1975's THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN: BRILLIANT MADE-FOR-TV SPLATTER SHOCKER

 

 

 

Haunting, dreamy, crazy nightmare thrills. 

 

Continuing my Halloween look at made-for-TV shockers, there’s a reason I and several million other people my age and older remember so well The Legend of Lizzie Borden, the 1975 ABC made-for-TV splatter shocker: it’s flat-out brilliant.

 

By Paul Mavis

 

Directed by Paul Wendkos, written by William Bast, brilliantly edited by John A. Martinelli, and featuring Fionnula Flanagan, Ed Flanders, Katherine Helmond, Don Porter, Fritz Weaver, Bonnie Bartlett, John Beal, Helen Craig, Alan Hewitt, Gail Kobe, Hayden Rorke, Robert Symonds, The Legend of Lizzie Borden stars Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery in the performance of her career as the willful, sneering, drugged-out—and homicidal (?)—Lizzie Borden.

Hypnotically creepy, The Legend of Lizzie Borden is, simply, one of the best made-for-TV movies of the 1970s—and that’s saying something considering it came out during the “golden age” of that format. Perversion and psychological torment underpin the splatter killings, while Elizabeth Montgomery scares the sh*t out of you with a truly frightening, preternaturally effective performance. It’s a remarkable achievement in the MTV format, one that holds up even better after 42 years—The Legend of Lizzie Borden is must-viewing for fans of Montgomery and of the horror/suspense genre.

According to The Legend of Lizzie Borden, on a sweltering August 4th, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Adelaide Churchill (Amzie Strickland) notices Irish housekeeper Bridget Sullivan (Fionnula Flanagan) running from her employer’s home, frantically seeking help. As Churchill approaches the neighboring Borden home, 32-year-old spinster Lizzie Borden (Elizabeth Montgomery) rather distantly invites her in with a sedate, “Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come in…someone has killed Father.”

To Mrs. Churchill’s shock, she spies the mutilated corpse of wealthy Fall River businessman Andrew Borden (Fritz Weaver) laying on the downstairs couch, a victim of multiple hatchet wounds to the face and head. As Mrs. Churchill and visiting friend Alice Russell (Gail Kobe) try to cool down the spaced-out Lizzie, Bridget later discovers the hacked-up body of Lizzie’s hated step-mother, Abby Borden (Helen Craig), in an upstairs bedroom. 

Lizzie’s sister, Emma (Katherine Helmond), who was away for the week, returns, and is sickened by the sight of the corpses, which she has to identify. However, her first words to Lizzie indicate where her real fears lie: “Lizzie…did you kill Father?”

The murders startle the nation, particularly when the prime suspect—the strange, odd-acting Lizzie Borden—is jailed pending the sensationalized trial. Defended by the former governor of her state, George Robinson (Don Porter), and prosecuted by sharp, increasingly disdainful Hosea Knowlton (Ed Flanders), Lizzie stands trial, as she dreamily remembers the events as they actually happened on that horrific day…or, perhaps…as she would have liked them to have happened that day.

To put it plainly: The Legend of Lizzie Borden seriously warped my little 9-year-old mind when my parents let me stay up to watch it on a Monday school night, way back on February 10th, 1975 (no doubt they were lulled into complacency by Montgomery’s presence—after all: what harm could nose-twitching Samantha Stevens do?). Anyone in my age range or older who caught that particular ABC Monday Night Movie “world premiere event” will no doubt remember its then-rather shocking content and its powerful, hallucinatory production.

Indeed, a network MTV that briefly flashed nudity and foul language was unheard of at the time. That may be Montgomery seen topless in a side mirror shot, and, through the magic of DVD, you can now freeze and see a few frames of her naked breasts during the attacks, as well as clearly hear Flanagan mutter, “The bitch!” at one point (remarkable that those moments were allowed on a 1975 network broadcast). 

Add to that The Legend of Lizzie Borden‘s barely concealed themes of pedophilia, incest, drug addiction, and even necrophilia for god’s sake—all while America’s TV sweetheart, adorable witch Samantha Stevens Elizabeth Montgomery hacks away at her parents and single-handedly introduces the splatter/gore genre to television—and you have a made-for-TV movie that was destined to leave an indelible imprint on those-then more sheltered network viewers. 

It scared the daylights out of me when I saw it back then; luckily, The Legend of Lizzie Borden is even better than I remembered it: a fascinating, hypnotic exercise in psychological grotesquerie, married to a beautifully fractured bit of arty horror.

I’m certainly no expert on the Borden case, but having read a little bit about it, The Legend of Lizzie Borden sticks reasonably close to most of the facts of this still-unsolved crime. Some events and characters are eliminated or shuffled around, but that’s to be expected with any biopic. 

The script postulates that Lizzie committed the murders in the nude (she subsequently washed off the blood), thus eliminating any evidence on her clothes (from what I’ve read, though, it doesn’t sound like she or her clothes were checked for bloodstains by the cops, anyway). 

It’s a proposition ripe for TV exploitation when the beautiful Montgomery is the one doing all the hatchet-hacking.  And yes, there apparently really was a “European cut” that did include full frontal nudity of Montgomery when The Legend of Lizzie Borden was released in big-screen theaters over there…and no, we’re not getting that version any time soon here in the States (more about the movie’s runtime below).

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter at all if The Legend of Lizzie Borden is reasonably accurate to the historical record or complete fantasy—it’s a frequently dazzling work of art that conveys multiple “realities” that play far more “true” than the dry facts of this particular case. An intricate puzzle of exposition that’s expertly fractured and re-arranged to give a startlingly subjective impression of the crime and its (maybe) perpetrator, by the end of The Legend of Lizzie Borden, we’re not sure of anything, of what’s real or imaginary, and particularly: of the guilt or innocence of Lizzie…or, for that matter, the state of her mind.

Aside from what we see outside of Lizzie’s perspective, are her flashbacks of memory actual recollections of the crimes she committed? Are they morphine-induced hallucinations (we learn that from the day of the crime until the end of her trial she had been given hefty daily injections)? Or are they the wishful fantasies of an angry, possibly psychotic—but innocent in the end—daydreamer? 

