits—unless you’re a massive fan of police procedure, waffly arguments, terrible flirting, sad faces, porn mustaches, justice and discussions about the afterlife, Heaven, suicide and the church.
Well-acted, but slow and soft headed, try to spot Kim Hunter (The Kindred), Paul Coufos (Chopping Mall) and Alan Fudge (Bug) amid the fog and then be amazed to learn this actually played some theater dates as The Specter On The Bridge, a title that makes it sound even better than it is.
For an update on how the Golden Gate is doing these days, go watch the morbid tales told in The Bridge (2006). [DF Dresden]
GOODNIGHT, MY LOVE
Director: Peter Hyams
Starring: Richard Boone, Michael Dunn, Barbara Bain, Victor Buono
Airdate: October 17, 1972 Network: ABC
A private eye and his dwarf sidekick tackle a tough case in this seventies homage to film noir.
The 1940s were very big in the 1970s. The cult of Bogart was in full swing and there were numerous attempts at recreating or updating the look and feel of the great forties’ detective films, from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown to Woody Allen’s Play it Again, Sam. This little known TV movie, clearly a labor of love from writer-director Peter Hyams, is one of the best.
It’s Los Angeles in 1946. Down-at-heel detective Frank Hogan (Richard Boone) and his dwarf sidekick Arthur Boyle (Michael Dunn) receive a visit from a glamorous blonde, Susan Lakely (Barbara Bain). Susan hasn’t seen her fiancé, Mike Tarlow (Gianni Russo), in five days, and wants Hogan to find out if he has another woman. Hogan and Boyle track Tarlow down to a hotel room, but, on entering it, Hogan is bopped on the head by an assailant who flees. “Thanks for the help,” he says, trying to pick himself up off the floor. “Well, what did you want me to do?” asks Boyle. “Punch him in the knee?”
They learn that Tarlow is also being sought by Julius Limeway, the fat man who owns the swank Top Hat Club. Limeway wears a white suit and sits in his club all day, eating clams and being lugubrious (in the 1940s, he would have been played by Sidney Greenstreet, but here the role is nicely handled by Victor Buono, best known for his turn as King Tut in the Batman TV series). It becomes clear that Tarlow was the man we saw at the beginning of the film, shooting one of Limeway’s couriers dead on a bus and stealing a briefcase full of money.
The plot thickens of course, with double and triple crosses, and Hogan getting bopped on the head some more (“I really hate getting beaten up.”). Kept abreast of developments, Susan does a lot of girlish weeping à la Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, while Hogan is convinced she’s lying through her teeth. The action culminates in a Hitchcock-like scene in a cinema, where a gunman synchronizes his shot with one in the movie being screened.
While it takes its cues from The Maltese Falcon, this is more than just a pastiche. It’s atmospherically shot in soft focus so that light comes through windows in bright foggy bursts (almost the opposite of film noir, really). Boone, who played the black-clad gunslinger Paladin in the existential TV western Have Gun—Will Travel, conveys a wonderful world-weariness as Hogan. The engine that drives the movie, though, is the relationship between Hogan and Boyle. Boyle, who is usually thinking about his next meal, is constantly undercutting the action with wry lines (“Francis, she’s crying again,” or, after one of Limeway’s florid speeches, “Francis, I think I’m going to be ill”). The hulking Boone and diminutive Dunn make a great comedy double act, and if this had been made in the forties, they probably would have been in a whole series of films together. Sadly Dunn, a very talented actor, died at the age of thirty-nine just two years after this was made. [Chris Mikul]
From left: Exceptional promotional artwork for The Golden Gate Murders; Richard Boone and Michael Dunn reinvigorate the noir with Goodnight, My Love.
HAWAII FIVE-O
Director: Paul Wendkos
Starring: Jack Lord, Leslie Nielsen, Nancy Kwan, James Gregory
Airdate: September 20, 1968 Network: CBS
Steve McGarrett, the charismatic head of Hawaii Five-O, clashes with US intelligence as he hunts down the Red Chinese agent Wo Fat.
The feature-length pilot of Hawaii Five-O introduced audiences to many of the elements that would become familiar during the popular series’ long (1968–80) original run. Jack Lord’s Steve McGarrett is as tough and stoic as ever, with a bit of a sensitive touch and Morton Stevens’ now classic and iconic theme music is there, as is the great and wonderfully-edited opening title montage, though both are in slightly different forms to those in the regular series. There are other differences between the pilot and the ensuing series as well—McGarrett’s right hand man, Danny “Dan-O” Williams is played by Tim O’Kelly, perhaps best known for the classic 1968 Peter Bogdanovich film Targets (in the series, Dan-O was played by the more familiar James MacArthur). Likewise, the part of Hawaii’s Governor is played by Lew Ayres, as opposed to Richard Denning, who portrayed the character throughout the show. There are also some uncomfortable attempts at comedy between two of McGarrett’s top agents, Chin-Ho (Kam Fong) and Kono (Zulu), which was thankfully downplayed in the series.
In this pilot, which was later edited into a two-part episode entitled Cocoon, McGarrett comes face-to-face for the first time with Wo Fat (Khigh Dhiegh), the Red Chinese agent who would re-appear several times throughout the series’ run. He was, effectively, the Blofeld to McGarrett’s 007, with the head of Five-O not getting to throw the book at him until the very last episode of the series. When we first meet him in the pilot, he is subjecting a US intelligence agent (and close friend of McGarrett) to an insidious sensory deprivation torture chamber designed to extract information: a large water tank installed in the hull of an old cargo ship, into which the agent, after having his eyes, ears and nose filled in with dental clay and a bizarre breathing apparatus placed over his head, is submerged in water until all mental resistance is broken down. It’s a very strange, eerie opening to the show, more reminiscent of an Irwin Allen sci-fi series than a cop drama. Off-kilter camera shots and fish-eye mirror reflections add to the strange, almost experimental feel to the pilot at times. Of course, the viewer suspects all along that McGarrett will end up in the deprivation chamber at some point, though he naturally proves a tougher nut for Wo Fat to try and crack.
Filmed entirely on location, one of the main selling points of Hawaii Five-O was its exotic (and then novel) setting, and the pilot certainly does its bit to encourage tourism and highlight the natural beauty and scenic splendor of the Hawaiian Islands. Thankfully though, the filmmakers didn’t shy away from also showing some of the sleazier elements which the islands had to offer, and forty-five-plus years later it’s great to have a visual record of all the seamy cocktail bars, strip joints and gritty skid-row motels which have sadly since given way to gentrification and “progress.”
While there were much tighter and more exciting episodes of Hawaii Five-O to come (seasons two and three being particularly strong), the pilot movie remains a highly satisfying introduction to a classic piece of American crime fiction TV. [John Harrison]
Director: Jerry Jameson
Starring: Ben Murphy, Bonnie Bedelia, Lew Ayres, David Huddleson
Airdate: January 26, 1974 Network: ABC
In the midst of a heatwave, a young couple escapes the city for the mountains. But the mountains pose new problems.
“The weathermen don’t seem to know what’s going on,” says Laura Taylor to her husband Frank. It’s the start of the movie, barely five in the morning, but the temperature is already 97°F and creeping steadily up, just like yesterday. And the day before. The overworked air conditioning unit in the young couple’s bedroom clatters to a stop. By midday the temperature is 115°F.
Frank (Ben Murphy) heads off to work and Laura (Bonnie Bedelia) heads for the supermarket. Their journeys make Heatwave! look for a spell like a pared down version of Goddard’s Weekend, with its microcosm of a society in disarray. People are collapsed on the sidewalk, tended to by paramedics. Animals scavenge whatever water they can find. Perishable goods are taken off-sale for health reasons, causing little riots in supermarket aisles. And so on. At the Laundromat, the heavily pregnant Laura has a funny turn. When Frank’s office is forced to close as part of an energy-saving contingency plan, the couple decide to leave the city for the hills, deducing it’ll be safer there.
Heatwave! is a bit of a mess. It’s not all bad, and this early section depicting the city grinding to a halt is effective, as is the failing of humanity in a crisis. (When the couple stop to help an old timer, he steals their car.) But then other aspects of the movie are unlikely or just plain bizarre. The ongoing quarrel Frank has with his in-laws, for example, serves no definable purpose. On the other hand, an encounter with a traveling beer salesman (David Huddleston) in a diner provides a longueur that is achingly misplaced. Its crude purpose is to enable the final act, when the salesman returns unexpectedly to save the day for Laura and Frank.
But what a final act! Stuck in the mountains, miles from anywhere and without electricity, the couple must build an incubator if their premature baby is to survive. Frank rounds up sympathetic townsfolk, who he then sets to work building the incubator—a complex piece of equipment—from bits and pieces of junk, like a benign A-Team. The salesman provides the gasoline for the generator that powers the incubator, thus forgoing his opportunity to make a mint selling beer to the parched masses from the trunk of his car. Shots of the sun in the sky remind us about the heatwave.
This end sequence is so far removed from everything else in the movie, and goes on for so long, I’m of the opinion the screenwriter left some pages on the bus into the studio that morning and was forced to make-do.
Director Jerry Jameson is another prolific name in television, working on shows and TV movies through to the present. He also directed Airport ’77 (1977) and the drive-in horror favorite, The Bat People (1974). [David Kerekes]
HEY, I’M ALIVE
Director: Lawrence Schiller
Starring: Ed Asner, Sally Struthers, Milton Selzer, Hagan Beggs
Airdate: November 7, 1975 Network: ABC
After a small plane crashes in the wilderness, an estranged couple has their faith and health tested by the elements.
Partially based on a true story (from a 1963 book by Helen Klaben and Beth Day), lumpy Edward Asner (Fort Apache The Bronx) runs out of plane fuel on his way to San Francisco and crashes his tiny aircraft into a desolate, snowy Yukon forest—much to the alarm of his wobbly-eyed passenger Sally Struthers (A Deadly Silence).
Narrated in flashback by Struthers, she tells the cold, plodding and inspirational story of how she met amateur pilot (and staunch, religious zealot) Asner, and how they took to the air, hit the ground, got injured, built a fire, and, in the spirit of survival, learned how to band together and forage for food while accepting each other’s personal quirks and opposing beliefs.
Lost in the barren wilderness for forty-nine days, the duo eat snow, grow beards, wear hats, figure out how to signal for help, slap each other awake and endure Asner’s half-assed Australian/Canadian accent, which wanders across many geographical borders in search of a home.
Hardly exciting, and with little to recommend it, the only joy you’ll find between the opening and closing titles is Struthers’ constant whining, Asner’s emotionless, solid turn and the fact that the rescue squad fail to find them each and every fly over. Personally, I was praying for a grizzly bear attack, an avalanche, or a freak hunting accident to bring an end to both of them and the preachy bible-heavy dialog which the pair recite and discuss endlessly as they try to save each other’s soul—as well as skin.
Director/producer Schiller is responsible for dozens of TV features, including the morose Marilyn: The Untold Story (1980), the memorable The Executioner’s Song (1982) and the forgettable Double Jeopardy (1992). [DF Dresden]
HITCHHIKE!
Director: Gordon Hessler
Starring: Cloris Leachman, Michael Brandon, Cameron Mitchell, Henry Darrow
Airdate: February 23, 1974 Network: ABC
In search of a new life away from an unloving partner, a woman gives a ride to a mysterious man.
Universal Television produced this taut, no-frills road trip thriller starring a practically-on-fire Cloris Leachman (Herbie Goes Bananas) as Claire Stevens, a woman on the run from a disintegrating relationship who fills her car trunk with red luggage and heads out on the highway in search of peace, quiet and a chance to rethink her life while she stays at her sister’s house, hundreds of miles away in San Francisco.
Barely down the road and looking for adventure, she picks up depressed, toy-boy hitchhiker Michael Brandon (Rock ‘n’ Roll Mom)—who is still wet with sweat after using a lethal hair clip to murder his slutty stepmother (Sherry Jackson) pre-coitus.
Unaware of her passenger’s heart-stopping tendencies, and blind to the fact she’s now harboring a wanted killer, Leachman smiles as she drives; slowly becoming more and more attracted to her mysterious, near silent traveling companion who encourages her to talk about her feelings, dreams and girly ambitions until she cracks wise and sets herself up as his next victim.
Despite being light on the action, things are kept watchable with some solid dialog, claustrophobic car interiors, a smear of mud, crazy trousers, pregnant pauses and nice, but brief performances from cops Henry Darrow (Night Games) and pipe-smoking Cameron Mitchell (Kill Point), who play the detectives hoping to find the odd couple before more bodies pile up.
Those interested in the Passenger From Hell genre should check out the classic The Devil Thumbs A Ride (1947), Hitch Hike (1977) and of course, both versions of The Hitcher (1986, 2007). [DF Dresden]
HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
Starring: Sally Field, Julie Harris, Jessica Walter, Jill Haworth, Eleanor Parker
Airdate: November 28, 1972 Network: ABC
An ailing man summons his four daughters home for Christmas. He informs them he believes his second wife is trying to kill him. A mysterious figure in a raincoat begins to murder the daughters one by one.
Not that there are many who’d need much convincing that a family Christmas gathering is the perfect breeding ground for horror, but who better to illustrate this point than legendary TV movie director John Llewellyn Moxey (The House That Would Not Die, The Night Stalker, No Place to Hide, et al), celebrated screenwriter Joseph Stefano (Psycho) and a wall-to-wall cast of heavy hitters, like Sally Field, Julie Harris and Jessica Walter, to name a few? Tie all that up with an Aaron Spelling/Leonard Goldberg Production bow and the possibility of failure is scarce.
Walter Brennan plays possibly paranoid patriarch Benjamin Morgan who beckons his four generally estranged daughters to his bedside to plead with them to assist in the disposal of his second wife Elizabeth (Harris) who he believes is slowly poisoning him. Thoughts that dad is delusional are leveled by the knowledge that Elizabeth spent time in an asylum having been accused of dispatching her previous husband in a similar manner. Having gone against public opinion defending Elizabeth’s innocence, pride now keeps pop from going to the police.
It’s not long before the sisters’ assorted dysfunctions surface, Freddie (Jessica Walter) is a boozy pill popper, Joanna “Joe” (Jill Haworth) has had a string of failed relationships, eldest daughter Alex (Eleanor Parker) is an overburdened dumping ground attached to the phrase “emotional prisoner” and Christine “Chris”(Sally Field) is the underestimated “baby” who claims to “have a habit of needing too much.” All of the girls live in the shadow of their mother’s suicide. On the surface, their mother killed herself suffering from a broken heart when father took up with Elizabeth but it is implied that his desire to leave her was spurred by the fact that she failed to give him a son, leaving all of the siblings liable by birth, at least in their father’s eyes. His guilt generating disapproval is inescapable and his longing and dissatisfaction is buried in each of the sisters’ very names. The wise thing to do when confronted with such a toxic environment is to simply walk away; unfortunately, in this case, that self-preserving action opens you up to being stabbed with a pitchfork by a shadowy figure in a yellow raincoat. Welcome home.
With its holiday setting, unidentifiable mystery killer and extended late in the game chase sequence giving way to a surprise unveiling complete with confession, Home For The Holidays can easily be pegged as a slasher flick forerunner. On the other hand, its anchored cynicism of family bonds, macabre sense of humor and tendency toward lightning flashes of histrionics insure its uniqueness. Due to budgetary and time restraints, the production was forced to forgo an originally scripted snowstorm and rely on rain, a concession that may actually work in its favor. The constant onslaught of dismal dampness outside mirrors the sense of dreary disappointment indoors, making the dank familial discord feel utterly ineludible. [Lance Vaughan]
THE HORROR AT 37,000 FEET
Director: David Lowell Rich
Starring: William Shatner, Chuck Connors, Roy Thinnes, Tammy Grimes
Airdate: February 13, 1973 Network: CBS
The passengers and crew of a 747 on a transatlantic flight discover demonic forces in the cargo.
What happens when seventies era airplane disaster clichés collide midair with the same decade’s morbid fascination with the occult? It turns out you get something low in logic yet high in entertainment value, namely, The Horror at 37,000 Feet. It doesn’t hurt that everyone who bought a ticket on this particular flight is either a television legend or a shameless scene-chewer, or in the case of William Shatner (who portrays a priest who’s looking for the faith he’s lost at the bottom of a bottle)—both. One would think we’d all be in highly capable hands with The Rifleman’s Chuck Connors on board as captain, and Gilligan’s Island’s “Professor” Russell Johnson as his co-pilot but neither are much of a match against the supernatural forces unleashed by The Norliss Tapes’ Roy Thinnes as a clueless architect transporting an ancient altar and Tammy Grimes as an undercover demon apologist. The Beverly Hillbillies’ Buddy Ebsen is along for the ride as well and his priceless befuddled expression speaks volumes. In fact, he can barely keep a straight face.
As ostensibly derivative as Horror at 37,000 Feet may sound, it’s overall one of a kind. Somehow the everything but the kitchen sink game plan, paired with its over-the-top performances and fearlessness in regards to its profoundly surreal conclusion, ensure that ultimately it’s in a class all by itself. There’s really no use fighting it, my advice is to put the rational part of your brain in the overhead compartment, securely fasten your seatbelt, and prepare for an onslaught of supernatural mayhem including voodoo baby dolls that spew green ooze, blasts of artic air so cold they freeze a dog mid-bark, killer elevators, human sacrifices, ominous chanting pouring out of earphones and a creepier than you’d expect, late in the flight, appearance from a funky phantom in a hooded robe. If none of the aforementioned sounds like your cup of tea, this journey is still worth taking as a simple eye-opening reminder of how much air travel, haunted or otherwise, has changed over the decades. Non-stop smoking, drinking and chauvinistic asides appear to be highly encouraged in this too groovy to believe shag-carpeted, double decker lounge club in the sky. If this plane is representative of modern life in the States it’s no wonder the ancient spirits are less than excited about being relocated.
It’s all perhaps silly and even preposterous but there’s something about the giddy madness aboard this craft that’s highly contagious as well, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself inexplicably unnerved before you get your feet back on safe, sane, solid ground. Shatner may always be better remembered for his notorious airplane-set Twilight Zone episode ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’ or for his legendary stint commandeering a spacecraft boldly going where no man has gone before, but for sheer outlandish television excess, in my book, you just can’t get any higher than The Horror at 37,000 Feet. [Lance Vaughan]
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
Director: Barry Crane
Starring: Stewart Granger, Bernard Fox, William Shatner, Anthony erbe Network: ABC
Airdate: February 12, 1972
The detective Sherlock Holmes investigates a case that involves the cursed Baskerville family and a spectral animal.
There are very few US TV movies that occupy a period setting, and fewer still set in Edwardian England with non-American lead actors. The Hound of the Baskervilles is one such TV movie, an adaptation of the most famous case handled by the fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. Here the sleuth is played by Stewart Granger, and Bernard Fox is his trusted assistant, Dr. Watson. Both actors (English and Welsh, respectively) are adequate, if failing to bring any real fizz to their roles. Fox shamelessly mimics Nigel Bruce, possibly the defining Watson, and in so doing upstages the grandfatherly Granger. Granger wears a deerstalker, but his keynote powers of deduction are decidedly underwhelming.
