Originally airing on May 7, 1980, on CBS, The Memory of Eva Ryker was directed by Walter Grauman (The Disembodied, Crowhaven Farm), written by Laurence Heath (who wrote Stunts Unlimited, a TV movie I’ve been searching for forever) — based on the book of the same title by Donald Stanwood — and produced by Irwin Allen, so you know it has a disaster in it. Namely, the Titanic. Well, at least in the original book. Here, it’s an unnamed ship during World War II. Thirty years after the ship sinks, Claire Ryker (Natalie Wood) starts to look into her mother Eva’s (almost Wood) death, which triggers her to unlock memories that have been repressed.

Her father (Ralph Bellamy) is also obsessed with the wreck of this ship due to Nazi subs and wonders how he lost his wife. He hires a writer, Norman Hall (Robert Foxworth), to investigate, and people start to die as he gets closer to what really happened. So it’s at once a disaster movie, a Giallo and even a bit of melodrama, all well told with a competent story that is now lost to many as it doesn’t exist outside of streaming sites in foreign countries.

This film’s cast includes Roddy McDowall, Mel Ferrer, Peter Graves, Morgan Fairchild and Bradford Dillman as the villain behind all of this. Best of all, there’s still a Geocities-era website for this movie that a fan made and I miss pages full of GIFs that would take so long to load. Do you kids think the internet crawls now? Have you waited ten minutes for a Real Player file of a TV movie to buffer?

So much of this is filmed on the Queen Mary, which I love, as Murder, She Wrote also did that. Plus, for 80s TV fans, Tanya Crowe, who was Olivia Cunningham on Knot’s Landing and Marylee in Dark Night of the Scarecrow, plays Eva when she was a child.

Sadly, for all the times this movie puts Natalie Wood in drowning danger, so did real life. She’d die a year later, and that could have been a Giallo, right?