The Initiation of Sarah (1978) is such a blatant rip-off of Carrie (1976) that the few original ideas it threatens to offer are forgotten or overshadowed by familiar characters and plot points. Even if you haven’t seen Brian DePalma’s masterpiece from two years earlier, or read Stephen King’s novel, chances are you know the beats…

Backed by a relentless soundtrack that ensures you know how to react while simultaneously beating you into submission, Cruise into Terror (1978) is a wacky mishmash of subject matter and genre tropes. You’ve got to applaud the effort, but also laugh at (with?) the result. It’s part disaster film, part horror movie… a little bit…

As 1970s TV movies evolved and started mirroring their theatrical counterparts, they got further and further from what was so unique about them. It sounds silly to say, but a TV movie made in 1978, Night Cries, is a refreshing throwback to earlier films like When Michael Calls and The Eyes of Charles Sand. Following…

Known primarily for its holiday television specials outsourced to Japanese animation companies, Rankin/Bass Productions occasionally financed live-action features. Three of these were made as TV movies in conjunction with Tsuburaya Productions, known primarily for its Ultra series (which began with Utraman in 1966.) We’ve already discussed The Last Dinosaur (1976) here, and now it’s time…

A two-part television miniseries is the perfect format for The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978.) There’s more time to learn about the characters and why they do what so many other fictional families have done in so many other horror films: move from the big city to a big house in the country. The…

How can a movie about the creepiest, crawliest, most shiver-inducing creatures on Earth have no suspense, thrills, or chills? It seems impossible… you have only to show the hairy legs of those nasty tarantulas crawling up someone’s leg. Nevertheless, we have Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977), which aired less than three weeks after Ants, making…

During the last few years, I’ve increasingly heard people mention how much they like Count Dracula, the 1977 BBC version of the classic 1897 novel by Bram Stoker. When it’s original broadcast date finally arrived within my TV Terror Guide series, I was eager to watch it. For me, however, it was a real mixed…

When I watched Ants! (1977) for the first time, I would never have thought I’d watch it again. However, I can’t skip a 70s TV-movie here just because I didn’t like it many moons ago. It’s still not very good, but I enjoyed it immensely. The qualities I didn’t like back then are still there,…

Why in the world would you watch Halloween with the New Addams Family (1977) when you have a perfectly good episode of the original series (Halloween with the Addams Family) that’s at least three times as good? A better question might be why in the world would you make Halloween with the New Addams Family?…

At first evoking such previous 1970s TV-movies such as The President’s Plane is Missing (1973,) The Disappearance of Flight 412 (1974,) and Mayday at 40,000 Feet (1976,) The Night They Took Miss Beautiful (1977) doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of originality. However, by adding a layer of satire about beauty pageants, it…