This made-for-TV movie aired on CBS’s Friday Night Movies and later had a short theatrical run. Director Walter Grauman may have only made six theatrical films, but he was a master of the TV movie, working on films like Daughter of the Mind, Crowhaven Farm, The Old Man Who Cried Wolf, The Memory of Eva Ryker and, most essentially, Are You In the House Alone? This movie was written by James D. Buchanan and Ronald Austin from a story by Anthony Wilson.

In 1971, we didn’t know about identity fraud involving credit cards. This was all new. So when four college students — Karen (Stefanie Powers), Jerry (James Stacy), Lisa (Tina Chen) and Joel Fisher (Elliott Street) — get a credit card belonging to someone they don’t know, Henry Norman, they create an identity on their university’s giant computers. When it seems they’re about to get caught, they turn to the most intelligent computer guy in the school, Avery (Dean Stockwell), as Jerry uses Karen to sweet-talk him into committing this crime with them.

The problem is that there really is a Henry Norman and that he’s closer to them than they could ever know, turning them against one another and then killing them one by one, using incorrect medication, computer-controlled elevators and even a medical school dummy. It’s at once a giallo, a TV movie, a computer killer thriller and, yes, a mannequin movie.

I really loved the sparseness of this, as it feels like the middle of the night for most of the movie. No one seems to trust one another, and even as Karen and Avery start to warm up to one another, she worries that he could be the killer. He’s concerned that he should never have let anyone in, instead of being a shy computer geek. As for catching the killer, well, dummy drops are always lovely.

You can watch this on Tubi.