Rating of
3/4
Made for TV movie that has become a cult classic!
mdtinney - wrote on 11/13/09
The always arresting and outstanding B-movie Queen Karen Black displays impressive and exceptional range and skill in this hugely enjoyable three story made-for-TV horror omnibus outing. In the first pretty good tale Black essays the role of a shy college professor who gets seduced and blackmailed by a scheming male student (nicely portrayed by Black's then real-life husband Robert Burton). Black deliciously sinks her teeth into a juicy duel part in the really blah second yarn as both a severely repressed spinster and her shamelessly slutty twin sister, respectively. However, it's in the third, final and most justifiably famous vignette that Black truly shines as a frustrated young woman who's at constant loggerheads with her domineering mother. Said young lady winds up being terrorized in her apartment by a savage and unrelenting Zuni fetish doll which comes murderously to life. This latter segment qualifies as an absolute tour-de-force of raw, ferocious and positively harrowing tension; it's a tightly wound and fiercely effective twenty minute assault on one's nerves with an especially creepy and downright chilling conclusion. Moreover, the Zuni fetish doll's hideously guttural grunting'n'groaning is profoundly unsettling stuff (said freaky noises were made by prolific bit player and voice actor Walker Edmiston, who was strangely uncredited for his fantastic vocal contribution). Director Dan Curtis, working from a smart script by William F. Nolan and Richard Matheson, further aided by Bob Cubert's supremely spooky score and Paul Lohmann's polished cinematography, expertly maintains a snappy pace, elicits fine performances from a bang-up cast, and supplies plenty of hair-raising suspense throughout, reaching a stupendously scary zenith in the third and most frightening story. Despite the frankly tepid quality of the first two stories, this picture still deserves its classic status for the tremendously terrifying potency of the third and most unforgettable segment.