 

Scripted by William Bast (Hammerhead, The Valley of the Gwangi, The Betsy), The Legend of Lizzie Borden refuses to reassure us on any of these scores; we’re left uneasily on our own to sort out if what we’re seeing is true or not. Completely unreliable narratively—and therefore, quite unnerving—The Legend of Lizzie Borden turns out to be far more “true” to the nature of this heinous, bizarre, now-unsolveable crime than a “straight” factual imagining could ever be.

This is true not just for the script, but for the stylized production, as well. Shot on what looks to be a typically small made-for-TV budget back then (probably no more than half-a-million), most of the action takes place in the dingy, cramped Borden house set and a courtroom mock-up, with just a few brief respites to the backlot. 

Cinematographer Robert B. Hauser (plenty of TV as well as big movies like The Odd Couple, A Man Called Horse, and Le Mans) uses lots of wide, distorting lenses and off-kilter camera angles to further compliment the dirty, grungy look of the Borden house, resulting in a dark, jaundiced look, with creepy shadows in every corner of most shots (when we get to the murder reenactments, Hauser goes hand-held—certainly not the norm at the time for network offerings—with disquieting, shaky results). 

The score by Billy Goldenberg, with scary shock cues alternating with a period-sounding Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-like plink, is highlighted by an eerie “La la la la la” chorus, putting the viewer “off” from the opening scene (an impressive, instantly worrying crane shot of the town tower clock, ominously chiming the time of the murders).

Director Paul Wendkos, an undervalued veteran of both big and little screen outings (everything from the original Gidget and The Mephisto Waltz to excellent MTVs like The Strangers in 7A and Susan Blakely’s Secrets) keeps the pace deliberately lethargic and drowsy, creating a half-asleep inevitability to the sequences that makes you think you’re watching someone’s dream (or nightmare) inexorably unfold. 

Punctuating this trance-like state is John A. Martinelli’s dazzling editing scheme, with its split-second shock cuts rupturing the already jumbled authenticity of the narrative, culminating in the murder reenactments where the action is slowed down and surrealistically repeated (that axe swinging over and over again), giving us a palpable sensory experience of sickening homicidal rage. 

It’s entirely appropriate that a highly unusual solo “Edited by” credit is given to Martinelli immediately at the movie’s final freeze-frame, on a split screen with Montgomery’s face, before the other credits roll (I can’t think of another made-for-TV movie that has so honored an editor—and rightfully so).

If The Legend of Lizzie Borden was only a stylized piece of surreal terror, it would be a noteworthy entry in the made-for-TV horror genre (I’d love to compare it to another M.I.A. MTV horror outing I remember with fondness: Spielberg’s Something Evil). From a marketing standpoint, ABC was correct in exploiting in their promotions the then-rather remarkable shots of Montgomery stalking around in the nude (as tempting as that prospect is…only a brief side shot can be deduced: your mind is doing the rest here). However, there’s far more going on beneath the surface than those prurient details…and all of it most unpleasant.

Scripter Bast postulates that Lizzie Borden was “special” (“psychologically disturbed” seems to be the final diagnosis) in a seriously screwed-up family on the brink of shattering apart. A manipulator (Lizzie’s step-mother knows her game) and petty thief with an angry streak a mile wide, Bast’s Lizzie has been shaped by an unnatural, destructive relationship with her father. 

As a child, she puts her favorite ring on her widowed father’s wedding ring finger, and kisses him full-on—a memory (or fantasy?) that’s immediately followed by another flashback where Lizzie, in a nightgown/wedding gown, sensuously kisses her dead father’s cold lips. Later, she sees her father, in this flashback an embalmer, resisting the urge to look at a naked corpse…before he begins to fondle it, as the camera pans away to young Lizzie’s shocked face (how that got by ABC’s Standards and Practices I’ll never know).

Sex and death are further linked in Lizzie’s mind when her father tries to calm Lizzie’s fears about her mother’s death, when he forces her to touch a dead body, remarking on how enjoyably cool the skin is…before the embalming tube comes loose, orgasmically spraying a screaming Lizzie with blood (do you know how wild all this was to a 9-year-old kid back in ’75?).  

The Legend of Lizzie Borden‘s all-but-open insinuations of perversion in the Borden house run throughout the movie, with Montgomery and Fritz Weaver exchanging heavy glances as they trade loaded lines: “Would you like to take a nap before dinner?” she suggestively asks her prone father, as he smiles knowingly at her, before a flashback where he exclaimed, “We were always so close…especially close,” to her pointed return stare. This quietly corrosive undertone of sexual deviancy runs throughout the movie, further wedding the narrative to the horror elements’ framework.

Perhaps most intriguing of all, The Legend of Lizzie Borden weaves an unmistakable feminist gender politics thread throughout it storyline, one that bears potent fruit. From small little asides like Lizzie flirting with the judge and the men in the jury box, to larger issues like male ownership, where Lizzie’s father angrily declares he owns everything in his house, even Lizzie’s pet pigeons (which to her horror, he slaughters with a hatchet), the notion that Lizzie’s obvious attempts to game her trial through “cheap, feminist sentimentality” as prosecutor Flanders sneers, is counterbalanced by the understanding that whatever Lizzie’s own psychological problems may be, the controlling patriarchal society of 1890s Fall River ain’t helping her head by a long shot.

In an unexpected scene between Flanders and the up-to-now unimportant character of his wife, Bonnie Bartlett, Flanders rages against Lizzie’s obvious tricks of feminine seduction to save her hide…as he impatiently snaps at his wife for the undercooked dinner she’s prepared him. Bartlett, her head down, replies that “you men” have no one to blame but yourselves if powerless women like Lizzie fall back on the only thing left to them: a male-imposed notion of femininity. 

Bartlett tries to elaborate by telling her husband he has no idea how heavy are the copious amounts of petticoats and woolen garments that women are required to wear (clearly implying other weights and burdens on women)…before we cut to a shot of Flanders looking exceedingly uncomfortable. 

It’s a great scene, particularly when you extrapolate out from it, and start thinking about Lizzie’s fury at the notion she might be cut out of her father’s will (and thus be rendered powerless, with no job, husband, or independent source of income), and then her murder scenes, where Lizzie is fully stripped—and liberated—letting down her long, sensuous hair (that, uh…seminal Victorian symbol of feminine sexuality) just for Daddy’s kill. It’s yet another fascinating subtext in what’s supposed to be just an enjoyably flashy TV suspenser.

