When you’re a kid, and you are too young to go see spooky movies on the big screen (or your parents are too square to take you!), it’s great when the scary movies come to you on the small one. Nowadays, with streaming services being what they are, it’s easier than ever to see anything you want, whenever you want. Back in the day, however, it usually took at least a year before a movie was played on TV or released on video. Luckily, TV networks created their own movies to fill all those programming hours and to quench the thirst of genre film fans. Made-for-TV movies, while not as graphic as films in the theaters, were often quite inventive with their scares. What they lacked in bloodshed, they made up for in suspense and all-around strangeness. For today’s Cinematic Void 31 Days of Voidoween, I want to talk Jack Bender’s 1985 made-for-TV movie Deadly Messages.
While Laura Daniels (Kathleen Beller) and her boyfriend Michael go out on the town, a young woman who is staying with the couple, Cindy (Sherri Stoner), finds a ouija board. Using it alone, Cindy contacts the spirit of a young man who claims that he was murdered. When Laura returns home, she’s forgotten her keys. She climbs the fire escape to her apartment’s window and witnesses a man in dark glasses strangling Cindy. Laura calls the police, but when they arrive and enter the apartment all signs of the crime have vanished -- including Cindy!
Laura uses the ouija board and contacts the spirit of Mark, the same spirit Cindy spoke to. Mark tells Laura that he killed Cindy and that he is going to kill her, too. Soon, Laura is being stalked on the streets of the city and the food court of the mall by a killer. Unfortunately, Laura is unable to convince anyone else, including Michael, that what she is experiencing is real. Will the killer get her? Will Michael believe her before it’s too late?
On the face of it, Deadly Messages is your typical made-for-TV fare. You got your woman-in-peril storyline and your nobody-believes-her storyline stitched together by a is-she-really-crazy storyline. Where Deadly Messages pushes the envelope is in the development of Laura Daniels’s past. I don’t want to give it away, but the truth about Laura is discovered and revealed in a really novel and charming way. It was such a pleasant surprise, and it opened the story up to new and weird possibilities.
Kathleen Beller was a staple of the made-for-TV landscape. She’d starred in such films as Are You in the House Alone?, No Place to Hide, and The Blue & the Grey. She was also a part of the cast of Dynasty for many years. Jack Bender had a heck of a year in 1985. In addition to Deadly Messages, he made Letting Go (with John Ritter) and The Midnight Hour.
Deadly Messages isn’t as over-the-top crazy as Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Trilogy of Terror, or Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, but I think it’s got a great energy that drives it to a satisfying denouement.
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