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Another week, another… wait a minute… Curse of the Black Widow (1977) was not a failed television pilot. However, it was another 1970s TV movie about a skeptical character investigating the supernatural. Here, Mark Higbie (Anthony Franciosa) is not a reporter, an author, or a parapsychologist. He’s just a simple private investigator. He’s hired by…
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Midway through his directing career, Fritz Lang is still going strong with The Woman in the Window (1944,) a nearly two-hour noir that speeds along as if it’s half the length. Not a horror film in any sense of the word, it nevertheless generates suspense that’s palpable. With Lang directing and Joan Bennett (Dark Shadows)…
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Another week, another failed TV pilot, another plot about fighting supernatural forces. Good Against Evil (1977) has one thing original about it, though. With its open-ended conclusion, it seems this would have offered a continuing storyline instead of a generic monster of the week structure. This doesn’t make it any better than the others, though,…
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For years, I’ve vividly remembered a movie in which a car was driving down a lonely highway and the giant electrical towers along the road changed back and forth to and from demons. Maybe there was lightning when the demons were revealed, or maybe there were just flashes of light as they appeared and then…
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Four days before Star Wars opened in theaters to eventually change the landscape of genre film and television forever, NBC broadcast Spectre (1977.) The timing is coincidental, yet appropriate, because, just as monsters and horror were about to move to the back seat and let spaceships and science-fiction drive, Spectre feels like the end of…
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Movies take place in the land of make-believe. It’s not uncommon that we must suspend our disbelief so we can enjoy the experience. It may help that I don’t know how a nuclear power plant worked in the mid-1970s, or how advanced computers were at the time; but I thought Red Alert (1977) was surprisingly…
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Warning! This review contains spoilers… When I think of big Hollywood studio sequels to innovative independent films, I think of Halloween II (1981.) Like it, Phantasm II (1988) delivers more of the same thing as its predecessor, just more polished and shinier. Both make valiant attempts to continue their stories, yet just miss on the…
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If all the failed supernatural television pilots had instead received a green light, the 1970s would have been a remarkable era for the genre. As it is, it’s remarkable for the number of supernatural TV “movies.” Here, we have another, The Possessed (1977), about an ex-minister charged by God him/herself to seek out evil and…
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Because Paramount+ slapped a new logo on a new thumbnail image for Snowbeast (1977), I thought the streaming service might be offering a nice, crisp transfer of the film. I was surprised and disappointed that, when I watched it, the quality wasn’t any better than many of the other 1970s TV movies that I’ve found…
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In the lower right-hand quadrant of the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland #180 (cover date January 1982) appeared a close-up picture of a zombie-like man with a moustache, blood coming out of his mouth, and a distant stare in his eyes. The caption read, “The Grim Reaper, You’re on His Menu!” It provided a…
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Classic Horrors Club 