Triple Black

I’ve heard a lot about Trilogy of Terror (1975) over the years, and now I’ve seen it. This made-for-TV movie is cited by a lot of the podcasters I listen to as one of the movies they loved to watch from behind the couch when they were kids. The last of the trilogy is most people’s favorite, but they are all pretty cool.

They all star Karen Black and are based on stories by Richard Matheson. The first one has college student Chad (Robert Burton) decide to “seduce” frumpy professor Black. He convinces her to go to the drive-in with him, then drugs her drink. He takes some sexy pictures of her and blackmails her into sexual slavery. Want the spoiler? Here it comes - it was all her idea. She likes playing sex games, but she’s tired of this one, so she drugs his drink. But her drug is poison!

The next features Black as a somewhat prissy rich woman, calling her doctor about her slutty twin sister. When you notice that you never see them together, you probably figure out the ending. The prissy sister kills the slut (also Black) but it’s a suicide, since they are one woman with split personality.

The final part is a tour de force, a one-woman play. Black comes home to her apartment, with a present for her boyfriend, an anthropologist. It’s a doll (called a Zuni fetish, but it doesn’t look very Native American) with fierce teeth and a spear. She has a talk with her overbearing mother who doesn’t want her to see her boyfriend, even though it’s his birthday. Then the doll comes to life and starts hunting her. The scene where the doll is hiding under the sofa made me understand why kids watched this from behind theirs.

I won’t spoil the end of this. It’s actually a pretty corny story, but Black does it all herself, with barely any special effects to animate the doll. That’s cool.

This was directed by Dan Curtis of Dark Shadows. I think my favorite was the first one, with the roofies and the me-too and the revenge turn-around. The gimmick of the twins in the second was a little too obvious. They tried to hide that it was a split personality in one scene, but barely. There’s also a voodoo subplot that doesn’t work. And the Zuni doll story is silly but let’s face it - it’s a classic now. Glad we got to this and kudos to Karen Black. She had done a some serious work before this, but afterwards found herself typecast. That’s suffering for art.