Where Have All the People Gone?

Where Have All the People Gone?
ABC Made-for-Television Movie | Starring Peter Graves, George O’Hanlon, Jr., Kathleen Quinlan, Vera Bloom | Written by Lewis John Carlino & Sandor Stern | Directed by John Lewelleyn Moxey | 74 minutes | Originally aired on October 8, 1974

“Two weeks ago I was manufacturing plastic cups…”

Steven Anders (Peter Graves) and his children David and Deborah (George O’Hanlon, Kathleen Quinlan) choose an auspicious time to explore some caves in the California foothills. While underground, a mysterious solar flare kills most of the exposed population on the surface, leaving the rest not instantly vaporized to rapidly sicken and reduce to a scattered white powder.

Fearing for the safety of his wife in their Malibu home, Steven gathers his children for a trek across the now post-apocalyptic landscape of Los Angeles for what, he hopes, to be a happy family reunion. Along the way, they encounter a dusty wasteland devoid of people, but eventually link up with a few other survivors: Jenny (Vera Bloom), a nearly catatonic woman who has clearly suffered some unspeakable trauma, and Michael (Michael James Wixted), a young boy whose parents were murdered by marauding car thieves.

Filmed around the Agoura Hills suburbs of Los Angeles, the film has a grubby, blistering atmosphere that benefits the bare-bones story. The quintent’s odyssey across a barren, de-populated wasteland establishes Where Have All the People Gone? as an effective mood piece. Although David, a college physics student, eventually postulates the causes of the disaster, they are simply nonsensical.

Overlooking the pseudo-scientific chain of causality between solar flares, earthquakes, and human disintegration allows the opportunity to enjoy the human drama along the way—and some mostly under-realized animal attacks. Day of the Animals would later embody the when-animals-attack genre, but here we have a brief cat assault, an unconvincing dog menace (with what appears to be a taped-down snarl), and an actual threatening dog pack.

Due to its short running time limited for its TV-movie time slot, the ending feels rushed, and unexpectedly positive for such bleak subject matter. The five survivors make a convenient surrogate family, as they set off for their new life together with some unearned, manipulated good cheer.

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Terror on the Beach

Terror on the Beach
Made-for-Television Movie | Starring Dennis Weaver, Estelle Parsons, Susan Dey, Kristoffer Tabori | Written by Bill Svanoe | Directed by Paul Wendkos | Originally Aired on September 18, 1973

A milquetoast dad and his family run afoul of a group of sadistic hippies during a camping trip on the beach in this modest made-for-television thriller with trappings of familial melodrama.

After their camper is run off the road by young hooligans in a dune buggy, Neil Glynn (Dennis Weaver) and his family proceed to an isolated stretch of California beach. Of course they are followed, but before the terror begins, family rifts are exposed as conversations around the campsite turn to matters relating to societal ills and the generation gap. DeeDee (Susan Dey) confronts her mother, Arlene (Estelle Parsons), over the role of the dedicated housewife in the burgeoning feminist era, while Steve (Kristoffer Tabori) decries his father’s ineffectual pacificim in dealing with their roadside tormentors.

Interestingly, the father-son dynamic reverses the expected roles of the era, with the son advocating a more confrontational tactic. Steve’s potential call to violence seemingly contradicts his generation’s outrage over the war in Vietnam, and places his father in the position of humanizing the enemy. Steve’s view of his father arguably travels back yet another generation, channelling a bit of Jim Stark (James Dean) from Rebel Without a Cause, who suffers a near existential embarrassment toward his own emasculated father Frank (Jim Backus).

The motivations of the faux family of hippies is never really explained, as their torment of the Glynn family slowly ramps up from simple intimidation to creepy mannequin stunts, nighttime audio terrors, and eventual campsite destruction, escalating finally in a violent dune buggy chase on the beach. If anything, the Manson-lite group of long-haired youth serve as a sort of cardboard bogeyman to Neil Glynn’s perception of a straight-laced family unit. Ultimately, the elder Glynn will have his mano-a-mano moment, as he reaches deep inside for some latent violence in a beatdown against the cult leader.

Overall, the thrills are scarce, with the most unintentionally horrifying scene coming as an enthusiastic family sing-a-long of I Went to the Animal Fair around the campfire. For Susan Dey, it’s certainly no Laurie Partridge moment singing back-up vocals on Come On Get Happy. Perhaps in some universe there exists a missed crossover opportunity as Partridge Family Terror on the Beach—but unlike Neil Glynn, Shirley Partridge (Shirley Jones) simply would not suffer the barbarity of a group of misbehaving flower children.

