The Victim is my wife’s pet name for me. It is also the title of a made-for-TV horror movie that aired Tuesday, November 14, 1972, on ABC.
It stars Elizabeth Montgomery. Mongomery was Samantha on the Bewitched TV series, where she played a woman struggling with a nose twitch from snorting too much coke.
Herschel Daugherty directed The Victim. He worked exclusively in TV and directed episodes of Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man and goes all the way back to the early 1950s, working on Biff Backer, USA, which starred Alan Hale Jr. as a spy behind the Iron Curtain. Lee Marvin was a guest star once.
The plot of The Victim is thus: during an electrical storm, wealthy Kate Wainwright is trapped in her sister’s country house with no electricity and no phone. An unknown killer has murdered the sister, stuffed the body in the cellar and is now pursuing Kate.
I’ve never understood the term electrical storm. Is it supposed to mean a thunderstorm with lightning? So…basically, like every thunderstorm ever then?
If that is the logic, we might as well call Wal-Mart the “Fat Lady Store.”
Let’s see how The Victim stacks up against other made-for-TV horror movies like The Intruder Within, Midnight Offerings, Curse of the Black Widow, Satan’s Triangle, Killdozer, Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell , Invitation to Hell, Summer of Fear, Savages, Moon of the Wolf, The Initiation of Sarah, Crowhaven Farm, A Cold Night’s Death, Snowbeast, The Possessed, Chiller, Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Full Eclipse.
The Victim
The movie begins with a station wagon pulling up to a big house in a California forest. How much do you want to bet the house belonged to the producer? In this case, the producer is William Frye, who gave us such films as Raise the Titanic and Airport ’77.
Did you know that 97 percent of cars in the 1970s were station wagons? The rest were AMC Gremlins and Ford Pintos. A brand-new Ford Pinto would set you back $2,000 in 1972. Normally, people look at something like that and exclaim…
“Wow, a new car was only $2,000 back then!
In this case, people exclaim…
“Who the heck would pay $2,000 for a Ford Pinto?”
A woman exits the station wagon. It is Jess Walton. Walton is best known for still appearing on The Young and the Restless. Walton enters the house. She owns a dog, a cat and a bird. Today, this kind of woman would display a cheaply printed Black Lives Matter poster in the background of her Facebook pictures.
Who would have thought an organization like Black Lives Matter would print cheap posters?
The Seventh Victim
Cut to pre-gay San Franciso. Elizabeth looks out the window at the Golden Gate Bridge. Hey, remember when Tanya Roberts almost died on the Golden Gate Bridge?
Elizabeth calls Walton. They are sisters. Apparently, life is not going well for Walton. She left her husband (big surprise) and called an attorney (another big surprise).
“When something is dead,” Walton sagely says, “the only decent thing to do is bury it…”
Elizabeth wants to visit. Walton poo-poos that idea. She wants to have a good cry (that will gain her another ten percent of her husband’s net worth in family court).
Meanwhile, slasher POV enters the house. Daugherty must have seen Psycho and Peeping Tom. Walton turns to the camera as it approaches and says, “What are you doing here?!”
Cue the sound of wire brushes on a cymbal and execute dramatic cut!
Back to pre-excrement covered San Francisco. Elizabeth wanders around the house and tries to call Walton back. The camera returns to Walton’s house and shows the phone is off the hook, plus signs of a struggle. A shadow is seen carrying a body into the basement.
Elizabeth tries to call back yet again. Then she calls the operator. Then she sips scotch. Everyone sipped scotch in the 1970s. Now we sip Starbucks. What happened to us?
Elizabeth decides to drive down to visit Walton after consulting her oriental manservant (man, I hope she pays him to attack her randomly to keep her judo skills on point).
Might As Well Face It You’re The Victim Of Love
Elizabeth drives a car that is not a station wagon, Gremlin or Pinto.
It might be a Rolls, judging by the radiator grill. I don’t know. I’m not a car person. I drive a twenty-year-old Pontiac so I can continue to relate to the common folk. I find myself growing increasingly detached to the poor, huddled masses due to the fame and fortune acquired from writing articles for The Last Movie Outpost.
Elizabeth stops at a gas station to make yet another phone call. That seems to be her go-to move. Still no answer from Walton. Elizabeth returns to her car, and I do not believe it…goes back to the phone booth to make another call! This time she calls her oriental manservant to see if Walton called her while she was gone.
Eventually, Elizabeth reaches Walton’s house under the soggy assault of a rain rig. You can tell it is a rain rig because it is sunny in the background. Granted, yes, it can rain when the sun is out. I believe the old saying is that when that happens, it means the devil is beating his wife. Still, I’m going with rain rig. Plus, if the devil is married and in hell, well, that’s just redundant.
Elizabeth enters Walton’s house (technically, her husband’s house). Things look normal. The cat greets her. No one else is home. Elizabeth treks through the 1970s opulence, which includes an oversized couch with a gaudy pattern of burnt-orange and taupe flowers. Now homes look like they were decorated by the THX-1138 set designer.
Elizabeth checks the basement and closes a banging window. She does not notice the dead face of Walton starring out of a crack of a wicker basket lid…
The Victim Complex
Elizabeth goes back upstairs and confronts the horror of a rattling door.
“Who is it?” Elizabeth fearfully asks.