It’s hard to muster interest in a story that limps along at such a sorry pace. The teleplay, by Robert E. Thompson, truncates Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s long and complex whodunit to chats in bright rooms and the small stage set that represents Dartmoor. There is time for a roaring prologue, however, an unnecessary backstory to the Baskerville curse. Here, William Shatner plays Hugo Baskerville, a badly behaved lord who laughs a lot and throws women around. He comes to a swift and sticky end on the moors in the jaws of the ’orrible hound, in truth a medium sized dog that otherwise doesn’t appear often—unlike Shatner. Shatner returns as another character, George Stapleton (named Jack in the original story), the villain of the piece. One might wish that Shatner was still a lord who laughed a lot, because as Stapleton he brings an element to the movie that breaks it. Period setting and British accent are irrelevant. This is Shatner doing Shatner—on the moors with a butterfly net. If he was dressed in his Starfleet uniform he wouldn’t look any less out of place.
Conversely, Anthony Zerbe is hypnotic. The Californian actor pulls off a convincing plummy British accent, bringing to the role of Dr. John Mortimer—another red herring—a sly depth that belongs in a better movie. This is England as seen through the backlot of Universal Studios. Apart from stock footage of the Houses of Parliament and a steam train, The Hound of the Baskervilles represents a romantic if wayward analogy to the British Isles, one in which no one talks or dresses right, London might easily be a village in Transylvania, and Bobbies have gunfights with convicts on the lam.
Director Robert Crane was a familiar name in television, having produced and directed many top shows, including Hawaii Five-O and Mission: Impossible. He was also a world-class bridge player. His murder at age fifty-seven in 1985, the week of a regional bridge tournament in Pasadena, remains unsolved. He was bludgeoned and his nude body dragged to the underground garage of his home in Studio City. Crane himself might make for an interesting movie of the week one day. [David Kerekes]
A HOWLING IN THE WOODS
Director: Daniel Petrie
Starring: Barbara Eden, Vera Miles, John Rubinstein, Larry Hagman
Airdate: November 5, 1971 Network: NBC
An unhappy housewife travels to her remote hometown only to be greeted by secrets and a creepy howling dog.
In a bid to escape her city life for a few days, fashion illustrator Liza Crocker (Barbara Eden) returns to her hometown of Stainesville, Nevada. She has asked her husband for a divorce, and is hoping that the separation will allow the two of them to come to terms with the decision.
As she slowly begins to reacquaint herself with the community, she is disturbed to discover that the inhabitants seem mysteriously affected by a common secret. Some of the locals greet her warmly, but others with hostility and caution. Something is clearly amiss, and the longer she stays, the closer she finds herself to a shocking revelation that even members of her family have tried desperately to hide.
This one’s a bit of a head scratcher. First off, the title is unintentionally misleading—the movie has nothing to do with werewolves and, in fact, it’s not even a horror movie. Actually, it’s very hard to categorize since, for the most part, it really isn’t about anything, per se. And yet, it’s undeniably compelling, suggesting that the title—evocative as it is—is what keeps the audience in anticipation, as opposed to anything happening on-screen.
Barbara Eden—here in a dramatic role—totally sheds any preconceptions audiences might still retain from her the lighthearted I Dream of Jeannie character that made her famous, and which in fact, had only ended the year previously. She would go on to work almost exclusively as an actress in made for TV movies that spanned all genres. Additionally, in a creative move that the producers must have appreciated was as commercially lucrative as it was ballsy, she is reunited with her long time Jeannie co-star Larry Hagman, playing her husband, although their relationship here could not be further removed from the high spirited comedy that had endeared them to viewers throughout the latter part of the sixties. One scene in particular, when the estranged couple meet up (Hagman, though second billed, is largely absent throughout much of the picture) to discuss their marriage and its dissolution, serves as an effective reminder of the range of both stars.
As fine as it is to see the leads playing against type and bringing their ‘A’ game (yet some of the supporting performances are distractingly wooden) and veteran director Daniel Petrie is as reliable as ever, there is one chief problem—the mystery element that the audience has presumably tuned in for is so vaguely addressed that one forgets the crux of the events that are unfolding. In effect, we end up caring deeply about Eden’s character, and even some of those around her, but we don’t know why. It certainly feels like a creative choice rather than bad filmmaking, but the merits of this narrative technique are questionable, while, admittedly, it was employed to good use in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which—and perhaps not coincidentally—this film pre-dates.
A rewarding but disappointingly insubstantial curiosity for those that are interested, NBC’s A Howling in the Woods is all atmosphere and foreboding. But devoid of any genuine suspense and shackled by a wandering narrative that culminates in a predictable, sigh-inducing climax, it’s enigmatic to a fault. [Kevin Hilton]
THE INITIATION OF SARAH
Director: Robert Day
Starring: Kay Lenz, Shelley Winters, Morgan Brittany, Morgan Fairchild
Airdate: February 6, 1978 Network: ABC
The relationship between stepsisters is strained when, at college, one explores social acceptance and the other telekinetic revenge.
Many dismiss The Initiation of Sarah for jumping on the revenge of the telekinetic oddball train spearheaded by the success of Brian De Palma’s 1976 big screen adaptation of the Stephen King novel Carrie. It’s a fair enough assessment as several elements and scenes are shamelessly pilfered, but as far as small screen also-rans go, it’s better than most and deserves credit for adding more than a few flourishes of its own. For all of its faults, and there are a few including a smudgy, over-edited climax, The Initiation of Sarah is rarely less than thoroughly entertaining.
Kay Lenz stars as Sarah Goodwin, a shy introvert who downplays her incredible ability to telekinetically knock people on their derrieres whenever they anger her. Morgan Brittany plays her more gregarious half-sibling Patty Goodwin. The two acknowledge their differences while remaining thick as thieves until they enter college and the more outgoing Patty is accepted into a sorority reserved for the snobby elite and Sarah is only welcomed into a rival sorority of outcasts. Although moving in different directions, the Goodwin girls vow to remain tight but their sisterly bond finds a formidable foe in the form of Jennifer Lawrence, the Queen Bee of Patty’s sorority played to the bitchiest hilt by Morgan Fairchild. During the course of this production if you find yourself asking, “In exactly what universe would Kay Lenz be considered a frumpy, undesirable underdog?” the simple answer is, “In any universe where Morgan Fairchild declares it so!”
Kay Lenz and Morgan Brittany are part of The Initiation of Sarah.
A KOOL newspaper promo for KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.
Obviously a great deal of the fun to be had here can be found in the delicious anticipation of Fairchild receiving her exceedingly well-earned comeuppance. The payoff is not quite as satisfying as one might predict but the not too shabby consolation prizes include a sweet turn from Tisa Farrow, as a put-upon waif nicknamed Mouse, Robert Hays playing against type as a bamboozled jock, Tony Bill as the sensitive student teacher who clarifies the flick’s modest moral to Sarah by advising, “Hate is the only real evil power—don’t give in to it,” and best of all, Shelley Winters doing her best Shelley Winters as conniving housemother Mrs. Hunter, who means to harness Sarah’s powers, add a little black magic, stir in some ritualistic human sacrifice and destroy the opposing sorority for good.
Admittedly, on more than a few occasions, you get the feeling that several pages of the script must have gotten lost in the shuffle. A strong implication is made that Sarah’s birth mother may in fact be Winters’ shady Mrs. Hunter and then we never hear a peep of that possibility again. Still, there’s something genuinely rousing about witnessing Sarah gain her sea legs and rallying her fellow outcast sorority sisters to take charge of their own self-images and destinies. It’s no stretch to say that the entire ride is often teetering toward over-the-top camp territory but the plethora of winning performances insure that the unlikeable characters are just as intriguing as the likeable ones and that viewers are never left out of the fun. [Lance Vaughan]
THE INVASION OF CAROL ENDERS
Director: Burt Brinckerhoff
Starring: Meredith Baxter, Christopher Connelly, Charles Aidman, George DiCenzo
Airdate: March 8, 1974 Network: ABC
Possessed by the reincarnated spirit of a woman who may have been murdered, Carol Enders investigates her own death.
Produced by the great Dan Curtis (Trilogy of Terror), here’s a strange and strained teleplay about love, life, reincarnation and revenge from beyond the grave, all shot in long takes on interior sets with harsh lighting and slow cameras.
The wooden schmaltz begins when posh brain doctor Charles Aidman (Deliver Us From Evil) is at work one day fixing heads. Across town, his sulky, cheating wife Diana (Sally Kemp of The Glove) crashes and dies (off screen) in a car “accident.” At the moment of her death, her “karmic spirit” is let loose and sent to invade the recently vacated body and empty blonde head of young bride-to-be, Carol Enders (Meredith Baxter), a fatally injured patient in Aidman’s hospital, dying after being previously battered into a coma during a late night sex attack.
Reborn—sort of—and confined in the cramped, tiny hospital, the merged Carol/Diana is cheerfully bewildered at first, but soon comes to terms with her new “selves” by crying rivers one minute and talking about the afterlife the next, freaking the fuck out of her befuddled fiancé Christopher Connelly (Jungle Raiders), who soon discovers that this new Carol may have been the victim of a murder, or a crime or something.
Who cut Diana’s brakes? Is there an afterlife? Will the guilty be punished? Will Carol/Diana learn to love anew? Can’t they all just get along? How grumpy will the police get? And just how much of the set remained free of Meredith Baxter’s teeth marks by the end of it all?
Low budget, soft and tacky looking, it’s tattooed with brittle, non-stop chattering, so even if you love bright, light, supernatural, 4:3 candy floss, you’ll still need beer to ease the passing of its paltry running time. If you can find it, keep watch for the excellent Phillip Pine (Brainstorm) as a cop and the always drunk and sleazy John Karlen (Killer’s Delight) as a scruffy alcoholic with a pimp mustache. [DF Dresden]
IRONSIDE
Director: James Goldstone
Starring: Raymond Burr, Geraldine Brooks, Don Mitchell, Barbara Anderson
Airdate: March 28, 1967 Network: NBC
After Ironside is paralyzed in a botched assassination attempt, he creates a special task force and sets out to find his assailant.
Detective Bob Ironside is probably best remembered as the curmudgeonly aggressive and somewhat cheerless police chief reconciled to a wheelchair, who, along with his motley assortment (by late sixties standards) of dogooders, solves special crimes for the police force. While much of that synopsis remained consistent throughout Ironside’s popular eight-season run, the pilot movie injects the forever-serious cop with a determined (and unexpected) dose of biting humor and pathos.
Fresh off his extremely successful run as Perry Mason, the commanding Raymond Burr opted for a change of pace with Bob Ironside. Much like Mason, Ironside is always in control, but he’s a lot more vocal about how he maintains that control, and almost as outspoken about his own personal doubts. As someone who has a sporadic relationship with the series, the depth of the pilot film’s character development was an unanticipated treat, and it was nice to see Burr play a less than perfect type of guy.
Also surprising was that Don Galloway’s Ed Brown, a character who is so ingrained in the series, is little more than masculine eye candy in the telefilm. He’s given very little do (and this was promptly addressed in the series’ first episode, which allows Brown more crime solving moments). Ironside’s complicated and sometimes abrasive relationship with Mark Sanger (Don Mitchell) is the highlight of the pilot. Their affiliation slowly goes from one of distrust to respect, and this is Mark’s starting point from potential lifetime criminal to lawyer. Racial issues are also put on the front burner, adding layers to Ironside’s decidedly diversified gang of crime fighters (and there’s a bit of feminism too: Barbara Anderson holds her own against Burr, and is one of the telefilm’s highlights in a hilarious scene in an art gallery—she’s not going to take your crap).
Director James Goldstone’s furious cuts and frenetic pace blend beautifully with Quincy Jones’ energetic score, making for a fast paced watch. But, the real star of Goldstone’s adept eye is the way he captures the growing hippie community of San Francisco. Featuring notable subculture personality Tiny Tim (in a stunning and oddball cameo), and positioning Ironside and his square gang against the easygoing guitar-playing bohemians, the film sees a country in the midst of intense change. Ironside remains the authoritative presence, but it’s also obvious that the “bad guy” won’t be as identifiable as they were back in his old black and white Mason days (note: this goes for Ironside’s attempted assassin as well).
Ironside is a fondly remembered series, and the show produced another TV movie titled Split Second for an Epitaph during the height of its popularity in 1968 (which features flashbacks from this pilot film), as well as a reunion movie in 1993, filmed shortly before Burr’s passing. [Amanda Reyes]
ISN’T IT SHOCKING?
Director: John Badham
Starring: Alan Alda, Louise Lasser, Edmond O’Brien, Ruth Gordon, Lloyd Nolan
Airdate: October 2, 1973 Network: ABC
A sheriff in a sleepy town investigates the suspicious deaths of several elderly residents, and finds himself in a race against time to stop the killer from striking again.
Isn’t It Shocking? takes place in the town of Mount Angel (population 1,325), where Sheriff Dan Barnes (Alda) is awaiting his move to a new job at nearby Horse Creek—a move he looks forward to with relish, if only to escape the clutches of local motel owner Ma (Pat Quinn) who has her eye on Dan as potential marriage material. Murphy’s Law dictates that it all kicks off just as Dan’s getaway is imminent, with a number of Mount Angel’s elderly residents dying in their sleep. Dan smells a rat, or more precisely, turpentine, menthol and nutmeg, smeared on each of the victim’s chests. Add to that the fact that Mount Angel’s pensioners all seem to sleep half-dressed—missing their pajamas tops or nightgowns—and Dan needs no encouragement to throw himself wholeheartedly into solving the mystery.
Assisting him is police secretary Blanche (Lasser), whose bizarre interpretation of office wear (pigtails and Wizard of Oz-style gingham dresses with matching head scarves) hides a flair for police work that comes to the fore as she helps Dan prevent the rest of Mount Angel’s older residents being wiped out. The on-screen relationship between Lasser and Alda is great to watch—one suspects they’re improvising in more than one scene—and their blossoming romance is a central theme throughout the film without the point being labored.
The film becomes a clever take on the traditional teen slasher flick, with Dan racing from house to house to warn everyone over sixty that they may be the next victim, and bends horror conventions even further in adding comedy to the mix. Jesse (Nolan) reads out a list of appointed officers in neighboring Horse Creek, the most galling to him being Moth Superintendent, and Dan quips with store-owner Myron (Liam Dunn) about “fumbling around” with girls. I couldn’t decide if the shots of the killer (played by O’Brien) menacingly eating a candy bar after each murder were intended to be comedic, however.
The high point of the comedy-horror weirdness comes in the shape of Ruth Gordon playing ‘Crazy’ Marge Savage, the obligatory cat lady. “They’re dropping like flies,” she muses at the funeral of one victim. “Fantastic.” Crazy Marge turns out to be the last woman standing, and the final scenes of the film see Dan and Blanche dispatched to her cat-infested house to stand guard, where they joke about eating cat meat sandwiches whilst unbeknownst to them the killer sneaks into Marge’s bedroom. (“Crazy Marge drinks beer?” “She’s a swinger.” “Nobody who’s a swinger goes to bed at 7:30.”) In what has to rank as one of the more surreal death scenes in a movie, we see Gordon confronting the killer in her nightdress, armed with a gun: “You lose, buckwheat! Get yourself another girl!” [Jennifer Wallis]
KILLDOZER
Director: Jerry London
Starring: Clint Walker, Carl Betz, Neville Brand, James Wainwright
Airdate: February 2, 1974 Network: ABC
Menace from space infects construction equipment with misanthropic rage; homicidal fun ensues as indie music fans thrill.
Perhaps rightfully overlooked as a low budget TV gag that lives up to writer Theodore Sturgeon’s Law that, “Ninety percent of [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud,” Killdozer is still a mildly enjoyable relic of slow seventies Saturday afternoon television.
Witness: From the cold depths of space a great blue hemorrhoid slips toward Earth, crashing to rest on a tiny island “200 miles off the coast of Africa.” An island that might as well be a small prison work camp, occupied as it is by a mere six-man crew of roughnecks marooned there by the Warburton Oil Resources Company in order to prepare the place for… something important yet somehow unnamed. ’Tis a small island indeed, for in mere moments crewman Mack (Robert Urich) manages to aggravate the asteroid by ramming it with his D-9 Bulldozer. Angrily the rock begins to emit a savage industrial hum and electrical glow, a glow that flows right into the bulldozer and blasts Mack with a critical burst of cosmic radiation.
Clockwise from above: Carl Betz and Clint Walker take on Killdozer; TV Guide ad for the excellent Murder By Natural Causes; and a goofy title for an electrifying serial killer drama, Isn’t It Shocking?
And from there on in things get dicey as the D-Niner, possessed now by malicious alien intent, sets out to wipe the puny humans from the face of its new domain one by one. Humans who somehow simply cannot manage to outmaneuver a slow moving piece of land grading machinery across rugged terrain, and perish for the foolishness of defensive strategies along the lines of, “Hey, if I crawl inside of a flimsy corrugated tin pipe, there’s no way a six-ton piece of demonic construction equipment can get me…”
Much absurdity follows, aided and abetted by “Special Guest Star” James Wainwright’s (aptly named a “general purpose actor” by IMDb) turn as Dutch, a bargain basement Ernest Borgnine type, a bit of drunkenness, and some latent homosexual references to “night swimming” before the survivors make their last-ditch effort to put an end to the “rogue machinery” with a device from an earlier and far superior sci-fistory.
The minute cast does manage to milk quite a bit of pulp melodrama out of a rather ludicrous plot (Dennis [Carl Betz] to Kelly [Clint Walker]: “What’s this with the funny blue light? I’m no piece of candy!” Kelly to Dennis: “You’re a sourball!”), and there is a good scene or two (Killdozer’s satanic victory salute), but Killdozer is still very much the kind of made for TV movie in which the commercials don’t seem at all out of place. Altogether it might remind one of that old Six Million Dollar Man episode wherein Steve Austin races around against a killer tank. But with an even lower budget and slower pace. Still, it could have been more ridiculous; Batman could have shown up… [Tom Crites]
KILLER ON BOARD
Director: Philip Leacock
Starring: Claude Akins, Patty Duke, Jane Seymour, Frank Converse, William Daniels
Airdate: October 10, 1977 Network: NBC
Trapped at sea aboard an infected ship, the crew and passengers fight among themselves to stay alive.
All aboard the SS Monte Claire, a salty sea tub of doom where sultry tour guide Jane Seymour (Live and Let Die) and her wandering British/American accent says “Welcome” to a gaggle of everyman TV movie characters who stroll up the gang plank for a posh thirty-day cruise. A place where they can relax, catch a tan and then get buried at sea all bug-eyed and dehydrated from the effects of a tropical disease, smuggled aboard in the blood and snot of a dying stowaway.
Among the cast of regulars determined not “to try the fish” are a ‘Nam vet, a pondering widow, a junkie bass player, a lounge lizard, an unloving husband, a bad jazz singer, some brat kids and worried captain Claude Akins (The Curse), doctor Murray Hamilton (Jaws) and spray tanned coffin lid George Hamilton (Pets).
All are given a few moments each to recite their lines and avoid contagion, but when most fail, the ship is quarantined at sea, panic ensues and the flu-like symptoms begin ridding the decks and thin corridors of seamen, passengers and crew. Which happens… very, very slowly.
Written by Sandor Stern (Web of Deceit), the bulk of the running time is cheap-to-shoot bad conversations in cramped quarters, with any action relegated to limp close ups of sweaty jowls, blood shot eyes, gritted teeth, bedside confessions and frequent use of the phrases: “Somebody get me a doctor!” “Everyone just stay calm!” and “He’s dead.”
Also includes giant sideburns, cold turkey, Thalmus Rasulala (New Jack City), Patty Duke (Prelude to a Kiss), a salad bar, a foot chase, a really terrible end theme, lots of crying and a sing-a-long. [DF Dresden]
KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK
Director: Gordon Hessler
Starring: Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Peter Criss, Ace Frehley, Anthony Zerbe
Airdate: October 28, 1978 Network: NBC
Four hard rocking superheroes, collectively known as KISS, battle a mad inventor and his automatons at Magic Mountain amusement park.
