My acting career pretty much begins with an appearance as Sergeant-Major Morris in The Monkey’s Paw and ends with my role as Dr. Green from this story. No, I was not in the movie. I was in a stage play version and the kiss that gave me a fatal heart attack was the first kiss I ever had from a non-family member girl. She said I tasted like a chili dog. A much cuter blonde girl offered to give me lessons after the play (and some mints).

Inspired by The Second Face, this was written by Joan Rivers and Agnes Gallin It was directed by Lee Phillips, who starred in Peyton Place and also made The Stranger Within and The Spell. It was the ABC Movie of the Week, first airing on November 6, 1973.

It’s also Stockard Channing’s first movie and she’s Miriam Knight, an intelligent young lady who is overlooked because of, well, her looks. Her roommate grows jealous when Miriam gets the lead in a stage play, so she sneak attacks her with roses. Miriam’s allergies send her running from the stage and into an accident which changes her looks and life forever.

Once the bandages come off her face, she’s a totally new girl. One who is now willing to do whatever it takes to get revenge — murderous revenge — on everyone who has ever wronged her.

The Girl Most Likely To… has a great cast, such as Ed Asner, Jim Backus, Joe Flynn from McHale’s Navy, Chuck McCann (a voice of a ton of animated characters), comedy magician Carl Ballantine, Fred Grandy from The Love Boat, CHiPs star Larry Wilcox, future director Dennis Dugan (who, before directing a LOT of Adam Sandler movies, such as Just Go with It, acted in films, such as 1980’s The Howling) and the man who would be Captain America and Yor Hunter from the Future, Reb Brown.

This is a comedy, but man, it’s a really dark one. How was my school allowed to put this play on?

Man, I’m on a Kathleen Beller made-for-TV kinda sorta giallo kick. I’m also a huge fan of Ouija-board-themed movies, even if I refuse to ever have a spirit board in my house. Combine the two and have Jack Bender (The Midnight Hour, Child’s Play 3, multiple episodes of Lost and Game of Thrones) and I’m all over it.

Beller plays Laura Daniels, a young girl in love with lawyer Michael Krasnick. When she gets home from a date with him, she watches a black-gloved and masked figure strangle her roommate Cindy Matthews (Sherri Stoner from Reform School Girls!), who had become obsessed by speaking to the ghost of David, who was murdered in the same apartment in 1978.

When the cops show up, all of the evidence — and Cindy’s body — are gone. The cops — hey there Dennis Franz and Kurtwood Smith — don’t believe Laura, who is being trailed by the killer everywhere she goes.

Laura decides to use the Ouija board and also comes in contact with Mark, who claims to have been the one who has murdered Cindy and announces that he is going to kill her next.

Oh man — this is getting good.

Seriously, even a swim in a pool leads to the killer attacking again, but a doctor thinks that it’s all in Laura’s head. And when he examines her brain, he discovers that she’s received electroshock therapy in the past and may be dealing with either extreme depression or schizophrenia. Her boyfriend can understand all that, but when he learns that the majority of her life story has been taken from a series of books by an author named Laura Brooks.

Actually, I really don’t want to spoil this movie for you because the plot gets totally wild and just keeps getting wilder. It’s has so much in common with the side of the giallo genre where a woman loses her mind and descends into a nightmarish odyssey of lost memory and revelation.

It was written by William Bleich, who wrote another great movie in this lost woman genre, The Hearse, as well as From the Dead of Night, The Gladiator, A Smoky Mountain Christmas and Danger Island. Nearly all of those movies are going to end up on our site.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Heather Locklear was a big deal. Like, the biggest. When I was a kid, I didn’t have a poster of her next to my bed, but my grandfather did. In fact, he framed it with a rustic wooden frame and mounted it dead center of the wall, as if he was challenging my grandmother, saying, “This is what you should look like.”