And old lady enters, carrying laundry. It is the housekeeper. Eileen Heckart plays the part. Viewers might recognize her as Burgess Meredith’s worse half in Burnt Offerings. That means Heckart got to work with Oliver Reed in all his boozy glory!
Elizabeth wants to know where Walton went (that is almost a tongue-twister). Heckart doesn’t know. She doesn’t keep tabs on people. They have a lengthy discussion about…can you guess?
That’s right, phone calls! They talk about how many phone calls were made and when the phone calls were made, and I can’t help but be riveted by the minutia of it all. Now I know how people feel when they read The Last Movie Outpost Bond On Series…
Elizabeth also asks if Heckart has seen the dog?
“Nope.”
Is Heckart the guilty one? She is certainly acting suspicious. Stay tuned to find out after these messages brought to you by Hostess Fruit Pies, Sammy Davis Jr. pimping GE and more!
I’m The Victim Here!
Elizabeth still can’t give up on the phone as being the answer to all of her problems. Or the screenwriter doesn’t know how to fill time without dialogue. Merwin Gerard wrote the screenplay. Gerard specialized in TV movies toward the end of his career. Looking at his list, a couple I may need to check out for future articles exist…
The Victim is not the brainchild of Gerard, however. It is based on a short story by McNight Malmar. It appears I may actually have more short stories published that Malmar, which is to say, no one has heard of either of us, and our moms are our main readers.
Elizabeth talks to Sue Ane Langdon on the phone. Langdon plays a ditzy housewife who is the perfect blend of not-too-smart and cooperative. Langdon appeared in some minor classics in the 1980s: Without Warning, Zapped! and UHF.
From Langdon, Elizabeth learns that Walton fired Heckart and adds…
“I always though that old witch was a little bit touched.”
To add more crimson to this red herring, Elizabeth confronts Heckart with this information, and Heckart is very curt about the fact that she was hired by Walton’s husband and can only be fired by Walton’s husband. Plus, Walton’s husband is going to lose everything in a divorce, including the house, which Heckart feels is hers to protect.
From here, The Victim begins to collapse from lack of plot. There is simply nothing here to work with. It’s like if you tried to hug Arianna Grande…
The Victim Rattlehead
Elizabeth now repeats a loop. She goes from the living room to bedroom to basement to the garage over and over again. The phone is mercifully taken out of the equation because slasher POV cuts the line. That does not stop the movie from talking about the phone, however.
Throughout this repetition, stuff happens to get us to the next commercial break. Police visit. Heckart disappears, then reappears. The body of Walton gets moved. Elizabeth hears noises and investigates them. She also tries to track down Walton’s husband (via phone, of course, before the line was cut) and learns that Walton’s husband did not go away on business. In fact, he actually lost his job with his firm.
Oh yeah, Elizabeth periodically mixes herself a drink. One of the bottles is filled with a green liquid. Are they drinking absinthe in this house? Is Jeffrey Combs going to use it to reanimate Walton? Is John Carpenter directing the green liquid?
Alas, we never find out…
Finally, after seven and a half hours, the husband enters the movie. George Maharis plays the husband. Maharis has one of those faces that you think you have seen many times because his face is an amalgamation of every leading actor from the 1970s.
Then you look at Maharis’s credit list, and you realize you fooled yourself. You have never seen Maharis in your life even though he appeared in The Sword and the Sorcerer.
Then you learn Maharis appeared in Playgirl and got arrested for cruising men’s rooms, and you realize…Yes! That’s where I knew him from!
Don’t Be A The Victim
The Victim has one of the most abrupt endings I’ve ever seen, probably the most abrupt ending I’ve seen since Desperado.
Maharis is obviously the killer, but the movie is so confused about that fact that eventually you become confused about it, too. Elizabeth and Maharis play cat-and-mouse conversation for an interminable time. Elizabeth pretends to know less than she does while asking pointed questions that Maharis brushes aside with excuses.
My favorite part of all of this is when Maharis tries to calm Elizabeth down with booze. He gives her a glass and makes her chug it.
“Okay. One more. All of it this time. Come on. Drink it down.”
I’m pretty sure Bill Cosby wrote that line…
It all culminates with Elizabeth trying to escape in Walton’s car. Maharis chases. Elizabeth loses control of the car and crushes Maharis between it and a tree. It is hard not to laugh as Maharis is shown with his face pressed up against the glass like Patrick Kilpatrick in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins.
Oh yeah, Heckart appears and yells something garbled. I had to put on captions to understand it. That didn’t work. Eventually, I found what she said on a Redditt thread. Apparently, she said, “No, Mr. Chappel! Let her go! I called the police!”
So, whether Heckart was in cahoots and had second thoughts or was simply a red herring is up for debate. We don’t have to care to debate it, though. It’s not that important.
Maharis doesn’t die. He is taken away by an ambulance at the end, and Elizabeth gives a thousand-yard stare to the camera, victimized by the experience of it all
The Victim
The Victim is a perfectly sound idea: woman alone in a house with a killer outside. It uses slasher POV before it became a mainstream thing. Elizabeth gives a decent performance that branches off from the comedic stuff she usually did. It is fun to look at all the 1970s things. Plus, If The Victim can’t keep it interesting, at least it keeps it short. Seventy-five minutes and we are out.
But, in the end, we, the viewers, are the true victims…