Nineteen seventy-eight was the year of KISS. Each band member released a solo album. They were touring around the world, making millions. There was a KISS comic book casting them as mystical superheroes. It was also the year of Superman: The Movie and The Incredible Hulk. It was only logical that the superhero version of KISS got their own movie. Hanna-Barbara stepped up to the plate. Right before Halloween, NBC aired KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park. Nineteen seventy-nine was not the year of KISS. It was the year of KISS re-grouping. History shows that this movie had something to do with it.
The film is camp at its most entertaining. It never winks its eye at the viewer like Wonder Woman or the 1960s Batman. It just posits four young hard rockers playing a series of concerts at Magic Mountain. These rockers are loved by all, as witnessed by all the people at the park dressed as KISS. (Although a few of the people in KISS makeup may be mimes.) KISS just happens to have super magical powers, along with the ability to rock an audience. Hard.
Abner Devereaux (Zerbe) is the mad inventor. Devereaux makes all the animatronic figures for the park, along with doing much of the design work. He is fired. He blames KISS. Devereaux builds KISS androids and attempts to steal the talisman that brings the boys their powers. This madman is against a hard rock good time. In 1978, this will not stand.
The film spends a lot of time with Devereaux showing his animatronic gorillas and animatronic barbershop quartets. And, all that is fun. However, when KISS takes over the movie, when they begin to rock, when they begin using their powers, this film becomes awesome. Their stage show was the best around. The songs are as bland as ever but that’s hardly the point. Can these boys fight? The answer is: they can. There are long fantastic fight scenes between the boys and Devereaux’s automatons. These include kung fu guys, giant white apes and, the best scene ever, KISS fighting monsters in the Chamber of Horrors. It was Halloween and, for every youngster watching, this was exactly what they wanted.
KISS Meets The Phantom of The Park gets a bit of a bad rap. Not sure why. What did one expect from a film with a superpowered hard rock band fighting an animatronic Frankenstein monster? To this viewer, only one band could have pulled this off and made it so damn entertaining. It’s not Journey. They may have been fine in a videogame but the Wolfman would have kicked Neal Schon’s ass. It’s not The Doobie Brothers, who would have been too damn high and laid back. It might have been AC/DC but the songs would have been too good. It simply had to be KISS. (A European Theatrical Version was released as Attack of the Phantoms.) [Daniel R. Budnik]
THE LAST DINOSAUR
Director: Alex Grasshoff
Starring: Richard Boone, Joan Van Ark, Luther Rackley, Steven Keats
Airdate: February 11, 1977 Network: ABC
A safarist sets out with company in tow to find a dinosaur in the jungle.
The Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass production team are best known to millions of television audiences as Rankin and Bass, the men behind the unforgettable holiday-themed, stop-motion animation outings Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Santa Claus is Coming to Town (1970), Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971), and The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974). Christmas and Easter would not be the same without a viewing of these specials on either television or home video. Though the bulk of their work is comprised of television movies and specials, they also collaborated on theatrically released films like The Daydreamer (1966), Mad Monster Party? (1967), The Wacky World of Mother Goose (1967), and The Last Unicorn (1982). This prolific producing and directing team assembled a crew of talented sculptors, writers, editors, photographers and musicians to create some of the most memorable family entertainment.
Just prior to the beloved made for TV movie The Bermuda Depths (1978), Rankin and Bass made The Last Dinosaur, a low budget film that was originally intended for theatrical release, but was shortened by 11 minutes to a 95-minute running time and aired on ABC, which is good because the film has a TV movie feel to it to begin with. Warner Archive has released the full, uncut 106-minute theatrical cut on DVD-R (if you’re looking for the original 95-minute cut, good luck finding it).
Written by William Overgard, scored by Maury Laws, and directed by Tsugunobu Kotani (listed in the credits as Tom Kotani), The Last Dinosaur is a fun movie for the twelve-year-old set and under, though I am sure that Rankin and Bass completists will find much to enjoy here. Mason Thrust, Jr. (Boone) is a cantankerous and misogynistic safarist who meets the sole survivor of an expedition who witnessed the existence of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Intrigued, Thrust puts together a team that includes the sole survivor, some experts, and, against his wishes, just because she’s a woman, photographer Francesca Banks (Van Ark). They travel to the jungle locale and have a few close encounters with beasts that should have been dead millions of years ago, one of which is the T-Rex who roars a little like Godzilla. Along the way, they encounter some Neanderthal dwellers, one of whom resembles Nova from Planet of the Apes (1968); she runs off with Francesca’s purse. It’s a fairly straightforward tale involving the usual Rankin and Bass special effects, which, at times, look just like that. The cheesiness is part of the film’s charm, though it is slow moving by today’s standards. The nighttime scenes are all shot day-for-night, and the film begins and ends with the Nancy Wilson tune The Last Dinosaur.
Advertisement for The Last Dinosaur.
The Last Dinosaur cover art boasts the exciting painting that was originally intended for the film’s theatrical one-sheet; this image also appeared on the French poster when the film was distributed theatrically as Le Derniere Dinosaure. [Todd Garbarini]
LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN
Director: Paul Wendkos
Starring: Elizabeth Montgomery, Fionnuala Flanagan, Ed Flanders, Katherine Helmond
Airdate: February 10, 1975 Network: ABC
Based on a real-life murder case, this excellent adaptation reconstructs the infamous crime and Lizzie’s part in it.
Paul Wendkos’ The Legend of Lizzie Borden is one of the most dramatic and well executed of the seventies’ telefrights. With intertitles demarcating separate segments of Lizzie Borden’s trial, the film recreates the still-unsolved crime that has fascinated the public for over a century. Elizabeth Montgomery, eager to escape the typecasting of her most well-known role as perky suburban witch Samantha Stevens on television’s Bewitched, was nominated for a well-deserved Emmy for her role here as the title character, Lizzie Borden, rumored to have butchered her parents with an axe (Montgomery was also, strangely enough, a distant relative of the real-life Borden).
The film begins in the immediate aftermath of the crime and is retold piecemeal through foggy flashbacks. The community doesn’t buy Lizzie as the culprit, and even her sister and housekeeper, who have witnessed her selfish tantrums and threats to father and stepmother, say nothing. Interestingly, while in real-life Borden was ostracized by the community following the events, the film uses the opportunity to examine how the media sensation surrounding the case fuelled the fervor of the growing feminist movement, the first winds of which had just swept into the town of Fall River at the time. The prosecutor’s wife is moved by Lizzie’s plight: when he scoffs that Lizzie is “hiding behind her skirts,” his wife asserts that men themselves are to blame for putting women in that role, adding that, “you have no idea how heavy these skirts can be.”
The film also has an unsettling sense of dislocation that fits nicely with Borden’s alleged physician-prescribed morphine abuse and the theory that she may have committed the murder while in a fugue state. The film also seizes the chance to explore salacious theories that she may have stripped nude before the murder to avoid leaving traces of evidence, which contributes to the courtroom drama’s few moments of overtly sensationalistic imagery. It also stands as a chilling character study; Lizzie is at turns aloof, daddy-obsessed and cruel, her hard-worn sister Emma (Helmond, miles away from her oversexed septuagenarian character on Who’s the Boss) crumbling emotionally while Lizzie fusses over which gloves to wear to court.
Little has been written about director Paul Wendkos, but the most oft-quoted (and quite apt here) observation comes from Christopher Wicking and Tise Vahimagi’s The American Vein: Directors and Directions in Television, in which they describe his best work as “having a clinical detachment that prevents any easy transference onto the characters. It’s as if we’re viewing them as insects under a microscope.” Wendkos would later revisit this terrain with the Emmy-nominated TV movie version of The Bad Seed (1985), based on the 1954 William March novel about a homicidal child descended from a female serial killer. [Kier-La Janisse]
LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE
Director: Harvey Hart
Starring: Shaun Cassidy, Linda Purl, Hope Lange, James Keach
Airdate: April 13, 1979 Network: ABC
Based on a true story. Young adults with slight mental disabilities, Roger Meyers and Virginia Rae Hensler meet by chance. Romance blossoms.
At odds with how society perceives them—their courtship scrutinized and frowned upon—this couple resolve to stand defiant against the prejudices of those around them, and, in time, carve a future together that inspires their various critics to reconsider their opinions on love and perseverance.
A class act production from top to bottom, and while writer Joanna Lee and director Harvey Hart each deserve high praise for their efforts behind the lens, it is the leads, Shaun Cassidy and Linda Purl, delivering career best performances that make this one unforgettable.
Admittedly, the plight of people with disabilities has always been a source for compelling drama, and Hollywood (especially in recent years) has shown no reluctance in bringing such stories to the screen, drawn to true-life examples like moths to a flame and churning out a string of formulaic bilge that, in most cases, is more likely to elicit groans of seen-it-all-beforedom from audiences as opposed to anything akin to real empathy.
That said, only the most jaded of viewers would survive this particular triumph-over-adversity story without feeling even the slightest pluck at their heartstrings. And this is because the movie never feels like a production cynically contrived (like many do) for the purposes of being a showreel for its stars and industry awards bait. It may in fact be that rare example of a project that is genuinely heartfelt, and, most commendably, it doesn’t strive to pity its characters because of their disabilities, but rather, condemns the limited understanding with which society treats people who have difficulties. It doesn’t preach, but rather, sensitively informs.
Amidst the rest of the cast, there’s decent supporting turns from some familiar faces, Hope Lange, Zalman King (before soft-core efforts like 9½ Weeks and Wild Orchid would make him more famous as a producer) and James Keach, who, as Roger Meyer’s brother (his real-life counterpart wrote the book on which this is based) gives a particularly affecting portrayal; full of love and care for his sibling, fearing the worst yet always hoping for the best.
A pitch perfect TV movie that casually invites your interest with a simple premise, and then holds you entranced for the next ninety minutes, despite the fact that it promises zero twists and delivers exactly what you expect to happen, precisely as it occurs. But none of that matters. This is the king of small screen “love conquers all” dramas.
Never released on DVD, it does still make the odd appearance on TV, but depressingly, this is another example of a forgotten gem that deserves a much wider audience. Definitely worth the hunt for TV treasure hunters. [Kevin Hilton]
LOOK WHAT HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY’S BABY
Director: Sam O’Steen
Starring: Stephen McHattie, Patty Duke, Broderick Crawford, Ruth Gordon
Airdate: October 29, 1976 Network: ABC
Now a free-spirited adult, Rosemary’s Baby contemplates whether or not he wants to mow the lawn for dad.
Divided up into biblical “chapters” and bereft of any bloodshed, terror or harsh words, there’s still a lot to moan about and gawk at in this mildly psychedelic Paramount Television Production, which uses half its ass to update the sorry, satanic story of poor Rosemary Woodhouse—a character given a second inning here by novelist Ira Levin (author of Roman Polanski’s seminal 1968 feature Rosemary’s Baby).
Editor of Cool Hand Luke (1967), Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Chinatown (1974), a possibly underwhelmed Sam O’Steen sits the wrong way in the director’s chair and curses this cut-price sequel with a far lower class of paranoia and black candle than the original. It may have chanting, attic masses, chalk diagrams and a return outing for Ruth Gordon as nosy neighbor Minnie, it’s all to no avail, being far from its namesake in terms of budget, performance, script and plot.
Instead of Mia Farrow, we’re stuck briefly with Patty Duke (Call Me Anna) as Rosemary, the panicked mother of Satan’s child Andrew (Philip Boyer), a pet-killing brat (who eats raw meat) that gets kidnapped and raised by a hooker until he grows up to be a confused, introspective hippie played by Stephen McHattie (Kaw).
Little more than a talky, actionless miscarriage, for co-stars we have Satanists Ray Milland (Aces High) and Tina Louise (The Trap), and crusty cop Broderick Crawford (Hell’s Bloody Devils), who all chase, question and fight with each other in order to gain control of the reluctant black heart and soul of poor, drug-addled McHattie—a perplexed, AWOL “Lizard King” waster, who at one stage dons the stage makeup of Marcel Marceau.
A suburban grab-bag of simplified satanic lore, plainly shot for the masses, it’s not as interesting as it sounds, being most noteworthy for the voiceover commentary supplied by the caped Milland and Gordon, some fine garage tunes and the scene where a jonesing son of Satan hungers for rock ‘n’ roll. [DF Dresden]
MAYDAY AT 40,000 FEET!
Director: Robert Butler
Starring: David Janssen, Don Meredith, Christopher George, Ray Milland
Airdate: November 12, 1976 Network: CBS
When a plane’s hydraulic system is crippled by a gunshot, two brave pilots battle the odds to save the day.
Talking chainsaws David Janssen ( Two-Minute Warning) and Christopher George ( Enter the Ninja) lead the thespian roll call for this dopey, memorable chunk of useless seventies cheeze which makes a full fat snack when served with similar TV ham like Terror in the Sky (1971), Horror At 37,000 Feet (1973) and at a stretch, Nurses on the Line: the Crash of Flight 7 (1993).
Alongside the Airport films— Airport (1970) through to The Concorde… Airport ’79 (1979)—this film is one of the main culprits parodied in the classic Airplane! (1980), so, if you love that, you’ll love this as it serves up the same stable of now iconic characters with straight-faced cheek, a lot of lumpy dialog, rubbish FX and a fantastic cast who all seem blissfully unbothered by the damage they were doing to their chances of ever winning an Emmy.
Before they fly into a snow storm and scream “Mayday at 40,000 feet!” we’re confronted with their hastily written lives, so prepare to endure the presence of a reborn romance, a racist criminal, a grumpy doctor, a cowboy navigator, an ailing pilot, a hot stewardess, an angry policeman and a dying passenger, until a game changing stray bullet from a Magnum handgun cripples the plane’s hydraulic system, making it impossible to land the bird. Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Classic TV mayhem with a vast array of familiar faces, try to stay awake to see crabby type-cast alcoholic Ray Milland (Premature Burial), sexy Linda Day George (Pieces), fossilized Broderick Crawford (The Yin And Yang Of Mr. Go), Don Meredith (Terror Among Us), the brilliant Marjoe Gortner (Viva Knievel) and even Al from Happy Days (Al Molinaro).
Advertisement for the ill-advised Look What Happened to Rosemary’s Baby.
The similarly themed Turbulence (1997) was also—oddly enough—directed by Robert Butler. [DF Dresden]
MEN OF THE DRAGON
Director: Harry Falk
Starring: Jared Martin, Katie Saylor, Robert Ito, Joseph Wiseman
Airdate: March 20, 1974 Network: ABC
When his younger sister is kidnapped in Hong Kong, martial artist Jared Martin back fists his way to the rescue.
Brought to you by Wolper Productions and obviously inspired by the global success of Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon (1973), here’s a flappy, fist and flare filled crock of soft fu from the director of the equally impoverished The Death Squad (1974).
Partially filmed on location in a fab looking Hong Kong, high-kicking brother and sister Jared Martin (Willow B: Women In Prison) and statuesque blonde Katie Saylor (Swinging Barmaids) fly in to visit judo buddy Robert Ito (Hollow Point) so the trio can take in the sights, drink tea and buy jade to bring back to the USA.
Before you can yell “Holy crap lady, them’s some tight fitting denim pants!” beautiful Saylor is kidnapped by white slave trader Joseph Wiseman (Dr. No) and whisked away to his secret kung fu island where she is forced to take drugs, hang in the chill room and stumble around in a stupor till she’s auctioned off to the highest bidder.
In response to the disappearance, Martin and Ito meet and recruit “the men of the dragon” at a dojo, do fake fu, drink tea, sniff about for clues and eventually get smuggled onto Wiseman’s island fortress where they axe-kick, punch and martial art everyone till Saylor (and her giant stunt double) are free to leave.
Pretty much a faint Xerox of the Enter the Dragon plot, it even uses the same sound FX and features hokey ‘Eastern’ philosophy, high-waisted pants, stoned ladies, turtle neck sweaters, eye-melting colors, ridiculous, scream-filled combat and shite henchmen who take ages to die in slow motion.
Despite a decent script, mad hairdos, ‘bong’ music and some likeable, lukewarm characters, ABC had yet another damp squib pilot movie that failed to inspire a follow-up series. [DF Dresden]
Director: Robert Day
Starring: Hal Holbrook, Katherine Ross, Barry Bostwick, Richard Anderson
Airdate: February 17, 1979 Network: CBS
A wealthy wife wishes to become a wealthy widow, and, along with her down-on-his-luck lover, plots her husband’s murder.
Whether it was intentional from the beginning or not, Murder by Natural Causes was the first in a trilogy of stylish mysteries written by the great Richard Levinson and William Link, the co-creators of Columbo. Along with Rehearsal for Murder (1982) and Guilty Conscience (1985), it rounds out a trio of incredibly adept and engaging contemporary thrillers for the small screen. Arguably, Natural Causes, a terrifically pared down little whodunit, is the best of the bunch.
Levinson and Link have been attached to some of television’s greatest achievements. From poignant topical issues like homosexuality in That Certain Summer or interracial relations in My Sweet Charlie to engaging crime stories via Columbo and other appealing characters, the dynamic writing/producing duo very seldom miss the spot. A great example of their work can be found in Natural Causes, which is a twisty tale of duplicity and deception. Hal Holbrook is a mentalist who uses several underhanded methods to give the appearance that he is an authentic mind reader. As noted by his exquisite digs, he’s an extremely successful soothsayer, but his Achilles Heel is that he suffers from heart problems and has to constantly check up on his pacemaker. This gives his wife the idea (ludicrous it may be, but perfect for TV movieland) that he can be scared to death.
Katherine Ross is almost too good as the nearly sociopathic “perfect wife” who strings along anyone who can help her get rid of dear old hubby. She, along with Holbrook, are aided by a small but amazing cast, including Barry Bostwick as the sexy but hammy out of work actor who knows he probably shouldn’t be a part of plotting someone’s death but can’t say no to the fortune that lies ahead. The intense twenty or so minute segment featuring a fake interview Bostwick arranges with Holbrook creates several nerve jangling moments of suspense, and there are twists galore as the tale unwinds and unwinds and unwinds until its goose bumps-inducing final moments.
This is an elegant and literate work of suspense that makes the most of the less is more theory of filmmaking. Directed with finesse by Robert Day, Natural Causes is stylish but holds back on any sort of obvious flair, allowing the actors—Holbrook in particular—to shine. And keeping a lighthearted touch on their production, Levinson and Link even make a nod toward Prescription: Murder, which was the name of the play that unleashed America’s favorite disheveled detective, Columbo, onto the world (it was also the title of the good lieutenant’s 1968 pilot movie). Natural Causes is not to be missed. [Amanda Reyes]
Tie-in novel promoting The Night Strangler.
Darren McGavin fends off Barry Atwater in the highly rated and well-loved The Night Stalker.
THE NIGHT STALKER
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
Starring: Darren McGavin, Carol Lynley, Simon Oakland, Ralph Meeker
Airdate: January 11, 1972 Network: ABC
Incorrigible reporter Carl Kolchak hunts down an ancient vampire in modern day Las Vegas, infuriating the city authorities.
When first we meet reporter Carl Kolchak (McGavin), he’s putting the finishing touches on his latest story, listening intently to the contents of his tape recorder to ensure he has all the details straight. It’s a tale of murder, the saga of a crazed killer stalking the dark streets of Las Vegas and gruesomely dispatching young women. Despite the official police reports, though, which couch the killings as the work of an ordinary maniac, Kolchak knows there’s much more to the story. For as he delved deeper and deeper into the twisted tale, Kolchak realizes that the oddities surrounding the case all lead to one inescapable conclusion: the killer is a centuries-old vampire.
