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…

Although Robb White wrote the occasional Perry Mason television episode, we all know him as the writer of the late 1950s-early 1960s William Castle classics, Macabre, House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, 13 Ghosts, and Homicidal. To be clear, he didn’t write today’s 1970s TV movie, Savages (1974), but it was based on his novel,…

Last Bride of Salem (1974) first aired during the day on The ABC Afternoon Playbreak but was so popular that it later got a primetime broadcast. Shot on video, it seems a good substitute for Dark Shadows, which had ended three years earlier. The quality and budget are about the same, but so are the…

Today, as a special treat, I present an excerpt from a feature I wrote for the upcoming We Belong Dead publication, Masters of Terror. In it, I discuss the influence of gothic literature on Dan Curtis and how it was reflected in a number of TV horror films that he produced, as well as the…

After raving about Curtis Harrington’s TV-movie prior to this one, The Cat Creature (1973), I really hoped to enjoy Killer Bees (1974.) Unfortunately, it’s uneven. The opening is scary and funny… the climax is creepy and unsettling… but the middle is lackluster at best. The way it’s constructed by writers John Willian Corrington and Joyce…