EDITOR’S NOTE: Mind Over Murder was on the CBS Late Movie on July 30, 1982.

Suzy (Deborah Raffi, Death Wish 3) is a dancer who suddenly has psychic visions where time slows down and she can witness a strange bald man (Andrew Prine, as creepy as it gets) assaulting and murdering women. Her boyfriend Jason (Bruce Davison) refuses to believe her but she gets some help from government agent Ben Kushing (David Ackroyd) and his partner Ted Beasly (Robert Englund). She can see the bald man killing everyone on an airplane and they hope that she can use her Eyes of Laura Mars powers and stop him.

Also known as Psychomania, Are You Alone Tonight? and Deadly Vision, this was directed by Ivan Nagy and written by Robert Carrington (Venom, Wait Until Dark).

This is the best IMDB review ever: “Deborah Raffin punched in the stomach? If this is the same movie I’m thinking about, what I recall the most is the lead girl (very pretty) Debra Raffin (I think) was punched real hard in the stomach by a bald guy. The punches weren’t seen but they were heard and then she was seen on her knees, doubled up on the floor – suffering for a long period of time, holding her stomach and bent over. I was rather young when I first saw this movie and I remember that scene of the girl on her knees, bent over double holding her stomach and in so much pain. I remember think How could someone do such a thing to such pretty girl? Her acting in the part was superb. She acted as though she had really been punched in the stomach.” 10 out of 10 stars.

Speaking of creepy, Prine is incredible in this, yelling dialogue like, “What do you want to do first? Make love or die?” She also gets to see him shirtless and glistening with oil while wearing pants that feel painted on as he stalks and kills several women.

And creepier still, let’s talk Ivan Nagy. A former bookmaker for the mob and boyfriend of Heidi Fleiss; he also directed episodes of CHIPs and HBO’s The Hitchhiker, as well as the movies Captain America II: Death Too Soon and Pushing Up Daisies. He made Deadly Hero, a film where an unbalanced cop becomes a hero after killing the stalker of a woman, then becoming obsessed with her, as well as the Gary Coleman as an arsonist TV movie Playing With Fire and Intimate Encounters, a TV film where Donna Mills get all sexed up. But it’s his movie Skinner that this reminds me of, a giallo-style thriller that has a killer pursuing Ricki Lake and being pursued himself by a scarred Traci Lords, one of the many sex workers that he’s cut off their skin but the only one who has survived. It’s beyond scummy in the way that only someone who knows the world they’re writing about can create.

After that movie, Nagy went into adult films, directing Izzy Sleeze’s Casting Couch Cuties, Trailer Trash Teri and Wild Desire.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Loneliest Runner was on the CBS Late Movie on August 12 and December 15, 1987.

This was written, produced and directed by Michael Landon, who really was the loneliest runner. That’s because he wet his bed until he was 14 and his mother hung his sheets out to dry so that all the neighborhood kids could see that he couldn’t sleep a night without pissing himself.

During his childhood, Landon had to deal with his mother threatening suicide. On a family beach vacation, she tried to drown herself, but he rescued her. Later, his mother acted as if nothing happened, and the stress of this led to him bedwetting even more.

Before he tore his shoulder, Landon wanted to be a javelin thrower. Instead, he became a teenage werewolf, a cowboy, a settler and an angel on the road.

John Curtis (Lance Kerwin) can’t sleep a night without getting the bed soaked and not from wet dreams. No, he urinates the sack nightly and runs to a local laundromat and washes the sheets when his parents are asleep. He also stays up all night during sleepovers. You would too if you had parents like Arnold (Brian Keith) and Alice (DeAnn Mears). She yells at both of them for being less than men and in response, Arnold slaps his son around. This makes him leak the sheets even more.

A young girl, Nancy Rizzi (Melissa Sue Anderson) shows interest, but all John can think about is running home to get those stained sheets down every day. However, his mother’s horrible parenting skills and his father’s inability to reveal that he also was a bedwetter means that he learns how to run fast. Really fast. He makes it to the Olympics, his father tells his mother to shut up and he gets the girl.

This movie inspired “Peanut Butter, Eggs, and Dice,” an episode of Mr. Show in which “The Bob Lamonta Story” is told.

Despite the earnestness of this film, it’s heart is in the right place. It was a staple of made for TV movies and it made me worry every night when I went to bed, sure that I’d be peeing everywhere. When I woke up and the bed was dry, I thanked Michael Landon.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Curse of the Black Widow was on the CBS Late Movie on April 13 and October 19, 1983 and June 6, 1984. Bill Van Ryn also covered this movie for the site.

