In "Murder's for the Birds" by Dean Haberman, and directed by Mende Brown, a man named Harold (Vic Morrow) celebrates his fortieth birthday. It is not a happy occasion, however. He owes a loan shark $12,000 dollars, and his mean old Cousin Lilly (Neva Carr Glynn), must bail him out. She is a wealthy but mean old woman that Harold can't stand.
Harold plots to murder Lilly, and inherit her money, but the murder goes awry when a pet cockatoo, Radcliffe, begins to talk, shouting out the word "murderer," again and again, and in the company of the maid.
Now Harold must commit his second murder of the evening and kill the bird...
Readers following my reviews of this 1970's Australian horror anthology, The Evil Touch (1973-1974), may be sensing a pattern, Specifically, the low-budget, blunt-minded but entertaining series keeps re-telling the same old story, week-after-week.
That narrative, simply put, is of a middle-aged playboy looking to inherit an old woman's fortune via unsavory, murderous means. We have seen men murdering spinsters before in "A Game of Hearts," and also a husband murdering his rich wife in "The Upper Hand." Here, the story is much the same, except for the presence of a tattle-tale cockatoo, Radcliffe.
The late Vic Morrow is powerful and diabolical in the role of Harold, a man who "desperately craves success" and "money," according to Anthony Quayle's opening narration. To make his wishes come true he plans out the murder, and executes it without remorse. A heart-beat sound track accentuates his crime, after he has used poison on poor old Lilly.
The last portion of the episode is amusing as Harold chases Radcliffe around the house. The bird sits on a chandelier, and flies up to the roof with a gun-toting Harold in pursuit. At one point, the camera adopts the bird's POV, as Harold moves in for the kill. The final sting in the tail/tale is that Harold dies pursuing Radcliffe, and that nobody could understand the bird's utterances, anyway. Nobody except for Harold and Lilly, that is.
The episode culminates with Quayle's notation that "everybody is a potential murderer," and being a cynic I might amend that statement. Every main character featured on The Evil Touch, at this points, seems a potential murderer, of rich old women. "Murder's for the Birds" is entertaining enough, and well-shot and performed, but the series has gone to this particular narrative well one too many times already.
Next week: "Marcie."
I know that I'm more than a year late to this party, but I wanted to thank you for blogging about THE EVIL TOUCH. It was your writing in TERROR TELEVISION that turned me on to this series years ago, and it has become one of my favorite anthologies. Have been searching for better copies of the show for years, and recently I've had some moderate success. I discovered that ET aired frequently in Japan during the 1980s, and a number of recordings are posted around the internet. Unfortunately, they're all in Japanese, and most are uploaded at only 360p (so they look very "soft"). Still, in many cases they look better than the multi-generational VHS captures in circulation among fans today. So I've been working to restore the English audio to some of the better Japanese prints, in an effort to improve the quality of the available copies of the series (even if only by a little bit). In some cases, these Japanese prints are also more complete (as in the U.S. TVLand edited some of their broadcasts by up to 3 and a half minutes). Here is a YouTube link to my work on a full-length copy of "Murder's for the Birds":
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuBkQd5dqUI
Thanks again for introducing me to THE EVIL TOUCH through your excellent book. Please keep up the great work with your blog!
-Curt