As the narrative proper begins, we’re invited to experience the story from the beginning, as Kolchak lived it, so that we might see what he saw and better understand how he reached his startling conclusions. Thus, we follow along as Kolchak is first introduced to the case, and proceeds to wend his way through the Las Vegas underworld tracking down the bloodthirsty murderer. We witness Kolchak’s frustration as he battles the brass, annoyed at his incessant attempts to sidestep their authority; we meet Kolchak’s constellation of inside men and women who keep him up on the latest tips, and ensure he’s one step ahead of the men in blue; and we watch as his skeptical investigations into the occult evolve into an unshakable belief in the terrifying truth.
Though the film’s lurid vampire particulars certainly have a grisly appeal, the real fun here comes from being so intimately involved in Kolchak’s detective work. Richard Matheson’s cunning screenplay makes deft use of Kolchak’s tape recorder, scattering the reporter’s voiceover narration throughout the film. This creative device at once allows explicatory information to be conveyed quickly and efficiently, and ensures we experience the story via Kolchak’s eyes. What’s more, owing to the magnetic personality of Kolchak the man, as brought wonderfully to life by Darren McGavin, we are also quickly won over to Kolchak’s point of view.
As the story progresses, and our understanding of Kolchak intensifies, we realize that the mystery of Carl Kolchak is just as fascinating as the mystery of the vampire. In fact, the entire vampire storyline seems to function, at least in part, as a vehicle to explain Kolchak’s life story. Like Janos Skorzeny, the ancient bloodsucker he is tailing, Kolchak seemingly cannot find a home, forcibly removed from town after town once his antics became insufferable. Thus Kolchak spends much of his life roaming around the dark streets of cities, searching desperately for the next scoop, his lifeblood, so to speak. For Kolchak, catching the vampire isn’t just a noble act of public assistance, or even the closing paragraph at the end of a great news piece. It’s a chance at redemption, to prove to the dimwits in the big cities that covering important stories is where he belongs.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the film doesn’t roll credits once the mystery is solved and the city is freed from its curse. Instead, we watch as Kolchak is hauled before the city authorities, and unceremoniously kicked out of town. His tireless efforts have been for naught. His story will not be printed. In so many words, the powers that be tell him he is an undesirable element. There’s no place for Kolchak in Las Vegas. Penniless and alone, Kolchak is left to roam the highways, recounting the details of the saga on his tape recorder, and keeping his eyes open for a new town to haunt. It’s a bleak ending, to be sure, but this gloriously downbeat denouement is a most fitting conclusion to one of the greatest made for TV fright films ever created. [Thomas Scalzo]
THE NIGHT STRANGLER
Director: Dan Curtis
Starring: Darren McGavin, Jo Ann Pflug, Simon Oakland, John Carradine
Airdate: January 16, 1973 Network: ABC
Intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak is on the hunt for redemption, and a blood-harvesting murderer, in the dark world of underground Seattle.
Kolchak is back—in Seattle this time—soon after being fired and kicked out of Vegas on a trumped up murder charge. Not a man to give up easily, Kolchak has been spending his time trying to convince everyone he meets that the Vegas vampire saga really happened. As our story begins, we find him in a local watering hole, seated across from yet another non-believer. Kolchak’s vociferous incredulity reaches the ears of another patron, Carl’s old boss, Vincenzo (Oakland). Hearing Kolchak’s familiar wail, he groans to himself: even in Seattle, he can’t find solace from Carl’s insufferable personality. As luck would have it, Vincenzo is managing editor at the Daily Chronicle, and, after some haggling, Kolchak once again finds himself on the beat. His first assignment, dig into a baffling murder.
In terms of overall story structure, this enjoyable sequel to The Night Stalker follows closely to the pattern established by its predecessor: Kolchak investigates a series of murders and discovers they are connected. As he delves deeper into the story, he realizes there is a supernatural component to the gruesome goings-on. When he attempts to report the tale, he finds himself at loggerheads with the civic authorities. Despite innumerable impediments, Kolchak persists in his work and succeeds in getting to the bottom of the mystery. Instead of Night Stalker’s ancient vampire in search of blood, however, here we have a megalomaniacal doctor murdering young woman as part of a decades-old quest to obtain immortality.
Since Kolchak’s character was well-established in Night Stalker, writer Richard Matheson doesn’t spend much time fleshing out the tempestuous newsman’s personality in this installment. Instead, he’s free to dwell on colorful plot points and delve into the killer’s complex backstory. Thus, we are treated to an assortment of engaging details, including an elaborate underground city beneath present day Seattle, a mysterious series of killings that seem to follow a peculiar pattern, and a brilliant but troubled man relentlessly searching for the elusive elixir of life. Despite Night Strangler’s overall similarities to its famous forbearer, such memorable touches give the film an appeal all its own.
Matheson’s comparatively optimistic handling of Kolchak this time around is also a welcome development. In Night Stalker, Kolchak is essentially a man apart, forever struggling against a world that won’t cut him a break. Here, although his wild conjectures continue to raise some eyebrows, he’s finally able to present hard evidence that proves he’s on the right track. In addition, he’s afforded the unflagging support of both Mr. Berry, the Chronicle historian who helps research the mystery, and a fetching belly dancer named Louise, who goes so far as to serve as bait for the killer. Despite ultimately finding himself booted out of Seattle, and once again out of a job, the future is looking bright: for now he has a plan, a team, and a new story to tell. Watch out New York, Kolchak’s coming back. [Thomas Scalzo]
NIGHT TERROR
Director: E.W. Swackhamer
Starring: Valerie Harper, Richard Romanus, Nicholas Pryor, John Quade
Airdate: February 7, 1977 Network: NBC
A late-night drive to reach her sick son takes a turn for the terrifying as Valerie Harper runs afoul of a relentless murderer.
Our story begins with Valerie Harper receiving the news that her son has been hospitalized in Denver. The fact that she is in Phoenix, and unable to fly to her boy owing to some inclement Colorado weather, compels her to set out on a late-night drive in the family station wagon. Not long into the trip, she happens upon a murder in progress on the side of the highway. As bad luck would have it she makes unwitting eye contact with the murderer. As worse luck would have it, she’s running out of gas. Suddenly, reaching her son becomes a secondary concern: first, she needs to outwit a cold blooded killer who cannot abide any living witnesses to his crime.
While owing a clear debt to Duel and its enthralling tale of hunter versus hunted on the highway, Night Terror manages to set itself apart from Spielberg’s legendary film in several ways. By doing away with the questions as to why the protagonist is being chased, we’re allowed to focus all of our attention on how Harper might escape her ordeal. Second, the fact that our hero here is a woman, and arguably handles herself with more pluck and reserve than Dennis Weaver, speaks to the efforts of director E.W. Swackhamer to take the highway horror tale in a unique direction. Finally, while Duel takes place primarily during the day, and affords its leading man occasional respite via normal human company, Swackhamer’s film takes place almost exclusively at night, in an unpopulated stretch of country, ensuring that Harper is largely alone in her struggles.
This night-scene focus of the film deserves particular attention. Not only does it add substantively to the tension, but also highlights the moviemaking talents involved in the project. For we can only assume that lighting a film like this—one comprised primarily of cars driving on a highway at night— must have been a significant challenge. Instead of allowing such concerns to limit the believability of the picture, however, or plunging us into perpetual darkness, we’re treated to an impressive assortment of creative lighting schemes that manage to increase the tension. From the halo of a streetlamp, to the haze of headlights, to the soft glow of dashboard running lights, what we can see in any given scene is severely restricted by whatever light source happens to be available. We’re thus constantly kept on edge, always wondering if the killer is lurking just beyond the limits of our vision.
The film’s tension is also enhanced by a succession of strategically inserted narrative details. For starters, we have the fact that Harper’s character is introduced as a bit of a scatterbrain, incapable of handling complicated situations. As the challenges pile up, we’re not sure she’s going to be able to pull herself together enough to overcome them. Next, we have the late night drive through a desolate stretch of the Southwest. Were this tale to take place on the populated East Coast, its plausibility would have taken a major hit. As it stands, the fact that not many other cars are on the road is no surprise. Add in details ranging from a fierce rain storm, an avalanche of rocks blocking the road, a paucity of gas stations, and the difficulty in both finding a working payphone and having the correct change, and we’re treated to an engrossing tale that grips us more tightly with every new obstacle thrown Harper’s way. (Aka Night Drive.) [Thomas Scalzo]
THE NORLISS TAPES
Director: Dan Curtis
Starring: Roy Thinnes, Angie Dickinson, Claude Akins, Vonetta McGee
Airdate: February 21, 1973 Network: NBC
A reporter who seeks to debunk the occult walks into the path of a violent demon.
From people lining up around the block to buy a ticket for The Exorcist to the Ouija board, supernatural mumbo jumbo was king during the 1970s. Television latched onto the genre because it provided a great vehicle for a medium (pun intended) that was prisoner to the FCC. Ghost stories offered straightforward, and PG-rated ways to generate suspense through creepy houses and flowing nightgowns, and many a telefilm tried to capture the Nielsen rating with tales of the unexpected. Dan Curtis capitalized on this movement and became an undeniable heavyweight in the realm of spooky television. He generated frenzied chaos with Zuni fetish dolls and he brought a vampire named Barnabas Collins into our living room every afternoon. In retrospect, the monster in The Norliss Tapes, which is a combination of a zombie, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Incredible Hulk, is both silly and awe inspiring. Watching him wreak havoc throughout Northern California is a giddy pleasure, and the scares remain brutal and morbidly beguiling.
A TV Guide promo for Night Terror.
Riding high on the success of The Night Stalker, Dan Curtis attempted to achieve ratings gold twice with yet another supernatural pilot, and The Norliss Tapes was released within months of Stalker’s sequel, The Night Strangler. This was William F. Nolan’s (Logan’s Run) first teleplay, loosely adapted from a story by Fred Mustard Stewart. Nolan may have penned this scary film with the idea that the Kolchak mythos could use some opposition. It featured an author named David Norliss (Thinnes), who was the antithesis of the charmingly disheveled Kolchak. Norliss was sophisticated and an intellectual, but he was also aloof and a lot less relatable, often reviewing how many miles he had driven during the voiceover narration. The creator of The X-Files, Chris Carter, has openly admitted the influence The Night Stalker had in the formation of his own hit series, and if Mulder is Kolchak then Scully must be Norliss (both Darren McGavin and Thinnes would appear on different episodes of The X-Files).
Despite his detached nature, Thinnes brings a sense of melancholy to Norliss, and his unstoppable and sometimes misguided fixations with thwarting the illogical aided the film greatly. Angie Dickinson is fantastic as the damsel in distress, although she seems strangely underwhelmed by the encroaching terror. There are quite a few scenes of pure dread, as her zombie/Frankenstein/demon husband rips doors off of cars and stalks pretty young victims. Unfortunately, Norliss could not win over enough viewers to warrant a series and the pilot movie ends in a frustrating cliffhanger. Although a sequel titled The Return was planned, it never came to fruition.
The Norliss Tapes has enjoyed a DVD release, and even if the overly serious debunker has one foot inside of humorless artifice, he still manages to bring on the scary in fun, and timeless ways. [Amanda Reyes]
THE POINT
Director: Fred Wolf
Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Mike Lookinland, Paul Frees, Lenny Weinrib
Airdate: February 2, 1971 Network: ABC
In this animated film, Oblio, the only round-headed boy in a village of points, is made to feel “pointless.”
Dustin Hoffman narrates the famed animated feature dreamt up, written and produced by the late songsmith Harry Nilsson, based on his album of the same name. In a land where everyone and everything has a point, the birth of a pointless child throws the kingdom into an existential crisis. Young Oblio (voiced by Mike Lookinland of The Brady Bunch) is a pleasant, round-headed child who is beloved by his community despite his freakish appearance. Beloved by everyone, that is, except the Count’s son, who lashes out at Oblio after his athletic prowess is challenged in a game of triangle-toss. He pulls in the big guns in the form of the bullying Count, who convinces the kindly old King that Oblio’s round-headedness is in fact “against the law,” resulting in Oblio’s banishment to The Pointless Forest with his pet (and accomplice) Arrow.
On their journey, Oblio and Arrow meet a bizarre stable of characters, no doubt inspired by Nilsson’s own colorful real-life extended entourage: A Rock Man, a Leaf-Seller, a trio of bouncing fat ladies and the anarchic Pointed Man, who points in every direction, pointing at nothing. Nilsson has admitted that the story idea came from an acid trip, and the lysergic visuals created by animator Fred Wolf (whose animation team here shared members with Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels the same year) certainly reflect that, not to mention the psychedelic songs. While Me And My Arrow was the hit of the bunch, songs like Think About Your Troubles and Lifeline are plaintive and powerful tunes as iconic as anything in the Nilsson canon. As Oblio and Arrow near the end of their journey, they come to the realization that sometimes the most pointless things have the greatest benefit to human existence.
While Nilsson himself acts as the storyteller on the original album, Dustin Hoffman was brought in to voice the narrator for the film. Hoffman was at the height of his fame, about to embark on a spate of films that would include Straw Dogs, Lenny, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man and more, and as a result, his contract for The Point did not allow subsequent airings to use his voice. After the initial telecast, Hoffman’s narration was replaced by that of Alan Barzman, and later Nilsson pal Ringo Starr for the video release—and (most strangely of all) Alan Thicke for an eighties telecast. The various characters—who range from histrionic to hilariously understated—are brought to life by a small cast of voiceover giants including Paul Frees, Lennie Weinrib (the voice of Timer from the Time for Timer PSAs) and Bill Martin (in his first role—he would later voice Shredder in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, among other things). A treat for Nilsson aficionados and seventies animation fans alike, The Point is one of the greatest animated fables of all time. [Kier-La Janisse]
Creepy TV Guide ad for The Norliss Tapes.
Director: Robert Scheerer
Starring: Sammy Davis Jr., Jack Klugman, Christopher Lee, Madelyn Rhue, Adam West
Airdate: February 14, 1973 Network: NBC
A happy-go-lucky, but blundering devil gets one last chance to score a human soul for his boss Lucifer.
Poor Devil has garnered a bit of cult reputation over the years, thanks to Sammy Davis’ connection to Anton LeVay and the Church of Satan (around the time this film was produced, Davis was made an honorary member of the Church). It also upturns the angel story in It’s a Wonderful Life, only now it’s a struggling demon named Sammy (Davis) who is desperate to get a promotion (at the beginning of the film, Sammy is saddled with the unenviable task of shoveling coal into Hell’s giant furnace to keep it heated), and singles out a disheartened accountant named Burnett J. Emerson (Klugman sans toupee). In its own version of The Odd Couple, a friendship develops and soul selling ensues.
Despite upside down pentagrams and name-dropping the Church of Satan, Poor Devil remains playful, sometimes funny and absolutely innocuous. It’s hard to believe that religious groups protested this somewhat sentimental pilot telefilm, although it’s doubtful the prospective series would be able to feature everyone leaving an episode with souls intact, which may have presented a problem for certain viewers. But they mustn’t worry too much; Sammy’s powers were quite limited and it would seem even Lucifer himself (Christopher Lee!) isn’t looking to send hellfire to the surface of Earth.
Everyone is in fine form here, and aside from the previously mentioned actors, Adam West is a lot of fun as Emerson’s smug boss. You want to see his comeuppance as much as the poor down-on-his-luck accountant!
Poor Devil is also a time capsule, not just for funky monochromatic suits of the seventies, but also for some of its location shots. Filmed in the heart of San Francisco, the legendary (and now partially demolished) City of Paris Department Store can be seen in all its yuletide glory. Yes, although this telefilm aired on Valentine’s Day (as part of February sweeps, which I’m sure had NBC proclaiming, “The devil made me do it!”), Poor Devil derives some of its humor from placing the act of soul selling during the holiest time of the year.
Poor Devil was sort of a synergistic creation between two separate parties. Both Sammy Davis, and a duo named Earl Barrett and Arne Sultan separately approached NBC with an idea to make a weekly series that revolved around soul selling. NBC saw the potential and brought everyone together. Sammy was anxious to do the project, as his variety show, NBC Follies, had just been cancelled, and he loved working in television. Christopher Lee was also excited about the prospect of steady work in the United States, and felt this was his shot at introducing himself to a larger American audience. Unfortunately, it was not to be and the TVM remains an oddball curiosity of the seventies.
Five years later, Human Feelings (aka Miles, the Angel [1978]) took the soul selling/redemption spin and spun it once more in a tale about an angel looking for six virtuous souls in Las Vegas. [Amanda Reyes]
THE POSSESSED
Director: Jerry Thorpe
Starring: James Farentino, Claudette Nevins, Diana Scarwid, Harrison Ford
Airdate: May 1, 1977 Network: NBC
Having died in a car accident, an alcoholic priest is returned to the land of the living on the condition that he must seek and destroy evil.
All is not well at a women’s school in Salem, Oregon; there are suspicions of sexual promiscuity and improper conduct, but of more concern are the unexplained deaths by spontaneous combustion that is reducing their number—and neither the pupils, nor the members of the faculty, are exempt from the sinister force that moves among them.
An early appearance by Harrison Ford on the brink of Star Wars fame is probably the main reason why this little known Exorcist rip-off (and a late one at that!) has not faded entirely into obscurity. However, his brief but impressive turn aside (playing a sort of Professor Indiana Jones that indulges in the advances of his female students instead of shunning them), there are several other reasons why this little shocker is well worth revisiting.
It’s pretty sleek for a TV movie, boasting high production values and some nice special effects work. Only the fact that the action is all but limited to the girls’ school location reminds us that this is entertainment devised and budgeted for the small screen. Two-time Emmy nominee Charles G. Arnold, serving as director of photography, ensures that it remains a visually classy affair throughout, even as the underdeveloped plot threatens to expose everyone’s best efforts for the shameless schlock that it evidently is.
Assuming the lead is James Farentino, delivering a phoned-in performance that feels labored and perhaps even dismissive of the material. He holds it together passably enough, but surely there was more depth—or at least fun—that he could have mined from the part of a sinful man of the cloth that dies, goes to Heaven, comes back with a mission and finds himself surrounded in a school of beautiful women. Genre fans would have to wait until 1981’s Dead and Buried to see the actor at the top of his game, whereas Joan Hackett is indeed very good, playing the overworked teacher who later becomes the nail-spitting, vomit-spewing (again with The Exorcist!) possessed of the movie’s title.
As for the supporting cast—assembled primarily of young females—they are given little to do but shuffle around in nightgowns. However, eagle-eyed viewers may delight in spotting a few up and coming fresh faces, P.J. Soles (Halloween), Dinah Manoff (Grease) and Diana Scarwid (Mommie Dearest) among them.
At a hopelessly brief running time, there is perhaps too much unexplored territory for the film to be considered a genuine contender of its kind; almost no information is provided regarding the nature of the demon, and the possession arguably arrives too late, feeling more like a payoff to the audience’s patience as opposed to the climax of what should have been an increasingly taut satanic chiller. Nonetheless, it’s highly ambitious stuff for the small screen that offers up some risqué themes, a brilliantly game performance by Hackett and a couple of effective set-pieces along the way.
Not too difficult to locate, having been released as part of Warner’s Archive Collection, it holds up decently against the slew of underwhelming demonic possession movies that have recently returned for another cycle. Imagine a late night Halloween special of Highway to Heaven and you’ll know what to expect. [Kevin Hilton]
PRAY FOR THE WILDCATS
Director: Robert Michael Lewis
Starring: Andy Griffith, William Shatner, Robert Reed, Marjoe Gortner
Airdate: January 23, 1974 Network: ABC
Leaving behind spouses to question the validity of their marriage, four businessmen embark on a dusty bike trip to Mexico.
