User Reviews

Well Thriller offered it's share of murderers, thieves, sorcerers, witches, devils and other assorted evil types, but I can't think of a seamier guy in the whole series than Guy Guthrie (Richard Carlson), especially the way he kept pawing at his son (David Kent) after the kid figured out what a lunatic the old man was. If I hadn't have just taken a shower before watching this one I think I'd be heading there right now. Man, what a creep! The guy just wouldn't stop; after offing his mistress and his wife, Guthrie makes a date with another potential victim the same day as Mrs. Guthrie's funeral!

You know, he really should have known when to stop. He might have gotten away with murder the first time if he hadn't been such a jerk with the family. Yeah I know, the wife had a severe bone to pick with hubby, but she wasn't going to blow the whistle if he just stopped playing around for a while. As for Julian (Kent), gee I don't know. The kid didn't have much of a spine to rat out the old man and that bothered me a lot about the whole thing.

The story also has a somewhat ambiguous ending that forces the viewer to figure things out for one's self. In that respect, it was similar to episode #2.18 - 'The Storm' in the way it concluded. Both stories pretty much leave you to figure out that the bad guy will get what's coming to him, but why leave it at that. Let's see him get nailed on screen for all the aggravation he put us through.

I like the idea of this series (mystery and horror, with a little fantasy tossed in) but the writing always seems so contrived to me! Case in point is the episode from Season Two called "Kill My Love".

When Dad returns from his "business trip" (really a rendezvous with his floozy, who he kills), one of the first things his kid asks him is whether he knew about "that murder in San Diego", as if Southern California teenagers in the early sixties were keen on the crime sheets in other cities. Dad denies being in San Diego, whereupon the kid shows him a San Diego newspaper he inexplicably finds in Dad's car. (It seems that while Dad was doing the killing, a newspaper vendor on the street beside his car spilled a batch of papers, one of which seems to have "spilled" into Dad's car, or was given to Dad, or was taken by Dad, or whatever. Now Dad will drive home with proof of the date and location!) Dad immediately snatches the newspaper from his son and rips it up, telling the kid that he has mistaken the number "7" for the number "17" in the date - something any murderer would surely say to divert suspicion fresh after the killing. Dad, however, carelessly leaves behind a torn strip of newsprint, and his wife sees the correct date blaring out at her in huge, bold type, as if the date itself is headline news on a par with the future Kennedy assassination. So Dad WAS in San Diego on the 17th! A quick Internet search tells us that the population of San Diego in 1962 was about a million people. Still, because he lied about not being in the city, and he's acting a little weird to boot, both wife and kid now begin to suspect that Dad is the murderer, as opposed to any of the 999,999 remaining residents of San Diego. Other clues follow, and they are all as contrived as this one, if not more so.

I may have a couple of the finer points wrong here, but please don't write nasty things about me. This is a long-forgotten episode of a long-forgotten TV series from the long-forgotten past...and, yes, I have to go out and get a life. I know this and I'm working on it.