For the last few years, men have been found dead in Los Angeles with small bites all over them. It hits home for Mark Higbie (Tony Franciosa, Tenebrae)  when a woman picks up one of his friends and soon leaves him killed in the same way. As a detective, Mark knows some cops, like Lieutenant Gully Conti (Vic Morrow), who lets him in on the secret: the men are filled with spider venom and the same woman, Valerie Steffan (Patty Duke) is always near the scene of the murders.

One of the suspects, Leigh Lockwood (Donna Mills) — her sister Laura (also Duke) is the other the police are following — hires Mark, as she once dated every single one of the men who were killed. Also: the girls’ father was killed in a plane crash that they survived, after which one of them was bitten by spiders. When he meets the Native American who saved them, he’s told that some women are affected by an ancient curse passed through the female line. During the full moon, these women turn into giant spiders in times of stress — werespiders! — murder men, encase them in webbing and feed on them. These women have a red hourglass-shaped birthmark on their abdomens, like a black widow. The only thing that can kill them is fire. Also, a bartender says that he saw a giant spider kill one of the victims.

Spoiler: Valeria and Laura are the same person, driven by a hate of the sister and how successful she is with men. Only their mother (June Lockhart) — now in a coma after seeing her turn into her spider shape — and their nanny Olga (June Allyson) know the truth. Meanwhile, Mark is falling for Leigh when he should maybe pay attention to his assistant Flaps (Roz Kelly). But what do I know? I’ve never investigated a giant werespider murder mystery before.

I love this movie. It’s packed with character actors — Max Gail, Jeff Corey and Hard Boiled Haggerty are also in this — plus Sid Caesar makes an unexpected appearance. Directed by Dan Curtis and written by Robert Blees (Savage Harvest, Frogs), this movie will teach you so many things but foremost that giant spiders sound like Rodan.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Red Spider was on the CBS Late Movie on October 20, 1989 and April 6, 1990.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park was on the CBS Late Movie on December 27, 1985 and July 21, 1986.

Known as Attack of the Phantoms in Europe and Kiss Phantoms in Italy, this movie has been an embarrassment to Kiss the band and their fans, the Kiss Army, for years. As a six-year-old in 1978, I was certainly aware of the band, as many of my friends had the toys and their older brothers and sisters had the records. But they always seemed strange to me — I was always wondering why they weren’t heavier. It wasn’t until I moved past their 1980’s work and started to enjoy the first few albums that I learned just how much fun Kiss could be.

That’s probably why this movie doesn’t upset me at all. In fact, I kind of love it.

In 1977, Kiss had an income of more than ten million dollars. Their manager Bill Aucoin believed that the traditional cycle of album releases and touring had taken Kiss as far as they could go. So what was the next level? Kiss would become superheroes. Seeing that band boss and bassist Gene Simmons was a huge comic fan, this move made perfect sense.

Round one was a Marvel comic, with the band mixing their blood into the ink for the cover. Round two was this, a Hanna-Barbera produced movie that was a rush job, with all four band members given a crash course in how to act that didn’t really take for anyone but Simmons, who would go on to menace Tom Selleck in Runaway and John Stamos in Never Too Young to Die.

Screenwriters Jan Michael Sherman and Don Buday spent time with each Kiss member so that they could properly learn their characters. “Space Ace” Ace Frehely was known to be pretty strange, frequently saying “Ack!” The writers decided that he would be like Harpo Marx and that would be the only word he would say. Ace responded by demanding more lines or he would quit the film.

Both Frehley and “Catman” Peter Criss hated the long downtime that comes with movie making. They were both dealing with substance abuse issues at the time, too. Nearly none of Criss’ dialogue is his voice. It’s Michael Bell other than when he sings “Beth.” In fact, Frehley got in a fight with director Gordon Hessler (Scream, Pretty Peggy) and left, so for one scene you can clearly see his stunt double taking his place. How can you tell? Well, Ace isn’t black but his double is.

Much of Kiss’ acting in this film is them performing in the parking lot of Magic Mountain in front of 8,000 fans. Those fans were drawn by free tickets from local station KTNQ and DJ “The Real” Don Steele, who shows up here, as well as in plenty of Roger Corman alma mater films like Gremlins, Death Race 2000, Rock ‘n Roll High School and Eating Raoul. In 1970, he was so famous that a “Super Summer Spectacular” spot Don Steele contest led to two teenagers trying to track down the DJ accidentally ramming a car into a highway divider, killing a man. The case that came out of it made it the whole way to the Supreme Court of California and Weirum v. RKO General, Inc., 15 Cal.3d 40 is still studied in American law schools in regards to the subject of foreseeability in torts law.