Swanky lounge-beat music by the great Fred Myrow coats this drama-inthe-desert feature from ABC, which stars William Shatner as a disillusioned, disappointed advertising executive cursed with a hollow home life, no money and a nemesis in the shape of business client Andy Griffith (Gramps), a loud shit-kicker who invites/challenges Shatner and his work colleagues Marjoe Gortner (Wild Bill) and Robert Reed (Prime Target) to a motorbike road trip to Baja, Mexico, where he’ll sign a contract that will make them all rich.
Cautious of Andy’s blaggard behavior and seriously considering a dose of LSD, “Shat” and the boys reluctantly don stylish Wildcats team jackets and nervously rev off through an unforgiving desert toward an uncertain horizon—while back at home, wives Lorraine Gary (Jaws) and Angie Dickenson (Dressed To Kill) are left with nothing to do but ponder the collective mid-life crisis of the males and examine the crumbling remains of their broken relationships.
Written by Jack Turley (Empire Of The Ants) and little more than a mildly psychedelic cattle drive on dirt bikes, all concerned ride for real and undergo reflective flashbacks and contemplative asides in a well-played, convincing and frequently serious outing that can boast one of Andy Griffith’s most menacing and deranged performances. “Yeah! I’m a hippie!”
If anything, you should check it out just to see the unexpected finale and the melancholic, near suicidal Shatner, who wanders around wearing bug-eyed spectacles and a fantastic lop-sided wig. [DF Dresden]
PRESCRIPTION: MURDER
Director: Richard Irving
Starring: Peter Falk, Gene Barry, Katherine Justice, Nina Foch.
Airdate: February 20, 1968 Network: NBC
Having constructed an ingenious alibi, esteemed but adulterous psychiatrist Dr. Flemming coolly strangles his wife. But Flemming’s criminal planning is no match for the instincts of Lt. Columbo.
Prescription: Murder has an interesting history. It is a pilot for the Columbo series as we know and love it only in retrospect; it was conceived and presented as a one-off movie written by Richard Levinson and William Link, based on a stage play they had developed from an episode of The Chevy Mystery Show that they wrote back in 1960.
The long gestation between the first glimpse of Columbo (played in Chevy Mystery by Bert Freed) and Peter Falk’s debut as the character paid off, as this is a smoothly executed take on that old “perfect murder” chestnut that stands up as a superior, early TV movie in its own right. But in establishing the highly robust template for the later Columbo series, it now also seems as warmly familiar as a favorite pair of slippers.
The series’ best ingredients are in place, more or less: the villain’s dark deed (and strong motive for it) opening the film, then the ingenious attempts to cover it up; the non-appearance of the unassuming Columbo until at least half-an-hour into the story, then the delicious war of attrition— “Just one more thing…”—as the ‘tec politely but incessantly wears down his arrogant suspect; and, not least, the soon-to-be omnipresent khaki raincoat, although here it looks new and nicely pressed, and Columbo doesn’t wear it all the time.
It’s a testament to his greatness that Falk offers such a complete performance in what could have remained an ephemeral, one-off TVM. The mischievous twinkle in his (one good) eye may not be quite as pronounced as in later installments; he may have a neater, conservative-era haircut; and he may even lose his temper at one point, but his Columbo is also pretty much the finished product. The idea of pitting Columbo against a psychiatrist is a neat device; the shrink’s casual if exasperated, off-the-meter analysis of the detective concisely highlights the traits that make him so enduring and enigmatic a character, just in case we weren’t to encounter him again.
As the dastardly Dr. Flemming, that velvet-voiced staple of general purpose sophistication, Gene Barry, sets the benchmark for the high profile guest stars to follow; watching his temper slowly fray and his slick façade gently crack over ninety minutes remains highly entertaining, even though we’ve since seen similar deflations in scores of Columbo villains.
Prescription: Murder was well received, but it still took three more years for NBC to make an official Columbo pilot (1971’s Ransom for a Dead Man), before going on to commission the series proper. [Julian Upton]
REVENGE FOR A RAPE
Director: Timothy Galfas
Starring: Mike Connors, Robert Reed, Tracy Brooks Swope, Deanna Lund
Airdate: November 19, 1976 Network: ABC
After his pregnant wife is attacked and raped in a tent, a husband ventures into the savage wilderness seeking justice.
Decked out in wide collared shirts and sporting a fine, over-dyed Elvis quiff, TV movie fence post Mike Connors (Too Scared to Scream) is Travis Green, a questionably more mature husband who fawns over his freshly pregnant young wife Tracy Brooks Swope (Terror on the 40th Floor).
Both are enjoying a quiet camping trip in a San Bernardino, California forest until they go get supplies at a redneck supermarket—a place where the overprotective Mike is immediately thrown into a huff when Tracy is drooled over by a group of scruffy hillbilly hunters.
Back at camp minutes later, and while Mike is out emptying his indignant bladder behind a tree, Tracy is set upon and raped (off screen) by a filthy trio of mouth breathers and is soon rushed to a redneck hospital where she has a miscarriage—a turn of events that sends the already fuming Mike into an even greater rage. In need of assistance, he goes to see disinterested local sheriff Robert Reed (Nurse) but is told it’s the middle of hunting season, the deputies are all busy and the attackers could be from out of town and may never be caught.
Upset at the news, and probably tired of listening to Jerrold Immel’s soppy background music, Mike despairs at first, but then takes it upon himself to hunt down and kill the rapists by any means necessary, so off he goes into the hinterland, armed with only a stick and some flashbacks.
Possibly not an inspiration for Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave (1978), those used to Connors’ “softer” roles in the likes of TV fare such as Mannix, Diagnosis Murder and The Love Boat will probably be surprised at the brutal subject matter and savage edge on display here, as he’s quite a decent and believable revenge machine once the lights go red and he’s allowed to rant, run, and kill.
Capped off with a nice twist finale and deftly written by Yabo Yablonsky, fans of ugly faces and leafy revenge in a forest should double-bill it with the faintly related and far, far nastier The Beasts (1980). [DF Dresden]
SARAH T.--- PORTRAIT OF A TEENAGE ALCOHOLIC
Director: Richard Donner
Starring: Linda Blair, Verna Bloom, William Daniels, Larry Hagman
Airdate: February 11, 1975 Network: NBC
A self-conscious teenager who needs help coping with her problems turns to the bottle.
After a square up containing statistics on teenage alcoholism, this early Richard Donner film (The Omen, The Goonies, etc.) is a study in intergenerational hypocrisy as much as a call for concern about the rising number of teen lushes in seventies North America. Donner already had over a decade of TV work behind him (including episodes of The Banana Splits!) when he cast sixteen-year-old Linda Blair as the eponymous Sarah Travis, who we first meet during one of her parents’ swinging parties—after which she proceeds to down all the leftover tumblers of booze in secret.
The next day at school, we see one reason she has turned to alcohol— she is painfully shy. She tries out for Glee Club, nervously fumbling her way through an off-key rendition of Carole King’s It’s Too Late, and the committee heartlessly ejects her mid-song. Her absentee dad (Hagman) cheers her up with some swanky denim duds, which she wears when neighbor boy Ken (Mark Hamill) gets roped into taking her out. They end up at a house party with the Glee Club gang, with Sarah once again assuming the role of social outcast. When offered a drink, she coyly accepts, and then raids the bar for a heavy dose of liquid courage. One of the snobby teens attempts to embarrass her by asking her to sing, but the thoroughly oiled Sarah knocks it out of the park, impressing everyone. She loosens up, has a good time, feels involved, and most importantly, throws a pie at the girl who mocked her. But when Ken has to practically carry her home drunk, her parents suspect he’s to blame. Still, he is intrigued by the girl, and the two start dating.
Sarah’s drinking intensifies with any added stressor—her parents fighting, the discovery that Ken is seeing other girls—and their kindly housekeeper takes the hit when the parents notice their scotch has been watered. Sarah’s alcoholism only comes out in the open when she gets blind drunk while babysitting and endangers a child. She goes to a tough counselor (Michael Lerner) who susses the situation immediately and refers her to AA, which is too much for her mother (Medium Cool’s Bloom) to bear, seeing as she cares more about saving face than she does her daughter’s wellbeing. In AA Sarah meets other kids her age and even younger—the youngest being a diminutive eleven-year-old (Eric Olson, a regular on Apple’s Way at the time) who is a real cut-up. Seeing such a young kid confess to his alcoholism strikes a chord with Sarah but she has much further down to go before she will admit to her own problem.
Through Lerner’s character, the film is critical of the parents’ double standards concerning both drinking and socialization, and the scenes where he calls them out are both potent and funny. Sarah T was a ratings hit at the time, and compared to similar TV movie The Boy Who Drank Too Much, it offers a more believable portrayal of what would drive a teen to alcoholism in the first place—a need to overcome social awkwardness—as well as what it does to keep them there. Still unavailable officially on any form of home video, the last circulating 16mm educational print of the film in North America was destroyed by Swank Motion Pictures circa 2010. [Kier-La Janisse]
SATAN’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
Director: David Lowell Rich
Starring: Pamela Franklin, Kate Jackson, Jo Van Fleet, Lloyd Bochner, Roy Thinnes, Cheryl Ladd (as Cheryl Stoppelmoor), Jamie Smith-Jackson
Airdate: September 19, 1973 Network: ABC
A student from a girls’ academy apparently commits suicide. Suspicious, her sister enrolls and uncovers the diabolical truth.
Given the film’s title, the big reveal at the climax doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The seventy-odd minutes preceding it, however, are a cavalcade of seventies center-partings, moody lighting, mildly terrifying suspense, two-thirds of Charlie’s Angels and Luciferian evil.
After an arresting opener, featuring a pretty girl being chased and some grade A screaming, we’re plunged straight into the strange goings-on at the not-at-all-suspiciously-named Salem Academy for Women. Pamela Franklin stars as Elizabeth, a young woman trying to find out the truth about her sister’s apparent suicide. The academy is seemingly attended solely by pretty orphans and odd teachers. Dynasty’s Lloyd Bochner is in fine form as the decidedly odd psychology professor, Delacroix. He twitches and sweats in the way that only a middle aged man confronted by a class full of leggy teenage girls can. His teaching on the breaking of the will not only makes him look like a refugee from Operation Paperclip, but also a superb Scooby Doo-style red herring.
The Invaders’ Roy Thinnes is the girls’ favorite. With his wing collars, hip teaching techniques and intense stare, surely he can’t be behind the string of suicides? Either way, he’s the type of teacher you read about in the papers when they run off with one of their pupils. Director Rich puts the whole thing together with a good deal of craft. The handy power cuts give him a great excuse to utilize some attractive camerawork as Elizabeth creeps around the requisite spooky basement. The setting may be a little hackneyed, but he manages to draw out a fair amount of suspense from the material he has to work with.
Okay, some of the performances are a touch weak—producer Aaron Spelling must have seen beyond Kate Jackson’s and Cheryl Ladd’s shortcomings to cast them in Charlie’s Angels, and Jo Van Fleet veers into Bette Davis-style melodrama whenever she’s onscreen. Aside from these small missteps, this is a typical example of the TV movie: solid, professional and entertaining. Franklin, all cropped hair and doe-like eyes, does well in a very similar role to Jessica Harper’s in Dario Argento’s vaguely similar (and marginally better) Suspiria. Having cut her horror teeth in 1973’s The Legend of Hell House, she obviously understood the genre, and easily outshines the rest of the young cast.
About half way through, a fleeting mention of the Salem witch trials telegraphs where the plot is going, but, even so, the fiery climax is effectively done. The sight of a group of girls happily facing immolation and, in one of the genre’s most memorable images—Satan casually walking into an inferno—do go a good way to outweigh a slightly ludicrous chase scene which ends with a poor guy being hit with a stick by Cheryl Ladd. The film’s best moment, however, comes at the very end. As the academy is ablaze, with people trapped inside, the local sheriff is spectacularly unconcerned. Perhaps evil finishing schools burn down all the time in his neck of the woods. [Rich Flannagan]
SATAN’S TRIANGLE
Director: Sutton Roley
Starring: Doug McClure, Kim Novak, Alejandro Rey, Jim Davis
Airdate: January 14, 1975 Network: ABC
A coast guard helicopter pilot investigates a derelict boat in the Bermuda Triangle and appears to find evidence of the supernatural.
This mischievous TV movie opens with crawling text explaining that “thousands of men, women and children have vanished off of the face of the Earth just off the East Coast of the United States,” and that what we are about to witness is “one explanation.” In fact, the film’s earliest scenes have a grounded, near-documentary quality that plants a deceptive seed in the viewer’s head that will be exploited before the film’s end. Satan’s Triangle is all about pushing away the cobwebs of superstition, presenting you with cold hard facts, and then, just as you’ve eased into the hammock of comforting rationality, deviously slicing the ropes that secure you and chuckling as you fall into a deeper abyss than the one you were originally fearful of. Doesn’t that sound like fun?
The coast guard helicopter team of Lt. J. Haig (McClure) and Lt. Cmdr. Pagnolini (Michael Conrad) answer a distress call from a seemingly abandoned boat in the notorious Bermuda Triangle. Onboard Haig discovers one skittish survivor named Eva (Novak) and several dead men; one of whom, appears to be levitating above the floor. A rescue attempt fails and Pagnolini must return to base to tend to the low-on-fuel helicopter, leaving Haig and Eva alone aboard the boat until further assistance can arrive. Soon we are made privy to many a strange occurrence as Eva recalls what befell the doomed ship through flashbacks. It seems all was going well until they came across a priest stranded at sea named Father Martin (Rey). As soon as he was brought onboard, the weather changed for the worse and deadly accidents became the norm as if the presence of the holy man enraged some malign force whose territory they were in. After hearing Eva’s incredible story, Haig delivers a logical explanation for everything; even the floating cadaver is revealed to be simply pierced and hanging from the pointy snout of a Marlin. As he told Pagnolini earlier, Haig has no problem believing in God, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny but he can’t quite swallow the devil.
So there you go, time to hit the hay. Eva sure has a spooky way of telling a story and the events depicted were admittedly eerie but Haig has a handle on everything and all’s well that ends well, as they say. Eventually Both Eva and Haig find themselves back on Pagnolini’s helicopter and ready to fly off into the sunset, except something isn’t quite right. Why is Eva suddenly acting weird? I’m not one to give away endings, so I won’t, but allow me to advise first time viewers to put rubber bands around their socks to prevent them from being knocked off. With one chilling, indelible smile, everything we’ve come to understand begins to unravel at a steading pace until a crescendo of horror is reached. For my money it’s truly one of the most unnerving moments ever depicted on the small screen or anywhere else. In the end, Satan’s Triangle is much bigger than the sum of its parts and if there exists a purer representation of the uncanny than its last ten minutes, I don’t know, and don’t want to know, what it is; some terrors defy rationalization. [Lance Vaughan]
SCREAM, PRETTY PEGGY
Director: Gordon Hessler
Starring: Sian Barbara Allen, Ted Bessell, Bette Davis
Airdate: November 24, 1973 Network: ABC
A co-ed finds work at a modern gothic mansion, and becomes curious about the mysterious woman in white who lives above the garage.
This breezy tale of gothic horror presents some rather heady family dynamics that come complete with a supposedly insane sister, a haunted, guilt-ridden brother and a drunk mother. Plucky Peggy (Allen) has no idea that she has walked into the housekeeping job from Hell, but even after spying a mysterious woman running around the estate at night, she continues on with her employer, a renowned and enigmatic sculptor named Jeffrey Elliot (Bessell). In the end, although she talks a lot about feminism and the new liberated woman (even negotiating a higher wage for her housekeeping job), Peggy is most interested in attracting the attention of Jeffrey, whose disturbed works should have been the lovely girl’s first clue. However, despite having a predilection for romance and the domestic, Peggy turns out to be a decent detective too, and stumbles upon mysteries and secrets almost as often as Jeffery tucks away dead bodies.
Although it feels like the script for Scream, Pretty Peggy (co-written by Hammer Studios legend Jimmy Sangster, and Arthur Hoffe, whose sole screen credit is this eccentric tale) is cobbled together from various other stories (most notably Psycho), there are a few sharp flashes thrown into the mix. Those wonderfully chilling moments are a testament to Hessler’s adept direction, and Bob Prince’s unnerving score. Despite the story’s limitations they create a tension that lies thick on the contemporary gothic telethriller. (Random TV movie note: But please take those clever references to family skeletons to heart; they are not a metaphor!)
Scream, Pretty Peggy also benefits from a game cast. In a maybe unintentionally hilarious turn, Bette Davis, substituting liquor for tea and giving Peggy a bit of hell in an attempt to get her out of the house, does very well as the overbearing mother (it also looks like her ornate nightgown wardrobe could have been leftovers from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). And Allen is in fine form here, making Peggy a charming, if slightly pushy, wannabe liberated woman who refuses to take Mrs. Elliot’s guff and persists in investigating the lady above the garage.
However, the spookiest things in Scream, Pretty Peggy come in the form of Jeffrey’s unsettling sculptures. Created by Don Chandler, these figures are either bug-eyed block figures or hulking monsters painted blood red, and hollowed out in the middle (and I’m sure you can guess why). The art direction of Joe Alves is wonderfully consistent with these menacing statues, and almost every work of art in the Elliot’s house, whether Jeffery sculpted it or not, is worth looking at. Chandler, who is most famous for sculpting Bruce, the shark used in Jaws would work again with Alves on Jaws 3, where Alves had moved up the ranks to director. [Amanda Reyes]
THE SECRET NIGHT CALLER
Director: Jerry Jameson
Starring: Robert Reed, Hope Lange, Sylvia Sidney, Robin Mattson
Airdate: February 18, 1975 Network: NBC
Businessman by day, obscene phone caller by night, a disturbed family man finds himself in troubled waters as his life falls apart.
In the days before “star 69” took the phun out of prank phone-calling, an IRS manager could easily procure the phone numbers of subordinates and residents, call them up and whisper vile things to them. Then, technology came along and put the kibosh on the practice. What’s shocking about The Secret Night Caller (1975) is that the film stars Robert Reed after he hung up his T-square following the demise of The Brady Bunch! He plays Freddy Durant, a bored IRS manager and owner of a plant nursery. His teenage daughter (Robin Mattson) frolics in front of him in a bikini, and his wife (Hope Lange) makes small talk during mealtime. Driven to distraction from his unexciting job, he’s the consummate professional, failing to give in to bribery by a businessman and politely warding off the advances of an exotic dancer (Elaine Giftos) who probes him for evidence that he’s the phone freak who’s been harassing her.
The film begins with a creepy apartment dweller who freaks out fellow single tenant Charlotte (Arlene Golonka) with his pronounced and noisy gait. She races to her apartment in time to get an obscene phone call. As she drops the phone, a close-up reveals the bizarre optical effect of a pair of lips moving in the mouthpiece as if the caller is in the handset! She tells her coworkers about the call; they all look like they stepped off the pages of Good Housekeeping or McCall’s. Durant, their boss, is professional with them, carefully masking the tortured soul beneath his civilized veneer. All sexual deviance is alluded to, and it’s a big kick to see the typewriters, rotary phones and other outdated machinery of the period prior to the widespread office infiltration by the personal computer; smoking was allowed everywhere.
