EDITOR’S NOTE: The Strange and Deadly Occurrence was on the CBS Late Movie on February 11, 1976.
Directed by John Llewellyn Moxey from a script by Sandor Stern (who wrote the script for the original The Amityville Horror and directed and wrote one of my favorite films, Pin) and Lane Slate, the verbose title of this mildly spooky telefilm suggests a supernatural angle. Still, The Strange and Deadly Occurrence is really a crime thriller with horror-flick flourishes.
Robert Stack—rendering the same brand of American masculinity he brought to countless movie and TV endeavors before diversifying his brand with self-parody in Airplane! and scaring me repeatedly as a child with Unsolved Mysteries—stars as Michael Rhodes. He’s the head of a small family that packs up and moves into a new home in an isolated area. Soon after Michael, his wife Christine (Vera Miles and their daughter Melissa (Margaret Willock) get comfortable, peculiar things start to happen, like power outages, weird noises and getting bothered by Dr. Wren (E.A. Sirianni), who wants to buy their house. Before long, Michael grows to convince himself that Dr. Wren has something deeply nefarious in mind, completely unaware that an even bigger threat is lurking.
Sometimes, slight narratives can be seen as a shortcoming in ’70s telefilms. Here, less is more because the focus is on atmosphere rather than intricate storytelling. Moxey and his writers achieve adequate results while generating low-grade tension and dramatizing how the Rhodes family reacts to increasingly upsetting circumstances. The filmmakers also succeed at the delicate art of misdirection, letting a third-act shift land with genuinely enjoyable impact.
You can watch this on YouTube.