Within Six Flags Magic Mountain, Abner Devereaux (Anthony Zerbe, The Omega Man) is upset that his animatronics are playing second banana to an appearance by Kiss. That may be because his creations have been eating up park revenue. Devereaux is a real piece of work, enslaving Sam Farrell and other employees and a gang of punks (one of them, Dirty Dee, is played by Lisa Jane Persky, who was an early CBGB audience member and girlfriend of Blondie bass player Gary Valentine, who write “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” for her. She has gone on to appear on Quantum Leap and in multiple projects with Divine. Another punk, Chopper, has a vest with a Satan’s Mothers patch, the exact same logo that would be used again the next year for Walter Hill’s The Warriors).

As Sam’s girlfriend Melissa searches for him as the mad scientist of the park is fired and Kiss plays their concert. After the show, we realize that Kiss are nearly ascetic magicians given to magical pronouncements and superpowers, particularly “Demon” Gene Simmons whose voice rumbles whenever he speaks and “Starchild” Paul Stanley who can read minds.

Devereaux eventually steals the mystical talismans that give Kiss their powers and replaces them with evil robotic duplicates. Of course, Kiss gets their powers back and wins over the crowd and saves the park.

Before the movie aired on TV, a private screening was arranged for Kiss. While their management and hangers-on loved it, the band was incensed and refused to allow anyone to speak of the movie in their presence.

This is quite literally a Scooby-Doo movie, only topped by the 2015 cartoon Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery, where Kiss wrote a song all about Fred, “Don’t Touch My Ascot.”

Ironically, soon after this film, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley would replace the increasingly unreliable and out of control Ace and Peter with an endless series of duplicates who had no ownership or voice in the band’s future. So you can kind of watch this film as a precursor to the very behavior that band would embody in the future. Perhaps the robotic Gene is now the real Gene? The mind boggles.

If I ever met Simmons — my brother has, he gave a keynote speech at a Major League Baseball annual retreat, something I find inordinately hilarious — I hope he looks at me and roars like a lion before intoning, “No gratitude need be voiced. Your mind speaks to us!”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Night Cries was on the CBS Late Movie on January 8 and July 9, 1982.

Jeannie (Susan Saint James) and Mitch Haskins (Michael Parks) have just had a baby. Or at least that’s what they thought, as when Jeannie wakes up, in a room with a woman who has just lost a child, she’s shocked to learn that her baby has died.

She’s sure that her daughter was taken from her and keeps having horrific dreams of a house and being attacked by Nurse Green (Delores Dorn). She decides to work with a sleep expert, Dr. Whelan (William Conrad), to discover what exactly has happened.

Those dreams are so amazing. Jeannie dreams a baby carriage has gone into water and when she saves it, it’s a grandfather clock. Directed by Richard Lang (Don’t Go to Sleep) and written by Brian Taggart (The Spell), this TV movie uses those dreams to make use of its low budget and become really odd in the best way.

I also am amazed that the house in her dreams gets explored and its owner, Mrs. Delesande (Cathleen Nebitt), just lets her in. The 1970s were way too forgiving of people who come to your home and say, “I’ve been dreaming of my dead child in your house” and they just let the dreamer explore the home. This would never happen today, right?

Then again, when you have real skeletons in your closet, let people look around.

Also: James and Conrad’s scene where they argue about her dream is really intense. The bedside manner of 70s made for TV doctors is really not good.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Something Evil was on the CBS Late Movie on February 8 and August 17, 1973.

Steven Spielberg directed this Robert Clouse (the director of Enter the Dragon) written TV movie that originally aired on January 21, 1972. In fact, Spielberg even appears briefly in the film speaking to Carl Gottlieb (who would go on to co-write Jaws) at a party.

Marjorie (Sandy Dennis, God Told Me To) and Paul Worden (Darren McGavin, Carl Kolchak forever) have just moved to a Pennsylvania farmhouse with their children, Stevie (Johnny Whitaker, Jody from Family Affair) and Laurie. There are symbols all over the house, which no one seems to have any issues with.

Is there weirdness at the farm? You know there is. Their neighbor, Gehrmann, (Jeff Corey, Battle Beyond the Stars) kills chickens right in front of the kids. Marjorie keeps hearing the sound of crying children. Then there’s Harry (Ralph Bellamy, Coming to America, Pretty Woman), a local who believes in demons and says that the house is protected from them because of all the symbols.

Marjorie is convinced that the devil wants her and even slaps her son, which leads to her leaving the family, as she can’t even trust herself. But what if the devil was after her kids and not her? Hmm?

Spielberg would escape TV movies after this. It’s a low budget affair, but his style as a director transforms the material. It’s unsettling, filled with doom and gloom and dread. The 70s really seem like a dismal time to be alive if we only go by TV movies, huh?

You can watch this on YouTube.