Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1971’s Five Desperate Women!  It  can be viewed on YouTube!

Five women, who all went to college together, reunite for the first time in five years.  They’re planning on spending a weekend at a cabin on a private island.  Lucy (Anjanette Comer) is the alcoholic who talks too much.  Dorian (Joan Hackett) is the pill popper who lies about having a handsome husband and two beautiful children.  Joy (Denise Nicholas) is the former activist turned trashy model.  Gloria (Stefanie Powers) is bitchy and self-centered.  And Mary Grace (Julie Sommars) is the one with the mentally ill mother who refuses to speak to her.  Upon reuniting on the dock, the five women all immediately gather in a circle sing an old sorority song.  It’s going to be one of those weekends!

The private island is lovely and the women believe that they have it to themselves, with the exception of the two men who are also on the island.  Wylie (Robert Conrad) is the caretaker and he seems to be a trustworthy gentleman and exactly the type of guy who you would want to be stranded on an island with.  And then there’s Meeker (Bradford Dillman), who drove the boat to the island and who is the type of overbearing jerk who has to be specifically told not to bother the women.  While the women stay in the main house, the men stay in the nearby caretaker’s cottage.

From the start, it proves to be a stressful weekend.  All of the women have secrets and long-buried resentments that come out at the slightest provocation.  Not helping the fact is that there’s a murderer on the island, one that goes from killing a dog to strangling Dorian while the rest of the women are at the beach.  The woman, figuring that the murderer has to be either Meeker or Wylie, lock themselves into their house for the night but it turns out that it’s going to take more than a locked door to defeat a killer.

Five Desperate Women has an intriguing premise but it also has an extremely short running time.  With only 70 minutes to tell its story and 7 major characters to deal with, the film doesn’t leave much room for character development and, as a result, each woman is only given one personality trait and each actress ends up portraying that trait as broadly as possible.  As a result, it doesn’t take long for the movie to go from being Five Desperate Women to Five Annoying Women.  As for Robert Conrad and Bradford Dillman, the two of them give effective performances but anyone with a hint of genre savvy will be able to guess who the killer is going to turn out to be.  There is one unintentionally funny moment where the desperate women attempt to fight off the killer by throwing rocks at him and none of the rocks come close to reaching their target but otherwise, Five Desperate Women is not particularly memorable.