A VACATION IN HELL (1979)

Originally broadcast on May 21, 1979 on ABC, A VACATION IN HELL is about five vacationers (a hip swinger dude, a blond airhead, a lonely feminist, a washed up mom and her sixteen year old daughter) who wisely leave their ocean side resort on a small crappy looking boat (that I'd be afraid to float across a swimming pool in) to go off in search of a private beach. Great idea! Well, they eventually find the private beach, but when they come in for a landing they fuck the boat all up.  Idiots.  So now instead of just hanging out, building a large signal fire and waiting to get rescued they decide to wander off, climb a jagged hill then trek across a big ass jungle filled with all kinds of dangerous bullshit like alligators, big cats, waterfalls and native warrior dudes.

Being a network TV movie, A VACATION IN HELL is very tame, but what it misses in violence and nudity it makes up for in tiresome soap opera level drama! The feminist blames everything on the dude; the dude just wants to get laid; the mom is sad and pathetic; the twenty-five year old teenage daughter is flirty and the blonde airhead, well, she just kinda stands there looking pretty (in an funky 70's body kind of way). I love this kind of stuff up so I enjoyed AVIH, but I imagine most people would dislike it for being boring and wish Predator or some cannibals would show up and kill everybody.  Or maybe they would find a long-lost tribe of nudists.

Worth a watch if you're into this sort of thing.

GRAY LADY DOWN (1978)

Somebody could write a book about all of the movies Charlton Heston made in the 1970's. Seventeen wildly varying movies, everything from a PLANET OF THE APES sequel to THE OMEGA MAN and SOYLENT GREEN, a western, some historical actioners and a number of disaster movies including this submarine crew in peril flick GRAY LADY DOWN. The film opens with longtime sub captain Heston bringing his ship into port for the last time. Normally you would stay underwater until you got there, but Heston is happy and tells 'em to go topside. Almost immediately they're hit by a gigantic freighter. With a breached hull, the sub sinks down, down, down 1450 feet and comes to rest on the edge of huge drop off. With only a limited amount of air and supplies, the crew needs to be rescued as quickly as possible, but during the wreck some heavy rocks landed on the exit door, so that means the Navy has to use an experimental mini sub (piloted by David Carradine) to clear the way for the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle.

For a single viewing, GRAY LADY DOWN is a good movie. The special effects are dated, but not distractingly so, the pace is quick enough and the story is pretty good. If you watch it you'll be entertained, if you don't watch it you're really not missing anything. Personally I prefer my 1970's disaster flicks to be bigger and have normal people in danger. Something like EARTHQUAKE or THE TOWERING INFERNO.

Mildly recommended.

ISN'T IT SHOCKING? (1973)

ISN'T IT SHOCKING? aired on Oct. 2, 1973 as part of ABC's "Movie of the Week" series and it stars a young Alan Alda as the sheriff of the small dying town of Mount Angel. The town is dying because only old people live there. Alan is bored and just riding out his last few days before he takes a new police job over in the thriving metropolis of Horse Creek. Then a serial killer strikes!

Mount Angel is full of quirky characters and the script by Lane Slate (who also wrote a number of other memorable 70's TV movies, most notably THE CAR) quickly brings the town to life. Right from the start I liked this movie and the naturalistic tone of the conversations. Especially the playful banter between Alda and his secretary Louise Lasser. Alda is dating with a single mother who runs the local roadside motel, but Lasser knows that he's secretly (even to himself) in love with her so she just plays with him nonstop. It's a lot of fun to watch. Anyway, there's a killer on the loose, but nobody even knows it because he's using a homemade defibrillator to make it look like the elderly victims died of a heart attack. But then the bodies start piling up so fast that Alan begins to suspect that something sinister is going on.  He decides to get to the bottom of it.

Quick pace, funny script, quirky town folk, nice camerawork and a excellent cast (including Ruth Gordon, Lloyd Nolan, Will Geer and Edmond O'Brien!)...I didn't want ISN'T IT SHOCKING? to end! If some TV exec back in 1973 had a brain he would have made a TV show about the adventures Sheriff Alan Alda and his town full of weirdos, but I guess Alan was already busy with "M.A.S.H.". Oh well, if you like small town mysteries, then check it out.