Last but certainly not least is The Legend of Lizzie Borden’s talented cast—particularly Elizabeth Montgomery’s turn here, which is nothing short of breathtaking. The supporting cast, made up of old pros and veterans from countless TV and movie outings, are uniformly fine, with Ed Flanders, Fritz Weaver, and Fionnula Flanagan stand-outs (Weaver was seemingly born to play these kind of twisted, weirdo authoritarian figures). 

It’s Montgomery’s performance, though, that won’t leave you. Always looking off somewhere else, her dead eyes reacting as if she’s hearing some faint, far-away murmurings in her head, Montgomery, in an instant, can go from these dream-like reveries into flashes of truculent peevishness, or snappish impatience, or inappropriately-timed giggles (when she sees her step-mother’s hideously mutilated corpse), to psychotic anger—all with truly frightening gravity. 

Her strange, sometimes trance-like line readings, putting mountains of implied meanings into the simplest sentences, are miles away from the performance that most people know her from—Bewitched‘s Samantha Stevens—the role that eventually bored her to tears and drove her into parts like Lizzie Borden out of artistic self-survival.

Montgomery, a consummate television actress, knew that the tube—at least back then—was all about the close-up and the eyes, and she gauges her performance accordingly, staying relatively immobile during the first part of the movie, with her eyes—the same eyes with the same enigmatic stare of her equally complicated actor/father, Robert—glazing over with an odd, detached look, before a hard glint of wickedness inevitably comes over them. 

As The Legend of Lizzie Borden moves toward the “revelation” of the murder scenes, explaining what (might have) happened, director Wendkos accentuates Montgomery’s sensuous body in a most deliciously aberrant way, as we’re encouraged to get turned on by her undressing, followed by her nude kills (for the slowpokes in the audience, he has her slowly caress the hatchet’s phallic handle).

Lizzie has shaken off the heavy garments she’s been forced to wear in the sweltering heat, as she mercilessly descends on her perceived oppressors, the camera slowing her movements down greatly as she swings and swings, her body heaving in a gauzy, dreamy, grotesque parody of sexual fulfillment, as she spatters her body and face with blood (wild, man). 

Wendkos’ final shot is perfectly realized: Lizzie, immobilized again in expensive finery—perhaps Father’s riches didn’t free her after all?—stands stock-still after her sister asks her one last time, “Did you kill Father?”, while Wendkos’ camera slowly revolves around the silent Lizzie, as Montgomery stares inscrutably at Helmond. Lizzie has come full circle—a full (sexual) revolution, if you will…with absolutely no psychological resolution, or even cathartic relief. She is unsolved…like her murders.

 

 

 

 

 

A special note on the run time of this CBS DVD (which is OOP and worth a fortune now):  The back of the DVD case lists it at “approximately 100 minutes” (sounds like someone in Copy didn’t actually do a time check). I’ve seen several sources list the movie run time at 100 minutes (I wouldn’t trust an IMDB run time, though, as far as I could throw the internet), with the “European cut” being four minutes longer. 

And yet…I’ve seen no hard proof or even reliable sources for that latter time. Were four minutes added for the European release? No idea. But this particular version of The Legend of Lizzie Borden actually runs 96 minutes and change. Now, that would allow about six minutes of commercial air time per half-hour of a two-hour broadcast slot. That’s slightly longer than the five minutes you would assume was the norm in ’75 (and which would match the 100 minute runtime).

However…it wasn’t unusual for a minute or even 30 seconds of local ad time to be sold as well, per half hour, and most official run times don’t take into account network intros and bumpers and their own promos run during a particular broadcast, as well—particularly during “sweeps,” when such network promotion was increased. 

And The Legend of Lizzie Borden was shown during “sweeps” as a special movie event (nor do PAL conversion issues seem to be relevant here, either). So…is anything cut here? I don’t have a photographic memory, particularly after all those years, so…who knows? 

But nothing jumped out as “missing” from my memory when I watched this version—it all seemed there to me (unlike, say, the disc version of the MTV, Frankenstein: The True Story, which immediately smelled wrong in a few parts). 

PAUL MAVIS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED MOVIE AND TELEVISION HISTORIAN, A MEMBER OF THE ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE ESPIONAGE FILMOGRAPHY. Click to order.

Read more of my TV reviews here. Read my film reviews at our sister website, Movies & Drinks.

1973's ABC MTV DYING ROOM ONLY: RICHARD MATHESON GIVES CLORIS LEACHMAN A DEADLY VACATION

Continuing our look at some vintage made-for-TV spookums, ABC’s 1973 telemovie, Dying Room Only, directed by Philip Leacock, written by the master, Richard Matheson, and starring Cloris Leachman, Ned Beatty, Ross Martin, and Dabney Coleman (and released on disc through Warner Bros.' Archive Collection), is a model of efficient, effective suspense.

The set-up is simplicity itself. On the final day of their long vacation sans kids, Jean Mitchell (Cloris Leachman) and her husband Bob (Dabney Coleman) are tired, hot, and beginning to get on each other’s nerves. Riding in their sweet, sweet ’73 Chevy wagon over a melting two-lane blacktop in the empty Arizona desert, irritated Bob can’t leave it alone that they traveled 100 miles out of their way so Jean can take photographs for their child’s school project. 

Jean tries to placate him, but he won’t let the matter drop. Seeing a café and motel ahead, he asks if they should stop to eat, and she agrees…once they pass it. Jean gets him to laugh as they U-turn back.

They should have just kept right on driving down the road. Once inside the café, owner Jim Cutler (Ross Martin) and country boy punk Tom King (Ned Beatty), are none too pleasant to the couple. Jean doesn’t feel comfortable there, but Bob digs in his heels, matching Jim’s and Tom’s rudeness with his own brand of upper middle class disdain, going so far as to dismissively call them “jerks” within earshot. 

An increasingly concerned Jean asks again to leave, warning Bob they’re out in the middle of nowhere, but arrogant Bob isn’t having any of that; besides, he has to hit the can. There’s only one problem, though: he never exits the restroom. He disappears. Completely.  And no one is going to help an increasingly desperate Jean.

