Possibly inspired by the kidnapping of Barbara Jane Mackle, The Candy Snatchers gets its name because Eddy (Vince Martorano), Jessie (Tiffany Bolling) and Alan (Brad Davis) have kidnapped a young girl named Candy (Susan Sennett) from her Catholic school. They keep her buried alive — with a pipe for air — in a field somewhere in California. Only the autistic Sean Newton (Christopher Trueblood) knows that she’s there, but he’s a little kid who can barely communicate, trapped with parents — Dudley (Jerry Butts) and Audrey (Bonnie Boland) — who seemingly hate him.

Candy will inherit $2 million from her late father when she turns 21. But if she dies before that, her stepfather, Avery (Ben Piazza), gets half, and his wife, Katherine (Dolores Dorn), receives the other. So he doesn’t even tell her that Candy is gone.

Even when presented with a severed ear — the criminals go to a morgue and cut one off a dead body — Avery doesn’t care. He’s already sleeping with an employee, Lisa (Phyllis Major), and doesn’t care that Alan seduces his wife. He cares even less when they kill her.

These horrible people are all determined to destroy one another. I won’t ruin the end of this, only to say that you will have to create your own conclusion to the story.

Bolling hated this, saying to TCM Underground, “I was doing cocaine…and I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I was very angry about the way that my career had gone in the industry…the opportunities that I had and had not been given…. The hardest thing for me, as I look back on it, was I had done a television series, The New People, and so I had a lot of young people who really respected me and… revered me as something of a hero, and then I came out with this stupid Candy Snatchers movie… It was a horrendous experience.”

Director Guerdon Trueblood — that’s his son playing Sean — and co-star Vince Martorano had been best friends at George Washington University in Virginia. They made a bet about who would get into filmmaking first. Trueblood became an in-demand writer for TV series and movies of the week. When he got the job of directing this movie, he asked writer Bryan Gindoff to create the character of Eddy specifically for Martorano, who was working as a commercial fisherman at the time.