The Horror at 37,000 Feet - a toupological analysis.

The Horror at 37,000 Feet is a 73-minute 1973 TV movie directed by David Lowell Rich starring William Shatner, Roy Thinnes (the guy from The Invaders) and several other actors including Star Trek guest-stars France Nuyen (also see here) and Paul Winfield.


The plot, from IMDB.com:

"An architect and his wife are flying from London to L.A. with an altar from an ancient abbey secured in the plane's cargo hold."

A boxed-up abbey.

"Also aboard the flight are Buddy Ebsen as a pushy millionaire, William Shatner as a drunken, cynical ex-priest, Tammy Grimes as a nutcase, and Chuck Connors as the lantern-jawed pilot."

Bill Shatner with Paul Winfield

The plane is mostly empty, with only a few passengers - two stewardesses and the flight crew - on board.


The stewardesses wear very short skirts...


Yet, something spooky is going on...

The plane seems stuck in mid-air, no matter which direction it turns.


One of the passengers starts to hears strange and horrific sounds coming from the cargo-hold...


While Bill Shatner's character, a mysteriously defrocked priest, laments away, drinking one cup of something alcoholic after another...


The crew investigates. There is no hull breach, yet a freezing cold is penetrating the plane from down below...


What the hell is this?!?!!


We're not going to give away any more than that - except to say that strange rituals with dolls ensue (something to do with druids and the Summer Solstice)...


...in which they are covered in make-up:


There is also some stuff to do with fire:


Ice...


And yet more fire - this time involving Bill Shatner and a lighter:


By this point, some of you are probably wondering if this movie isn't yet another mid-seventies Bill Shatner turkey. Well, not so fast...

In undertaking our toupological analyses we have found both the good, the mediocre and the bad. And then there is another rare category known as "so bad its good" - something we last found with the movie Impulse.


We also very much feel that The Horror at 37,000 Feet qualifies for this honor. The movie is terrible, but it is also brilliant. It really is great in a totally lame kind of way! Simply put, this movie is awesome; quite possibly the best bad movie ever made! Make sense?


The Horror at 37,000 Feet is pretty much a kind of feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone (entirely unofficially, of course) and mirrors the sense of terror of Bill Shatner's "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" - the similar names, no doubt not entirely coincidental. That and a healthy dose of Scooby-Doo, with an airplane substituting for a haunted house.

Rather than just being yet another tacky disaster movie, The Horror at 37,000 Feet makes some clever and original choices, for example having a nearly empty airplane. The dialogue is pretty risible at times, but what stands out is the genuinely unsettling atmosphere crafted by the director and assisted by an impressive musical score and some wonderfully eerie sound-effects.

As to why the pilots don't just land the damn plane right away - there really is no explanation for that offered in the movie.

As an example of just how truly awesome this movie is, witness Bill Shatner's bizarre and strangely pointless introduction:

Now, to the hair.

This movie is an example of Bill Shatner's brief relatively long hair phase during the early seventies.


Add to the long hair, a very, very strong toupee side-parting:


During one scene, some strange ruffling goes on at the rear by the neckline:


Was this Bill Shatner's Rubber Soul period?


There's also a scene where Bill Shatner's toupee meets a gust of decompression - but we won't spoil the moment by revealing any more than that.


Anyway, we really enjoyed this TV movie and thoroughly recommend it! Sadly, The Horror at 37,000 Feet is not presently available on DVD (hopefully it will be one day) or even VHS. However, if you search the Internet, you'll find it, we promise (for example, here)... Oh, and a great companion piece to this movie is 1975's equally awesome Murder on Flight 502, which can be watched here.

Go Ask Alice - a toupological analysis.

Go Ask Alice is a 1973 TV movie based on a book of the same name published two years earlier. The book, written by "anonymous" purports to comprise of extracts from a fifteen-year-old girl's diary that chronicles a horrifying descent into drug addiction and prostitution. Bill Shatner, in a relatively small role (though curiously receiving top-billing), portrays Alice's father.


