EDITOR’S NOTE: When I first wrote about this movie, I said “If this played on the CBS Late Movie, it would have probably taken two hours and forty minutes with all the commercials. Actually, it did, on August 29, 1972 and March 6, 1975.”

Bernard L. Kowalski has a decent horror pedigree, directing Night of the Blood Beast; Attack of the Giant Leeches; Krakatoa: East of Java; Terror in the Sky and Sssssss. Here, he puts the terror on a slow boil and puts Reverend John Keyes (Roy Thinnes, always battling the occult) and his wife Lorna (Lynn Loring, The Horror at 37,000 Feet) against an unseen force bedeviling a small Western town named San Melas. There’s voodoo, devil worship and a mute young girl and a gunslinger possessed by the Left Hand Path.

Ray Milland shows up, proving that Old Hollywood is never to be trusted. Plus there’s Gloria Grahame (Blood and Lace), Henry Silva (Almost Human, Megaforce, the epic Escape from the Bronx), stuntman Stan Barrett, Joshua Bryant (Salem’s Lot), a young Leif Garrett (Thunder Alley) and Jodie Foster’s brother, Buddy.

70s made for TV horror neglects the Old West, so this is a strange film to start with. Then again, it also plays the Troll 2 trick of a town with a backward name and a connection to witches, but it doesn’t telegraph that. The ending — which moves to 1971 — more than makes up for the slow moving last 68 minutes.

Actually, I love dreamy TV movies that seem to take forever to get anywhere.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gargoyles was first on the CBS Late Movie on May 1, 1973; May 16, 1975 and September 3, 1975.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Gargoyles was first on the CBS Late Movie on May 1, 1973; May 16, 1975 and September 3, 1975.

When I was a kid, I remember asking my dad what movies he thought were scary. He answered Night of the Living Dead and Gargoyles, so I was always nervous to watch this movie. It just looked strange, and in the late 1970s, it wasn’t like I could find it on demand. But the unique storytelling of Gargoyles always intrigued me.

Originally airing on CBS on November 21st, 1972, it was directed by Bill L. Norton (Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, More American Graffiti) and written by Steven and Elinor Karpf (Devil Dog: The Hound from Hell, The Jayne Mansfield Story), Gargoyles may be uneven, but has moments of pure joy.

It’s one of the first films Stan Winston (Terminator, Aliens) worked on, providing a variety of gargoyle makeup. The look of the creatures is not just terrific, it’s downright amazing, as they don’t all look the same. The leader (Bernie Casey (Felix Leiter in Never Say Never Again, UN Washington in Revenge of the Nerds) has a perfect look that balances a regal bearing with an otherworldly aura. You can see why this won an Emmy. It’s big budget-worthy work on a shoestring budget.

Speaking of budget, the film was shot with just one camera over 18 days, which chased away the original director. Temperatures at the Carlsbad, NM location, baked the cast and crew, reaching 100 degrees or more the entire shoot. So it’s incredible that what emerged is so interesting.

The opening dialogue informs us that Satan lost the war in Heaven, with his children being the gargoyles who rise against man every six hundred years (there’s even an image from Haxan to symbolize the devil). This dialogue is by Vic Perrin (Tharg from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of Star Trek, and the voice of Metron and Nomad), who also provides the crazy VO for the head, Gargoyle.

We join Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornell Wilde, No Blade of Grass), author of the occult, and his daughter, Diana (Jennifer Salt of Sisters and Son of Sam TV movie Out of the Darkness) as they head off to the desert — and Uncle Willie’s Museum — where they find a skeleton of a creature that Willie (Woody Chambliss of Zero Hour! and The Devil’s Rain!) claims he saw in the hills. The doctor doesn’t believe a word, but his daughter listens to his tales, only to be cut off by the sound of wings and something trying to get into the museum. Whatever it is, it sets off a fire that kills Uncle Willie.

They head to a local motel run by Mrs. Parks (Grayson Hall, who played Dr. Julia Hoffman in Dark Shadows and Carlotta Drake in Night of Dark Shadows), who is never without a drink in her hand (an acting choice by Hall that we can endorse). Two of the gargoyles try to take back the skeleton they’ve rescued from the inferno, but one is hit by a truck. It seems like the doctor sees money in the bodies of these gargoyles, alerting the group’s leader to his plan. He kidnaps Diana, showing her the eggs his people care for and explaining that they just want to live in peace with humans.

Throw in a bunch of motorcycle riders (including Scott Glenn of The Right Stuff and Silence of the Lambs), cops who can’t understand what is going on, the finest hound dogs in the area, an all-out war between humans and Gargoyles with way too much talking and you have this movie. But I can’t dislike it — it’s filled with great moments like the leader making Diana read to him about the historical account of an incubus seducing a woman and the speech he gives to the humans at the end. The closing image of a Gargoyle flying away, clutching a wounded female of his species? Amazing.

It’s worth seeking out, if only to see how horror used to be all over 1970s TV. If you grew up in that era, you have less of a chance of dismissing this movie as dumb.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Woman Hunter debuted as a CBS Movie of the Week on September 19, 1972. It played the CBS Late Movie on October 7, 1974.

