Three 1974 Made-for-TV Movies

THE STRANGE AND DEADLY OCCURRENCE

A tension-filled made-for-TV project from 1974, The Strange and Deadly Occurrence follows the three members of the Rhodes family (father Michael, mother Christine, and 16-year-old daughter Melissa) as they acclimate to their new isolated house in the California countryside.  Strange happenings on the property unsettle the family members.  Melissa screams one night and reports that someone touched her hair and face (the perpetrator presumably exited through an open bedroom window), but Michael chalks the incident up to the wind blowing a curtain onto his daughter as she slept.  The family’s new dog gets killed, and the sheriff concludes that the pet got trampled by the horses in the stable.  Christine gets trapped in the steam room near the pool and passes out from the heat.  A fellow named Dr. Gillgreen shows up a couple of times asking to buy the house, and Michael concludes that he is the one stalking and terrorizing the family.  In one especially spooky sequence, the power goes out one night, and the Rhodes find that the phone is dead.  Someone bangs on the walls and doors, and eerie shrieks come from outside.  Unlike many characters in horror films, the Rhodes opt to stay together in one room and wait until morning instead of splitting up and wandering around in the dark.  At sunrise, they find Dr. Gillgreen dead in the swimming pool.  An autopsy reveals that someone strangled him.  Michael races home from his office after asking the police to get to the house and take his family to safety.  There he finds a dead deputy, and at last he comes face-to-face with the stalker (who has Christine and Melissa at gunpoint).  I won’t spoil the ending, but the antagonist does have a compelling reason for wanting to scare the family off the property.

The Strange and Deadly Occurrence sets a tone of suspense and dread right from the opening scene by putting the viewer in the stalker’s voyeuristic point-of-view as the camera approaches the house and peers in a window.  I was engrossed throughout the movie’s 73-minute running time (about the average length of made-for-TV fare from the seventies) as I tried to guess the identity and motive of the stalker until the big revelations in the tale’s finale.  The Rhodes take a proactive approach to their situation (Michael acquires the ill-fated guard dog and also brings a gun home), unlike some characters in lesser similar stories.  Though the characters are a bit generic and bland, the plot kept me interested and wondering what would happen next.  The Strange and Deadly Occurrence is a decent little film that will entertain you for an hour and thirteen minutes.  Over three decades after it was produced, this project holds up with its timeless story of a nuclear family in jeopardy.  It’s worth seeking out.     

DEATH CRUISE

Penned by Jack B. Sowards (one of the credited writers on Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Kahn), 1974’s Death Cruise is more of a murder mystery than a flat-out horror tale.  Three couples (the Carters, the Radneys, and the Masons) meet on a cruise ship and realize that they all won their all-expenses-paid vacations from the same promotional company.  Jerry Carter goes missing one night, and the crew concludes that he fell overboard.  Elizabeth Mason dies seemingly from a fall down a flight of stairs, but the ship’s doctor concludes that she might have been murdered by blunt-force trauma to the head.  After David Mason finds Sylvia Carter dead with two bullet holes in her, no one doubts that there’s a killer on board.  The murderer seems to be targeting just the Carters, Radneys, and Masons, who may have crossed paths four years earlier in Atlanta.  Ultimately the ship’s doctor pieces together some clues, and justice prevails.  I won’t spoil the identity and motive of the person behind the deaths, but I will say that I perceived the final couple of twists as quite clever.

Death Cruise runs a mere 70 minutes, and it’s a fun ride with some enjoyable dialogue and a cool mystery at its core.  The plot takes a good fifteen minutes to get well and truly underway, but soon enough the filmmakers set up some interesting questions about just what’s really going on.  I was utterly blindsided by the ending, when the antagonist comes face-to-face with the ship’s doctor.  This project is yet another long-forgotten made-for-TV gem worth tracking down.

CRY PANIC

Another 1974 made-for-TV movie penned by Jack B. Sowards, Cry Panic follows a fellow named David Ryder (played by John Forsythe) who in the opening scene accidentally mows down a man with his car.  He walks to the nearest house, where a young blonde woman allows him to use the phone to summon the police.  When he returns to the accident scene, the authorities have already arrived, and the body is gone.  The townsfolk seem skeptical of his story.  Ryder stays at a motel while his car is repaired and soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy involving adultery, cover-ups, and lots of gunplay.

Cry Panic is more of a mystery than a straight horror story, though it does include one horrific moment (when the protagonist discovers a corpse hanging from a meat hook in a freezer).  The whole project runs about 73 minutes, and I was engrossed the whole time as more and more questions piled up about the nature of the conspiracy among the community members.  The ending (in which the testimony of a housekeeper saves the hero from a life behind bars) seemed a bit deus ex machina, but otherwise the tale is well-constructed and worth a look.