The first part of this movie teases that this is going to be a giallo-esque TV movie, with Locklear as Andrea McKnight, an office drone that everyone loves and who never leaves her apartment. Then, the ex she’s run from for years — Terrence Knox, way better than this movie deserves — starts stalking her again, up until the point that to get her, he starts blowing up entire buildings up real good.

Seriously, what a plan. Can you imagine?

“How did you and mom meet, dad?”

“Well, he blew up everyone I loved and where I worked and then I saw that he was finally serious about settling down.”

Who can save the day? How about Gerald McRaney?

Robert Michael Lewis made many — and many better — made-for-TV movies. I would recommend The Astronaut and perhaps one of the best films ever made expressly for TV, Pray for the Wildcats. Writer William Wood wrote the much better regarded Haunts of the Very Rich, as well as Victims and Death Car on the Freeway.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ripped from the headlines TV movies are my jam. In the world before the internet and the 24/7 news cycle, we had to wait for these movies to get the real story.

This is the tale of Marla Hanson (Cheryl Pollak), a model who moves to the big evil town of New York City but finds who she thinks is a nice guy to help her out. He even puts her up in an apartment and gives her tips to get ahead in modeling. But by the end, he’s hiring thugs to slice her face apart. It gets worse, because she has to defend herself in court despite not being the one on trial.

This was written and directed by John Grey, who created Ghost Whisperer. It’s not the best TV movie you’ve ever seen, but it does get pretty brutal in parts.

The real story of Hanson is shown here though. After resisting the attentions of her landlord Steve Roth, he hired two friends named Steven Bowman and Darren Norman to attack her. They left her with cuts that required a hundred stitches in her face, ruining her modeling career.

Hanson was subjected to brutal cross-examination by Bowman’s defense attorney Alton H. Maddox who was part of several high-profile civil rights cases in the 1980s. He claimed that Hanson had identified Bowman and Norman because she was racist. They got the maximum sentence and the judge told Hanson that he was incensed at the way the criminal justice system treated her.

Hanson would later write two Abel Ferrara films, the short Love on the Train and The Blackout.

You can watch this on YouTube.

You know, I never watched soap operas, but Susan Lucci knew how to make a TV movie. Yeah, she may have been nominated for an Emmy every year for All My Children, but she made some awesome stuff like Invitation to Hell, Haunted by Her Past and Lady Mobster.

Yet this tale of Lucci’s Italian shopgirl falling for David Soul and watching him get gunned down on her wedding day before following his past life has a twist that I feel that only I could appreciate. It was made in Pittsburgh!

It also has Reginald VelJohnson as a boxer who teaches Lucci how to take care of herself, Finola Hughes as an old flame of Soul’s and Tony Todd. Tony Todd in a TV movie!

Director James Goldstein also made Rollercoaster, Jigsaw and Cry Panic. Either fate has made me watch these movies for the reason that they are connected by this director or I just watch way too many movies. Perhaps both.

This also has Ronald V. Garcia as cinematographer. He was the director of The Toy Box and shot Fire Walk with Me.

This was written by soap scribe Claire Labine and Jack Laird, the man who wrote all the silly parts of Night Gallery. But yeah — at one point, Lucci was in the City of Champions, making a movie where she undergoes the journey of introspection that comes from having one’s life violently destroyed before one’s eyes. I can only imagine that she went to Images to dance after filming wrapped.

I’ve gone on and on about how when it comes to TV movies, John Llewellyn Moxey is the director to watch.

Working from a script by Lewis John Carlino (The Mechanic, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) and Sandor Stern (The Amityville Horror, Pin), Moxley puts together a compelling science fiction film here, with Steven Anders (Peter Graves) and his two children Deborah (Kathleen Quinlan) and David emerging from a cave to learn that a solar flare has turned most of humanity into dust. Those that survive often grow sick and after they die, turn into the same powdery remains.

The solar flares that cause the flash are also driving dogs and humanity insane — Day of the Animals was correct! — and drive the family home to Malibu to try and find the kids’ mother.