Certainly there were many excellent made-for-TV movies on the other networks back during the form’s heyday. However, there did seem to be something special about the titles that appeared on ABC’s weekly series, The ABC Movie of the Week—the first television series specifically dedicated to premiering original made-for-TV films each and every week of the season.

There was a buzz of excitement about the show that’s impossible for today’s younger TV viewers to understand (are there "younger TV viewers"?), certainly because of all the programming choices at their disposal. Plain and simple: we just didn’t have as much to watch back then on the three networks, so anything new or different-looking caused some excitement for regular TV watchers (and everybody was glued to their sets back then). 

Even the longer running times for these telemovies were a source of anticipation for viewers. If all you had were hour-long dramas and half-hour sitcoms on the schedules, a 90-minute or two-hour telemovie (with commercials, of course), was actually noteworthy, sad to say (it didn’t take much to please us back then).

As well, ABC’s production and lighting “house style” usually delivered a product that approximated quite well the look of big-screen features (you should have seen the look on my old man’s face when seven-year-old-I tried to make him understand that CBS shows looked “film-like smooth and glossy,” NBC’s looked “grainy and dark,” and ABC’s popped like comic books: “Call a head-shrinker for this kid!” as he shook his head, turning back to his paper). Dying Room Only looks like a cool little exploiter you’d catch in the middle of triple feature at the drive-in…only without the overt sex and violence.

Marrying a “what would you do?” suspenser to a “city folks at the mercy of country psychos” actioner (a subgenre that just reached its peak the year before with Deliverance, the Gone with the Wind of this kind of exploitation film), Dying Room Only managed to stay with people who saw it back then, although nobody seemed to remember or mention it in reviews when obvious—but excellent—rip-off Breakdown came out in 1997. 

Author and screenwriter extraordinaire, Richard Matheson, riding high with ABC after the twin MTV monster successes of Duel and The Night Stalker, had a busy year in ’73, including The Night Stalker sequel, The Night Strangler, and a big-screen feature, the equally well-regarded The Legend of Hell House. Cloris Leachman was swinging into a high point of her career, too, having won an Oscar two years before, while racking up an Emmy win for her current gig on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (and right before achieving screen immortality as Frau Brucar in Young Frankenstein). All signs pointed to Dying Room Only scoring a sizeable hit with the viewers and critics.

And while Dying Room Only doesn’t quite hit the highest levels of those previous Matheson TV classics, it is beautifully set-up and snazzily directed and performed, delivering its fair share of scares and chills. Setting the stage with the couple’s brief car ride before chancing onto the cafe and motel (hey…Vacancy ripped off this movie, too), Matheson effortlessly gets across the tension between this couple, all in a few, short, sparse exchanges (credit for this realism is also due to Coleman’s and Leachman’s expertise, whom, along with the rest of the excellent cast, do much with seemingly very little).

Much like Duel, where Matheson, with just one short scene on the telephone, nails down Dennis Weaver’s character as a spineless wimp (calling his wife and whining about not protecting her from a handsy partygoer), Dying Room Only sets up the almost-bickering couple in just a few minutes (one of the benefits of that tight 74-minute run time). Their pithy dialogue perfectly captures the petty bickering between a long-married couple who know just how far the anger will escalate if they give into the squabble. 

When pissed-off Bob says that he just wants her to admit she’s wrong, any married person out there understands exactly where this argument is going (typical for Matheson, he does a neat bit of witty foreshadowing, as well: with the argument on the cusp of turning nasty, Jean falls back on angry resignation, saying, “I’m sorry, Bob! Shoot me!” to which Bob responds with blasé contempt, “Load the gun, baby”).

Once inside the diner, Matheson and director Leacock turn up the increasingly uneasy tension by having Bob remain oblivious to the tell-tale warning signs all around him. Still ticked off about not getting his own way (in the car he was bitching about being five hours off their schedule), and ready to show his dominance over his wife’s objections, Bob can’t see that from the minute he and Jean walked into the café, something was wrong with that room. 

Jim the owner refuses to talk to them or extend even the simplest of courtesies, while Tom sizes them up in a manner that would make any couple say, “We’ll be leaving,” and turn right around and out the door. Both men exchange baleful glances at the couple while silently communicating something malevolent to each other (the editing by Bill Mosher is really first-class here: tight and worrisome), while Jean quietly asks to leave, saying specifically she doesn’t feel comfortable around these men in this isolated spot. What husband wouldn’t leave then?

Well...Bob, apparently, because not only does he refuse to listen to his wife (“Bob, I wouldn’t….” “You wouldn’t what?” he snaps disgustedly), he aggressively pushes the confrontation over Jim’s rude service, insisting on knowing what kind of beer and bread they have…as Jim looks as if he’s going to kill him. It’s a quietly nerve-racking, realistic scene (the best in the movie), and one that promises great things for Dying Room Only.

Leacock, long a veteran of polished, accomplished TV fare, having directed everything from Falcon Crest and Dynasty, to Family and The Waltons, doesn’t waste a shot here, approximating a sparse, lean visual style that relies on subjective reaction shots for quite a bit of the story development, with a visual design that falls somewhere between Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock and Hitchcock’s Psycho—an interesting coincidence, since the story as it’s worked out here, has elements that remind me of those two classics (the desert environment, the unfriendly locals hiding a secret, the dilapidated motel with someone snooping around it, looking for their loved one, danger lurking in a seemingly innocuous space: the bathroom).

Unfortunately, just as Coleman starts to get warmed up (nobody played a sneering, sarcastic dick better than Coleman), he drops out of the picture altogether, only to return for a brief moment at the end when Leachman rescues him (…or he rescues her). And that’s really the (minor) trouble with Dying Room Only. It’s tight, it’s comfortably exciting, and it delivers on the suspense, but motivation for the action disappears along with Coleman. 

We just never get a bead on Leachman, because her character is never fleshed out. She argues with her husband, he disappears, and she frantically searches for him. SPOILER! She rescues him at the end, but even that’s fudged because Bob has to tell her how to ward off Vi, the evil motel manager (Louise Latham, so good as the mother in Hitchcock’s Marnie, is terrific as usual in a too small role). 

