In the days where there were only three major channels, Operation Prime Time was an effort to create network quality programming for small independent stations. I can remember several films that aired locally from this effort, including Yogi’s First Christmas, the Rankin/Bass Jack Frost special, Solid Gold and The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything. With the launch of the Fox Network, most of the independents all switched to that network and there was no further need for OPT.
This was directed by Kevin Connor, who has some pretty fun movies in his resume, including Motel Hell, The House Where Evil Dwells, From Beyond the Grave and The Return of Sherlock Holmes and plenty of others.
Written by Pat Fielder (The Monster That Challenged the World, The Vampire) along with Richard M. Bluel and Hugh Benson, who often were producers.
It’s a great idea — at some point in World War II, the gigantic ocean liner RMS Goliath was sunk by torpedos, along with its entire crew and 1,860 passengers. 42 years later, however, a crew led by oceanographer Peter Cabot (Mark Harmon) discovers that the ship is still intact, with 337 survivors and their descendants living in an air bubble utopia. Then again, if you consider a world with mandatory contraception and physical abuse utopia, then maybe it’s not for you. Leading the ship is John McKenzie (Christopher Lee), who saved many of them during the original accident.
Oh yeah — the Goliath also has sensitive documents from President Roosevelt, with Admiral Wiley Sloan (Eddie Albert) demanding that Cabot’s team destroys the top secret letters.
You also get Alex McCord from Airwolf, Emma Samms, John Carradine as an actor who replays his same movie over and over again*, Robert Forester, Frank Gorshin, Duncan Regehr, Kirk Cameron, John Ratzenberger and more.
*That movie is The Black Knight, which starred Peter Cushing.
Jack Smight, known for his exceptional directing in films like No Way to Treat a Lady, Airport 1975 and Damnation Alley— well, maybe not movie — brings his talent to this TV movie. Working from a short story by Ray Bradbury, he delivers a quick and suspenseful reminder of the unique cinematic style of 1970s TV movies, a style that could truly get under your skin.
Olivia De Havilland plays Laura Wynant, a wealthy former mental patient who has gone to the country to continue healing. That’d be easier if she didn’t keep hearing the pleas of a woman who has been buried alive on her property. Arthritis has robbed her hands of the ability to save the woman and as she brings others in to help her, her family starts to think that she is losing her control over her sanity again.
De Havilland, Cotten, and Pidgeon deliver stellar performances that elevate the movie to another level. Their talent and dedication to their roles are evident, making this TV movie a must-see for any classic TV movie enthusiast.
This is a movie that masterfully builds its suspense, keeping you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. It’s a rare gem that doesn’t let up, a testament to the captivating storytelling of TV movies from this era.
Man, Dennis Weaver can’t catch a break when he’s in a Paul Wendkos movie. In The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd, he’s imprisoned for treated John Wilkes Booth. And in Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction, McCloud is blasting nose candy right past his trademark mustache. But here, it’s Last House on the Left or Straw Dogs as a TV movie, with Weaver and his family — argumentative son who doesn’t want to go to college, wife who feels frumpy and nascent women’s libber daughter (Susan Dey!) — going up against an ersatz Manson Family on a beach vacation.
The leader of this group, Jerry, is played by Scott Hylands, who would much later play Dr. Mercurio Arboria, the kindly creator of The Arboria Institute in Beyond the Black Rainbow. He uses psychological warfare, bugs in the family’s RV and a PA system to drive the nuclear unit to madness and eventual revenge.
The cast also includes Michael Christian (Eddie from Poor Pretty Eddie), Roberta Collins (Matilda the Hun from Death Race 2000), Jacqueline Giroux (Snow White in Cinderella 2000 and Linda from Gary Graver’s Trick or Treats) and Carol White (Spider from Chained Heat). If you ever wondered why I love TV movies so much, it’s because there’s such a crossover between them and the exploitation trash I love with an equally impure devotion.
This never gets as crazy as it should, but the scene where the hippies sing back the nursery rhymes that the family had been singing in the privacy of their RV is really unsettling. This could have been even stranger, but hey — it was a movie you got to watch for free.
Written, produced and directed by Joseph Stefano, author of the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Eye of the Cat, Home for the Holidays, Snowbeast and The Kindred, this was originally a pilot for an anthology series for CBS called The Haunted. Sadly, it was never picked up*.
Nelson Orion (Martin Landau) is an architect who has an affinity for the occult. His fiancee, Vivia Mandore (Diane Baker), is haunted by the mother of her first husband. If they want a future, the past must be dealt with.
This is way better and cooler than it had any right to be and man, I wish we could have seen more of Orion — housebuilder by day, ghostbuster by night — in more adventures.
*One theory is that the network received complaints that the movie was too scary and disturbing, so the project was canceled. Another — and potentially more likely situation — was that CBS president James T. Aubrey had originally greenlit the show and when he stepped down, they had no one in power who was interested in the series.
You can watch this on YouTube. It’s also available on DVD and blu ray from Kino Lorber.