The plot goes thus: Alice is a middle-class girl in a middle-class family living in a middle-class neighborhood. For no reason that is explained in the movie, a chance puff of a joint leads to a monumental spiral of drug addiction.


The whole Pandora's box is opened: marijuana, LSD, cocaine, uppers, downers, heroin, which leads to dropping out of school, homelessness and even prostitution. Those "damn dirty hippies" do nothing but force an endless array of drugs upon this poor girl.


It isn't long before Alice is quite literally eating out of a dustbin and walking around with a tear in her shirt (a sign that, you know, she's become a bum...).


Fortunately, Alice encounters a "with it" Catholic priest (played by Andy Griffith), who "digs where the girl is at". As a result, Alice decides to go clean.


She then meets a non-hippie - a Jock whose straight, clean ways also offer a way out.


However, while babysitting for a junkie friend, Alice drinks soda that has been spiked with LSD. The hell from which she had thought she escaped returns. She locks herself in a cupboard and almost cuts her fingers off.


By the end, Alice has again gone clean, but remains just one pill away from returning to the old life. At the end of the movie, we learn that she died of a drug overdose anyway for some reason - probably designed to try to make the movie feel really powerful.


The way that this girl's story is told in the movie is so crass, so shallow, so two-dimensional, that we were immediately reminded of the classic 1936 anti-drug movie Reefer Madness. We don't doubt that fifteen-year-old girls could meet such a fate, but rather it is how this story is told here that led to instant doubts among our team of toupologists as to the veracity of the "real life" diary on which this tale was based.

So it came as no surprise to learn that the authenticity of the original book has been seriously questioned. Apparently, it is actually (and we most certainly agree) a work of fiction, written by a zealot, barely capable of concealing some deep-seated personal issues (or simple profit motive, or need to proselytise) that led them to pass off such work as being real. The real author is one Beatrice Sparks about whom you can read here.


Go Ask Alice comes off as being written by "adults" - a caricature of teenage drug abuse, designed to be watched by youngsters to terrify them into just saying "no". In truth, the movie is so shallow, it's likely to actually serve the opposite effect - making teenagers want to take drugs, if only to numb the pain of watching such condescending, patronizing nonsense.


And where are the parents in all of this? Bill Shatner and Julie Adams, who portray the girl's mother and father, are so completely detached - docile, yet well-meaning - that this instantly raises yet another red-flag about the story's authenticity. They can only watch from afar as their daughter, for no reason whatsoever, descends into a world of pushers and pimps. That is a deliberately manufactured contrivance that seems increasingly odd as the movie progresses: Alice runs away, then returns, the weak parents don't even seem that bothered. Again, we're not saying that parents can't be this bad, but rather this clichéd, in terms of how they are written. Curiously, for a movie that espouses the socio-political credo of "personal responsibility" (which would gain a strong footing in 1980s America) the idea of anyone sharing in the responsibility for what happened to Alice, particularly her parents, is entirely absent from this movie.


Similarly to Reefer Madness, Go Ask Alice has attained a kind of cult following for its sheer kitsch value.


On the plus side, the movie contains a decent soundtrack of contemporary-era music (as the late comedian Bill Hicks would no doubt point out, all written by musicians that were very high at the time).

Now, to the hair...

Neither Bill Shatner, nor his hair, really have very much to do in this TV movie. The way these wishy-washy parents are written, all they really do is watch events unfold, completely powerless as their daughter is possessed.


Interestingly, Bill Shatner, apart from the usual toup, wears not only a mustache, but also glasses.

The hair round the back and sides is particularly long for Shats, while conversely, the toup at the top is relatively light for this era:


Meanwhile, the actor's performance as a weak, bumbling father, is (again) deliberately understated and pretty effective considering what he was being asked to portray. At one point, the hair moves a little as Bill Shatner removes his glasses:

And that's about it. Perhaps the toup was telling the audience that it likely won't be moved much by Go Ask Alice - or was the actor trying to underscore, via the toupee, a weakening of his character's rigidity?

