1970s horror in America has long been championed as the genre’s definitive golden era, if only for the sheer diversity you’re bound to find when a movement comes to a crossroads. As the last remnants of gothic horror lingered on in the final days of Amicus and Hammer Films, the burgeoning slasher movement of the next decade began taking root. Meanwhile, Satanic panic was in full swing thanks to THE EXORCIST and its various imitators. On the more natural side of things, JAWS ushered in a new wave of eco-horrors that reimagined ’50s nature-run-amok mayhem on a more realistic scale. Television was lurking throughout all of these shifting tides, now more popular than ever and a viable medium for film. While the origins of TV movies stretch back to the ’60s, these small-screen spectacles truly flourished in the ’70s, and it’s no surprise that horror—the genre Hollywood has consistently exploited since its inception—was at the forefront. Even less surprising is that these films often took their cues from their big-screen counterparts, acting as low-budget doppelgangers of popular blockbuster fare. When theaters became overrun with killer critters, TV followed suit, serving up even more deadly beasts to viewers. As part of its July slate, KL Studio Classics—who has carved a niche bringing these ’70s TV terrors home—unleashes three creepy-crawly favorites from the era, remastered and restored in high definition for the first time.
ANTS: IT HAPPENED AT LAKEWOOD MANOR (1977)
Premiering on December 2nd for ABC, IT HAPPENED AT LAKEWOOD MANOR finds a long-standing resort under siege by some of nature’s smallest—but, as it turns out, deadliest—creatures. Lakewood Manor has been a staple of a sleepy coastal town for decades when unscrupulous real estate magnate Anthony Fleming (Gerald Gordon) arrives in town with his business partner (and mistress) Gloria (Suzanne Somers) in tow. Looking to tear the old place down and replace it with a casino resort, he’ll say and do anything to sweet talk the deed from long-time owner Ethel Adams (Myrna Loy) and her daughter Valerie (Linda Day George). Before he can seal the deal, however, a colony of deadly ants emerges from a nearby construction site, claiming the life of a worker and sending others to the hospital until an emergency rescue operation launches to evacuate the hotel as the swarm spreads.
If you had to pick a movie that captured the vibes of these made-for-TV productions, you could pick a worse representative than IT HAPPENED AT LAKEWOOD MANOR. Boasting a fantastic cast that also includes the likes of Bernie Casey and Brian Dennehey, it’s solidly helmed by small-screen mainstay Robert Scheerer from a Guerdon Trueblood script that peppers in plenty of mayhem. The big question here, of course, is if the premise is too ludicrous: sure, ants are a summertime nuisance, but how terrifying can they be without the involvement of Bert I. Gordon or Saul Bass? LAKEWOOD MANOR does an impressive job of making its premise believable enough, largely thanks to some pseudo-scientific wrinkles that reflect the era’s growing concern about pollution. It turns out these ants are extra deadly because they’ve ingested all of the toxins polluting their soil, granting them enhanced strength and venomous potency. You will believe that a mass of ants is enough to paralyze grown adults in fear—but maybe just barely, of course. Ultimately, it is all a little silly, though I’d argue that this is the exact niche many of these TV terrors carved: lightweight schlock that couldn’t compete in the same weight class as its big-screen counterparts but managed to deliver some cheap thrills all the same.
And in that respect, LAKEWOOD MANOR certainly delivers in its quest to shadow the stereotypical ’70s nature-run-amok routine. Robert Foxworth is Mike, our leading man and inevitable hero who first discovers that these ants are the culprits. Experts scoff at him, dismissing his pleas as the ravings of a madman, and he obliges by…well, acting like a total maniac and taking a bulldozer to the construction site in an unhinged attempt to destroy the ants. Of course, he’s downright virtuous compared to Gordon’s sleazy real estate baron, whose shady business practices and misogynistic treatment of his assistant pegs him as the big bad who will eventually deserve whatever gruesome comeuppance awaits him. LAKEWOOD MANOR obliges as best as it can given network restrictions, though it must be said that it does push the envelope a bit with its most infamous sequence: Somers falling prey to a swarm of ants wearing only her bedsheets as protection (it’s little wonder that the eventual home video art seized on this image). The climax is consistently amusing too in the way it ramps up the danger: not only does a group of survivors get trapped on the top floor of the hotel, but the eventual helicopter rescue attempt sends the ants flying into the crowd as Myrna Loy descends on a crane. At this moment, you realize that LAKEWOOD MANOR is also trying to recapture the epic grandeur of the decade’s disaster epics, albeit on a much smaller scale and budget. The very thought is ludicrous, yet that’s exactly why these productions are so charming, particularly when compared to modern-day successors that wink and gag their way through the motions, dripping in irony and snark. You’ll find none of that at LAKEWOOD MANOR, a movie that delivers exactly what its rebranded home video title promised: ANTS!, and lots of ‘em.
TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO (1977)
A few weeks later, CBS countered ABC’s infestation with a bug movie of their own in TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO. When a couple of pilots (Tom Atkins and Howard Hesseman!) try to smuggle coffee beans from Ecuador, the locals insist they sneak aboard three stowaways as compensation. Stuck in the plane’s cargo hold, the trio of men is the first to realize the compartment also holds other unwanted passengers: dozens of tarantulas that quickly swarm the plane, forcing a crash landing in Finleyville, a sleepy California town whose oranges will soon be under siege by the deadly cargo.
TARANTULAS leans even further into the disaster movie formula, at least early on, when a good chunk of the film finds this small town convening at the impressively staged plane crash and sifting through the carnage. Once again sporting a cast of familiar faces, the film eventually settles into JAWS rip-off mode in one of the most idiosyncratic fashions imaginable when the spiders infest the town’s orange-producing cooperative. Naturally, the mayor (Bert Remsen) freaks out, caring only about the town’s precarious economy as the spiders claim several lives, including a poor kid’s. While this particular scenario is amusing, the threat here is a step up from the ants in LAKEWOOD MANOR since tarantulas are…well, just look at them, you know? Generally speaking, spiders don’t freak me out, but if I saw one of the huge, fuzzy bastards crawling about, I wouldn’t exactly laugh it off. Veteran TV director Stuart Hagmann (MANNIX, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE) gets a lot of mileage out of simply capturing these beasts on camera, both in close-up and long shots that’ll make your skin crawl. Despite the creatures’ deliberate movements, Hagmann creates a frantic energy, particularly inside the huge co-op warehouse, where the handheld camerawork pokes around, uncovering spiders in every nook and cranny as TARANTULAS builds to its harrowing climax.
The unique predicament here—which finds the small town trying to preserve its oranges while destroying the spiders—means the climax isn’t exactly stirring. Because they can’t nuke the building from orbit, the townspeople must be more resourceful in deploying wasps, giant amplifiers, shovels, and tongs. What it lacks in explosiveness, this climax makes up for with a clever sense of escalation: anything that can go wrong does go wrong, resulting in the power shutting off, leaving our small band of heroes trapped inside of a building with the deadly spiders. Like LAKEWOOD MANOR, TARANTULAS is mostly concerned with the characters’ survival, leaving the actual destruction of the creatures to be wrapped up off-screen before the final credits pleasantly roll onto the screen. It makes for a tidy enough experience, which is exactly what most of these made-for-TV horrors often are: safe, entertaining little riffs on superior material that does exactly what it’s meant to do. Plus, like so many of its eco-horror contemporaries, time has been especially kind to it in the wake of real-life disasters that make the mayor’s behavior here all too believable. Before the bodies can even be recovered from the airplane wreckage, he’s bitching and moaning about the gawking bystanders, insisting that they need to get back to picking oranges. Later on, he threatens to arrest anyone—including the town doctor (Pat Hingle) and fire chief (Claude Akins)—who thinks eradicating the spiders should take priority over the economy, meaning the cartoon villains of ’70s schlockfests don’t feel so cartoonish anymore. Likewise, this shit mayor escapes unscathed; hell, if there had ever been a sequel, I’m guessing we’d find out the town even reelected his dumb ass.
TERROR OUT OF THE SKY (1978)
Speaking of sequels, next year did little to diminish the public’s appetite for killer bug movies, as CBS prepped TERROR IN THE SKY for the day after Christmas 1978. A follow-up to NBC’s THE SAVAGE BEES, it finds one of that film’s survivors, Jeannie Devereux (Tovah Feldshuh, stepping in for Gretchen Corbett), still traumatized by the swarm of bees that invaded Mardi Gras a few years ago. Plagued by nightmares of barely escaping in her bee-covered VW Bug, she’s soldiered on and continued her work at a bee institute alongside her old professor, David Martin (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.). When the lethal strain of South American bees resurfaces, Jeannie and David hit the road to track down some local hives that may harbor the killer insects.
