Night of Terror

With a cast punctuated by Martin Balsam (Psycho), Chuck Connors (Tourist Trap) and Peter Hooten (Inglorious Bastards, The), this criminally neglected ‘ABC Movie of the Week’ from October 1972 grips the viewer from the off and never lets go throughout its TV slot running time. Director Jean Szwarc serves up a suspenseful, compelling and superior thriller, which reeks of quality: from the funky animated opening titles to the automaton-like villainy of Connors — which quite possibly might just have been a partial inspiration for James Cameron’s The Terminator.

Celeste (Catherine Burns) and Linda (Donna Mills) hold art classes in their shared top floor flat for neighbourhood children. The normally peaceful get-together is disturbed when Linda hears a noise coming from the stairwell. Opening the door, she witnesses three heavies roughhousing a fourth man; seconds later, the man plummets to his death.

The three men are mobsters — out after a locker chit — and now believe Celeste and Linda are connected in some way to the dead man. They later break into the apartment, ransack it and hospitalise Celeste after a brutal beating. Later, as Linda and Celeste are about to drive home from the hospital, the towering DiPaulo (Chuck Connors) appears unexpectedly, causing Celeste to panic and crash the car; Celeste is killed and Linda ends up confined to a wheelchair, paralysed from the waist down.

After an unscheduled visit in hospital from DiPaulo, she is assigned chain-smoking, former police Captain Caleb Sark (Martin Balsam) for protection. Sark takes her to an old friend’s house by the ocean — both for her own safety and rehabilitation. It’s not long however before the unyielding and resourceful DiPaulo picks up the scent…