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The UFO Incident

What exactly happened to Betty (Estelle Parsons) and Barney Hill (James Earl Jones) while driving on a desolate stretch of New Hampshire highway on the night of September 19, 1961?

Although suffering from a temporary amnesia around their experience, the anxiety produced by dream-fueled partial recollections lead the couple to Dr. Benjamin Simon (Barnard Hughes). Under a program of hypnotherapy, the Hills are finally able to unlock their memories and recount a horrifying tale of alien abduction.

Remembered events unfold at a deliberate and talky pace. James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons dominate the screen time, in what is essentially a three-character play. Leisurely close-ups during the hypnotherapy sessions allow the actors to run the gamut from a modulated recital of actions, to nearly histrionic reactions to the horrors being revealed under hypnosis (plus the N’Hampshah accented cries of “Baaaaaaahneee!” when Betty refers to her husband).

The first full hour allows the dark New Hampshire roadside, and the prospect of what the couple has encountered, to establish an evocative mood. When the alien reveal finally occurs, their screen time is wisely minimized, often intercut with the character recounting the story. Less is definitely more in the blinky-rubber-alien-head department.

The film depicts the couple as sincere about their belief regarding their abduction, but grounds both characters with an emotional foundation that offers a number of factors–including personal stress, the tension accompanying being an interracial couple in 1960s America, and the overall paranoia and anxiety from a potential Cold War era nuclear attack—that could possibly imprint themselves onto a shared fantasy.

Two decades before the X-Files claimed “The Truth is Out There”, this film suggested the truth is <points to head> in here.

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Death at Love House

“This house has been the scene of too many strong emotions. Too many tragedies and too many secrets. It’s like the way the scent of flowers stays in a room after they’re gone. Only these flowers have been dead a long time, and they don’t smell so sweet.”

Husband and wife writing team Joel (Robert Wagner) and Donna Gregory (Kate Jackson) move into the long-abandoned mansion of late Hollywood starlet Lorna Love (Marianna Hill), planning to research and write a tell-all biography of the actress. The project also has a very personal meaning for Joel, whose own late father was involved in an obsessional love affair with Lorna.

The estate serves as a post-mortem tribute to Lorna Love, whose glass-walled mausoleum showcases her body in repose. Joel immediately falls under the spell of Lorna’s portrait, painted by his father and said to have given a soul to an actress otherwise despised by many of her colleagues. Commencing with the research, Joel and Donna discover a library full of books on witchcraft, and view clips of a mysterious occult figure associated with Lorna in newsreels of her death.

For a man consumed by a growing obsession and madness, Robert Wagner mostly sleepwalks through the role, slightly more tormented (and throwing less punches) than in a regular episode of Hart to Hart. Kate Jackson responds accordingly with the occasional wrinkled brow. John Carradine, as Lorna’s early film director, barnstorms his way through his single scene, taking the pair of TV actors to school on how to hambone through a B-movie role (before ending up face down in an estate pool).

Several golden-age Hollywood actresses, including Joan Blondell and Dorothy Lamour, make brief appearances, bolstering the film’s atmosphere of a gone era fading from memory, if not from imagination. Lorna Love herself mostly breaks the illusion, since her styling and composure seem jarringly out of place with her supposed time.

Black cats (both alive and stuffed), references to the occult and black magic, an attempt on Donna’s life by a gloved and black-robed assailant, and a grotesque finale that sends everything up in flames help make Death at Love House an enjoyable, if ultimately minor, gothic-lite thriller.

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Nightmare on the 13th Floor

Nightmare on the 13th Floor

Made-for-Television Movie | Starring Michele Greene, John Karlen, Louise Fletcher, James Brolin, Terry Treas | Written by J.D. Feigelson & Dan DiStefano | Directed by Walter Grauman| Originally Aired on October 31, 1990

A Los Angeles hotel hides a deadly secret in this lesser entry in what could be described as the “apartment horror” subgenre. Falling well short of such films as Rosemary’s Baby, The Sentinel, or even Dario Argento’s Inferno, Nightmare On the 13th Floor offers a hint of appealing mystery, but slowly devolves into a mundane slasher with a nonsensical resolution.

Travel writer Elaine Kalisher (Michele Greene) checks into the Wessex Hotel intending to write an article on the building’s history, but instead witnesses a shocking murder from inside a stalled service elevator. After failing to convince the staff or local police (John Karlen) that the murder actually occured, she delves deep into her own investigation, which leads to the hotel’s dark past. Meanwhile, other guests begin disappearing, stalked on the secret thirteenth floor by an unknown assailant with an axe.

