The line between TV movie and giallo is always so close.

While on a honeymoon with her husband Ernesto in Spain, Sandra (Janet Leigh) wakes up one morning to discover that he’s gone. When she reports it to the police, Ernesto comes back, except that he’s not the same man. Then, his attorney (Eric Braeden, Victor from The Young and the Restless) and sister (Barbara Steele!) claim that nothing is wrong and that perhaps Sandra is deranged.

This has to be a giallo, because the cops are just the worst at their jobs.

This movie is based on the French play Piège pour un Homme Seul (Trap for a Single Man), which was based on the Indian movies Sesh Anka and Puthita Paravai, which were — following all this? — based on the British movie Chase A Crooked Shadow. And it wouldn’t be the last TV movie based on this story, as it was also turned into One of My Wives Is Missing and Vanishing Act.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Lisa McVey (Katie Douglas) left a bad home situation with her mother to live in Tampa with her grandmother, but within a few weeks she was being abused by Morris, her grandmother’s boyfriend, and then abducted by Bobby Joe Long. Even worse, her grandmother just assumed that she ran away and wasn’t in any danger.

Bobby (Russif Sutherland, the half brother of Keifer) holds Lisa bound and blindfolded — much like the nine other women he’d already killed — continually assaulting her while she gains his trust by asking him about other women and then leaving behind as much evidence as she can, touching everything in his apartment and even pulling out her hair and hiding it all over the place. She also begins memorizing everything she can.

Finally, when she escapes — pleading for her life when Bobby wants to shoot her in the head in the woods — Morris and her grandmother beat her for five hours before calling the police. Luckily, her case is assigned to Sergeant Larry Pinkerton (David James Elliot, who made your grandmother and aunts feel all tingly when he was on JAG), who is one of the few people who believes in her.

Amazingly, this true story ends with McVey becoming a deputy sergeant in Sex Crimes, working to protect children from the terror that she survived. As for Bobby, he was arrested outside a movie theater and was executed in prison via lethal injection in 2019.

Airing on Showcase in Canada and Lifetime in the U.S., this is a pretty frightening story even in TV movie format. I can’t believe that McVey made it and was able to lead such a positive life after.

The January 14, 1975 ABC TV Movie of the Week totally had the zeitgeist of the country pegged, because the Bermuda Triangle was all I could remember kids talking about. How could this little section of the ocean keep stealing all these planes and ships? And now, in 2021, no one talks about it at all.

USCG pilot and his winchman Haig (Doug McClure) rescues Eva (Kim Novak), the lone survivor of a wreck who claims that it was all caused by the evil Father Peter Martin (Alejandro Ray, Mr. Majestyk*). Yet all is not what it seems to be.

Sutton Roley directed tons of TV but also did Chosen Survivors and The Loners. He’s working from a script by William Read Woodfield, who started his career as a photographer, shooting Elizabeth Taylor and Jayne Mansfield, as well as nudes of Marilyn Monroe on the set of Something’s Got to Give. He was also the magic consultant on Mission: Impossible.

This movie is a tight 74 minutes and an atmosphere of doom. It’s one of the better Bermuda Triangle movies you’ll find. Other examples are Beyond the Bermuda Triangle, Death Ship, The Triangle, Triangle, The Fantastic Journey, the 1979 documentary The Bermuda Triangle, Rene Cardonna’s Jr.’s The Bermuda Triangle, The Bermuda Depths, the lucha film Mystery in the Bermuda Triangle, the 27th dimension threat of Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle, Escape from Atlantis, Lost Voyage, Lost in the Bermuda Triangle and, inevitably, David DeCoteau’s 1313: Bermuda Triangle.

As for Doug McClure, he’s learned nothing about the evils of the ocean and battled it again in movies like Warlords of Atlantis and Humanoids from the Deep.

*This is a movie of Bronson co-stars, as Ed Lauter (Breakheart Pass, Death Wish 3) and Jim Davis (The Magnificent Seven) also appear.

The January 26, 1971 ABC Movie of the Week, this film was directed by Jerry Paris, who you may know as Jerry Helper, the dentist and next-door neighbor of Rob and Laura Petrie. What you may not know is that he directed 237 of the 255 episodes of Happy Days in addition to Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment and Police Academy 3: Back in Training.

Speaking of police, hey, there’s the fuzz right there in the title. Said cop is played by David Hartman, who would go on to host Good Morning America from 1975 to 1987. He’s Officer Jerry Frazer and somehow, he ends up splitting an apartment with pediatrician Jane Bowers (Barbara Eden). They’re quite the odd couple — that had to be the pitch for this — as he’s a traditional man’s man who dates a Playboy Bunny (Farrah Fawcett!) and she’s a believer in women’s lib who has a mother’s boy for a fiancee (Herb Edelman, who would one day be Blance’s ex Stanley on The Golden Girls).

This is just packed with TV stars, like M*A*S*H* and Dragnet‘s Harry Morgan as Jane’s father, Jo Anne Worley as the feminist leader of Women Against Men Dr. Debby Inglefinger and Julie Newmar as an aspiring porn star who asks Jerry to arrest her so she can have a place to sleep.

It’s 74 minutes of fluff, you know exactly where it’s going but man, there’s nothing like early 70s TV to just make our 2021 world feel a little better.

