Director – Dan Curtis, Screenplay – The Graveyard Rats by Dan Curtis & William F. Nolan (Based on the Short Story by Henry Kuttner), Bobby by Richard Matheson & He Who Kills by Dan Curtis & William F. Nolan, Producer – Julian Marks, Photography – Elemer Ragalyi, Music – Bob Cobert, Special Effects – Frank C. Cacere, Creature Effects – Eric Allard, Prosthetics – Rick Stratton, Production Design – Veronica Hadfield. Production Company – Wilshire Court Productions, Inc./Power Pictures/Dan Curtis Productions.
Cast
The Graveyard Rats:- Lysette Anthony (Laura Ansford), Geraint Wyn Davies (Ben), Matt Clark (Roger Ansford), Geoffrey Lewis (Arley Stubbs). Bobby:- Lysette Anthony (Alma), Blake Heron (Bobby). He Who Kills:- Lysette Anthony (Dr Simpson), Richard Fitzpatrick (Lieutenant Jerry O’Farrell), Thomas Mitchell (Lew)
Plot
The Graveyard Rats:- Laura is married to aging, wheelchair-ridden millionaire Roger Ainsford. He obtains video evidence of her in bed with his chauffeur Ben and threatens to divorce her and leave her with nothing. Instead she and Ben concoct a scheme where they push Roger’s wheelchair down the stairs and kill him. It is ruled an accident but when the will is read, it is discovered that Roger’s entire fortune has been liquidated. However, the clues to its whereabouts are on a microfilm in a secret compartment in Roger’s watch, which has been buried with him. This necessitates that they have to rob the grave. In doing so, they have reckoned without the ferocious rats that inhabit the graveyard. Bobby:- Alma conducts an occult ceremony to bring her late son Bobby back to her, but instead what she raises is something undead and vengeful. He Who Kills:- Detectives investigate the murder of Amelia in her own apartment. A doll is found in the oven and taken to anthropologist Dr Simpson who determines that it is a Zuni fetish doll. With the chain around the doll’s neck removed, it comes to life to attack Dr Simpson as she works late at night in her lab.
Trilogy of Terror (1975) was a TV movie that has gained quite a cult reputation. All of this rests on the Amelia segment where Karen Black is pursued around her apartment by a Zuni fetish doll. Twenty-one years later, director Dan Curtis returned to make a sequel with Trilogy of Terror II, reuniting with screenwriter William F. Nolan and again adapting stories by Richard Matheson. The third story is also a direct continuation from the Amelia segment. There is no Karen Black this time – she would have been in her mid-fifties in 1996, which one presumes was considered too old – and the equivalent part is recast with Lysette Anthony, who also played Angelique in the then recent revival of Dan Curtis’s Dark Shadows (1991). Just like Karen Black did in the original, Anthony plays three different roles, the lead in each episode.
The first story is an adaptation of The Graveyard Rats (1936) by Henry Kuttner, the author who also wrote the short stories that became the basis of The Twonky (1953), Timescape (1992) and The Last Mimzy (2007). The same story was later adapted as an episode of Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022- ). Curtis and William F. Nolan add a whole preamble that is not there in the story about Lysette Anthony and Geraint Wyn Davies scheming to murder her wheelchair-ridden husband Matt Clark and then discovering they have to break into the coffin to retrieve a microfilm that holds the whereabouts of his fortune. None of this exists in the short story. In the story, the lead character is the cemetery keeper who does appear here (played by Geoffrey Lewis) in a fairly minor role, while the actual grave robbing is rewritten so as to be conducted by Lysette Anthony’s character. This is an okay episode where at least the rat attacks come with some ferocity, even if the rat effects look somewhat immobile.
Lysette Anthony, protagonist of all three episodes
The second story Bobby is a remake of an earlier segment of the same name that Richard Matheson had written for another Dan Curtis tv movie anthology Dead of Night (1977) where the role of the woman was played by Joan Hackett. The original is regarded as quite a classic. Dan Curtis was never the most sophisticated of directors. Here he marshals a great deal in the way of shadows and thunder and lightning to occasional effect.
He Who Kills is a sequel, for which read rerun, of Amelia from the first film but with Lysette Anthony being chased around a laboratory instead of Karen Black in her apartment. As with the Bobby episode, Dan Curtis aims for much in the way of horror effect. However, the episode, like the film itself, suffers from simply being a follow-up to a well-remembered predecessor. And as such Trilogy of Terror II seems to exist too much in Trilogy of Terror’s shadow, recycling what has gone before, but never finding an episode of its own that enters into the memorable.