The Woman Hunter has an all-star cast, with Barbara Eden in the lead, alongside Stuart Whitman, Larry Storch and Robert Vaughn. Like I said — it’s what I say is an all-star cast.

Most Giallo heroines are characterized by their wealth and potential mental issues. However, in The Woman Hunter, when Dina Hunter (Eden) survives a car accident and plans a trip to Mexico with her husband (Vaughn), who would have thought that the artist she hired to paint her portrait (Whitman) could be a jewel thief and a murderer?

Enrique Lucero, who plays the Commissioner, would go on to try and hunt down Mary, Mary, and Bloody Mary and also appears in The Wild Bunch, Guyana, Cult of the Damned and The Evil That Men Do.

This was written by Brian Clemens (Captain Kronos, And Soon the Darkness) and Tony Williamson (Adam Adamant Lives!, The Avengers). It is Clemens’ first U.S. work and Williamson’s only script made over here. It’s directed by Bernard L. Kowalski, who stepped in for John Peyser (The Centerfold Girls). I assume that everyone enjoyed shooting this on location in Acapulco. Larry Storch even brought his wife Norma along.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: She Waits debuted as a CBS TV movie on January 28, 1972. It played the CBS Late Movie on September 12, 1972 and January 14, 1974.

Laura Wilson (Patty Duke, Valley of the Dolls, The Swarm) and Mark (David McCallum, Illya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and better known to today’s TV audience as Dr. Donald Mallard on N.C.I.S.) haven’t been married long. On their first trip to meet his mother (Dorothy McGuire, The Greatest Story Ever Told), she learns that maybe this marriage wasn’t the best of ideas. Mom has been ready to go nutzoid ever since Mark’s first wife, Elaine, died, and she’s convinced that her ghost is inside her home.

Everywhere Laura goes, she starts hearing Elaine’s favorite song and even her voice. Is she trying to possess her? Or is she just being ridiculous, as the family doctor suggests? The movie never fully embraces the supernatural. It’s more about Mark shutting himself off and not dealing with the past.

The family maid thinks that Mark’s mother is getting worse and worse, with Laura in danger of the very same insanity. And what’s the deal with Mark’s friend David (James T. Callahan, the dad from Charles in Charge)? And can you talk a ghost out of possessing someone just by talking to them?

Director Delbert Mann (Marty) weaves a competent story, penned by Art Wallace, the main writer for TV’s Dark Shadows. It’s a tale that fits snugly into the 1970s, a time when possession, Satan, and the ghosts of murdered wives lurked around every corner. The film’s slow pace is a deliberate nod to the conventions of TV movie horror, inviting you to revel in the nostalgia of a bygone era.

Directed by Lamberto Bava and written by Dardano Sacchetti (nearly every Italian movie that you love), Roberto Gandus (Macabre, Madhouse) and Giorgio Stegani (Cannibal Holocaust), School of Fear is part of the second series of TV movies that Bava was hired to make.

Known as Alta Tensione (High Tension), the other movies in this series are The Prince of Terror, The Man Who Didn’t Want to Die and Eyewitness. For TV movies, they have decent production values and allow Bava to explore some rather mature themes.

If you have children, let me remind you to never allow them to attend European educational facilities like the Swiss Richard Wagner Academy for Girls, the Tanz Akademie or the Giacomo Stuz private school. I mean, a child drowns at the beginning of this and that’s moments into this movie.

Diana Berti (Alessandra Acciai) arrives at the school and instantly runs into problems. There’s a deformed child in the shadows, her skirts are too short for the school’s leader (Dario Nicolodi) and oh yeah, she has past traumas that the school keeps bringing to the fore. You know what isn’t helping? The last teacher in her role died by going through a plate glass window and they’re never fixed all that broken glass.

The real problem, as always, is the children. They play some secret game that the last teacher — the one who took a header through a closed window — was already worried about after she learned just how frightening that it can be from one of her students.

This game takes them into the abandoned parts of the school, places that are haunting for adults much less little ones. These kids, however, are borderline monsters, able to hack into video signals, showing an image of her impaled on the front gate just like the last teacher and using Diana’s past sexual assault to remind her that no one will ever believe her when she tries to expose how horrible they behave.

They’re right.

The children are from the upper crust, the school has too good of a reputation and after all, look how sweet these young men and women are as they sing in the choir. Surely they couldn’t have done all this. Even her police inspector love interest, Mark Anselmi (Jean Hebert), thinks she’s being ridiculous about it all.

This movie is absolutely wild, as it has a classroom of kids tear to pieces the morality and art of Pier Paolo Pasolini while a child who looks like a dwarf in a red jacket runs wild on the grounds.

I have no idea why neither of Bava’s sets of TV movies are available in better quality in the U.S. Here’s hoping with Vinegar Syndrome releasing A Blade In the Dark that they go deeper into the movies that he made as his career took him to the small screen.

You can watch this on YouTube.