Bob’s anger at her and at Jim and Tom sets the story in motion, but he doesn’t have to “pay” for putting Jean in her situation at the end (the way it’s shot, nervous Jim and Tom do not want the arriving couple to stay—it’s Bob who pushes them too far). No scene is shot showing them discussing what happened after they defeat Jim and Tony; Bob never has to say, “Sorry.” Jean’s simple motivation—a wife saving her husband—isn’t deepened by anything in her characterization. She suffers no internal conflicts over the situation, other than a growing desperation and terror.

As for the villains (SPOILER!) who apparently kidnap people through a second door in the café bathroom—Vacancy again—to rob and kill them, burying them out in the desert), we only hear from Tom, who chillingly states, “Killing don’t mean nothing. This is our territory out here. You folks come here. This is my place. You have something I want, I take it, see? I just take it. That’s all. I just take it.” It’s an intriguing statement, full of implications about Western and rural resentments directed towards “city folks."

But Matheson either ignores it or didn’t have time to expand any further on this menacing theme (apparently greed was the only motivation for Martin’s character; pity more wasn’t done with him, since he and Beatty are so good together). So with Coleman out of the picture, villains who have tantalizing but underdeveloped motivations to rob and kill, and with no acknowledgment of Bob’s role in getting the couple in trouble in the first place, Dying Room Only ultimately becomes a straight, more-than-competent action/suspenser…but no more.

This review was originally published as part of my series, Killing the Ladies of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Here are the other reviews in the series:
Night Terror
Payback

PAUL MAVIS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED MOVIE AND TELEVISION HISTORIAN, A MEMBER OF THE ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE ESPIONAGE FILMOGRAPHY. Click to order.

Read more of my TV reviews here. Read my film reviews at our sister website, Movies & Drinks.

ABC'S 1972 MTV THE EYES OF CHARLES SAND--FUN VIEWING FOR DARK OCTOBER NIGHTS

Flashy but familiar, bait-and-switch ABC Movie of the Week entry. 

Recently, I've been getting these posts in my FB feed from someone who seems to think she's the first person to discover and write about 1970s made-for-TV movies.  Her level of critical appraisal rarely runs higher than, "Oh wow...more funky 70s clothes!" so I just scroll on, but her incessant self-promotion (you know...the internet isn't going to fill that hole that you have at the center of you) did get me to dig out some Halloween themed MTVs, so let's look at some in the next few days, before the witching hour on October 31st.

Warner Bros.’ Archive Collection of rare, hard-to-find library and cult titles released The Eyes of Charles Sand a few years back, a television pilot that aired on ABC’s smash hit made-for-TV movie anthology series back in February, 1972. Written by Henry Farrell and Stanford Whitmore, directed by Reza Badiyi, and starring pros Peter Haskell, Joan Bennett, Barbara Rush, Sharon Farrell, Bradford Dillman, and Adam West, The Eyes of Charles Sand didn’t sell as series and it’s pretty clear why not.

However, for vintage TV lovers—particularly those fans like myself who can’t get enough of these glimpses back into the “Big Three’s” made-for-TV movie “golden age”—The Eyes of Charles Sand‘s dreamy, showy direction, solid performances (and those ripped-off music cues) outweigh the obvious, misguided storyline. Fun viewing for these dark October nights.

Successful L.A. businessman Charles Sand (Peter Haskell) awakes from a terrible nightmare: his Uncle Edward, eyes whited over, rises up from a coffin and points at him. Almost immediately, Charles’ Aunt Alexandria Sand (Joan Bennett) rings and demands that Charles come over to the Sand mansion at once. 

The reason? Charles’ Uncle Edward has just died. Disturbed by the nightmare, and the continuing visions of his dead uncle, Charles arrives and is informed by his aunt that as the sole surviving Sand, he has inherited the Sand family legacy, “The Sight,” an ability to see premonitions and future events—an ability he cannot control, or stop.

Charles is skeptical, but at Uncle Edward’s funeral, Charles “sees” a mummified corpse beckon to him at the Parkhurst mausoleum, and he begins to realize that something is terribly wrong. He consults his good friend, Dr. Paul Scott (Adam West), who advises seeing a fellow doctor, Sam Ballard (Ivor Francis), an expert in ESP. 

Charles fails Dr. Ballard’s test, yet the unwanted visions continue…as do frantic visits from the girl Charles saw at his uncle’s funeral: rich, beautiful, and stacked Emily Parkhurst (Sharon Farrell).

Deranged Emily, this close to being put in an institution by her rich, worried sister, Katharine Winslow (Barbara Rush) and Katharine’s husband, Jeffrey (Bradford Dillman), fervently believes that her brother Raymond is dead–an obsession discounted as delusion by Katharine and Jeffrey. 

Emily insists, though, that she somehow saw Ray killed, but Jeffrey assures her she only saw Raymond fight with Jeffrey, before passing out—an event Emily can’t recall. It’s up to Charles Sand to help Emily, before it’s too late for both of them….

If you grew up during the early 1970s, The ABC Movie of the Week series and its subsequent “spin-off” nights were a high point of that era’s “golden age” of made-for-TV movies. The other networks soon had their own MTV series, but The ABC Movie of the Week was the gold standard, broadcasting the majority of “classic” MTVs we associate with that era. 

With today’s ever-widening platform of media content—we’re going backwards if Netflix wants me to watch on my phone and not my 75-inch monitor—it’s becoming more and more difficult to remember how exciting it seemed back in the early 1970s to have a series like The ABC Movie of the Week air a brand new “world premiere” made-for-TV movie once a week on the dial (by 1973, ABC had three nights of new movies airing each week).

Prime time network TV viewing was very much a shared national pastime back then (with only three networks in the game, ABC, NBC, and CBS split up well over a hundred million viewers and more each night, with only piddling competition from local independent stations), and, hard to believe in today’s instantaneous download society, a seemingly crappy little one-shot, half-a-million-dollar-budgeted TV pilot could still feel like a “big event” for viewers back in 1972 (I still remember begging the old man to let me stay up to watch Satan’s School for Girls: “What’d you call it? What’d the kid call it? What’s it called? Satan’s School for Girls?…uh, yeah…go ahead...we can watch that,”).

