EDITOR’S NOTE: Death Stalk was on the CBS Late Movie on November 22, 1976 and November 24, 1977.
I write a lot about how old TV was the unknown. TV Guide could prepare you for a program, but sometimes movies blow your mind, and you’re in no way ready. This led to kindertrauma of the highest order sometimes.
Pat (Anjanette Comer) and Jack (Vince Edwards) take one of Jack’s best employees, Hugh (Robert Webber), and his wife, Kathy (Carol Lynley), camping. Everything is as good as it can get before four convicts — Leo Brunner (Vic Morrow), Cal Shepherd (Neville Brand), Frank Cody (Norman Fell) and Roy Joad (Larry Wilcox) — tie the men up and take the women captive, leading them deeper down the river and into dangerous rapids.
Norman Fell plays against type as a criminal, but you’re coming to this to see Neville Brand snarling lines like “I’ve been in jail so long I was starting to believe the greatest smell in the world was coffee,” to a cute as a button Lynley. This movie is also filled with all manner of anti-woman dialogue, like the men telling the women to row harder and they’ll get a dress, the slut shaming back and forth between the women and Comer’s character getting damp down below at the thought of submitting to Vic Morrow (and can you blame her?). Then again, everyone is horrific to one another in this, and when someone shows a moment of decency, like Wilcox attempting to help the women, they are dispatched.
A mean, quick and entertaining TV movie. Yes, we have Deliverance at home, but this goes there. Neville Brand forever.
You can watch this on YouTube.
Robert Webber also played a character named Hugh a few years later in the film “10”.