Category: TV Terror Guide
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The Bermuda Depths (1978)
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…
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The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978)
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…
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Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (1977)
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…
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Count Dracula (1977)
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…
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Ants! (1977) aka It Happened at Lakewood Manor
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,…
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Halloween with the New Addams Family (1977)
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?…
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The Night They Took Miss Beautiful (1977)
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…
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Curse of the Black Widow (1977)
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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Good Against Evil (1977)
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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Spectre (1977)
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…