The movies on TV gave thread gave me the idea for this one.
Sure, now there’s a whole cable channel for TV movies, Lifetime, but I mean really memorable ones. Well anyway, ones you find memorable.
Here’s a couple of mine:
The Legend of Lizzie Borden. Famous for suggesting Lizzie committed the murders in the nude. Elizabeth Montgomery walking around like that probably helped its fame. One thing I never got from the movie that I later read about was Fritz Weaver’s huffing and puffing around the corpses in his basement (Andrew Borden was an undertaker.) was meant to suggest (gulp) necrophilia! With young Lizzie looking on! Man, them 70’s were some decade!
Trilogy of Terror. Karen Black and that little Zuni doll with the teeth. That doll terrified me, but it was soooo cute with its big flappy head and Cousin It dialect.
Sybil. I guess Sybil was more of a mini-mini-series. (It had two parts) but it was
outstanding. Even if the case it was based on was a case of false memory syndrome, this movie was stunning.
Do mini-series count? If so, then Stephen King’s “The Stand,” which aired in 1994. Plague wipes out most of mankind, the Lincoln Tunnel littered with corpses, journey across a barren nation. Scared the hell out of me, but I liked it so much I got the book and spent most of the summer of 1994 reading it.
The BBC Version of Day of the Triffids Great Low-Tech effects, and faithful to John Wyndham’s book (which the 1963 movie definitely was not)
The BBC Quatermass serials, at least from the 1950s. Excellennt SF.
As far as the US goes, I’ve generally been disappointed even (especially) by sf/fantasy films. The Point, the only animated entry in the ABC Movie of the Week was pretty cool, though. And Daughter of the Mind (adapted from “The Hand of Mary Constable”) was a halfway decent piece of fluff from the ABC MOW.
Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol. Great little story about a returning Vietnam vet who discovers his home town has been completely erased from existence. He suspects a government plot, but the answer is much more interesting.
Rehearsal for Murder. A playwright rehearses a new play, designed to catch the murderer of his fiancee. William Daniels is superb, though the rest of the cast is also very good.
The Day After sacred the crap out of me when I was a kid, far more so then any traditional horror movie.
Probably doesn’t count, but I liked the made-for-TV version of Inherit the Wind with Kirk Douglas more then I liked the original film (with Spencer Tracy).