So what if the ozone layer really went away and we were forced to go to a parallel earth and take it over? Well, then we’d be the bad guys in this movie and we’d be up against the formidable Yasmine Bleeth, who has come home to realize that everyone in her old town is a totally different person.

David Jackson, who directed this, made one of the worst TV movies I’ve ever seen, The Jesse Ventura Story, as well as a movie I never knew existed, From the Files of Unsolved Mysteries: Voice from the Grave, which takes the dramatizations of Unsolved Mysteries all the way to a full movie in which Megan Ward is possessed by a dead woman. He also made  Return to Halloweentown, which just shows that I have watched way too many movies.

It’s all based on a book by J.D. Feigelson, who also wrote Horror High and Dark Night of the Scarecrow. He’s completed a sequel to that film recently that he directed, wrote and edited.

Look — TV movies are a mixed bag. Sometimes you get Carl Kolchak. And other times you get people with their organs on the wrong side of their bodies. I mean, I liked it, but if this site proves anything, it’s that my taste is questionable.

Look, I don’t write these articles to beat up on movies, but this is like shooting dead pigeons in a barrel.

Some facts:

Rather than playing Melanie from Hitchcock’s The Birds, Tippi Hedrin plays Helen, the owner of a local store that knows all about the birds and remembers the events of the original. Why is she a different character? Is she there under witness protection? Did Hedrin only do this movie to get a check for her animal charity? Was this a worse experience than Roar?

This is not the first — or the last — sequel that Rick Rosenthal would make, what with being part of the best Halloween sequel and the worst. He made sure his name was not on this movie, as Alan Smithee is credited.

Ken and Jim Wheat, who wrote this movie, made a bunch of other sequels, like Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, The Fly II, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, It Came from Outer Space II and The Stepford Husbands. They’re probably better known for The Silent Scream and Pitch Black.

Why would this movie be made? Was Showtime obsessed with sequels? Is it worth sticking around for the last ten minutes where seagulls go nuts and most of the cast gets killed? Would Hitchcock hate this movie? Did he once give Melanie Griffith a doll of her mother inside a coffin? Am I obsessed by movies that most people know better than to even try to watch?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and forever.

You can watch this on Tubi.

PS: Craig Edwards worked on this movie and shared this amazing article about his time on the set.

Casper Van Dien plays a meteorologist haunted by…oh man, just let me say it. I will honestly watch anything obviously. I mean a Christmas movie about a tornado with the star — such as it is — of Starship Troopers? I did it. I did it for you, like Rudolph in the foggy night trying to save Santa and the reindeer who had previously ignored him to the point that he decided to go die on an ice floe in a world of toys missing eyeballs and appendages. I did it like Frosty, trying to keep kids happy despite knowing that soon the Earth would suffer global warming and things like floods through New York City would soon become commonplace but fighting back icy tears and gamely putting on that stupid scarf and magic hat that’s tainted by the blood of a long-dead magician. I did it like a man ready to jump off a bridge because I lost all your money and wanted you to forget I ever lived because at their heart Christmas movies are dark and horrifying affairs as we scream into the sun and try to cling to a planet where gravity is the only thing keeping us from being launched out into the vast cold void of space.

So yeah, a tornado brings a family together and no one wants to believe that the Earth is changing and that things like tornadoes out of season can be a thing, so the one-time husband of Catherine Oxenberg, who is a legitimate princess — 3,936th in succession to be Queen of England no less — and a woman was once married to Robert Evans for nine days, can not only save people but save his family…at Christmas.

This was also called F6 Twister which is a horrible name and I’d never watch it because I’m a strange man and I like the idea of an act of God happening during the season of His Son’s Divine Birth and for some reason, Casper has fought tornadoes before in 500 MPG Storm and Fire Twister and why do I know this?

Did you know the F in F6 stands for the Fujita Scale? Now you do. Happy holidays.

Also — Creighton Duke shows up if you’re the kind of person who cares about those things and you know that I am.

Maybe I cried a little during this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Filmed back to back with Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes, the fourth Pumpkinhead movie played in Dayton, OH before it showed up on SyFy. Despite being a Southern story, it was filmed in Bucharest, Romania.

It sets up a real Hatfield and McCoys situation and literally, I mean that, as this is about the feud between the two families. Ricky McCoy and Jody Hatfield are in love and this feud won’t stop them from hooking up. Then Pumpkinhead gets summoned and the ghost of Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen) shows up too and nearly everyone dies.

Director and writer Michael Hurst also made the House of the Dead 2 TV movie and Mansquito, so there you go. Also, Romanians playing rednecks. There needs to be a Letterboxd list of that.

Uncle Charles (Peter Coyote), Becky Carlton (Aimee-Lynn Chadwick), Cody (Cody Hardrict) and Julian Garrison (John Keefe) return from the last movie, while Katie Williams (Jana Kramer) was going to come back as well, but Kramer had a serious gallbladder infection and could not appear. That meant that she was killed off and replaced by Jenny (Jenny Mollen).

Shot in the home of 2000s direct to SyFy movies, Romania and the Ukraine, this movie concerns, yes, a rave and zombies. Also a drug made from Trioxin called Z that turns you onto a zombie when you smoke it and yeah, that’s about the only clever part of this.

I take that back. Tarman shows up and has to hitchhike to the rave, which has already been bombed by U.S. planes.

I’m really happy that they stopped this series of movies after this film. The 2000s were not kind to horror and this is but one exhibit of the sheer garbage that we had to wade through.