Movies/pilots like The House That Would Not Die, Tribes, Brian’s Song, Duel, Say Goodbye, Maggie Cole, That Certain Summer, The Night Stalker, Women in Chains, Dying Room Only, Go Ask Alice, Isn’t It Shocking?, Satan’s School for Girls, The Girl Most Likely to…, The Six Million Dollar Man, Trapped, Bad Ronald, Death Cruise, Get Christie Love!, Heat Wave!, Hit Lady, Killdozer, Locusts, Mrs. Sundance, Pray for the Wildcats, The California Kid, The Day the Earth Moved, The Morning After, The Stranger Within, Winter Kill, Wonder Woman, Hey, I’m Alive, Satan’s Triangle, The Hatfields and the McCoys, The Legend of Lizzie Borden, and Trilogy of Terror—just to name a very few—became legendary memories for huge swaths of the TV-watching public during that early part of the decade. 

By the time The Eyes of Charles Sand premiered on Tuesday, February 29th, 1972, The ABC Movie of the Week, which had debuted in 1969, was the fifth most watched series on television, with even relatively minor entries like The Eyes of Charles Sand pulling in ratings numbers that would pole ax today’s TV programmers.

Now…the exact reasons why a largely forgotten movie pilot like The Eyes of Charles Sand wasn’t picked up for a series order are most likely lost to the Charles Sands of time. Maybe its premise was too similar to ABC’s mid-season replacement, Gary Collins’ fun The Sixth Sense, which had debuted just a month before The Eyes of Charles Sand aired? 

Maybe there was bad blood between the network and the producers once Oscar-winning composer Henry Mancini successfully sued everyone in sight when he discovered, quite by accident, that major cues from his big-screen Wait Until Dark score were lifted for The Eyes of Charles Sand without his permission, during an industry-wide music strike (listen carefully and you’ll also hear an instantly recognizable cue from Ron Grainer’s haunting The Omega Man score…didn’t anybody call up Ron for some of that lawsuit gravy?)? 

Maybe a network focus group didn’t respond to the pilot with the appropriate enthusiasm the network was looking for? Or was it simply a matter of ratings? That would be the best guest: ratings, despite b.s. to the contrary from high minded-sounding executives, are the only important factor in the TV biz.

The Eyes of Charles Sand certainly seems like it’s going to be a winner as it starts to unfold. Highly respected TV director Reza Badiyi (along with countless episodic TV outings, Badiyi designed the opening credit sequences for Hawaii Five-O, Get Smart, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show) grabs the viewer with an inexpensive but smartly designed little shocker opening, as Peter Haskell dreams about his dead uncle’s appropriately stylized funeral. 

Badiyi gives The Eyes of Charles Sand a dreamy, pensive pace (aided by Ben Colman’s gauzy, hazy cinematography, also used in Dan Curtis’ The Norliss Tapes), a measured tempo that not only creates a strange, waking nightmare quality for The Eyes of Charles Sand…but that also helps string out a fairly thin script.

Several jolting shock cuts and zooms ratchet up the scares, and as usual with these ABC MTVs, the production values, while shot on the cheap, still wind up looking first-rate. As for the cast, it’s excellent. Peter Haskell, always a welcome face when I was growing up on 70s TV, admittedly isn’t asked to do much here, but his quizzical, craggy features and quiet, serious demeanor are a good match for the character (Adam West has even less to do in a very small role). 

Joan Bennett, perfect for the mysterious, regal Sand matriarch, may have been cast because of her just-ended stint on ABC’s cult gothic horror soap, Dark Shadows, while Bradford Dillman, making his usual solid impression, lashes out quite nicely with his patented brand of cynical, smarmy villainy. 

It’s true that I’ve never had very much good to say about Barbara Rush, but credit where credit is due: she’s flat-out terrific here, giving a frenzied, unhinged turn at the movie’s climax that’s memorable. Equally fine is the beautiful Sharon Farrell, an under-utilized actress who should have had a bigger career; she’s not afraid to go off the deep end here, playing full-out the part of a crazed woman driven mad by horrific visions.

So what’s the (minor) problem with The Eyes of Charles Sand? Well…just read that synopsis again. Aaaaaaaaaand…you just figured out the mystery, didn’t you? That’s the biggest problem with The Eyes of Charles Sand: the mystery plot, which is almost ridiculously easy to spot the minute we’re introduced to Dillman and Rush. 

It’s given far too much emphasis here while the more intriguing occult angle is inexplicably pushed into the background. The set-up from writer Henry Farrell (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, What’s the Matter With Helen?) and Stanford Whitmore (Hammersmith Is Out, Baby Blue Marine, The Dark) sounds good: a wealthy young man has inherited second sight, and must then aid the various strangers he “sees” who are in danger.

However, as executed here, that promising premise is hollowed out by the fact that the “eyes of Charles Sand” have almost nothing to do with the actual plot. Charles really isn’t an active part of the plot at all. He has visions of Farrell, sure…but she comes to him, over and over again. He very slowly starts to put the mystery’s pieces together…but more time is spent on Farrell’s histrionics than in Haskell first coming to turns and then utilizing “The Sight.” 

In the fine, energetic slasher finale, SPOILER ALERT!, as Rush goes insane trying to stab and bash everyone to death (she’s really quite believably mad here), director Badiyi cuts away from Haskell for long, long stretches, to the point where we forget he’s wandering around the mansion, trying in vain to help someone.

In the end, what should be the central crux of The Eyes of Charles Sand–Sand’s family legacy, “The Sight”—really plays very little (if any) part in the plot, other than providing a few pleasant shock effects with his visions. What should have been predominantly an exercise in the supernatural, unfortunately pans out to be a stylish, reasonably enjoyable—but perhaps too predictable—stab at murder mystery. Still, these old network MTVs are like catnip to vintage television lovers, so The Eyes of Charles Sand is still recommended viewing for a rainy Saturday afternoon.

PAUL MAVIS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED MOVIE AND TELEVISION HISTORIAN, A MEMBER OF THE ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE ESPIONAGE FILMOGRAPHY. Click to order.

Read more of my TV reviews here. Read my film reviews at our sister website, Movies & Drinks.

HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR 80S UK TV ANTHOLOGY IS JUST THE TICKET THIS HALLOWEEN

The Complete Hammer House of Horror is perfect Halloween viewing for anyone interested in 80s UK horror and the Hammer Films studio: the scripts are tight, the direction nimble, and the performances spot-on…with plenty of gore and slight nudity to keep you tuned in.

Synapse Films’ The Complete Hammer House of Horror release (five discs, thirteen episodes) features famous Hammer alumni from both in front of and behind the cameras (including Hammer horror icon Peter Cushing and Denholm Elliott, and directors Alan Gibson and Peter Sasdy among others). A TV anthology that should be better known here in the States, Hammer House of Horror‘s scary, gory, sometimes naughty, sometimes British black humor-amusing episodes are necessary viewing for the horror enthusiast. A region-free Blu-ray version was released in 2020.

By 1979, the Hammer Films studio was in big trouble. Once the world-leader in big-screen horror during the late 50s and early 60s, it had by the late 70s fallen by the wayside in terms of international box office market share. Changing audience tastes (Hammer’s trademark Gothic chiller was considered passé at this point); its own failed experiments in tweaking its spent formulas (modernizing its tried-and-true Dracula franchise found little favor); and splurging on bigger-budgeted suspensers (its expensive 1979 Hitchcock remake, The Lady Vanishes, with, um…Elliott Gould and Cybil Shepherd, was a notorious, ruinous flop), eventually put the studio into receivership.

Former Hammer executive Roy Skeggs, along with Brian Lawrence, both of whom had quit Hammer in the mid-70s to start their own production company, Cinema Arts, only to return again in ’79, developed Hammer House of Horror for television as an inexpensive way to keep the brand afloat. In the best Hammer tradition―which was improvise on a shoestring budget―Skeggs moved Hammer Films to Buckinghamshire, locating the offices and studio facilities at Hapden manor house (shades of Down Place/Bray Studios), where much of Hammer House of Horror was shot.

Co-produced with Skeggs’ Cinema Arts and Sir Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment (which was also in deep trouble by 1980 with twin big-screen mega-flops, Can’t Stop the Music and Raise the Titanic! playing to empty houses), Hammer House of Horror drew good reviews and ratings when it aired first in the U.K. and later in international syndication (in the U.S., two episodes would be featured on “double bill” VHS releases hosted by Elvira, as well).

Its success momentarily buoyed Hammer Films, leading to a second TV anthology foray in 1984, Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (known here in the States as Fox Mystery Theater), before the studio effectively closed up shop for the next two decades.

Like most viewers from my generation, I grew up on big-screen Hammer horror movies popping up on little-screen Saturday afternoon TV and late, late movie shows, where their combination of “foreign” allure, eye-popping Technicolor, and the for-the-times heavier-than-usual gore and sex quotients, made them “must see” titles anytime they surfaced in the TV Guide. There’s a good chance that most of the readers catching this review are well-versed in the Hammer style, anyway; so a rundown of the studio’s aesthetics isn’t really necessary here.

Suffice it to say: R-rated gore and PG-rated nudity are present in Hammer House of Horror as predictable mile-markers from the studio, while Hammer’s often delightfully overblown, melodramatic approach to horror is on full display in many of these outings. While I wouldn’t consider myself in any way an “expert” on the studio (so 86 the emails and FB posts, okay?), I’m a big fan; I met this collection with a high degree of anticipation…and to make it short and sweet, it didn’t let me down. Let’s look very briefly at the episodes here, which are arranged on the discs according to original U.K. air dates.

First up is Witching Time (which premiered in April, 1980, as a teaser “pilot” for the upcoming fall episodes), scripted by Hammer House of Horror‘s story editor Anthony Read (TV’s Doctor Who) and directed by Don Leaver. Jon Finch (Frenzy) is a preoccupied film composer who, upon suspecting his wife Prunella Gee’s infidelity, is visited at his isolated farm by The Rocky Horror Picture Show‘s Patricia Quinn…who happens to be a horny, 17th century witch. 

A solid start to the series, Witching Time benefits from always-good Finch’s tortured performance…as well as Hammer keeping up its 70s tradition of sex-soaked mayhem by having Quinn frequently topless and sexy Gee running around in skin-tight panties and bra (Leaver’s blocking at the fiery finale, however, is a bit wonky, diluting the pay-off).

Next, The Thirteenth Reunion, scripted by The Horror of Frankenstein‘s Jeremy Burnham and directed by Peter Sasdy (the terrific Hammer outings Taste the Blood of Dracula and Countess Dracula), has Julia Foster as an investigative reporter stumbling onto strange doings connected with a “Think Thin” weight loss clinic…where people wind up dead and dismembered. 

A suitably gory little exercise that still comes up short (opens with a beheading, off-camera, and closes with the same), The Thirteenth Reunion runs behind most viewers who can readily figure out the “twist” ending (Foster’s performance is too patently “plucky” to help, either). Fun to see familiar faces Norman Bird and George Innes as the chop-happy mortuary workers, though.

Rude Awakening, one of the series’ best episodes, directed much better by Sasdy again, from a script by U.K. TV’s Dracula, Gerald Savory, finds Denholm Elliott caught in an endlessly recycling waking nightmare of being married to snoring Pat Haywood, lusting after his luscious secretary Lucy Gutteridge, and being accused of murdering Haywood inbetween his own hangings and fatal brain operations. 

A beautifully-sculpted entry, with Sasdy expertly ratcheting up the tension to a suitably nerve-wracking pitch, Rude Awakening is also frequently hilarious, with a subtly perverse undertone (check out gorgeous Gutteridge’s stereotypical fantasy outfits) and a turn by Elliott that’s a comedic gem.

Growing Pains, however, is one of the series’ weakest entries. Matthew Blakstad, of Young Sherlock Holmes (fame?), is a strangely self-possessed little boy adopted by scientist Gary Bond and government diplomat Barbara Kellerman, after their own boy dies ingesting some of Bond’s protein-rich plant food. Of course, Blakstad isn’t what he seems to be, while the ghost of the dead son shows up to teach everyone a lesson. 

