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)”
Category: Mystery
The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989)
Poor Sarah Hardy had the worst funeral ever! I don’t mean the one they had for her. She was too busy faking her death to worry too much about that one. I’m talking about the one that happened 15 years earlier for her beloved father. No doubt that was a downer, but then her crazy mom had to go and ruin a perfectly good mourning buzz by causing multiple scenes! Continue reading “The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989)”
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)”
Dead Reckoning (1947)
Humphrey Bogart plays recently returned war vet Rip Murdock. He’s searching for the truth behind the death of Johnny, his best friend from the service. Rip knows that Johnny was a damn good paratrooper and he deserves his Congressional Medal of Honor, even if it has to be awarded posthumously. That’s not so much to ask for a guy who gave everything he had to kick the Ratzis in their Teutonic nads, is it? Continue reading “Dead Reckoning (1947)”
The Haunted Strangler (1958)
Boris Karloff (Frankenstein) runs around with a gimped-up arm and makes faces to show us that he has turned from a genteel novelist to a serial killer who likes to slash the pretty girls that work at the local strip joint somehow named “The Judas Hole.” (I just looked this up and it means something like “peep hole”. If nothing else, this movie taught me some cool new slang.) Continue reading “The Haunted Strangler (1958)”
The Spiral Staircase (1946)
Do you remember when Snoopy used to sit on top of his dog house and type a story that started “it was a dark and stormy night?” If that dog ever buckled down and got beyond that first phrase, this would have been the movie based on his story. At least it would have been if his dark and stormy night involved a serial killer who was bumping off women with various physical deformities. Continue reading “The Spiral Staircase (1946)”
Dead & Buried (1981)
Dead & Buried poses a question that is really almost embarrassingly obvious: What if there was this small town where the guy in charge of the funeral home starting mixing his business with a little voodoo? Continue reading “Dead & Buried (1981)”