User Reviews

Interesting early look at a serial killer before it was trendy. The story centers on a man at a isolated ski resort who kills women who remind him of his mother. The best sequence comes at the beginning where the killer (Marlowe) disguised with a ski mask, skies down a long, lonely slope and kills a woman who has fallen and hurt herself. The scene looks like something straight out of a modern day slasher flick and it is pretty creepy especially with the use of music and the fact that it cuts a way to show it from the killer's viewpoint.

Actor Scott Marlowe plays the part of the psycho in an interesting way. Instead of portraying the character as cold ,calculating, and evil he is instead shown as a very vulnerable and fragile man who is more a victim of his obsessions and compulsions than anything else.

The script does get a little too talky at points and Buz and Tod are seen too little and needed to be a little more involved. The eventual explanation for the reasons to the killer's psychotic behavior seem a little too simplistic also. Still the positives outweigh the negatives.

Grade: B+

The idea of basing an episode in Squaw Valley months after the 1960 Olympics were held there was a good one. Too bad Stirling Silliphant couldn't come up with a better story than this. It's about an apparently charming psychopath who falls in love with women who remind him of his mother and then kills them when they don't live up to his idealized image of her. The baddie is played by Scott Marlowe, a handsome, talented young actor whose career never really took off. His intended victim is the lovely Jeanne Bal. George McCready shows up as his father, playing a similar role to the Donald Pleasance character in the Halloween series, warning of the danger.

The story is clichéd and probably a highly inaccurate portrayal of mental illness. It also has nothing to do with the beautiful surroundings and turns what should have been an upbeat, fun episode into a dismal downer.

Stirling Silliphant comes a cropper by dabbling in melodrama for his screenplay "Effigy in Snow". The majestic snowscapes (plus plenty of skiing footage) of Squaw Valley set the scene for what becomes a very trite story of a psycho killer, poorly acted by typecast creepy Scott Marlowe, preying on women at a ski resort. That's a far cry from the human dramas Milner and Maharis usually experience on their travels.

Miner is the expert on ski people, and introduces the milieu to Maharis, both securing jobs at the resort. Maharis is immediately attracted to lovely MILF Penny, played by the relatively obscure TV actress Jeanne Bal. She can't get over the death of her ski champ husband the year before, and while Maharis is striking out with her, Marlowe has donned a scary ski mask to kill a young woman, and now is stalking Penny.

The joyful atmosphere of the skiing community is played off against the corny "killer on the loose" central plot line to ill effect. George Macready shows up in the final reel to fill in all the background, playing the killer's dad, and the psychosis regarding his mommy leads to a very poor, anticlimactic ending. Casting Marlowe sunk the entire project, and the maudlin finish is so bad that the characters turn away, unable to watch -I wasn't so lucky.