The ingredients are all here for some cheap seasonal thrills—the witness investigating the crime no one believes happened, the architectural secret waiting to be discovered, a historical crime that may have modern consequences, the sense of paranoia surrounding the motives of the people who may or may not be involved in some greater conspiracy—but Nightmare on the 13th Floor mainly just sleepwalks through most of its running time. While Elaine chases down leads, a new victim is occasionally pushed off the elevator, stuck between the 12th and 14th floor, to face the swinging blade.

James Brolin (The Amityville Horror) plays the house doctor with an insistent, bug-eyed friendliness that telegraphs a later role reversal, while the other actors are forced to work within their limitations. Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) is reduced to her character props, a pair of chained reading glasses and lipstick-stained cigarette, while John Karlen (Dark Shadows) furiously chews up a box of Tic-Tacs in his few scenes, no doubt an attempt at covering his dyspepsia generated from the role.

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Yvonne Craig is Batgirl

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The Woman Hunter

A luminous Barbara Eden, with the support of a handful of glamorous outfits, shines in this otherwise tepid made-for-television thriller.

Recovering in Mexico from the trauma of an auto accident, Dina Hunter (Barbara Eden) feels herself slowly becoming estranged from her cold, business-oriented husband, Paul (Robert Vaughn). Overcoming her early resistance, she falls for the masculine charms of her neighbor on the beach, Paul Carter (Stuart Whitman). Seemingly tracking Dina from afar, Carter could actually be an international jewel thief and murderer intent on stealing her valuable necklace.

Lumpy and hairy in a middle-aged, seventies leading man sort of way, Stuart Whitman provides easily the most terrifying moment in the film—the prospect of emerging from the surf without his swimming trunks.

Barbara Eden carries the low-grade, woman-in-peril story with her screen presence alone—including an unintentionally funny, weirdly jerky dance number that predates Elaine’s awkward dance on Seinfeld by about twenty years.

Unfolding without much suspense over most of its running time, The Woman Hunter crawls along at a slow pace until delivering a predictable, yet unlikely, twist ending. However, the modest locations and era fashions make for a pleasantly inessential, wallpaper viewing.

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Snowbeast

We’re going to need a bigger snowmobile.

Essentially Jaws on the ski slopes, Snowbeast cribs all the elements of Spielberg’s summer blockbuster.

Washed-up former Olympic star Gar Sebert (Bo Svenson), prompted by his wife Ellen (Yvette Mimeux), seeks out a job as a ski instructor from his old friend, Tony Rill (Robert Logan), whose family owns a Colorado resort. Gar’s arrival coincides with a fatal attack on a pair of skiers, leaving one dead and the other shaken by a vision of the killer—a monstrous, hairy beast.

From here, plug in variations on the standard details from the when-animals-attack boilerplate, only this time addressing the “Bigfoot controversy” that was the rage of the day; an attack occurs before the lucrative Winter Carnival, a bear is shot and killed that purportedly is responsible for the deaths (with resultant calls to cut it open to see what is inside), and an intrepid party that sets out (in a camper) to track the monster.

Point-of-view monster shots and an appealing winter landscape (including skiers and their primary-colored suits) help elevate the derivative nature of this made-for-television movie, with shots of the monster held back just enough to build suspense (or prevent over exposure of an actor in a fur suit). Given the nature of the television pedigree, attacks prompt a reaction shot from their victims, but fade to a red screen before becoming graphic.

A scene depicting a direct monster attack on the Winter Carnival, with the Snow Queen’s crown getting crushed in the human stampede to escape, briefly flirts with camp—but Snowbeast (fortunately) fails to go full into Nights with Sasquatch territory and have the beast take the beauty as his bride.

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Curse of the Black Widow

Curse of the Black Widow
Starring Anthony Franciosa | Donna Mills | Patty Duke
Directed by Dan Curtis
ABC | September 16, 1977 | 1 hour, 40 minutes

Anthony Franciosa plays a private detective on the trail of a supernatural killer in a television movie that feels like a lost episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, with its outsider hero pursuing the clues and ultimately revealing the monster-of-the-week.

Following a murder outside a bar, Mark Higbie (Anthony Franciosa) glimpses an inexplicable dark shape fleeing up a cliff side. Although the victim was last seen accompanying a strange woman, the body exhibits an almost animal-like pair of puncture wounds in the chest cavity. The dead man’s fiancé, Leigh Lockwood (Donna Mills), whose first husband died in a mysterious boating accident, fears the scrutiny of the police, and employs Higbie to investigate.