Of these three films, TERROR OUT OF THE SKY is undeniably the most dynamic of the bunch, starting as a road movie that eventually becomes a claustrophobic thriller when the bees lay siege to a baseball game and a school bus. There’s even a love triangle tossed in for good measure when Jeannie’s boyfriend Nick (Dan Haggerty) comes along for the ride, unaware that she and David have admitted to always having feelings for each other (which is not professional behavior on his part especially, in my opinion). Anyway, the bees are also the most menacing threat of these three movies, on account of them being able to fly in huge swarms instead of deliberately crawling around, waiting for someone to stumble across them. Bees will just fuck you up of their own volition, something TERROR OUT OF THE SKY consistently exploits to create a sense of urgency. Standing around and figuring out a course of action isn’t a luxury our three heroes have very often here because they’re thrust into danger, forced to make split-second decisions that put them in one harrowing situation after the next. The film’s best sequence comes towards the end, when Jeannie has to herd a bunch of Boy Scouts into a bus, where the sweltering heat conspires with the bees to create a truly miserable experience. TERROR OUT OF THE SKY is at its best when it simply allows the bees to do their thing, whether it’s taking down a guy in a truck or stinging a dog to death right in front of its owners, solidifying the mean streak running through all three of these films. Network constraints may have kept this small-screen fare from being too explicit, but it unwittingly makes it all the more screwed up when something ghastly happens in these sunny, movie-of-the-week productions.
Less effective here is the melodrama that occasionally surfaces in the ill-fitting love triangle that’s admittedly good for a few chuckles when David and Nick snipe at each other over Jeannie’s affections. Otherwise, it’s pretty dreadful stuff, mostly because it’s hard to understand what she sees in either of these guys. To his credit, David has some big hero moments that make for a pair of awesome stunt displays involving a helicopter and a swarm of bees during an otherwise subdued climax that finds him skulking about an abandoned missile silo to kill the bees in seclusion. By this point, TERROR OUT OF THE SKY feels a lot like its two contemporaries, as it eschews the big, rousing climaxes found in big-screen blockbusters for a more somber denouement that tidies up the love triangle. By the way, don’t let this one’s sequel status deter you: from what I can gather, Jeannie is the only returning character from THE SAVAGE BEES, a film that still hasn’t made it to DVD in the U.S., much less Blu-ray. I’m not sure what rights issues kept it from being released alongside this trio of films, but here’s hoping KL (or someone) gets them sorted. It’s downright unnatural for a sequel to be more available than its predecessor!
THE DISCS
One reason to hope that KL figures out THE SAVAGE BEES is that you’d know it’d be in good hands, at least if these three releases are any indication. Boasting brand new 2K remasters, the transfers here are tremendous upgrades over the ancient DVD presentations from 15 years ago. Aside from a few instances of negligible print damage, nothing’s out of sorts here, and these films wouldn’t have looked this good during their initial broadcasts. KL has even provided the option to watch IT HAPPENED AT LAKEWOOD MANOR with a 1.85:1 framing, replicating the presentation of the theatrical release it had in some overseas markets. LAKEWOOD MANOR also boasts the most robust set of special features of the bunch: in addition to an audio commentary from historian Lee Gambin, who also conducts audio interviews with stars Barbara Brownell, Barry Van Dyke, Anita Gillete, Moosie Drier, and production assistant Valerie Landsburg. Clocking in at nearly three hours in length, these interviews are loaded with anecdotes about the production of IT HAPPENED AT LAKEWOOD MANOR, plus scattered musings about the participants’ other career work.
TARANTULAS and TERROR OUT OF THE SKY also have audio commentaries of their own, with Made for TV Mayhem Show hosts Amanda Reyes, Dan Budnik, and Nate Johnson doing the honors on the former, while historian David Del Valle and David DeCoteau muse upon the latter. All three movies also feature trailers for other KL ’70s TV horror releases, plus brand new artwork from Vince Evans. Leaving no stone unturned, though, KL even includes reversible cover art for LAKEWOOD MANOR, allowing you to recapture the glory days when a VHS cover could entice you with killer ants and cleavage. As these three releases remind us, it’s the little things that count: through the magic of ’70s TV-movie alchemy, tiny bugs on the small screen make for big-time entertainment.
Tags: Alan Landsburg, Alex Colon, Amanda Reyes, Anita Gillette, Ants, Arachnids, Barbara Brownell, Barry Van Dyke, Bees, Bernie Casey, Bert Remsen, Blu-ray, Brian Dennehy, Bugs, Charles Frank, Charles Hallahan, Claude Akins, Dan Budnik, Dan Haggerty, David DeCoteau, David Del Valle, Deborah Winters, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Gerald Gordon, Howard Hessman, Ike Eisenmann, Insects, Joe E. Tata, Karen Lamm, kino lorber, KL Studio Classics, Lee Gambin, Lee H. Katzin, Lonny Chapman, Lynda Day George, Made for TV Mayhem, Moosie Drier, Myrna Loy, Nate Johnson, Pat Hingle, Penelope Windust, Philip Baker Hall, Richard Herd, Robert Foxworth, Robert Scheerer, Spiders, Steve Franken, Stuart Hagmann, Suzanne Somers, Tarantulas, The 1970s, Tom Atkins, Tovah Feldshuh, TV, Valerie Landsburg, Vince Evans
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