A second phone call to Charlotte’s apartment sends her fleeing and crashing her car, which lands her in the hospital. The guilt of his actions compels Durant to take care of her hospital bills, and everyone thinks that he’s a great guy. Little do they know…
The one person who does know is the dancer who discovers his true identity and demands $10,000 in cash to keep quiet. Durant is forced to plead for the money from the businessman whom he previously shooed out of his office, and gets it in exchange for concessions. His confrontation with the dancer leads us to believe that he might kill her, but he races off for reasons that become clearer later when he attacks his wife for her overall complacency.
John Carl Parker wrote the score and his style is typical of the music of the period, though during the phone call sequences it takes on an air that is sinister and creepy, recalling Billy Goldenberg’s score for Duel (1971).
The one unanswered question is: what exactly did Durant say during those phone calls? [Todd Garbarini]
SEVEN IN DARKNESS
Director: Michael Caffey
Starring: Milton Berle, Barry Nelson, Lesley Ann Warren, Dina Merrill
Airdate: September 23, 1969 Network: ABC
When a plane crash leaves them stranded in the wilderness, seven blind people fight for survival against insurmountable odds.
Leonard Bishop’s novel Against Heaven’s Hand provides the basis for ABC’s first official Movie of the Week; a peculiar and quite wonderful feature that serves us up a little model plane (on strings) flying through a massive electrical storm as it makes its way to Seattle.
Aboard the Airfix twin-prop are a group of seven blind people on route to a sight convention where they hope to consult with doctors and schedule treatment for their condition. Unfortunately, before they reach their destination, the storm worsens and the seeing-eye pilot loses control of the craft and slams the bird into an isolated mountainside, killing everyone… except for the blind people.
That’s right. Not only are the seven missing the gift of sight, they now have to contend with being marooned in a dangerous, unknown wilderness with no food or guidance and nothing else to do but dodge wolf attacks, tie themselves together with a ball of wool, and stumble about, casually falling down leafy ravines.
On top of all this, one of the group is a heavily pregnant woman, while another is a depressed war hero, and the rest just bicker and spit bile at each other in a dark hornet’s nest of past secrets, self-loathing, self-preservation, self-interest and regret. Hurrah.
Filmed cheaply on small, thrift store sets, if you’ve no sense of humor you’ll find it a mildly tasteless, albeit inspirational tale of perseverance against impossible odds. If you’re the opposite, you’ll still find it just as tasteless, but you’ll laugh a lot more as Michael Masters (Ssssss), the brilliant and cranky Milton Berle (Evil Roy Slade), Barry Nelson (Island Claws), panicky Alejandro Rey (Mr. Majestyk) and confused Dina Merrill (Caddyshack II) all frequently fail to maintain the fourth wall.
If you’re interested in cinema featuring the visually impaired, go hunt for the low budget Filipino wonder Blind Rage (1978), a movie about a blind gang who attempt a complicated and bloody bank heist. [DF Dresden]
SHE’S DRESSED TO KILL
Director: Gus Trikonis
Starring: Eleanor Parker, John Rubinstein, Connie Sellecca, Jessica Walter
Airdate: December 10, 1979 Network: NBC
A fading fashion designer stages a comeback at her remote mountaintop mansion, unaware that she’s also invited a cold blooded killer.
To be a Barton Girl you must be beautiful, ambitious and, apparently, snarky. Irene Barton (Jessica Walter) isn’t concerned with playing housemother, she only cares that her models bring in the big bucks and you can worry about your morals later. This makes the girls rather competitive, especially newcomer Alix (Connie Sellecca in a very early role) who will do just about anything to make it to the top. Boozy Regine (Eleanor Parker) needs the Barton Girls to help her regain her status as a fashion designer. Despite her palatial digs, which you have to take an aerial cable car to reach, Regine is running out of both money and ideas and has resorted to stealing concepts from her assistant Tony (Peter Horton before his signature beard). She’s staging a very exclusive show at her mansion where the Barton Girls will show off Regine’s, er, Tony’s haute couture to fancy buyers and the ultra-rich. A spot opens up on the modeling roster when someone poisons another model’s lipstick (!), killing her almost instantly. Alix is more than game to play with the big girls but despite the incredible clothes (designed by Travilla, no less), the showstopper occurs when yet another model is murdered.
She’s Dressed to Kill is ludicrous. It’s almost impossible to not guess who the killer is, yet the motive comes directly out of left field. Nevertheless, despite its faults, the film’s style over substance approach seems to be inspired by the Italian giallo genre, making it an interesting watch for Euro-horror fans. Director Gus Trikonis was no stranger to the B-movie world, and worked on several low budget exploitation films, including Moonshine County Express (1977), before easing into the world of television. He brings a strong sense of atmosphere that makes up nicely for some of the script’s shortcomings. The film also makes good use of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, which was used in several other TV movies, including Skyway to Death (1974) and Hanging by a Thread (1979).
VHS artwork for She’s Dressed to Kill.
Played with a completely straight face, Dressed misses its potential for camp, although Eleanor Parker’s dippy Regine captures a screwy sense of humor. It’s as if Parker is in another film altogether and she is the highlight with her purposely overdone performance as the bitchy, washed up fashion designer.
In the early 1980s, Dressed was retitled as Someone’s Killing the World’s Greatest Models, most likely to lure viewers who may have already seen the film, along with those who like salacious titles. The ploy worked because the film ranked sixth for the week when it re-ran in 1983 under its new moniker. [Amanda Reyes]
SMILE JENNY, YOU’RE DEAD
Director: Jerry Thorpe
Starring: David Janssen, Andrea Marcovicci, Jodie Foster, Clu Gulager
Airdate: February 3, 1974 Network: ABC
When a crazed photographer threatens the life of a beautiful model, a detective is hired to protect her.
Considered the second pilot movie for the memorable Harry O TV series (the first aired a year earlier and was titled Such Dust as Dreams are Made Of), morose David Janssen (Inchon) is great as retired San Diego detective Harry Orwell, a solitary firebrand who lives in a run-down beach shack, barely surviving on disability payments. A man with a bullet in his back and a half built sail-boat called The Answer on his porch, which once repaired and sea worthy will be his one man ticket to solitude in the middle of the ocean.
To raise cash for mast wax, Harry (who narrates and hates phones) moonlights as a private detective and helps cop buddy Clu Gulager (Hit Lady) and a family friend solve a case involving a trail of dead bodies that indicate the next victim may be supermodel Jennifer English (Andrea Macovicci), a woman currently being stalked by peeping tom/non-flyer weirdo Zalman King (Galaxy Of Terror).
Well shot, nicely conceived and graced with credible dialog by Howard Rodman (Coogan’s Bluff), brief gunfire, oversized chess pieces and a surprise appearance by a young Jodie Foster (as a smart-mouth beach waif who “adopts” the endearing Janssen), it’s a likeable outing unharmed by its tired, predictable plotting or meager budget.
Co-produced by ABC and Warner Bros Television and divided into two halves for the series reruns, keep watch for co-stars John Anderson (Scorpion) and Howard Da Silva (Nevada Smith) and don’t expect any car chases. Harry O takes the bus. [DF Dresden]
SNOWBEAST
Director: Herb Wallerstein
Starring: Bo Svenson, Yvette Mimieux, Robert Logan, Clint Walker
Airdate: April 28, 1977 Network: NBC
An aging ski champion helps locals fend off a vicious yeti-like creature that is picking off locals and tourists at a popular Colorado ski resort.
The critical and commercial success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) not only ushered in the era of the modern blockbuster, but also created the “nature strikes back” subgenre which remained popular for the next few years, before the sci-fi craze created by Star Wars (1977) moved in on its territory. Unlike the monster movies of the 1950s, these creatures weren’t created by atomic radiation, mad scientists or some other calamity2. They were just naturally dangerous beasts feeding on anyone stupid enough to invade their territory.
Of course, Snowbeast differs from the likes of Jaws and William Girdler’s Grizzly (1976) in that it is based on a mythical creature rather than a factual one, but the formula is exactly the same, just toned down somewhat for television (especially in the boobs and blood departments). The screenplay by Joseph Stefano (who did much better work on Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Outer Limits in the 1960s) apes Jaws to such an extent that it even features a scene where a couple of the lead characters discuss cutting open a slain grizzly in order to verify that they have got the right beast that’s been eating up all the local residents and tourists! And you’ve gotta love dialog exchanges like this (delivered with the utmost seriousness, of course):
SHERIFF PARADAY: I understand she was a guest at your ski lodge. I was hoping you could help me identify her.
TONY RILL: I must have seen her somewhere. Maybe I’ll recognize her when I see her face.
SHERIFF PARADAY: She doesn’t have one.
While no great shakes as a monster flick (the creature is rarely shown and the killings all fade to a red screen just as the fun is about to begin), Snowbeast is still an enjoyable attempt by television to cash in not only on Jaws but the whole bigfoot/yeti zeitgeist that was popular during the 1970s. The cast includes a familiar roster of TV faces and former film stars, including Bo Svenson, Yvette Mimieux (The Time Machine, Jackson County Jail), Sylvia Sidney, and Clint Walker (who had previously battled killer wildlife in the underrated 1966 adventure/western yarn Night of the Grizzly). Director Herb Wallerstein was an assistant director on William Castle’s classic The Tingler (1959), and spent most of his career directing episodic television shows such as Star Trek, The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, Petrocelli, Wonder Woman and The Six Million Dollar Man. His own ending at the age of fifty-nine could have made for a good TV movie itself—bludgeoned to death in 1985 by an illegal alien from El Salvador who had been working as Wallerstein’s maid at the time.
Released on VHS in the 1980s (as Bigfoot in some countries), Snowbeast was released as a bare bones DVD in 2008 on the Pro-Active Entertainment label in the US. Alpha Video also issued it on DVD in 2009, paired with the 1976 pseudodocumentary The Legend of Bigfoot. [John Harrison]
SOMEONE I TOUCHED
Director: Lou Antonio
Starring: Cloris Leachman, James Olson, Glynnis O’Connor, Andrew Robinson
Airdate: February 26, 1975 Network: ABC
Laura learns that her husband, Sam, has given her syphilis. What’s more, Laura has just become pregnant with their first child.
An ABC Movie of the Week about syphilis feels exactly like the sort of thing that network television did in the 1970s: A melodrama that tries, very earnestly, to deal with the issue of casual sex and the dangers of VD. Cloris Leachman plays book editor Laura Hyatt, who has had more than one emotional problem throughout her marriage to Sam, played by James Olson. After many years of trying and one miscarriage, Laura is pregnant. Unfortunately, Sam has had a dalliance with a twenty-year-old named Carrie (Glynnis O’Connor). The Hyatts now have syphilis. There is a theme song, sung by Leachman called Someone I Touched. There is a gentleman from the Board of Health who keeps appearing to talk about VD. There is touching music. Carrie has a very unpleasant mom who belittles her and slaps her a lot in scenes that can’t be deemed entertaining by anyone but sadists. And, Laura’s boss is played by Kenneth Mars. At this point, the viewer might see a problem with Someone I Touched.
The movie itself is well-written, well-acted, well-paced. The TVM places its large moments (and its big twist) at a decent distant apart. Occasionally it’s too melodramatic for its own good. Its treatment of Carrie isn’t that great. But, the Hyatts have reconciled by the end. And, America has learned a lesson. Within the film, Cloris Leachman and Kenneth Mars are given several scenes together. The first scene, before the troubles begin, involves them discussing the books their office are working on. The scene feels like improvisation between two folks who had recently appeared in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Their following scenes are found deep in the drama and it’s tough to look at the two of them together and not expect this to become a send-up of VD films. It is not.
There is something very nostalgic about VD that could be taken care of with a few injections. It must have been a tough time for parents when all they had to warn their kids off of casual sex was “You’re going to have to get some shots.” Once the 1980s hit, parents could promise their children disease and death if they had casual sex. Everyone took their lives into their hands and men spent a lot of money on condoms. Someone I Touched feels almost like a nostalgic Afterschool Special that happens to be based around adults rather than a serious journey into the problems of a couple who have neglected one another.
Someone I Touched is from a different time period in America in more ways than one. A well-made TV movie that doesn’t become as funny as Leachman and Mars would lead one to believe it’s going to be. It has light moments but, in the end, it is as serious as getting touched by Kenneth Mars can be. That will vary by viewer. [Daniel R. Budnik]
SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME!
Director: John Carpenter
Starring: Lauren Hutton, Adrienne Barbeau, David Birney, Charles Cyphers
Airdate: November 29, 1978 Network: NBC
A gorgeous up and comer takes matters into her own hands when the police won’t protect her from a menacing stalker.
New to Los Angeles, TV director Leigh Michaels rents an apartment in a high rise complex, that unbeknownst to her, has been the location of a series of seemingly unconnected suicides of young women. Soon, she begins receiving strange gifts and threatening phone calls, and all evidence suggests that they are emanating from an unhinged male in the apartment building opposite. He knows her every move. And she knows he is watching. The police are powerless to intervene without substantial proof of her endangerment, so instead, she recruits the help of her boyfriend and one of her colleagues in an effort to stop him… before he stops her.
A lesser seen thriller from genre maestro John Carpenter (and produced in the prime of his career, no less!), this never gets close to reaching the heights of his masterpiece Halloween (1978), made the same year, but is certainly cut from the same cloth, and, as such, it packs more entertainment and suspense than most big screen thrillers could ever hope to muster.
Of course, the plot itself is nothing new, instantly drawing comparisons to Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954)—of which it arguably rips off wholesale— and in lesser hands this would be cause for concern, but with Carpenter, it’s cause for celebration. Interestingly, the similarly themed 1993 thriller Sliver, based on a novel by Ira Levin, would feature many of the same ideas that were specific to Someone’s Watching Me!, and, minus the eroticism, is close to a carbon copy.
Tailoring this kind of adult material to the small screen (though it was conceived as a cinema release) means that—despite much posturing to the contrary—this is very much a soft-core thriller that’s low on violence, but high on menace; resulting in a movie that comes on like a sharp toothed animal on a leash, that never really gets the chance to bite. But having said that, it’s quite refreshing to see a thriller that executes the fundamentals of the genre so well that there is no need to throw buckets of blood at the camera in an effort to obscure any creative shortcomings—especially considering the gore drenched eighties were just around the corner, all but rendering this kind of low key thriller instantly extinct.
Lauren Hutton is well cast in the lead role, playing both tough and vulnerable when the script demands; and Adrienne Barbeau particularly stands out as her sympathetic co-worker who’s eager to help her fight back.
Most notable is the excellent cinematography from Hollywood veteran Robert B. Hauser (The Odd Couple, A Man Called Horse); every frame impresses, and though made for television, it looks leagues above the average movie of the week.
Unavailable for decades, the movie was finally given a DVD release in 2007. Completists of Carpenter’s work should lap it up. And so too, should everybody else. [Kevin Hilton]
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Sandy Dennis, Darren McGavin, Jeff Corey, Ralph Bellamy
Airdate: January 21, 1972 Network: CBS
A young couple move into an idyllic Pennsylvania farmhouse, only to discover the place is a domain of evil.
An old man runs through a barn in slow motion. He’s clearly being chased, but his assailant remains tantalizingly off screen. Cornered in the hayloft, the old man turns his back on his pursuer and plunges to his death through the open hayloft door. Time passes, and as the opening credits roll, we witness a wholesome young family picnicking in the verdant fields adjacent to the ill-fated barn. Paul (McGavin), the patriarch of the clan, reclines on a blanket. Young Stevie (Johnny Whitaker) scampers about the fields. Marjorie (Dennis) sketches the details of the nearby farmhouse, paying particular attention to the unassuming For Sale sign in the front yard. Before her drawing is complete, she begins pleading with her husband to purchase the place. Despite his initial reluctance, and annoyance at what will become a lengthy commute to his job in the city, Paul caves and begins discussing details of the sale with the owner.
Clearly, there’s something odd about the house, a fact driven home with graphic vividness when Gehrmann (Corey), the previous owner, is spotted spattering chicken blood over the nearby fields in an attempt to ward off evil spirits. But for levelheaded city dwellers the Wordens, such eccentricities are written off as the comical superstitions of uneducated country folk. But then Marjorie hears the baby crying. It is a haunting sound, seemingly emanating from all directions at once, and tinged with what seems to be the faint outlines of speech: an eerie, inarticulate cry for help. At first, Marjorie shrugs it off, assuming it was in her head. After checking on her family, and taking a close look around the barn, she’s convinced it was nothing. But as the days pass, the crying continues, louder, more insistent, and most definitely emanating from the barn.
With such an enticing setup, it’s a shame that the film never really comes together. Sure, we have some promising moments here and there, including vague hints that this house, and maybe even the entire town, is a dwelling place for sinister spirits. And the palpably eerie atmosphere throughout is a testament to Spielberg’s burgeoning talents. But the hoped-for lurid details of the town’s dark legacy never materialize, and the haunting-of-Marjorie storyline never becomes the blood-curdling crescendo of horror it was seemingly intended to. Talk of pentacles and other methods of warding off malevolence fill up the runtime, but don’t ever have the payoff we might expect.
Clockwise from top left: Andrea Marcovicci and Zalman King in a pilot movie for Harry-O, Smile Jenny, You’re Dead; excessive ad for the excessive Star Wars Holiday Special; and Robert Culp enters the Spectre.
In the end, if the nondescript title is any indicator of how this story came together, we can only assume that the filmmakers, including writer Robert Clouse, never really knew what story they wanted to tell, possibly landing on the bewildering tale of demonic possession out of sheer desperation. Without a doubt, something is evil in this house and in this town, but it’s anybody’s guess what that something actually is. [Thomas Scalzo]
SPECTRE
Director: Clive Donner
Starring: Robert Culp, Gig Young, John Hurt, Gordon Jackson
Airdate: May 21, 1977 Network: NBC
Threatened by evil, a wealthy family enlists the help of a supernatural investigator trained in the black arts.
Penned by Gene Rodenberry and produced by Twentieth Century Fox, a well-cast Robert Culp (Spy Hard) is excellent in this spooky detective outing as supernatural investigator William Sebastian—a quirky, paranormal puzzle-solver whose heart has been stolen by a demon and hidden away inside a voodoo doll.
When offered a case involving a rich, gloomy family cursed by bad luck and unexplained deaths, Culp invites bourbon-soaked psychologist friend Gig Young (Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia) to come along and help expose the mysterious truth behind a satanic cult that uses murder, witchcraft, deceit and evil shape-shifters to get their way.
Enticed by the large fee and excited to ride in a private jet, the duo (who bounce brilliantly off each other) travel to the family’s exclusive Cyon Estate in England where they encounter some pretty decent black masses and a cadre of “I know his face” British actors hamming it up with pointed sneers, silent stares and suspicious actions—all filmed with devilish, low budget charm and a forked tongue placed in several cheeks.
Shot on damp, creepy English locations and stained with the satanic lore of novelist Dennis Wheatley (The Devil Rides Out), there are further tips of the hat to Hammer movies, as well as memorable scenes involving the disco-lit caves of Hell, Culp’s hollow chest cavity and a sexy succubus who bursts into flames when a magical tome is placed atop her knockers like a holy bra.
Above average for a TV movie but shy of being classic, it’s directed by the genius who made David Niven a playboy Dracula in Vampira (1975) and stars the tenacious Gordon Jackson (The Great Escape), snooty James Villiers (Repulsion), young pilot John Hurt (Monolith), sexy Vicki Michele (Queen Kong) and Roddenberry’s real-life wife Majel Barrett (The Suicide’s Wife).
Not quite Sherlock Holmes vs. Satan, but close. Keep watch for a few revealing flashes of mammary and some saucy Benny Hill-esque S&M scenes that were considered too hot for TV broadcasts. [DF Dresden]
THE SPELL
Director: Lee Philips
Starring: Susan Myers, Lee Grant, James Olson, Helen Hunt
Airdate: February 20, 1977 Network: NBC
An unhappy teenage girl discovers supernatural powers within herself. Revenge becomes her evil hobby.
