Welcome to Stainesville, Nevada! It’s a small town where everyone knows everyone else and more importantly, everyone knows everyone else’s dirty little secrets and spends most of their time shooting glowering looks back and forth and testily advising one another not to talk to that no good outsider from New York who is staying at her family’s lodge. (Don’t be so defensive guys! She’s just there to establish residency so she can get a quickie divorce, not bust up your evil coven, secret sex cult or college sports betting ring!)
There’s old man Henshaw, who runs the filling station. He’s really crabby and his son Lonnie doesn’t respect him whenever Lonnie isn’t creepily watching the visiting Liza Crocket (Barbara Eden). There’s MaeJean Warren who used to be Liza’s friend in school, but now is just as crabby as Henshaw. Her husband Mel skulks through the woods trying to shoot a starving dog when he’s not abusing his daughter.
Liza’s stepmother Rose seems pleasant enough. Except that she has a son she didn’t bother to mention to Liza’s dad until a year after her marriage to him. But that was because his backstory is that he’s a Nam vet and recovering dope fiend! And now he’s living at the family lodge while Liza’s father is away on an archeological dig in Mexico. But why did her dad leave his Bible? And why did he order some expensive piece of equipment and leave before it arrived? And why can’t Liza get a hold of him?
There’s no time to wonder about the vagaries of her father’s lackadasical packing and trip planning though because there’s an unsolved murder of a dead girl also lingering in town! It was MaeJean’s daughter’s cousin and though stepmother says the kid is just telling stories, dang if there isn’t a grave for the poor old Brixton girl right smack dab in the cemetery! She was pulled out of the lake, but was already dead before she was dumped in there!
And while Liza might want to look into that a bit more, she’s also busy hunting down the source of that titular howling in the woods. (In the movie’s only disappointing moment, it’s just a hungry and grieving dog, not Bigfoot or even a rabid grizzly!)
Liza even has time to be caught in the woods in the middle of the night and attacked by something! (And if that wasn’t awful enough, she finds out one of her old high school friends called her a -gasp- clotheshorse! Worst homecoming ever! But she does have a gorgeous wardrobe! I mean I was never the biggest fan of culottes, but she makes them work!)
A Howling in the Woods packs an impressive amount of twisted mysterious goings on into its speedy 90 minutes. Barbara Eden as Liza gamely wanders through it all, a good stand in for the audience as she asks skeptical questions whenever the various townspeople offer vague or silly explanations for whatever suspicious event just occurred. She even manages to play Nancy Drew a bit (the dolls the murdered girl played with were Liza’s!) while dealing with her stepbrother’s icky romantic overtures and her estranged husband’s attempt to reunite when he arrives in town unexpectedly. (It’s even more of a reunion because the husband is played by Larry Hagman, making you think the movie might just be a some strange fever dream Captain Tony Nelson is having after one of Jeannie’s schemes goes horribly awry.)
There’s such a heaping helping of sinister happenings that if the movie doesn’t exactly collapse under their combined weight, it gets bogged down to a crawl on occasion when characters have to barf up giant chunks of exposition explaining to Liza what is happening.
The Scooby-Doo style reveals though marginalize the character of Liza, practically reducing her to a bystander as everything is explained to her after she did virtually nothing to investigate any of it. She is placed in jeopardy of course in the waning moments of the movie, but the best that can be said for her is that she struggles long enough for a couple of other people to come in and rescue her.
If Liza’s lack of agency throughout most of it doesn’t put you off, this is another 1970s TV movie thriller (based on the gothic novel by Velda Johnston) that never wastes your time with filler and strings you along with enough bizarre behavior, you kind of want to see just where it all ends up. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say it ends up in perfect fashion – a tawdry affair, murder and attempted suicide.)
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