Imagine Psycho, but if instead of running a motel, Norman Bates was a sculptor, his mother was still alive and a raging alcoholic and Marion Crane didn’t take that shower, but performed light housekeeping duties and was an art student who had a crush on Norman. By the time the denouement finally occurs, it’s clear that at best Scream, Pretty Peggy was heavily influenced by that earlier, far superior film and the only suspense is whether it really is going to blatantly rip off Psycho. (For fans of homely guys in drag, it happily does!) Continue reading “Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973)”
Category: ABC Movie of the Week
Runaway! (1973)
A train full of skiing revelers on the way down the mountain! But engineer Holly Gibson (Ben Johnson) has never seen it this cold before! But by tomorrow it won’t even matter because Holly is just one day from retirement! (The savvy traveler never takes public transportation piloted by a guy who is just trying to get through his last shift! It’s in all the guidebooks!) Continue reading “Runaway! (1973)”
The Victim (1972)
Taking the plot of every episode of Dateline NBC, but draining all the mystery and tension from it with its painfully bland story and gussied up with a literal “dark and stormy night”, The Victim (or Out of Contention as it is even more absurdly called on the print I saw) is highlighted mostly by Elizabeth Montgomery and her lustrously awesome blonde hair (at least until she gets drenched in the non-stop rainstorm) running back and forth between various rooms in her sister’s house chasing sounds and shouting some variation of “who’s there!” Continue reading “The Victim (1972)”
Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate (1971)
In a better universe than ours, The Golden Girls wasn’t a sitcom, but an hour long detective comedy/drama with the four old biddies solving any variety of capers, their tart retorts flummoxing bad guys into confessing to an incredulous local police force. It would be like Murder She Wrote, but funnier. And times four! Continue reading “Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate (1971)”
Along Came a Spider (1970)
There are all sorts of twists and turns in Along Came A Spider, an ABC Moive of the Week starring Suzanne Pleshette and Ed Nelson as a couple of star-crossed psychopath lovers. Sometimes, you’ll think she’s crazy, sometimes you’ll think he’s crazy and sometimes watching the mindgames going on between her archeologist character and his physicist character, you’ll wonder if we shouldn’t just shut down all the universities and make people get real jobs where they don’t have so much free time to concoct meticulous murders and frame ups. Continue reading “Along Came a Spider (1970)”
The Missing Are Deadly (1975)
Could the Margolin Lab really have anticipated that its progressive “Take Your Simpleton Brother to Work Day” would go so very wrong? Who would have ever guessed that leaving the moronic Jeff alone in the Director’s office would result in Jeff smuggling a plague-ridden mouse to accompany him on his and his brother’s camping trip? Sure the Lab director was also his dad and his brother who brought him knew of his unhealthy obsession with small rodents. But other than those two, no one could have possibly had any idea! Continue reading “The Missing Are Deadly (1975)”
The Death of Me Yet (1971)
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union stopped at nothing to get the drop on the good old US of A! Recruiting their best and brightest to serve as infiltrators, the Reds spared no expense, going so far as to build an exact replica of a small town so perfect in its appearance, it looked like Warner Brothers’ Midwest Street backlot set! Later in the movie, the very same set was used again, this time pretending to be a small town in Arizona, the explanation being that the Russians used that town as the model for their own fake town! Whatever, it looks like you just watched The Music Man too many times! Continue reading “The Death of Me Yet (1971)”