Classic Horrors Club

The most frightening moment in The Missing Are Deadly (1975) comes when Dr.. Margolin (Ed Nelson) tells a member of the press that a pandemic is “a very real possibility that no one thinks about.” Been there; done that. It’s intriguing, but is unfortunately only a footnote to the story. Here, the authorities seem prepared for disaster and act quickly when it happens.

A deadly “Mombassa fever” escapes the lab when Margolin’s uneducated but brilliant 15-year old son, Jeff (Gary Morgan), sneaks into the lab and takes an infected mouse to add to the menagerie of hamsters in his bedroom. So contagious is it that even hidden in his sweatshirt, a woman he briefly encounters at a distance becomes sick.

When Jeff and his older brother, David (George O’Hanlon Jr.), and David’s girlfriend, Michelle (Kathleen Quinlan), depart for a camping trip, there’s a race against time to find them before there’s an outbreak of Mombassa fever. Meanwhile, the trio of youngsters is stopping for groceries and gas, leaving a potential trail of death in their rear view mirror.

This all sounds very exciting. However, while it’s not slow or boring, The Missing Are Deadly is extremely lackluster. It does everything by the numbers and provides no suspense or thrills. One of the problems is that the stakes aren’t very high. Instead of going to the popular national park with a lot of lives at stake, the kids go to an area of the woods that’s isolated.

Therefore, instead of potentially infecting the masses, they only come into contact with the aforementioned grocers and gas station attendants. The majority of infected come from the chain reaction of Michelle’s mother, Mrs. Robertson (Marjorie Lord), going to the beauty salon. Oddly, not one person dies from the actual Mombassa fever. The one death is due to a heart attack.

Veteran television director Don McDougall helmed episodes of Star Trek (“The Squire of Gothos”), The Name of the Game (“The Civilized Men”), and Mission: Impossible (“Image”), among many others, but the well of excitement must have run dry. Since he at least he maintains forward momentum, it may be better to blame the writers.

No strangers to genre and genre-adjacent television, Michael Michaelian and Kathryn Powers wrote episodes of Kung Fu, Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Were they good episodes? I can speak only for Charlie’s Angels; probably not. They were fourth season episodes when only one original angel remained, no offense to Shelley Hack.

Speaking of Star Trek (twice), Dr. Durov is played by Leonard Nimoy. I would have led with that, but he plays second fiddle to Dr. Margolin. Yes, he does eventually help save the day, but he’s also the one who secretly continued to experiment with Mombassa when ordered to stop, and is responsible for the infected mouse in the first place.

Finally, the character of Jeff is problematic. He obviously has a mental handicap, but it’s played awkwardly. He sometimes speaks of himself in third person with the robot name, “Gordot.” When the last line of a movie about a potential contagion is, “Dad, Gordot loves you,” how can you take it seriously?