Space 1999: The one with Dobermans in a department store

 

Title: Trapped aka The Doberman Patrol

What Year?: 1973

Classification: Prototype/ Mashup

Rating: What the Hell??? (3/5)

 

With this review, I’m finally starting what I consider the successor/ spinoff to my Space 1979 review feature, though I certainly haven’t finished with that one yet. The change in title, in turn, will not reflect a change in the timeframe, but a shift from theatrical films to the small screen (part of the inside joke that led to the name of the original feature). This will be a feature dedicated to TV movies, especially of the “vintage” network variety, and as we will see, this is going to be even more of a mixed bag than my usual standards. Our first entry will be from the arguable golden age of the artform, the 1970s, when TV movies like Duel and Trilogy of Terror were drawing and in some cases establishing Hollywood talent. The present film may well have intended to follow their example, with a big-name star in a storyline that blended drama, horror and science fiction. Here is Trapped, the movie-of-the-week that anticipated Dawn of the Dead and Chopping Mall.

Our story begins with a man named Chuck and his daughter in a department store’s toy section. We momentarily meet his ex-wife and the girl’s new stepfather, who are about to move out of the country. To score extra points, Chuck stays behind while the store delivers a doll for his daughter, only to be mugged and left for dead in the bathroom. By the time he regains consciousness, the store is closed, and the staff have deployed their main security measure: a pack of attack dogs that patrol the floors for intruders. While the rest of the fractured family are trying to convince the police that something is amiss, he must evade or fight off the dogs. With a worsening wound and only a bow and arrow for a weapon, he must face the most persistent of the pack. Will he survive, or be literal dog food?

Trapped was a TV movie originally broadcast by ABC in late 1973. The film was written and directed by the late Frank De Felitta, also responsible for 1981’s Dark Night Of the Scarecrow as well as many screenwriter credits. James Brolin starred as Chuck, with Susan Clark as his ex-wife Elaine and character actor Robert Hooks (see… Star Trek 3?) as a detective who grudgingly joins a search for him. Like Duel, the movie was later released theatrically, though only in the UK and possibly other foreign markets, mainly under the alternate title The Doberman Patrol. There is further evidence of foreign distribution on VHS, which if not strictly “bootlegged” would be the only known authorized home video release of the film. The movie has received attention for similarities with the 1986 film Chopping Mall among other science fiction and horror films; the creators of the latter film have denied any direct or knowing influence. The movie was apparently referenced in the 1993 Perfect Strangers episode “After Hours”.

For my personal experiences, this was a movie I first heard of second-hand long before I had any way to figure out if it really existed, mainly from a family member who seems to share my own uncanny memory for pop culture. I might have started to question if it was real if I hadn’t occasionally run across hints of its influence, including an above-mentioned ‘90s sitcom episode that by now might prove more elusive than the actual movie. I also became aware of a modest body of older fantasy and horror centered on department stores, like the Twilight Zone episode “The After Hours” and Thomas Disch’s story “Descending”. Not too long ago, I did enough research to figure out that this was the movie I had heard of. After starting Space 1979, I thought of it early and occasionally thereafter. It easily got to the top as I considered the possibilities for TV movies, all well before I watched the movie itself. I finally watched it for the present review, after I already had planned a lineup of several other entries I had been putting off. For all intents and purposes, I was going in with several decades of heightened expectations, and the real surprise was that I wasn’t a lot more disappointed than I was.

The thing that really stands out with this movie from the start is how much it screams to be “relevant” for its time. In these terms alone, it really does better than it has a right to. Right out of the exposition, we get the still-relevant issues of divorce and child custody, without any obvious moralizing angle. In further contrast to the cipher of David Mann in Duel, we get a good sense of our protagonist in the process: He’s a clearly flawed hero, perhaps disreputable by the 1970s framework, but someone we can want to like and certainly hope to get out alive. As the story proceeds, he doesn’t exactly grow to meet the challenge, yet he does at least muster a determination to survive that is augmented by Brolin’s screen presence. What’s absolutely striking is that there’s never a point where he crosses over into adrenaline-fueled heroics. Instead, he runs, climbs or crawls his way along about as slowly and clumsily as anyone in the audience probably would. This especially evident when he manages to get hold of a weapon, a story point I knew about from when it was recounted to me. With further hindsight, it conjures up pictures of The Hunger Games, except with the bow in hand, the best he seems to do is scare or annoy the dogs. It’s an anticlimactic moment that fritters away a good deal of buildup. At the same time, it drives home the sense of realism driving the story and the character.

On the “con” side, critics of the movie will usually start tearing down the plot holes and disregarded realities needed to set up the story. On most of these points, the real question is how much is meant to be comedy, something which the story admittedly does a far spottier job at advertising than satires like Dawn of the Dead. What needs to be acknowledged in fairness is that the prominent misjudgments of the main character are outweighed by the oversights and incompetence of the store staff who get him into the situation in the first place. The egregious example is a clerk who eventually admits that he never collected change on a $50 bill (in 1970s dollars!), and she then did nothing more than take the money to lost and found. The other major area of criticism is the whole subplot of the ex and her new husband looking for him. It’s certainly much longer than it needs to be, with several further moments of irrelevance and inanity. In the balance, however, it provides an unsettlingly believable picture of what missing-person cases are really like. There’s some extra dark humor, especially when the ex views a body; her reaction is stereotyped, but my guess is it was a substitute for actual vomiting.

Now for the “one scene”, and it’s going to be short. About half an hour in, Chuck find himself in a store display (shortly after leaving a secure office…) that’s a mockup of an actual home. He looks around, and there is a sense of reflection on former dreams of domestic bliss or at least stability. He examines an iron, seemingly assessing it as a weapon. He then wanders through a selection of stacked dishes. He starts when a dog barks at him over a partition, but he is still secure. He then wanders into a living room area, where he finally stops at a picture window. There’s a well-framed shot from the other side as he gazes through the window, with at least a hint of the humor and dark irony of Romero. After the moment’s pause, he knocks the whole thing down. That’s when more of the dogs start barking, and he quickly beats a retreat.

In closing, the one thing I would still have to comment on is the genre. This is ultimately a major reason I am treating this as the start of a new feature. To resume the comparison with Duel, this is a movie that verges toward horror the way the preceding film did toward science fiction. However, it doesn’t do so nearly as much, leaving little if any need to redraw our concept of genre lines. Still, it remains an interesting and genuinely impressive entry in the annals of televised features, all the more so given that its kind had little hope of lasting past a single airing. The best testament of its effectiveness is that it is still remembered well enough that even people who never saw it still talk about it. Not bad, for a movie of the week.

Image credit Cult Trailers.