It hasn’t been a very good week for my memory. Not only did I forget about the career of singer Jack Jones (click here to read my review of The Comeback), but I also didn’t realize that Reflections of Murder (1974) is a remake of Les Diabolique (1955.) That’s even after acknowledging the opening credit,…

All the Kind Strangers (1974) starts incredibly strong and, sustained by a terrific performance from Stacy Keach, feels at times more like a theatrical film than it does a television movie. However, by the time John Savage is taking a contemplative stroll in the woods with a painful song by Robby Benson playing in the…

Imagine an episode of The Love Boat where the three couples of that week’s story are murdered one by one. It won’t make Death Cruise (1974) any better or worse, but it makes it a little more fun than it already is. It’s an easy-breezy mystery with familiar faces (and voices, if you’re watching the…

There’s nothing particularly unique about Bad Ronald (1974), except for one thing: it works. I’m not sure I can pinpoint why, but it simply has all the right stuff. It’s a case of the sum being more than the individual parts. When I learned that the director, Buzz Kulik, also made Brian’s Song (1971), I…

Who says you don’t learn anything from movies, especially 1970’s TV movies? Did you know it’s apparently “against regulations” to bring a basket full of snakes onto a U.S Navy submarine? Yes, before there were mother f-ing snakes on a mother f-ing plane, there were gosh-darned snakes on a gosh-darned submarine. The movie is named…

On a Sunday in August, the Anders family is in the hills outside Rainbow, California when there’s a flash of bright light followed by an earthquake. Mrs. Anders (Jay W. MacIntosh) has just departed for the airport due to a pressing work commitment. Father Steven (Peter Graves), son David (George O’Hanlon Jr.), and daughter Deborah…

Talk about a coincidence! Susan Davis (Cloris Leachman) is chosen for the jury in a murder trial in which her husband is the real killer. This isn’t a spoiler, the revelation comes early… for us, that is. The fun of the Death Sentence (1974) is in Leachman’s performance as Susan gradually becomes suspicious of her…

The Disappearance of Flight 412 (1974) starts off strong, then ultimately doesn’t deliver what it teases. Right off the bat, there’s urgency to it as it unfolds at breakneck pace, facilitated by dramatic music by Morton Stevens. With the title and the mysterious goings-on, I thought the radar test unit’s flight (412) was going to…

It’s hard for me to get past the title of this one: The Strange & Deadly Occurrence (1974.) First, there’s no single occurrence. Second, while events that happen in the new country home of Michael Rhodes (Robert Stack) and family are indeed strange, they’re not ultimately deadly. The title caused me to watch and wait…

It’d be easy to dismiss Terror on the 40th Floor (1974) as a quickie rip-off of The Towering Inferno, which it is. However, when you look at the timeline it’s not really that easy. The former aired on television three months before the latter opened in theaters. It’s more likely there was something in the…