What, exactly, that lesson is, is anyone’s guess in this pseudo-“meaningful” episode that somehow tries vainly to drag in world poverty, starving African nations, and workaholic guilt into a standard and fairly draggy ghost story (about the only thing worth mentioning are the gore scenes, including maggot-covered steaks and a whole bunch of lab rabbits torn to bloody bits).

In The House That Bled to Death, Nicholas Ball and Rachel Davies move into a council flat that has a nasty pedigree: the previous owner had freaked out and poisoned and butchered his wife. This isn’t good news for them or their young daughter, Emma Ridley, or especially Ridley’s cat, “Timmy,” who winds up with his neck slashed open on a mysteriously broken window. Before you can say “Amityville Horror,” the young family is terrorized by the haunted house. 

Directed for maximum scares by Tom Clegg, The House That Bled to Death has a nasty, claustrophobic feel to its cramped, grotty interiors, with a bloody sensibility that’s highlighted by a wonderfully over-the-top moment: a children’s birthday party absolutely drenched in blood from a haunted overhead water pipe. A nice double-twist ending settles the score for all the guilty involved―a good example of Hammer House of Horror‘s nicely fatalistic “nobody gets out alive” strategy.

In the well-done but familiar Charlie Boy, directed by Robert Young (Hammer’s Vampire Circus), Leigh Lawson inherits an African fetish doll and soon everyone’s dropping like flies. With a storyline this recognizable, you had better come up with some entertaining (if not original) murders, and Charlie Boy’s are pretty good, from falling on a thresher, to a crossbow to the stomach, to a nicely-blocked finale where someone thinks they’re okay…until they fall on a hatchet.

In what many fans apparently consider the series’ best episode (I think it’s a toss-up with the final two outings…), horror icon Peter Cushing shows up in The Silent Scream. Newly-sprung convict Brian Cox feels it’s necessary to go thank stranger Cushing who used to visit him in prison with gifts of cash. Cushing, who runs a tatty little pet shop, has something really interesting to show Cox in the back: a hidden laboratory filled with predatory beasts that are kept in their open cages by high-voltage electricity. When Cushing asks Cox to watch the pets for the weekend, Cox can’t resist cracking open Cushing’s safe, and that’s when the fun begins…as Cox drops down into his very own cage…. 

A tight, concise thriller that drives the viewer crazy with anxiety, The Silent Scream has all kinds of intriguing sub-themes winding through it for a such a short little exercise (WWII concentration camps, failed marriages, learned nature of criminality), with a final final twist ending you won’t see coming. A real winner.

Children of the Full Moon, however, is well-intentioned but pretty standard stuff, with a title that should just about wreck any suspense it might have had: stranded couple Christopher Cazenove and sexy Celia Gregory wind up at former bombshell Diana Dors’ backwoods house…with all her little werewolves children. It’s always good to see Robert Urquhart (another Hammer alum), but this story is too predictable to elicit any scares.

In Carpathian Eagle, copper Anthony Valentine investigates a series of Ripper-like murders where the male victims have their hearts cut out during sex. Help in the form of an introduction to suspect Sian Phillips comes from writer Suzanne Danielle. 

A twisty little murder mystery you’ll probably figure out before it’s over, Carpathian Eagle benefits mightily from its excellent cast; Valentine really holds it together, while Phillips is a treat as a weary exile (look for Pierce Brosnan in a small bit…although why you’d want to do that is anybody’s guess). Too bad almost all the violence is out of camera range….

Guardian of the Abyss, on the other hand, feels like an old-timey Hammer exercise: head devil worshipper John Carson (Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter) is hot on the heels of would-be sacrifice Rosalyn Landor, but he has to get by antiques dealer Ray Lonnen, who also has a valuable scrying glass in his possession―a portal to the underworld. 

Sure it’s a well-trodden path here…but from any collection of episodes from the house of Hammer, you’d expect at least one to deal with devil worshipers, and Guardian of the Abyss, directed by old pro Don Sharp (Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire, Rasputin, the Mad Monk), delivers the goods here.

Visitor from the Grave, directed by Sasdy from Hammer vet scripter Anthony Hinds story, is no less predictable (and no less entertaining), with gorgeous nutcase Kathryn Leigh Scott (of Dark Shadows fame) being gaslighted by shady husband Simon MacCorkindale (perfectly cast here). Blake’s 7 fans will no doubt enjoy Gareth Thomas here in a dual role, while Scott, a true beauty who plays “fragile” very well, runs around in lingerie for half the show―thank you very much, Hammer House of Horror.

Finally, Hammer House of Horror winds down with two superlative entries: The Two Faces of Evil and The Mark of Satan. In the first, Gary Raymond fights off a murderous, raincoated hitchhiker who attacks him, crashing his car. His wife, Anna Calder-Marshall, wakes up in a hospital to find her husband critically injured and the hitchhiker supposedly dead…or is he? 

As disc narrator Shane M. Dallmann (who intros all the episodes here) correctly states, detractors of The Two Faces of Evil who say it doesn’t make sense, obviously never had a nightmare before. This episode’s surreal, waking terror atmosphere is expertly crafted by director Alan Gibson (Hammer’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula, Dracula A.D. 1972), utilizing odd angles and off-kilter blocking to achieve a genuinely scary effort.

The Mark of Satan, directed by Don Leaver and starring Peter McEnery finds McEnery, a hospital morgue attendant, rapidly losing his mind as he starts to make paranoid connections between everything and the number “9.” Brilliantly plotted, with some rather disturbing shots from Leaver (head and shoulders above his earlier effort for Hammer House of Horror, Witching Time), The Mark of Satan proved too grisly and disturbing for U.S. distributors back in 1980: it was never broadcast here. 

And while there are some nasty shocks (McEnery stabbing his mother is truly off-putting), some funny little bits unexpectedly pop up (McEnery trying to unclog the autopsy table’s sink) amid the frightening, ultimately depressing machinations (McEnery scores the series’ best performance: he’s remarkable). A terrific end to the series; it’s just too bad Hammer House of Horror had to end so soon.

PAUL MAVIS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED MOVIE AND TELEVISION HISTORIAN, A MEMBER OF THE ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY, AND THE AUTHOR OF THE ESPIONAGE FILMOGRAPHY. Click to order.

Read more of my TV reviews here. Read my movie reviews at our sister website, Movies & Drinks.