Tag Archives: Lanny Duncan

Made-For-TV Horror Review: Mind Over Murder (dir by Ivan Nagy)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1979 made-for-TV movie, Mind over Murder, Deborah Raffin stars as Suzy.

Suzy is a model and an actress.  She has a nice apartment, which she shares with her football-loving boyfriend, Ben (Bruce Davison).  She has a best friend (Penelope Willis), who is constantly looking to get laid.  Her latest job requires her to dance with a man who is dressed up like a giant hamburger.  It would seem that, by the standards of 1979, Suzy has the perfect life.

However, her life is turned upside down when she suddenly starts having visions.  All of the action around her will either switch to slow motion or stop altogether while Suzy has a vision of a scary-looking bald man (Andrew Prine) stalking her.  Her most disturbing vision involves Suzy hearing the sound of a pilot begging for help while his airplane crashes.  Ben tells her that she’s probably just working too hard but, the next morning, Suzy looks at a newspaper and immediately sees a headline about a plane crash.

With Ben dismissing her concerns, Suzy takes it upon herself to meet with the two detectives (David Ackroyd and Robert Englund — yes, Robert Englund!) investigating the plane crash.  They are surprisingly sympathetic to Suzy’s story of hearing the plane crash before it happened.  They arrange for her to meet a psychic researcher, who explains that Suzy must have some sort of mental connection to whoever was responsible for the crash.  While Ben continues to be skeptical and jealous of all the time that she’s spending with one of the detectives, Suzy keeping having disturbing visions of the bald man….

Considering its origins as a made-for-TV movie, Mind Over Murder is a surprisingly frightening film.  This is a film that proves that slow motion can make just about anything creepy and Deborah Raffin does a good job of showing us just how much Suzy dreads those moments when everything starts to slow down and she realizes that she’s about to get hit with another vision.  That said, what truly makes this film frightening is the performance of Andrew Prine, who plays the bald man as being every woman’s nightmare.  He’s a misogynist, the type who is convinced that every woman should be in love with him and that those who aren’t should be punished.  Whether he’s appearing in Suzy’s visions or stepping into her reality, Andrew Prine is never less than terrifying.

Along with featuring a scary performance from Prine, this film also features a genuinely likable one from Robert Englund.  Englund is playing a nice guy here.  In fact, before he made horror history in A Nightmare in Elm Street, Englund almost always played nice guys.  It’s interesting to watch him here, with his friendly manner and his polite style, and to imagine the roles Englund would have ended up playing if he hadn’t gotten typecast as a horribly scarred serial killer.

The first hour of Mind over Murder is brilliant.  The final 30 minutes, unfortunately, find the film turning into a far more conventional thriller, as Suzy’s visions are replaced by the Bald Man actually coming after her.  That said, this is still an effective horror thriller and one that deserves to be rediscovered this Halloween season.

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 2.10 “Return of the Turks”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983.  The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee!

After two months, I’m ready to get back on the California highways with Jon and Ponch!

Episode 2.10 “Return of the Turks”

(Dir by Barry Crane, aired on November 25th, 1978)

It’s always bad news whenever Ponch runs into any of his old friends.

In this episode, when he pulls over a van, he’s shocked to discover that it’s being driven by his old friend, Sid (Kaz Garas).  After discovering that former wild man Ponch has now become a cop, Sid spirals into a midlife crisis that leads to him and his friend Rudy (Mark Thomas) playing bumper cars on the highway.  Sid is freaked out by the entire experience but Rudy discovers that he loves intentionally bumping into other cars and forcing them off the road.

This episode featured a lot of car crashes and, as usual with CHiPs, they were well-filmed.  But I have to admit that I found it almost too disturbing to watch.  Usually, I enjoy a good car chase or a spectacularly-filmed car crash.  I like fast cars and I’ve always been aware that, when a car crashes onscreen, it’s being driven by a stunt driver.  But, back in May, was Dad was in a very serious car crash.  He not only broke his shoulder but the crash aggravated his Parkinson’s and the subsequent stay in the hospital and in rehab left him so weak that he died two weeks ago.  As a result, I’m not really in the mood for car crashes right now.  That’s not the fault of this show, of course.  And, under normal circumstances, I would probably be raving about how exciting Rudy’s highway mayhem was.

