MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*
*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*
If I ever again get the impulse, "Oh, X Celebrity just died; I'll watch this obscure thing in which he/she appeared," I need to kick myself. In this case I gave this worthless piece of TV fodder a chance because of the passing of June Lockhart. I would have done better to have watched the lousiest episode of her stint on PETTICOAT JUNCTION. The director here is long-time journeyman Christian Nyby II, but I blame the badness of eleven-time screenwriter John Bensick for not putting together even a basically serviceable script.
In some small town, Liz (Loni Anderson) runs a local newspaper in partnership with a guy she once slept with. She wants to keep things all business, he doesn't. Then the viewer (but no one else) sees the partner stabbed to death by what is pretty evidently (as shown in the advertising) a lean woman in a mask. A day or so later, a reporter named Dan (Joe Penny), friend of the deceased, comes to town, wanting to find the killer. Liz and Dan butt heads as a foretaste of their inevitable hookup, but she hires this apparent "bad boy" anyway. The killer announces her intent to kill again by phoning the sheriff and saying so in a forbidding whisper.
For the next half hour, Liz and Dan spin their wheels, wasting time and building no suspense whatever. Finally the script gets around to having Dan interview Liz's mother Mrs. Rogers (Lockhart), who reveals that Liz underwent psychiatric care after her father either was killed by an intruder or killed himself-- the script is vague about which is the case. After this big revelation, Dan suddenly starts seeing Liz in a different light, as a possible psycho-- though at no point does Loni Anderson play her character as anything but a square citizen. There's a suggestion that Liz might have been molested by her dad, and also that she had an affair with her psychiatrist, but it's just more time-killing crap.
I can't do better in pointing out, as did another reviewer, the absurdity of creating a mystery about a female killer in a script that only boasts two prominent female characters (though, curiously enough, former serial queen Phyllis Coates has a small role in the telefilm). So of course it's really Mrs. Rogers, but the lazy writer can't even be bothered to sketch out her motivations. Did she execute her two or three victims because she thought they threatened her daughter? Or (slightly more likely) did she resent her daughter because her husband has sex with Young Liz, and so decided to go after Liz's exes?
Even in the domain of TV movies, this is one of the laziest scripts I've ever encountered.
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