Due to both its awfulness and a music rights clearance nightmare akin to The Wonder Years, one shouldn't expect Go Ask Alice to be released on DVD any time soon. However, it is pretty easy to find on the Internet - Go Ask Alice really has to be seen to be believed, and by "believed" we certainly don't mean that it should be believed in any way!

Alice is hated by the junkie majority for going straight.

On a separate note, we at Shatner's Toupee express our heartfelt condolences to Walter and Judith Koenig for the tragic death of their son Andrew (1968-2010).

Incident on a Dark Street - a toupological analysis.

Incident on a Dark Street is a 1973 feature-length pilot for a proposed television series that was (thankfully) never picked up. It was ultimately broadcast as a one-off TV movie instead. It is set in the annals of the District Attorney's office of Los Angeles County, focusing on several Justice Department lawyers - some freshmen - prosecuting all manner of cases.


The plot, to quote an Imdb.com reviewer:

...involves two law school grads (David Canary of "All My Children" and Robert Pine) who take on their first big cases as prosecutors for the federal government. David Canary's case involves convincing a marked mobster to blow the whistle on local politicians on the take from organized crime. Robert Pine's case is about whether or not to prosecute a seemingly clean cut family man of being the bag man in a drug deal.


Bill Shatner has a "guest star" role as Deaver G. Wallace, the corrupt head of the Utility Authority, making deals with the Mob for his own self-enrichment. He's under surveillance by the good guys...

The guy from Jaws talks to Bill Shatner.

How this piece of dreary garbage managed to make its way onto DVD at all remains something of a mystery.

Evidently, no-one involved in this production (NBC and/or Fox) has bothered to attend to the copyright of a low-quality print of this TV movie and so all manner of strange-looking DIY DVDs have been released, mostly with odd and deceptive packaging. There's a reason for that - the pilot is, frankly, dreadful. Years later, Bill Shatner remains its only conceivable selling point. Ironic, since the movie represents the absolute nadir of his "Lost Years" period during the mid-1970s.


There's something about bad pilots that is almost universal: the over-earnest two-dimensional characters; the cookie-cutter-constructed bland ensemble (there's even a "token black guy" that gets a few lines), with each cast member forcefully being assigned their own "interesting" quirks; the utter lack of chemistry between the performers...yes, Incident on a Dark Street serves as a textbook example of how not to put together a prospective TV series.


The direction is awful, with the actors lost as to the emotions or point of any given scene; the pacing is dreadfully slow - the movie feels far, far longer than it actually is; the script is so bad, one wonders how it was ever filmed in the first place. Add to that a lack of action, poor performances, bad dialogue and a dull story and you have Incident on a Dark Street. None of the main cast elicit any interest from the viewer. Indeed, Bill Shatner and the other guest star Richard S. Castellano manage to outshine the proposed regular cast - which isn't a good sign at all for a pilot.


Let's move quickly on to the hair...

Firstly, Bill Shatner's hair is very, very thick in this show. In fact, it is so thick that one wonders if it should be categorized as a wig (or treacle) rather than a toup. The hair-line is particularly high up on the forehead, and we also have sideburns and a mustache. The entire construction is clearly serving as a critic of this TV movie, telling us not to take it seriously.


Years before Christopher Reeve was cast a Superman, Bill Shatner wears an S-curl in one scene (another example of this can be found here):


In another scene, Shats scratches the toup:


There's also a fight with some bimbo over a bear, perhaps a there's a toupee metaphor there of some kind:

And at the end, the hair gets knocked around a little - alas the framing conceals the true extent of what is underway. Why waste a great toup moment on a bad film, right?

Anyway, Incident on a Dark Street is available on DVD, but we recommend that you stay away from this deceptively-marketed turkey. It really isn't "so bad it's good" - it's just plain awful.


UPDATE: A reader correctly points out that Incident on a Dark Street's Robert Pine is the father of Chris Pine, who portrayed James T. Kirk in the recent Star Trek (2009) movie.