Margaret Rutherford may have ben in more than 40 films, but she is best known for playing Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple in four movies and Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit. She also dealt with some family craziness, as before she was even born, her father killed his father by beating him to death with a chamber pot. After seven years in a mental ward, he was released. After starting his new family, changing his name and moving to India, his wife killed herself, leading Margaret to be raised by her aunt. She was told her father was dead, despite him trying to reach her for years.
Once she began acting, she was pretty much protected from the world by her husband — and frequent acting partner — Stringer Davis. There have been rumors that the two never consummated their relationship, but they did adopt a child of sorts by taking in a young man named Gordon Langley Hall who eventually had gender reassignment surgery and became known as Dawn Langley Hall, the name she used when she wrote the biography of Rutherford, Margaret Rutherford: A Blithe Spirit.
In 1965, Margaret — who suffered bad spells and electroshock therapies in her life in an effort to stay away from the madness she thought infected her family — Stringer Davis and Tom Corbett visited the haunted homes Longleat, Salisbury Hall and Beaulieu for an NBC special based on Diana Norman’s book The Stately Ghosts of England.
Honestly, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen, an absolute delight of old English manners, famous British actors and just plain goofball haunting silliness.
NBC promoted this show with articles in the New York Times and Show Magazine. There was plenty of William Castle-level BS in these, including all manner of ghost antics like slamming doors, ruined footage and broken cameras writer, producer and director Frank De Felitta asked for the ghosts to give him permission to film them.
Great story, right? Well sure, but De Felitta also wrote the novels Audrey Rose and The Entity. So he knew a great ghost story when he heard one.
You’re a young acting hopeful, in the business since 1965, who has worked alongside Tommy Kirk and a young Ron Howard in Burt I. Gordon’s Village of the Giants, and alongside Bob Hope in Eight on the Lam. Then you hit pay dirt, the dream of every actor: a steady acting gig. You just booked a starring role as Jan Brady on TV’s The Brady Bunch . . . then Sherwood Schwartz — who made a bundle in TV syndication with all of his ’60s and ’70s series, but “legally” wasn’t obligated to share the bounty because there were no residuals clauses back in the day — decides he wants a cast of “all blonde girls.”
But as you mature into a young adult, you end up in — of all things — The Brotherhood of Satan, a movie we love so much in the B&S About Movies offices, we reviewed it three times. Then you’re cast as the female lead in one of the ’70s most iconic and influential horror films of all time: William Freidkin’s The Exorcist*. And one of the actresses that also auditioned and was seriously considered as Regan MacNeil was Anissa Jones — and you worked alongside Buffy on a couple of episodes of TV’s Family Affair. And your parents — as did Denise Nickerson’s, who portrayed Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and was in the running — made you drop out of the project because of the troubling, controversial subject matter.
Eventually Sherwood Schwartz tosses you a bone to work on the show he fired you from — over hair issues, mind you (there was no Clairol or wigs, Woody?) — with a guest-starring role as the homely-to-hot Molly Webber in “My Fair Opponent,” a 1972 episode of The Brady Bunch. And, at the mercy of channel surfing the retro-channels Cozi or Antenna TV, you can still be seen in the still-in-reruns Adam 12, Green Acres, and Emergency! — sans residuals, natch.
Actress Debi Storm as Molly in The Brady Bunch.
Meanwhile, Leigh McCloskey (later of Hamburger: The Motion Picture) is climbing his way up the network TV ladder with roles on The Streets of San Francisco (that’s sadly absent from reruns) and the miniseries ratings juggernaut that was Rich Man, Poor Man (1976; that starred Peter Strauss of The Jericho Mile), while on his way to star with the very actress that got Debi Storm’s job in The Brady Bunch — Eve Plumb — in another ’70s ratings juggernaut: Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. Then, Leigh gets a leading man gig in the post-Exorcist marketplace with Dario Argento’s Inferno. (Do we need to mention that Karl Malden (Meteor) from Streets also worked for Dario in his early Giallo, Cat o’ Nine Tales?)
And the six degrees of Debi Storm stops here, since she did not work with Maestro Argento or Karl Malden, but it does bring us to this lost TV movie for the young adult crowd** starring Leigh McCloskey and Debi Storm. The poster says it all: In an effort to understand his blind girlfriend, a teenage boy decides to spend an entire Sunday blindfolded. It’s simple. It’s heartfelt. And a great lesson is learned. And teen love in the ’70s was a beautiful thing, indeed. And is that my teenage crush Cindy Eilbacher from The Death of Richie and Bad Ronald alongside a pre-L.A. Law Corbin Bernsen (The Dentist, Major League) as a lifeguard?
Director Larry Elikann, who did 18 ABC Afterschool Specials and 5 CBS Playhouses (that became Schoolbreak), also gave us a slew of network TV movies, including the The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake (1990). So if you’re in the market for a disaster flick starring ’80s TV mom Maggie Seaver and TV dad Jack Arnold, then that’s your movie.
I remember Blind Sunday — as with most of these young adult network TV movies (via reruns into the mid-80s) — as if it was yesterday (thanks to my McCloskey fandom*˟). But wouldn’t you know it: with all of the various network teen flicks uploaded, there’s not a copy of Blind Sunday to share. But we did find this nifty You Tube playlist of other ABC Afterschool Specials to enjoy. Ah, but get this! We also found a clip from 2014 of Debi singing at a Brady Bunch convention . . . and she’s BLONDE!
