Warning! This review contains spoilers! If not for its disappointing letdown of an ending, Dying Room Only (1973) would undoubtedly be one of the best 1970s TV movies I’ve watched during the series so far. It’s The Twilight Zone feel for 99% of the running time is not surprising considered it was written by Richard…

With Terror on the Beach (1973), we’ve arrived at a point where one of these 1970s TV movies feels like a compilation of several others. I’d call it a sort of “greatest hits,” but that’s the wrong term for this particular movie, which isn’t really very good. With both its cast and storylines, it borrows…

As a special treat this week, I present another 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 1970s TV horror films that he produced, as well…

Director Jeannot Szwarc has a style that always seems “slow” to me. For example, among their other flaws, his big-screen efforts like Jaws 2 (1978) and Supergirl (1984) are just a little too long and sluggish for me. I love Somewhere in Time (1980), but nobody is going to call it a fast-moving film. One…

Astronaut Neil Stryker (Glenn Corbett) awakens in a hospital bed following a tumble through space when a failure in his ship’s “transponder” prevents him and his two crew members from identifying their trajectory. He learns he’s been isolated there for two weeks and that his companions died during the accident. With a title like, The…

Dan Curtis has always used and re-used plot elements and stories among his various productions; however, few have been as evident as those recycled in The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC just over a month after The Night Strangler aired on ABC. David Norliss (Roy Thinnes) is a copy of Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin)…

Sometimes the more outlandish the concept, the more entertaining a movie can be. It’s The Exorcist (nearly a year before it was released) meets Airport (three years after it was released) in a TV movie directed by the man who would later make The Concorde: Airport ’79, David Lowell Rich. Some may find that it…

What are the chances that either screenwriter Bill Lancaster or director John Carpenter were inspired by a 1973 TV movie called, A Cold Night’s Death, when they made The Thing nine years later? Similarities between the two films are numerous, yet the small screen version lacks something very important that the big screen version has:…

Pursuit (1972) starts with a superimposed digital clock counting down from “zero minus 15 hours.” It doesn’t remain visible for the movie’s entire running time, but appears at key moments, especially before and after the black spaces originally filled by commercials. It’s like the gimmick of the TV series, 24 (2001-2010), minus the loud and…

Until I watched The Devil’s Daughter (1973) and did my subsequent research for it, I didn’t remember that Shelley Winters had appeared in so many 1970s TV movies. I count at least ten. Her B-movie appearances at the time in theatrical films like What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972)…