This is one downbeat film –1974 was a dark time — and it was actually the pilot for a series that may have taken things down an even more brutal path.

I mean, Peter Graves fights a house cat in this. If that doesn’t make you want to watch it, you really have no hope.

Originally airing on February 24 and March 3, 1991, this is based on the book by Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson. It’s all about a double murder on Palmyra Atol in which Duane “Buck” Walker (Hart Bochner, Die Hard) was found guilty and his girlfriend Stephanie Stearns (Rachel Ward) — defended by Bugliosi and Leonard Weinglass — was found innocent.

You know why I watched this? Because Tommy Lee Wallace directed it.

That’s right, the same man who made the TV version of It. The director of Halloween III and Fright Night 2. The writer of Amityville II: The Possession!

I’m no fan of Bugliosi — get me to go off some time about how he he lost a court case to the Process Church — but if you’re a big time lawyer and writer, you can get Richard Crenna to play you in a movie. Oh yeah! And getting Susan Blakely to play your wife!

Anyways, our protagonists end up taking a barely seaworthy ship out and about before getting lost and ended up living off the charity of the Mac and Muff Graham (James Brolin and Deidre Hall). Within a few months, they’ve stolen their ship and quite possibly left them for dead. That said, only a skull that may have been Mac’s has even been recovered.

You know, I found myself watching this because of Wallace’s name in the credits, but his talent as a director kept me with it for both parts.

John Llewellyn Moxey will never let you down. The man knew how to make TV movies filled with menace and dread. Take a look at his record of success — The House That Would Not Die, The Last Child, A Taste of Evil, The Night Stalker, Home for the Holidays, Where Have All the People Gone?, Nightmare In Badham County, Killjoy, Desire the Vampire — and see a group full of proven suspense winners.

Really, Moxley is making a giallo here. Stick with me.

First, just take a look at the VHS cover art for how this was sold overseas* as Soon, Amy, Soon.

Now let me let you in on the plot: After leaving class, 20-year-old art student named Amy Manning (Kathleen Beller, who is nearly the Edwige Fenech of 70s and 80s TV movies about young girls in trouble with roles in this, Are You in the House Alone? and Deadly Messages; she’s also married to Thomas Dolby, a fact that amuses me beyond belief) gets in her car and is menaced by a masked, leather-gloved and knife-wielding maniac who whispers, “Soon, Amy. Soon.”

This is not the first time this has happened and the cops refuse to help her any longer. Only her stepmother Adele (Mariette Hartley) believes her and urges her to visit psychiatrist Dr. Letterman (Keir Dullea, who knows a thing or two about American — err, Canadian — giallo-esque films thanks to Black Christmas).

Could Amy’s issues be daddy-related? After all, he drowned on a trip she was supposed to go on, leaving her in the care of her stepmother. Or is there really a killer coming after her? After all, he keeps showing up every time she’s alone. And he’s sent her flowers. Or maybe she ordered them herself!

This film understands that not all giallo is offing gorgeous female characters, but also the gaslighting that comes with driving the central character to explore her psychosis. And just how does that hunky new man (Gary Graham from the TV version of Alien Nation) fit in?

Originally airing on March 4, 1981 on CBS, this is a film that has so many twists and turns, even switching the main character partway through the film and amping up the psychological trauma. It benefits from a tight script by Jimmy Sangster, who also wrote The Legacy; Scream, Pretty Peggy; Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?; and tons of stuff for Hammer including Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Revenge of Frankenstein; The Mummy and more. He also wrote one of the best non-Bond Eurospy films, Deadlier than the Male.

This is the kind of movie that makes me realize why I love TV movies. A quick plot, some murky darkness, great performances and an amazing last scene reveal that made me literally leap from my seat. You gotta check this on out.

*It was released in Brazil as The Eternal Escape, as Nightmare in France, Without Escape in Spain and Shadow of Evil in Germany.

You can watch this on YouTube.