By Erin Free
In this regular column, we drag forgotten made-for-TV movies out of the vault and into the light. This week: the 1977 highway thriller Night Terror, starring Valerie Harper, Richard Romanus, Nicholas Pryor, Michael Tolan and John Quade.
The pursued-on-the-open-road, terror-on-the-highways, vehicular-threat subgenre has a surprisingly rich history in the world of telemovies. The success of Steven Spielberg’s 1971 telemovie classic Duel (the high quality and success of which saw it released theatrically in many territories) obviously had a lot to do with this, and the rewards reaped on the small screen in its considerable aftermath have been substantial, with 1973’s Dying Room Only, and 1979’s Death Car On The Freeway and 1986’s The Gladiator (both reviewed for this very column) just three high-quality examples. Another is 1977’s Night Terror (also known as Night Drive) which also throws the telemovie-popular woman-in-peril and star-vehicle tropes into the highly appealing mix for very good measure.
Directed by wonderfully named small screen workhorse E.W Swackhamer (the E.W stands for Egbert Warnderink, no less!), Night Terror represented a major detour for leading lady Valerie Harper (who sadly passed away in 2019 at the age of eighty.), who found fame as Mary Tyler Moore’s frenemy Rhoda Morgenstern on the epochal TV series The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), and proved so popular that she was gifted her own spin-off show with Rhoda (1974-1978), another era-central hit. The very picture of the early 1970s single woman loved for her sass and spirit, Harper well and truly parks that image for Night Terror.
Penned by the curiously both one-and-done screenwriting duo of Carl Gabler and Richard DeNeut, Night Terror casts Harper (who would later feature in her own 1980s sitcom Valerie) as the rather craply named Carol Turner, a suburban housewife and doting mother prone to fits of forgetfulness and general ditziness. Seen in a flap right from the off, Carol is instantly established as a very unlikely heroine. But when a near-labyrinthine set of circumstances (it’s difficult to find a film with such a simple premise so front-loaded with exposition than this one) places her alone on the highway from Phoenix to Denver, Carol Turner has to dig deep to find her sense of inner strength and resolve. She does, however, have the most maternal of motivations: her son is gravely ill in the hospital, and Carol is desperate to be by his side.
Carol’s already stress-sweated journey is complicated – to put it mildly – when she witnesses an unnamed man murdering a highway patrolman on the side of the road. Now, The Killer (as he is billed in the credits) has Carol in his sights, and he won’t stop until the only witness to his crime is erased. Nebulously identified as some kind of career criminal and war veteran wired into an organised crime syndicate, The Killer is played with a bizarre kind of near-art-experiment lunacy by the fascinating character actor Richard Romanus, who sadly passed away in 2023 at the age of eighty.
A featured player in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, a four-episode guest star on The Sopranos, and the older brother of fellow actor Robert Romanus (the great Mike Damone in 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High), Richard Romanus gets a big actor’s sandbox in which to play in Night Terror. His Killer is not only cruelly determined when it comes to his chosen profession, he also communicates through a mechanised voice-box, which considerably ups the chill factor.
Romanus gets to establish The Killer’s wacked-out bona fides in a fantastic slow-burn scene in a roadside diner where he terrorises a sweet-faced waitress (Jan Burrell) using neither words nor overt violence. It’s the best scene in Night Terror, and nothing short of a small screen masterclass in how to build and then pay off tension and suspense; to say that Richard Romanus absolutely nails the scene is a major understatement.
Bolting hard and fast through its economic 74-minute running time (after its exposition-heavy opening, this telemovie really gets going, and then never lets up; it was, however, later padded out to 89 minutes with extra bits of business for later TV syndication), Night Terror sees Carol Turner hurtling through the night in her suburban station wagon with The Killer hot on her trail. Connecting with a few 1970s-standard oddball characters (Nicholas Pryor’s drunken businessman, a stoic Native-American family, and a sweaty derelict played by character actor John Quade, best known as Clint Eastwood’s bikie gang nemesis in Every Which Way But Loose) along the way, Carol proves surprisingly resilient, industrious, brave and creative as she avoids the clutches of The Killer, manages to stay alive, and forges forward to get to her son.
Effectively utilising the wide-open spaces during the day, and ramping up the chill of a lonesome highway at night, director E.W Swackhamer (surprisingly, not even a specific proponent of thrills and action in his TV work) applies the thumb-screws with great skill here, grabbing the audience hard and never letting them go, doling out the vehicular carnage with a sense of real invention. Swackhamer (again, what a name for a filmmaker!) is helped immeasurably by his two major players: Valerie Harper is truly engaging and sympathetic as the plucky, big-hearted Carol Turner, while Richard Romanus makes The Killer terrifying, but not in an unstoppable, infallible Terminator kind of way; this murderer has flaws, making him even more fascinating.
A wonderfully minimalist (and often charmingly oblique) thriller with mildly feminist overtones, the perfectly calibrated Night Terror is a great example of the telemovie’s frequent ability to do a lot with a little; it’s also a wonderful performance piece from a winningly against-type Valerie Harper and the underrated Richard Romanus.
Availability: Night Terror is available on Blu-Ray as an import title from the US, complete with crystal-clear sound and vision, and an audio commentary by author and noted telemovie proponent Amanda Reyes.
If you enjoyed this review, check out our other vintage telemovies Inmates: A Love Story, The Shadow Riders, CHiPs: Roller Disco, Dawn: Portrait Of A Teenage Runaway, Young Love, First Love, Escape From Bogen County, The Death Squad, Hit Lady, Brian’s Song, The Defiant Ones, A Cry For Help, Trilogy Of Terror, Policewoman Centerfold, Smash-Up On Interstate 5, Something Evil, Savage, A Step Out Of Line, The Boy In The Plastic Bubble, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission, A Very Brady Christmas, The Gladiator, Elvis, The Rat Pack, Silent Victory: The Kitty O’Neil Story, Terror Among Us, The Hanged Man, Hardcase, Charlie’s Angels: Angels In Vegas, Vanishing Point, To Heal A Nation, Fugitive Among Us, To Kill A Cop, Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Police Story: A Chance To Live, Murder On Flight 502, Moon Of The Wolf, The Secret Night Caller, Cotton Candy, And The Band Played On, Gargoyles, Death Car On The Freeway, Short Walk To Daylight, Trapped, Hotline, Killdozer, The Jericho Mile, Mongo’s Back In Town and Tribes.