Carrie, the book and the film, turned puberty and sexual awakening in the American teenage female into screaming, bloody fury. As with all popular entertainment, it was imitated. As with all imitations, there are strange variations. The Spell is one of these. Fifteen-year-old Rita is tormented by her classmates. Rita is a bit plump. That seems like it might be the reason for torment. But, Rita’s really just kind of weird. The film seems like it’s going to be about Rita tormented to the point of explosion, like Carrie. But, it’s not.
Rita lives in a beautiful mansion in San Francisco with her loving mom (Grant), her not-so-loving father (Olson) and much cuter sister (Hunt). The majority of the film revolves around the parents trying to figure out what is going on with Rita. The Spell implies early on that the girl has some sort of supernatural power. She causes a classmate to severely injure herself. She makes a woman spontaneously combust. Rita’s sister almost drowns and her dad is almost hit by an errant car.
Mom is desperately trying to understand her daughter. Dad seems completely uninterested in Rita and cares more about his younger daughter. The way the movie presents Rita makes the viewer inclined to agree with him. Rita is antisocial and vexatious in the creepiest ways. One would think they’d try to present her in a sympathetic manner. But, it never happens. Rita’s ugly sweaters don’t help.
The dad is unpleasant. Rita is unpleasant. They constantly clash while mom tries to find some sort of peace. The supernatural events build as the film goes along. The plotline about her classmates becomes very much a secondary part of the film. The viewer learns that Rita feels different from the other girls and she likes it. Then, the twists begin to come. One which isn’t expected; one which is. Something resembling witchcraft begins to loom large in the mix.
The Spell is about a girl who is different from the other girls. One of the twists here is that she likes being different. She wants to be different. It’s too bad that the way the filmmakers present Rita isn’t very pleasant. She’s unlikeable. Her sister is nicer than her. It makes for an odd dynamic when the viewer reaches the ending, because there’s no real sympathy for Rita. Unlike Carrie, whose journey is heartbreaking, Rita is kind of a jerk.
This is a well-made film that probably knows exactly what it’s up to. Honestly. The only extremely obvious misstep is the main musical theme. It seems to combine the melody from John Denver’s Sunshine On My Shoulder with the main music from the Shazam TV series. Not a great combination of music for any day of the week. Maybe they are Rita’s favorite songs combined? That sounds like something she’d enjoy. [Daniel R. Budnik]
STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL
Director: Steve Binder
Starring: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Peter Mayhew, Carrie Fisher
Airdate: November 17, 1978 Network: CBS
It’s up to the Star Wars crew to help Chewbacca save his family in time to celebrate Life Day!
Not long enough ago that viewers couldn’t bootleg it on their VCRs and in a galaxy that is, sadly, this one, George Lucas approved a TV special based on his 1977 hit movie Star Wars. The plot (for lack of a better term) follows rogue pilot Han Solo (Ford) as he struggles to outwit agents of the Empire in order to get his friend and co-pilot Chewbacca (Mayhew) back to his home planet in time to celebrate the Wookie tradition that is Life Day.
Forget about Jar Jar Binks, the Ewoks and even Han shooting first; in terms of atrocities against geekdom’s most beloved franchise, they’re simply artistic misdemeanors. However, TV producer/director Steve Binder’s attempt to bring the movie event of all time to the small screen is a feature-length rampage that would surely be considered a hate crime if only it didn’t retain the credibility of involving so much of the creative talent behind the original.
Having been screened only once on US and Canadian television and officially unavailable in any format (even to this day), it was throughout the eighties and most of the nineties, little more than a pop cultural urban legend; much talked about but little seen. However, with the rise of the Internet and YouTube, curious fans of the series were granted the ability to self-inflict this nonsense onto their retinas in the millions, no doubt much to Lucas’ dismay and then presumably their own.
Much like the Zapruder footage, watching it is an infinitely more distressing experience than engaging in the wild speculation that it generates: Who was behind this? What was their motive? Most fingers would have to point toward Binder, whose television credits went on to include Beauty and the Beast: A Concert on Ice and The Chevy Chase Show, of which, alarmingly, in terms of content and zero entertainment factor, this Holiday Special would fit snugly in between.
Lucas and Star Wars fans all agree that the only element of this TV movie come variety show disaster that even approaches something watchable, is a short animated sequence that introduces the character of bounty hunter Boba Fett. The fact that this film’s high point is when no human being is appearing on the screen to embarrass themselves even further, says all that can be said about special appearances from the likes of Golden Girls’ Bea Arthur, musical group Jefferson Starship and a particularly disturbing exchange between singer Diahann Carroll and a Wookie child, in which her holographic self tries to seduce him by way of an advanced version of Sex-cam ’net porn.
In short, if you’re a hardcore Star Wars fan and have always wanted to hear Carrie Fisher sing lyrics over John Williams’ unforgettable score… No! I still can’t recommend you see it. [Kevin Hilton]
THE STRANGE POSSESSION OF MRS. OLIVER
Director: Gordon Hessler
Starring: Karen Black, George Hamilton, Robert F. Lyons, Lucille Benson
Airdate: February 28, 1977 Network: NBC
Mousy Mrs. Oliver seems content with her tidy, colorless existence, but someone or something inside of her has other ideas.
After awaking from a disconcerting dream in which she sees her own lifeless body lying within an opened casket, Mrs. Miriam Oliver (Black) is convinced that she’s dying inside. Her life has become a dull ritual with no prospect of anything exciting on the horizon. When we meet Miriam’s overbearing husband (Hamilton), who doesn’t let her work, study, volunteer, or do much of anything besides stay at home and think about having a baby, it’s easy to understand the source of her fears. And when Miriam decides to shed her drab attire for a new, vivacious look, it seems a logical reaction to her circumstances. What doesn’t seem quite right is the palpable shift in personality that accompanies her change in wardrobe—a metamorphosis so startling that her husband almost doesn’t recognize her. When we realize that Miriam herself seems unsure why she’s acting so differently, it becomes clear that someone, or something is attempting to possess Mrs. Oliver.
As is the case with several of Richard Matheson’s legendary teleplays— Duel, The Night Stalker, and Dying Room Only among them—The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver features a protagonist at once isolated from normal society, and tormented by a preternatural foe. For Miriam Oliver, though, the nemesis seems to be coming from inside of her. But who or what is it? An enigmatic opening scene, featuring a burning house and disembodied screams, provides the semblance of a clue, especially as Miriam expresses a clear aversion to fire. But what is her connection to the house? How does her murky past explain her present behavior? The mystery only deepens as Miriam finds herself drawn to things she never considered before: a formfitting red blouse, a striking blonde wig, brightly colored lipstick, and a penchant for drinking and dancing. When she crosses paths with a man who’s certain her name is Sandy, Miriam’s sense of herself begins to dissolve.
A testament to Matheson’s succinct storytelling and Karen Black’s believable portrayal of a woman seemingly losing her mind, this simple, unassuming film engulfs us in a wonderful atmosphere of unease and uncertainty. From the slow, softly lit journey down the eerie hall of the mortuary of Miriam’s nightmare, through scene after scene of Miriam wandering aimlessly through a hazy seaside town, the entire film feels like it is taking place within a dream. Miriam’s gradual degradation into her new personality adds to the hallucinatory effect—her muddled sense of reality serving as our window into this odd world and constantly keeping us off balance. Though this low key film is unlikely to attract the attention of casual viewers looking for high-octane thrills, The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver offers a well-paced story, an appealingly creepy atmosphere, and an intriguing mystery, you just need to allow yourself to fall under its spell. [Thomas Scalzo]
THE STRANGER WITHIN
Director: Lee Philips
Starring: Barbara Eden, George Grizzard, Joyce Van Patten, David Doyle
Airdate: October 1, 1974 Network: ABC
A woman becomes pregnant, even though her husband has had a vasectomy, and she begins to exhibit strange behavior as a result.
In the late 1960s and well into the 1970s the devil was big box office. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) made enough moola to cause other big studios to follow suit (Richard Donner’s 1976 outing The Omen proved popular with its prestigious cast and it spawned many other Omen projects). This method of entertainment also made its way to the small screen, and it’s hard to believe that at this time television was considered a form of substandard entertainment, a virtual dumping ground for lesser material while feature films were held in high esteem. The roles seem to be completely reversed now! Ironically, I find the 1970s to have been responsible for some of the most memorable and creepy TV movies ever made. While the devil certainly played a role in a good number of them, some of these flicks had more of a sci-fi slant to them.
An interesting though bizarre little television outing is Lee Philips’ 1974 film The Stranger Within, which was released on VHS in the 1980s with a very creepy cover. (Be aware that there are at least a handful of other films with this same name.) Barbara Eden trades in her genie outfit for that of a suburban housewife, Ann Collins, who finds herself pregnant despite the fact that husband David (Grizzard) had a vasectomy, a maneuver on his part so that her health would not be harmed by a pregnancy. When it becomes apparent that she is, in fact, pregnant, David reels, knowing that he cannot possibly be the father. Infidelity becomes the prime suspect and it momentarily causes a rift between them. As the pregnancy progresses, Ann manifests strange behavior that includes eating massive amounts of salt and raw meat, and speed-reading through a physics book. It becomes apparent that she was impregnated by something far more sinister than another man…
The Stranger Within began life as many Twilight Zone episodes did. It originated in the form of a short story written by the great Richard Matheson: Trespass first appeared in the September/October 1953 issue of Fantastic magazine. Mr. Matheson penned the teleplay for the film, as he also had adapted several of his own stories into genre favorites, Trilogy of Terror (1975) and Dead of Night (1977), both directed by Dan Curtis for television. Those films benefitted from a shorter running time, and The Stranger Within would have probably done better as a vignette in this format. Despite the somewhat long lulls in between the start and the bizarre conclusion, The Stranger Within is an entertaining showcase for Ms. Eden’s considerable talents and is definitely worth seeking out. [Todd Garbarini]
STREET KILLING
Director: Harvey Hart
Starring: Andy Griffith, Bradford Dillman, Harry Guardino, Robert Loggia
Airdate: September 12, 1976 Network: ABC
Andy Griffith pursues criminals through the courts in an attempt to bring justice to the streets of New York.
Voraciously typed by TV script machine William Driskill (writer of 1957’s Rockabilly Baby), here’s a slow, solid slab of courtroom drama fat with a platoon of TV movie regulars.
There are rides in elevators, stuffed briefcases, wide ties, stern words, meetings, phone calls, reports in duplicate and the odd perm or two on show as city prosecutor Andy Griffith (Winter Kill) tries to catch and convict a school of lawless scallywags via a chain of dull courtroom/office sequences where everyone discusses the plot and slowly figures out that the crimes involved may have links that may go all the way to the mayor.
Plodding along like a pointless, chat-filled episode of Matlock, most of the proceedings are set in a courtroom, or an office. Or a hallway attached to an office. It’s light on the action too, with only brief flashes of a loaded gun or a dark alley to pass the time and it shamefully wastes the talents of Don Gordon (The Gamblers), Anna Berger (Hebrew Hammer), Bradford Dillman (Piranha) and Robert Loggia (Jagged Edge) who just amble about wishing they took that episode of Kojak instead.
Hidden under the legal molasses and worth a mention is the fleeting use of Times Square at night, some great afros, nice cars, fat cigars, wild comb-over hairdos, a funky pool hall, Gerrit Graham (Beef in Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise) as a junkie doctor and a minimal amount of killing—street or otherwise.
Produced by ABC Circle Films, you’ll have to really, really love police procedure and lots of talking to make it through to the closing credits. If not, just watch for the screen debut of Gigi Semone as Kitty. [DF Dresden]
Director: Lee Philips
Starring: Linda Blair, Martin Sheen, Jeanne Cooper, Bert Ramsen Network: ABC
Airdate: October 10, 1975
A disturbed man kidnaps a teenaged girl, but she soon develops feelings of respect and love for him.
Between Badlands (1973) and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1977), a young Martin Sheen starred as Leonard Hatch, an asylum inmate who believes himself to be the embodiment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. He lives an exuberant inner life, but is rattled whenever his delusion is threatened. It’s not long before he escapes in search of his mythical Xanadu and runs into Doris Mae Withers (Blair), a sassy teenage farmgirl whose potential is constantly derailed by her accusatory father and put-upon mother, both of whom seem threatened by their own daughter’s intelligence. When her truck breaks down on the way back from town, Sheen pit stops in a stolen vehicle and offers her a lift. But after she airs her own grievances about being stuck in a dead-end, he decides to whisk her away with him to Xanadu—by force.
Still, the title of the film is enough to alert the viewer that this won’t be a harrowing hostage horror as much as the kind of soppy Stockholm syndrome romance that proliferated as the eighties slouched into view (see also My Kidnapper, My Love, 1980). The sexual tension is immediately palpable; problematic in today’s context for a number of reasons but in line with the general structure of what was deemed “women’s entertainment” at the time, be it Harlequin novels, gothic horror or movies of the week (it should be noted that the romantic elements of the film purportedly do not appear in Nathaniel Benchley’s 1968 novel, Welcome to Xanadu, on which the film is based).
Leonard takes Doris Mae to an isolated cabin he’s appropriated, renames her Christabel (after another famous Coleridge poem), and her womanly talents are quickly put to work cleaning the place up. His moods are erratic—one minute he’s galloping around the room, over-annunciating in a strained mid-Atlantic accent, and the next he’s shoving his pouty hostage in a confused rage. He has some sort of sexual hang-up and likes that Blair also scoffs at the centrality of sex in relationships—but this of course is a means of protecting herself from any embarrassment she might feel about being a virgin. He, on the other hand, is frigid—his fear of sex helping to neutralize the threat of sexual violence that underlies the pulpy romance of Stockholm syndrome stories. Doris Mae quickly learns how to navigate his mood swings, and grows to like him—even love him. He’s like no one she’s ever met—he is both teacher and lover, and he comes from another place; his worldview is fantastical and unfettered.
Andy Griffith pleads his case in Street Killing.
James Brolin finds himself Trapped.
Sheen goes overboard (including an amazing scene where he peels down the highway yelling “I’m Betrayed! I’m Betrayed!! Betrayed!!”), and Blair resorts too easily to sulking, but overall turns in an assured performance, offering up one of her most likeable and believably compassionate screen characters. Directed by Lee Philips, a TV lifer whose output included the subversive Stockard Channing revenge-comedy The Girl Most Likely To… (1973) from a teleplay by Edward Hume—who had also co-written the hostage docudrama 21 Hours at Munich (1976)—Sweet Hostage may have questionable sexual politics but remains charming all the same, and its central casting can’t be beat. [Kier-La Janisse]
THE TENTH LEVEL
Director: Charles S. Dubin
Starring: William Shatner, Lynn Carlin, Ossie Davis, Stephen Macht
Airdate: August 26, 1976 Network: CBS
A controversial experiment on the subject of obedience, gives participants the false impression that they are torturing a subject.
During the decade between the cancellation of Star Trek and the first of its motion picture spin-offs, William Shatner appeared in an array of minor films and TV projects, none more illogical than the CBS movie The Tenth Level. Based upon Stanley Milgram’s 1960s research, Shatner stars as a psychology professor who conducts underhanded experiments where volunteers are asked to punish subjects who answer questions incorrectly. The volunteers believe that they are administering increasingly severe electric shocks to the subjects, who they can hear pleading and screaming.
Milgram and Shatner were concerned with the propensity in people to do things that they find repugnant or distasteful, when a figure of authority orders them to. Footage of Nazi concentration camps gives a pretty obvious example. Shatner, short of work and not wanting to blow it, does a good job of reigning in his mannerisms, and emotes as only he can in the almost climactic scenes. The rest of the cast go through the motions, with shock-haired Ossie Davis in particular wooden as hell. TV stalwart Stephen Macht, making his debut, is fun in a role that would have suited James Woods if it were a proper film. He twitches and sweats as he launches into a fantastic slow motion rampage, smashing up the superbly retro-looking analog apparatus in the laboratory.
The implications of the research are fascinating and troubling, with a frighteningly high sixty percent of volunteers administering the maximum dose of electricity. The then-recent actions of US soldiers in Vietnam are mentioned as inspiration for the experiments. Davis makes an interesting point accusing the WASP Shatner of not being able to empathize with the subjects because his racial group has not suffered the deprecations of genocide or mass oppression. If these points had been expanded upon a little more, then the film may have been a more interesting one. Unfortunately, all such considerations are lost beneath a sea of terrible production values. The film was shot directly onto videotape, and has a washed out, fourth generation-copy porn film look. Despite exteriors being filmed at Yale, interior scenes have a real bargain basement feel, especially a “crummy bar,” which seems to be six feet wide.
An overbearing score from Charles Gross and a completely unnecessary “For Mature Audiences Only” disclaimer give proceedings a 1950s feel, despite the funky CBS jingle at the beginning. Dubin had been active in the fifties, and despite being a regular director of the M*A*S*H TV series, his work here harks back twenty years. Shatner fans will find plenty to enjoy here, as will psychology students, but The Tenth Level is ultimately a frustrating, almost interesting ninety minutes. [Rich Flannagan]
THEN CAME BRONSON
Director: William A. Graham
Starring: Michael Parks, Bonnie Bedelia, Akim Tamrioff, Martin Sheen
Airdate: March 24, 1969 Network: NBC
After the suicide of a close friend, the impossibly cool Bronson leaves his nine-to-five lifestyle and rides his hog through America.
In 1969, the big three networks were becoming interested in a new age demographic that fell between the ages of ten and thirty-one. Realizing the marketing and viewership potential of the American youth, NBC attempted to speak to the counterculture movement through Bronson (Parks), an enigmatic lone wolf who rode the highways, and solved people’s problems with his own take-life-as-it-comes demeanor. The pilot telefilm is beguiling and, in spots, almost documentary-like, as it follows Bronson and his companion, a gorgeous young woman who refuses to be named (Bonnie Bedelia). Well, at least until the end of the film.
Created by ex-newspaperman Denne Bart Petitclerc, Bronson was loosely based on former Hell’s Angels biker and fellow reporter Birney Jarvis, who had traveled across the country on his hog. Reliable character actor Michael Parks filled the role nicely. Parks related well to the character, and also considered himself a bit of nomad, on his own since he was fourteen-years-old. Although he’d been working as an actor for over a decade before Bronson, he was still searching for that star-making role; now, some four decades later, he is still often associated with this freewheeling character.
Hoping to ride on the biker craze brought on by Easy Rider and the success of hip new shows like The Mod Squad, this pilot telefilm proved to be an enormous success for NBC. Critics and audiences loved it, and despite its desire to evade pithy synopsizing, it was nicknamed a “Route 66 for a new generation.” Finally, someone on television was speaking to a generation of those either already on the road, or heading in that direction, and the network invested heavily in the series, which follows Bronson on similar adventures throughout the country. Unfortunately, it was because the fans of the TVM spent more time outdoors and were mostly uninterested in episodic programming that the series failed, and was cancelled after its first season.
Despite the disappointment, the pilot film remains a mesmeric time capsule that encapsulates the feeling of late sixties youth looking for the meaning of life, and it captures the country at its most gorgeous and serene. Bronson’s quiet charms provided a tranquil antidote to a nation polarized by Vietnam and proved that sometimes finding yourself was all about getting lost. [Amanda Reyes]
THIEF
Director: William A. Graham
Starring: Richard Crenna, Angie Dickinson, Cameron Mitchell, Hurd Hatfield
Airdate: October 9, 1971 Network: ABC
A suave burglar with gambling debts finds it difficult to give up his crooked life.