Higbie uncovers a series of other murders, with victims exhibiting similar puncture wounds and complete loss of blood, along with a common link to Leigh and her twin sister Laura (Patty Duke). After the discovery of spider venom at the scene of a new killing, Higbie begins to accept a previously unthinkable theory based on native folklore—the killer is a woman who transforms by light of the full moon into a giant spider.

With compound-eye point-of-view shots depicting pincer attacks and squirting spider silk, little doubt exists from the opening scenes regarding the supernatural origins of the murders. A backstory involving a childhood plane crash in the wilderness, with one twin suffering a traumatic series of spider bites, serves to scatter suspicion of the mystery woman’s identity between Leigh and Laura. Could either one be Valerie Steffan, the mysterious femme fatale picking up and killing men?

Franciosa and Vic Morrow (as the gruff detective Gully Conti) play straight through what could be arguably high-camp material in the wrong hands, with only a few instances of fending off fake spiders and pushing through Silly String webbing. The POV perspective on the murders also allows for withholding the big spider reveal until the conclusion, reducing the need for too many mood-breaking rubber creature shots along the way. Some attempts at light comedic banter between Higbie and his assistant, (somehow disturbingly) referred to only as “Flaps” (Roz Kelly), fall a little flat.

Several familiar faces (June Allyson, June Lockhart) have small, slumming turns here, including Sid Caesar, who wanders onto the set as Laszlo Cozart, the investigative team’s heater-obsessed landlord. Popeye (H.B. Haggerty), a mustachioed Mr. Clean type questioned by Higbee as a potential witness, is somehow both a “wino” and a gymnastics coach. Finally, the unnamed morgue attendant (Robert Nadder) adds an unexpected undercurrent to his scene after emptying a vial of embalming fluid into a sink, and awkwardly declaring to Higbie, “Mark, you know how I feel about you.”

Ostensibly a monster movie, Curse of the Black Widow also throws in an undercooked schizophrenia plotline. A repressed female sexuality, all buttoned up and wearing glasses, triggers a secret murderous personality, decked out in a black wig and faltering German(ish?) accent, equal in murderous force to the spider’s supernatural curse.

It’s all hokum, of course, but unadulterated seventies TV-movie arachnid hokum – in heels.

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Alien Lover

Alien Lover | The Wide World of Mystery
Starring Kate Mulgrew | Pernell Roberts | Susan Brown
Directed by Lela Swift
Aired on ABC, November 25, 1975

Failing to live up to its salacious title, Alien Lover instead delivers a pedestrian take on inter-dimensional contact that today’s audiences would probably consider as Alien Skype.

Institutionalized since the accidental death of her parents, Susan (Kate Mulgrew, Orange is the New Black) is released from the asylum to the custody of her only living relatives, aunt Marian and uncle Mike (Susan Brown, Pernell Roberts). Soon after her arrival, she begins to hear voices calling her name, eventually leading her up to the disused attic storeroom. Sorting through the detritus left behind by her electronics whiz-kid cousin Jude (Steven Earl Tanner), Kate discovers an old television set that harbors an unusual secret.

The set flickers to life with an alien presence: Marc (John Ventantonio), a self-described visitor from another dimension (vaguely resembling Slim Goodbody in Star Trek garb) who can see and hear Susan through the television screen. Equating the existence in his reality to human death, Marc quickly establishes a bond with the lonely Susan. After a scant few sessions, they are professing their love for each other, a feeling tempered by Marc’s somewhat sinister invitation to Susan to touch him through the screen.

Quickly declared emotions are about the only aspect of this production that run hot, with Susan also declaring hatred towards her new guardians. Otherwise, most of the just-over-an-hour running time feels downright languorous. Pernell Roberts seems bored and passively angry (Trapper John, M.D. still being a few years off), and Steven Tanner’s Jude character reduces to a shrill nerd.

Although a few trivial hints point to an alternate explanation—a relapse of Susan’s mental illness, a prank by her cousin, or an attempt by her relatives to wrest control of her inheritance—there becomes little doubt that Marc actually exists. Marian hears Marc while eavesdropping at the attic door, and ultimately Jude confesses that he has been receiving visits from Marc since he was five years old. Without this dramatic tension, the only real question becomes Marc’s intent.

Susan is sympathetic in her isolation, but Alien Lover falls short in delivering the treatise on loneliness in the television age that it perhaps intended. Directed by Lela Swift, longtime Dark Shadows veteran, this made-for-television project exhibits all the static flair of a quickly shot, low-budget daytime serial. The only thing missing is a flubbed line or an overhead microphone dropping into the frame.