Perhaps hoping to merge The Poseiden Adventure (1972) and The Cassandra Crossing (1976), NBC gave TV audiences the virus-is-loose-on-a-ship thriller Killer on Board (1977). Departing from the Philippines and heading for Hawaii, a cruise liner gets into troubled waters (booooo!) when two stowaways bring a virus onboard. Naturally, the dumb ship's doctor (Murray Hamilton, forever cast as a impassive bureaucratic cog after Jaws) says it is the flu when crew members start getting sick, while another doctor (Frank Converse) feels they have a panic on their hands. There is a stellar cast here including Patty Duke-Astin (as a widow with her son), Susan Howard (as Duke's lovelorn sister), Jane Seymour (as a tour guide), William Daniels (as a rich snob who thinks he can buy his way out of a pandemic), Beatrice Straight (a woman dying of cancer), Len Birman (as a casanova lounge singer), John Roper (as a hysterical "junkie musician"), Michael Lerner and Thalmus Rasulala (as CDC docs helicoptered onto the boat), and Claude Akins and George Hamilton as the boat's captain and second-in-command, respectively (damn, those are some fine heads of hair piloting this ship). Unfortunately, they aren't given much to do except talk about their relationships and stuff. The most suspense we get on the boat is when Roper sneaks around to try to recover his drugs from a quarantined area; the end also has a brief chase of an infected person who swims to San Francisco. The best thing about the version I watched on Youtube is the person uploaded the entire broadcast, including the commercial breaks. What a different time, Jimmy Carter was looking to unveil his universal health care plan and you could put $99 dollars down for a car. Nowadays that wouldn't get you into a theme park.