About halfway through Thief, Neil Wilkinson, the titular thief, finds himself in a casino washroom taking stock of his life. It is not a good day for Wilkinson, having gambled away almost all the money he owes to a dangerous man called Jim, with whom he has an imminent appointment. Also in the washroom is a jolly man shaving. Neil humors the stranger in order to lift the wallet he spies in the jacket hanging on the wall. But the jolly man is smarter than he looks and tells Neil he may as well give the wallet back because it’s empty; the casino has cleaned him out.
Wilkinson (Richard Crenna) is a man with two lives: a pension salesman in the eyes of his new girlfriend, Jeannie (Angie Dickinson), while to others he is a burglar of repute. He dresses like a salesman to cruise affluent neighborhoods for houses to rob. He has a pocketful of dog biscuits to occupy guard dogs, should he encounter them, and an innate ability to smooth-talk his way out of a tight corner, as happens when a homeowner returns unexpectedly to find him in her driveway, departing the scene of the crime. Wilkinson acts like he’s lost. Without breaking a sweat, he then helps carry the homeowner’s groceries to her door.
Penned by John D. F. Black, who co-wrote Shaft the same year, Thief effortlessly runs from one gem of a set-piece to another. The washroom scene reveals a character more troubled than he is dashing or daring, as first he appears. It’s the movie’s turning point. Wilkinson is on parole and wants to do right by his son, yet still he steals jewels. When eventually he arrives for his important meeting, cap in hand, Jim (Robert Webber) accuses him of using his son as emotional leverage. The meeting doesn’t go well, and Wilkinson arrogantly puts himself in an even tighter spot, vowing to deliver the outstanding cash in twenty-four hours.
The movie ends in a pinhead instant, with Wilkinson about to make good on his promise. Instead, he is shot dead in his home by a strung-out kid, seen fleetingly only once before in a parole office early in the picture. In resolving its ethical conundrum—that of a criminal who wins out and even gets the girl as a bonus—it’s a kick in the nuts. But as unexpected as it is, the death of Wilkinson is as near as dammit a perfect end to the movie.
Thief features a veteran cast at the top of its game, one that also includes Hurd Hatfield, and Cameron Mitchell as Wilkinson’s long suffering buddy, Charlie (“You can’t offend people who can hurt you!” he advises him). A musical score by Ron Grainger breezily rounds out a wholly satisfying TVM.
No stranger to the format, director William A. Graham is probably best known to sleaze fans for the 1980 miniseries, Guyana Tragedy. His Thief should not be confused with Michael Mann’s 1981 movie of the same name, which was based on the memoirs of real-life jewel thief John Seybold. However, I like to think of Graham’s humble TV offering as a quiet influence on Mann. What’s more, the idea of the antihero who can’t stop gambling, using money he desperately owes, turns up again in another movie, Karel Reisz’s The Gambler (1974). [David Kerekes]
Director: Frank De Felitta
Starring: James Brolin, Susan Clark, Earl Holliman, Robert Hooks
Airdate: November 14, 1973 Network: ABC
James Brolin is trapped in a department store policed by a ravenous pack of Dobermans.
Despite working with a script that feels like it was tossed together in about fifteen minutes, this killer dog thriller by the director of Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a heck of a lot of fun. The story centers on James Brolin and his admirable efforts to win back the affections of his daughter, Carrie (Tammy Harrington). You see, Brolin is a drunk, and has made a habit of ditching important family events for the comforts of the local bar. But he’s determined to change. He’s going to buy Carrie the doll she really wants, and he’s going to meet her for dinner. After all, his ex-wife Elaine (Clark) is moving to Mexico City that very night, and bringing Carrie with her. This dinner may be his last chance to see her for quite some time. He’s going to be there.
At the department store, biding his time as the sales clerk hunts down the coveted doll, Brolin steps into the hallway for a smoke. What he doesn’t realize is that it’s almost closing time, and that the clerk will forget him. Nor does he foresee that he’ll be knocked unconscious by a pair of department store ruffians and left for dead in the bathroom. Or that the store’s security system is a pack of Dobermans. When he wakes up from his beating, the doors are locked and the dogs are roaming free. As the reality of his plight sinks in, and the dogs begin to growl in furious anticipation, Brolin’s character morphs from suave charmer to disheveled mess. And then he gets bitten in the leg. As Susan and her new beau grow increasingly miffed at the man’s tardiness, Brolin’s dinner plans take a backseat to surviving the life-and-death duel in the department store.
Though this set-up is patently ridiculous, director Frank De Felitta keeps the inanity at bay, making canny use of his limited resources to create an atmosphere of terror. For instance, the soundtrack is saturated with barking and snarling. Even when the mongrels aren’t on-screen, we know they are there, waiting, ready to pounce at any given moment. This constant threat, coupled with Brolin’s increasingly feeble state as he loses blood, establishes and maintains an appreciable level of tension. Some memorable set-pieces also serve to keep the anxiety high and the tale moving. The most engaging of these involves a sweaty, pale-faced Brolin crawling out onto a perilous ledge. His plan: use a fishing rod to snag an archery set propped up on a display floor table. All he needs to do is reel in this catch and then launch arrows into his growling nemeses.
Such action scenes aside, though, Brolin the actor isn’t given very much to work with here. Sure, there are ravenous dogs at every turn, but without any humans around to commune with, his emotive opportunities are limited to exaggerated gestures and a bit of yelling. Impressively, Brolin makes the most of what he’s given, awkwardly climbing on furniture, yelping at his pursuers, hobbling frantically up a flight of stairs, and, in my favorite moment, delivering a karate kick to a kiosk that gets in his way. Brolin must surely have realized the absurdity of the film, but instead of phoning in his performance, he plays up the role with admirable gusto. Trapped may not be a masterpiece, but Brolin’s enthusiasm ensures that the audience walks away happy. (Aka Danger Doberman; Doberman Patrol.) [Thomas Scalzo]
TRIBES
Director: Joseph Sargent
Starring: Darren McGavin, Jan-Michael Vincent, Earl Holliman, John Gruber
Airdate: November 10, 1970 Network: ABC
A hippie goes up against his drill sergeant in this dramedy about the Vietnam War.
Darren McGavin, better known to telefilm fans as future vampire-fighting ink-slinger Carl Kolchak, plays tough Vietnam-era marine drill sergeant Tom Drake, who zeroes in on reluctant hippie recruit Adrian (Vincent) as the bane of the recent batch. The sun-soaked, free-spirited Adrian shows up in sandals and love beads, and Drake can see trouble brewing, even though he secretly doesn’t see eye to eye with his right wing commie-bashing co-workers.
Written by Tracy Keenan Wynn (son of character actor Keenan Wynn), for which he and co-writer Marvin Schwartz won a Primetime Emmy, Tribes was a ratings hit and a timely attempt to bridge a volatile intergenerational communication gap. The opening credit sequence fetishizes the head-shaving ceremony of military boot camp, set to the soft sounds of frequent Bobby Sherman songwriter Al Capps and Marty Cooper—the latter the writer of squeaky pop hit Peanut Butter and onetime member of the Shacklefords alongside Lee Hazlewood. A primal drumbeat is set against the repetitive chanting of the military drill to expose a commonality within the friction.
The promotional campaign seized upon this conflict with the tagline, “Wanted by the United States Marines: For AWOL, insubordination… and doing his thing.” But in fact, the biggest threat Vincent’s character poses is not outright insolence as much as his ability to go through the motions of following orders without having his spirit broken, and to devise coping tactics that also help his fellow soldiers adapt. Throughout boot camp, he tests better, performs more efficiently and acts more responsibly than expected, despite lacking the formal schooling and social structure of many of his fellow privates. His comrades can’t help but notice this, and one by one, they turn to him for guidance.
Clockwise from top: TV Guide promo for Tribes; Karen Black fights for survival in one of the best remembered telefilms in history, Trilogy of Terror; and Kathleen Quinlan and Peter Graves hope to find other survivors in Where Have All the People Gone?
At first, Adrian’s resolve causes Sergeant Drake start to question his methods of training; Drake’s co-workers accuse him of going soft when his troops look content and focused (as opposed to terrified and frustrated) on the field. The accusation derails him. “I will not stand for any more smiling during drill, is that clear?!” But eventually Drake starts to question the purpose of the training, and by extension, the purpose of the war.
The film is full of many familiar TV faces, but McGavin in particular gives a moving performance as the drill instructor in crisis, and despite prefiguring Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket in some ways, Tribes is that rare war film that celebrates rather than dehumanizes its individuals. [Kier-La Janisse]
TRILOGY OF TERROR
Director: Dan Curtis
Starring: Karen Black
Airdate: March 4, 1975 Network: ABC
An anthology horror film starring Karen Black. The final segment involves a Zuni fetish doll. It’s tough to forget.
In the first half of the 1970s, Dan Curtis became the king of TV horror. His supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows had become a cult series. In 1972, Curtis and author Richard Matheson made the telefilm The Night Stalker, which became the highest rated TV movie up to that time. One year later, the team followed it up with The Night Strangler. In March of 1975, Dan Curtis directed a three-segment anthology film based around Matheson’s short stories. Karen Black was the star, appearing in all three segments in four different roles. That film was Trilogy of Terror.
Each of the segments is named after the lead female(s) in the tale. The first one is ‘Julie,’ set on a college campus. It involves lust, sleaze and an interesting twist. The second tale, ‘Millicent and Therese,’ is about twin sisters living in an old mansion. The third tale is ‘Amelia.’ A young woman buys her anthropologist boyfriend a Zuni fetish doll.
‘Julie’ is a decently told tale that never completely takes off. A student decides that he must possess a teacher named Julie. So, he takes her out, drugs her, blackmails her and makes her his sex slave. It’s pretty sleazy. There is an implication that the student is prostituting Julie out to his friends. A twist occurs but it happens very quickly and isn’t incredibly satisfying. One moment Julie is at her darkest point and then there’s the twist. It feels like there’s a scene missing.
‘Millicent and Therese’ is a lot of fun for Karen Black fans. She plays the very repressed Millicent. She also plays the blonde-haired, mini-skirted twin sister Therese. They have a very unpleasant passive-aggressive relationship. The problem with this tale is that the outcome is really obvious. One would think it was probably really obvious in 1975, too.
‘Amelia’ starts off slow and calm, setting the mood. It gives Karen Black time to talk on the phone with her mom and boyfriend about her life… and about a strange Zuni fetish doll. Suffice it to say, this creepy doll with the huge teeth comes alive. Amelia must fight for her life. The sequence where she does so is sharp, fast and scary. It is a triumph of sustained terror.
Trilogy of Terror starts strong but then loses its way right around the time the ‘Julie’ twist occurs. The film coasts along a bit, with some very interesting performances within some very obvious storytelling. This is a trick. The middle tale seems to exist to put the viewer into a state of “Oh, this is going to be just OK.” Then, the Zuni doll attacks and this becomes classic. It’s too bad that all three aren’t up to the level of the third. But, this film is very watchable and fun. It’s not the best Curtis-Matheson team up but a worthy one. [Daniel R. Budnik]
Director: Philip Leacock
Starring: Ben Gazzara, Elizabeth Ashley, Karen Pearson, Michael Douglas
Airdate: February 5, 1972 Network: ABC
A woman is distraught when she begins to receive phone calls from a relative who died fifteen years earlier.
Helen Connelly lives a satisfied life; happily settled down with her attorney husband and young daughter, when from out of the blue she begins to receive a series of disturbing phone calls. She hears a child’s voice on the other end of the line—but not just any child; it is a voice eerily similar to her nephew, Michael. But Michael was believed to have died young many years ago, lost in a blizzard. And yet, if that is so, how is it that this caller knows how to relate to Helen in familiar ways and with intimate details? Is it merely someone playing a sick game, or is Michael really calling?
A solid, if ever so slightly disappointing thriller from the TV movie’s golden age, When Michael Calls takes great care in setting up the story and crafting the suspense, but all of the good work is sadly undone as it moves toward the final act, which is of course a bit silly, but worse than that, simply dull.
The premise itself is delightfully chilling and the haunting phone calls are particularly effective. It’s easy to understand why it’s so often cited as one of those movies that, when seen at a certain age, stays well remembered, if albeit, as something a little scarier than it actually is. But small quibbles aside, this is an otherwise compelling and understated gem with a remarkably decent cast that deserves greater recognition.
Based on the novel of the same name by horror scribe John Farris (a big screen adaptation of another of his novels—The Fury—would prove to be a late-career hit for Kirk Douglas) and with a taut screenplay by James Bridges, the material—though still essentially pulp—remains top drawer. Bridges, having cut his teeth penning several episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in the sixties, is obviously in his comfort zone here, and would go on to have a moderately successful career behind the camera, re-teaming with Michael Douglas at the end of the decade with the theatrically released, The China Syndrome (1979).
Cult film actor Ben Gazzara is serviceable as the lead, though no more than that, and if there is to be any criticism leveled at the writing, it might be that there is an overemphasis on mood rather than characterization. Mostly remembered for featuring Michael Douglas in one of his earliest appearances, providing what is little more than a supporting role with some genuine substance, it really ends up being more his movie than anyone else’s.
When Michael Calls—also popularly known as Shattered Silence—just about ticks all the boxes one would realistically hope for given it’s small screen trappings, and for the most part, has aged remarkably well. Widely available on DVD on budget labels, this is one call that’s worth picking up. [Kevin Hilton]
WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEOPLE GONE?
Director: John Llewellyn Moxey
Starring: Peter Graves, Kathleen Quinlan, George O’Hanlon Jr., Verna Bloom
Airdate: October 8, 1974 Network: NBC
After a series of solar flares turns most people into white powder, a desperate family fights for survival.
Penned for NBC by Lewis John Carlino (Seconds) and Sandor Stern (Pin), here’s a Rapture/UFO tinged sci-fi feature starring the one and only Peter Graves (who outsmarted giant grasshoppers in Beginning of the End) as a fossil hunting father who takes his son and daughter on vacation deep into the caverns of an L.A. hillside so they can bond as a family and find ancient stones.
While hacking at granite below ground, an earthquake strikes, forcing them back to the surface where a frightened hillbilly guide tells them they just missed a blinding white light in the sky that seems to have knocked out all the radio and TV stations. Guessing it was a harmless solar flare, the group prepares to head home, but before they can leave, the hillbilly turns pale, takes ill and dies. Shocked, they decide to bury the man but can’t—as his body has vanished, leaving nothing behind but an empty pair of dungarees and a mess of white dust.
Officially freaked out, the family struggle down the mountainside toward civilization where instead of finding help and assistance, they discover empty streets, unparked cars, abandoned buildings, open doors, billowing curtains, half eaten meals and household pets gone feral—raising the question “Where have all the people gone?”
If you can forgive the partial exhumation and make-do tweaking of the plot from Day of the Triffids (1962), this is a fine, effective, loveable and often creepy feature brimming with low budget desolation, heaps of spilt talc, confused survivors, vacated supermarkets, sun flares, actual flares, gunfire, ridiculous animal attacks and memorable performances from Kathleen Quinlan (My Giant), Verna Bloom (After Hours), Jay W. McIntosh (The Healers) and George O’Hanlon Jr. (son of George Sr., the cartoon voice of Hanna-Barbera’s George Jetson).
A big hit broadcast numerous times on both sides of the Atlantic, fans of UK pre-cert video tapes will be first to tell you this saw a release in 1982 on the collectible Iver Film Services label—an outfit responsible for unleashing such rare delights as Honky (1971), Birds of Prey (1973) and Andy Milligan’s Blood (1974). [DF Dresden]
WILD WOMEN
Director: Don Taylor
Starring: Hugh O’Brian, Anne Francis, Marilyn Maxwell, Marie Windsor
Airdate: October 20, 1970 Network: ABC
The year is 1840. With an offer of freedom, five female convicts embark on a dangerous wagon train mission into war-torn Texas.
Any movie—even a TV movie—that opens with a screaming catfight in a women’s prison yard is worth more than a casual glance. If you do donate time to this harmless, smartly colored western, you’ll be treated to at least three more babe-brawls, a cute, clever and often cracking script (by Richard Carr) and some fine, cut-price period piece performances from a posse of cowgirls who all trade life in the stockade for a dangerous mission into Mexican held Texas of 1840. A place where they’ll deliver supplies and engineers to an American army camp in exchange for their freedom.
Led by rock-faced frontier man Hugh O’Brian (Twins), the troupe battle bandits, wear gingham, crack wise, load rifles, shoe horses, make pies and get drunk on sour mash and avoid anything too action packed or violent or too expensive to film. But that’s okay as the sets, costumes, nifty ghost town location and great turns by Anne Francis (Mazes and Monsters), Sherry Jackson (Stingray), Marilyn Maxwell (Rock-A-Bye Baby), Marie Windsor (Love Me Deadly) and Cynthia Hull (The Eye Creatures) are more than enough to hold it all together.
Basically the same plot as The Dirty Dozen (1967), the premise theft can be forgiven here as the five girls (disguised as the wives of traveling settlers) spit and sass with the best of them in some decidedly standard western setups, ambushes, hoedowns and shoot-outs that are far from amazing, but well-handled and a soft goof to watch.
Produced by Aaron Spelling as an ABC Movie Of The Week, it’s based on the novel The Trailmakers by Vincent Forte—screenwriter of Mario Bava’s Baron Blood (1972). [DF Dresden]
YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN
Director: Jeannot Szwarc
Starring: David Hartman, Jane Wyatt, Ralph Meeker, Jess Walton
Airdate: February 28, 1973 Network: ABC
After a bitter argument, a troubled husband allows his wife to leave, only to have her vanish into thin air.
Remade with the same title in 1986 and based on a short story by the prolific Cornell Woolrich, David Hartman (Island at the Top of the World) and Jess Walton (Return of the Mod Squad) star as Ned and Vikki Bliss, a pair of flare wearing, candy bar eating “newlyweds” enjoying their huggy two-year honeymoon until an argument about visiting the in-laws results in a bitten hand, a bitch slap, a slammed door and the line “You’ll never see me again!” which leaves grumpy architect Hartman home alone with nothing to do but go back on the smokes, have a long face, ponder regret and miss his angry spouse.
By the next evening, and with no word from his gingham wrapped gal, Hartman becomes increasingly worried about the brunette’s absence and begins cold-calling relatives and co-workers. Eventually, he hits the streets with a photo and a description—all to no avail as his wife has simply disappeared into thin air. Distraught, he informs the police, who offer no help and, instead, lecture him about lovers’ spats and domestic violence, which only drives him to expand his one-man search to out of state bus routes where he gets to threaten violence on oily gas station attendant Larry Watson (Gentle Savage).
After a while (and a weak flashback complete with echoed “You’ll never see me again!” audio), the cops receive a tipoff and begin investigating the slowly unraveling Hartman, who then becomes the primary murder suspect and a fugitive from the law.
Devoid of blood and violence, but well scripted and acted, slightly gripping and capped with an odd and rewarding twist finale, the always unsurprising Szwarc (Jaws 2) keeps things moving, but sadly fails to make it special enough for anyone to love outright. [DF Dresden]
1Ridlen (now a deejay) screened one of these recordings—replete with the original commercials aired during its first broadcast—at the Tradewinds Social Club in Dallas in 2010. Clint Howard also attended a screening of the film at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles in 2011.
2One exception from this period is John Frankenheimer’s misfire Prophecy (1979), an environmental horror about a grizzly bear deformed from years of toxic waste dumping.