Ponch is not the only one who meets someone from his past.  Baker runs into Pete (James Houghton), the brother of his former partner.  Pete’s brother died when he crashed his motorcycle on duty.  Pete now puts on his brother’s uniform and pretends to be a member of the Highway Patrol, writing tickets and directing traffic,  Because he stole and copied a page from Ponch’s ticket book, Ponch gets the credit for all the tickets but — uh oh! — it turns out that a lot of the tickets are being contested in court.  Pete is a bit overzealous.  Can Baker and Ponch get Pete off the street before he pulls over the wrong person?  And why is a story about the brother of Baker’s former partner mostly about Ponch?

This was a rather melancholy episode.  It’s easy to laugh at any episode that features people talking about how Ponch used to be a delinquent because Erik Estrada’s goofy performance doesn’t exactly lend itself to that interpretation.  But, in the end, Sid, Pete, and even Rudy were all suffering from a general sort of malaise.  They all regretted the way that their lives had turned out and they were all using the California highways as a way to live out their dreams.  Unfortunately, by doing so, they put other people’s lives at risk.  Fortunately, Baker and Ponch were there to keep the highways safe …. though only after two spectacularly-filmed pile-ups.

October Hacks: X-Ray (dir by Boaz Davidson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1982 film X-Ray (also known was Hospital Massacre) opens in the early 60s.  A nerdy kid named Harold gives a Valentine’s Day card to a popular girl named Susan.  Susan takes one look at the card and laughs.  Harold responds by taking Susan’s friend, David, and hanging him from a coat rack.  Yikes!

The film then jumps forward by 19 years.  Susan (Barbi Benton) is an upper class, divorced mom who has just received a promotion at work.  As a part of the promotion, she was required to get a medical exam for insurance purposes.  On Valentine’s Day, she heads to the hospital so that she can get the results of that exam.  It should be a routine thing that only takes a few minutes.  Susan may be a  chain smoker but, otherwise, she’s in good health.

Unfortunately, Harold is now working at the hospital and he finally sees his chance to give Susan “a piece of my heart.”  Harold fakes Susan’s test results and then murders her doctor.  Susan finds herself being checked into the hospital, pretty much against her will.  Since Harold didn’t do a very good job at faking her results, the doctors are all confused by Susan’s results.  Some of them want to operate.  Some of them just want to hold her for observation.  Susan desperately wants to leave, especially when she comes to realize that Harold is killing people in the ward.  As the doctors and nurses strap Susan down to her bed and prepare to operate, Harold goes on a rampage….

Produced by Cannon Films and directed by Boaz Davidson, X-Ray is an effectively frightening slasher film.  While the film’s plot doesn’t always hang together (for instance, Susan is remarkably untraumatized by the fact that, when she was a child, her best friend was hung from a coat rack), the hospital itself is a thoroughly creepy location and the supporting characters are all either extremely strange or extremely callous.  This is a slasher film that works less because of the blood that’s spilled but instead because it captures the dread that everyone feels at the prospect of having to spend any time at the hospital.  Even the doctors who aren’t trying to kill Susan come across as being cold and unfeeling.  The scene where Susan finds herself being ordered to undress so that she can be examined by a brusque doctor who she only met a few minutes before is, quite frankly, just as nightmarish as anything that we see Harold doing to any of his victims.  The fact that no one is willing to tell Susan what’s wrong and that everyone refuses to listen to her when she gets upset over the way she’s being treated is something to which many viewers will immediately relate.  And, of course, it’s not just that Susan has a madman stalking her through the hospital.  It’s also that all of the other patients seem to be so strange, from the guy who wanders around with his flask of bourbon to the three old women who share a hospital room with her and who talk about how, while Susan is beautiful on the outside, the inside of her body is slowly decaying.

Violent but quirky, X-Ray plays out like a filmed nightmare and it’s one of the most effective slasher films over the early 80s.