Trilogy of Terror (1975)

This is a made-for-TV anthology horror movie consists of three stories.  Each story is about a specific woman or women, and each central character is played by the same actress, Karen Black.  She’s actually quite a good actress, selling you the preposterousness of some parts of the story, and she’s very striking with odd features…kind of grotesquely pretty.

The first story is about a mousey, timid woman who teaches at a college, and who relucantly agrees to a date with one of her students (they’re both adults, by the way).  This guy turns out to be a really sleazy type who drugs her and takes pictures of her so he can blackmail her for months to do all sorts of terrible things (this is all implied rather than shown).  I loathed this guy, but the end saw a great comeuppance, so I enjoyed this story a lot.

The second story was a tale about two sisters, one bad and one good, who inhabit the same house and hate each other…however you could see the end a mile off, as they were both played by Karen Black – there’s no way she can hide her features enough to pull this off convincingly.

The third story was a hell of a lot of fun, and the one most remembered by anyone who has seen this movie.  Basically a lone woman is terrorised by a little warrior voodoo (‘Zuni’) doll in her apartment – imagine gremlins with a scary looking doll instead of a gremlin.  Now, this should be completely ridiculous and laughable, but Black sells it completely – it’s genuinely scary and you’ll be getting tension in the shoulder-blades as she creeps around the apartment, trying to find the thing or as a door-handle turns.

Definitely recommended.

Rating: ODD, 7/10
Suitable for teens and adults