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies and publish music reviews and short stories on Medium.
*˟ No, I really am. Come on, you have to remember Leigh’s work in The Bermuda Depths, Fraternity Vacation, Just One of the Guys, Dirty Laundry, Cameron’s Closet, Double Revenge, and Lucky Stiffs.
The ’90s Alt-Rock We Miss MTV’s 120 Minutes Sidebar: If Eve Plumb didn’t get the job on the Brady Bunch . . . would this ’90s alt-rock band have called themselves Debi’s Storm? No, they didn’t do “Don’t Crash the Car Tonight” — that was another “female food” band, Mary’s Danish. No, they didn’t do “Love Crushing” — that was Fetchin’ Bones.
Here’s our round up of all the network TV, cable, and theatrical airline disaster movies of the ’70s — and beyond — that we’ve reviewed during this end of the year “TV Movie Week.”
When the “Big Three” over-the-air networks began expressing a disinterest in the TV movie business, the USA Network — in the early days before they were swallowed by the NBC-Universal behemoth and turned into an NBC series aftermarket shill — took the torch with aplomb.
Just look at that overseas theatrical one-sheet, if you don’t believe us. You’ve got the Hoff, along with Robert Guillaume, Charles Haid, Angie Dickinson, and Tom Bosley. And you get Lawrence Pressman, Dean Jones, and John Beck in the bargain. So, yeah, basically all of the familiar, dependable actors we know and love around here at B&S About Movies.
Based on Fire and Rain: A Tragedy in American Aviation, a novel by Jerome Greer Chandler, the film investigates — with the usual artistic licenses of events and composite characters — the tragic flight of Delta 191 at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in 1985.
Taking off from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the flight crew (John Beck) is warned of a pending storm as it prepares to land in Texas. The crew jokes the plane will “get a wash” and decide to go ahead with a landing. Then, without warning, the storm slams the L-1001 into the ground a mile short of the runway. FAA agents Dean Jones and Angie Dickinson are dispatched to investigate the crash.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
A HBO TV movie that combines film noir, late 40’s Hollywood, H.P. Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones, magic and monsters, as well as turns by Fred Ward and Julianne Moore? Why isn’t this movie not discussed all the time?
Let’s change that.
Unlike the rest of 1948 Los Angeles, private detective H. Philip Lovecraft (Ward) doesn’t use magic. He relies on his fists, his smarts and his gun. He’s been hired by Amos Hackshaw (David Warner, as always absolutely perfect) to find chauffeur Larry Willis, who has stolen a book called the Necronomicon.
You know that it can’t be that simple, right?
There’s also the virginal Olivia Hackshaw (Alexandra Powers, who played Tonya Harding in a TV movie but is now part of Scientology’s Sea Org), who is the key to a much greater scheme, plus Lovecraft’s old flame Connie Stone (Moore) has an angle, too. Look for appearances by Clancy Brown (the Kurgan from Highlander), Charles Hallahan, Arnetia Walker as a witch who aids our hero and Curt Sobel, who in addition to playing the band leader, won an Emmy for his song from this movie, “Who Do I Lie?”
Director Martin Campbell would go on to make GoldenEye and Casino Royale. This looks way bigger and better than a TV movie and would have made a great series for HBO, back in the days before they actually did that as often as they do today. The special FX are also perfect, making this feel like a lost 90’s direct to video movie.
HBO did make a spiritual sequel, Witch Hunt, which had Dennis Hopper take over for Ward and the story move to 1953 and magic take the place of Communism.
ABC-TV wasn’t letting those Airport (“Exploring: Airport, Watch the Series“) theatrical blockbusters slip by them without a TV movie knockoff, this one by the ’70s production dynamic duo of Leonard Goldberg and Aaron Spelling. Critics pounced on the film’s special effects, sets, and stock footage ineptitude on a low budget, but it cleaned up on the advertising front as it placed in the Top 10 shows during the week of November 21, 1975.
Courtesy of RetroNewsNow/Twitter
The DC-8 from The Doomsday Flight (reviewed this week) is out, as the industry had upgraded to the Boeing 747. This time, instead of bomb threats and ransom tomfoolery, this airline fest’s resident nutjob takes the serial killer route: he’s left behind a letter with the airport Head of Security proclaiming that a “series of murders” will occur of Flight 502.
As you can see, this is pure 1970s TV, courtesy of Robert Stack — who did a gunnysack load of TV movies back in the day, along with Spelling’s soon-to-be favorite blonde angel, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, and . . . Sonny Bono and Danny “Partridge” Bonaduce? Wow! And there’s Walter Pidgeon (The Neptune Factor)!
Courtesy of RetroNewsNow/Twitter
This one is quite easy to find on DVD — with Farrah to the forefront, of course, even though she’s a minor character (as a stewardess) amid the aeronautical chaos. Needless to say, the acting royalty of Robert Stack, Ralph Bellamy, Hugh O’Brian, and ‘ol Walter rise to the occasion and make it all work against the budget.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
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