TeenzTen An action-packed slog

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

PimpinAinttEasy Dear Philip Leacock, you made a good film alright. Here, have a beer. Or how about an orange soda? Or a grape soda? You deserve it.Dying Room Only starts off with beautiful shots of a deserted road in Arizona. It preceded Long Weekend, the Australian film by five years. Like the Long Weekend, the TV film has a squabbling and seemingly miserable middle class couple driving across the desert in a car as protagonists. Clois Leachman does the irritating and nagging wife really well. She nails the role and the mood of the couple in the first few minutes itself.The couple stops for drinks and food at a roadside café and after this the film wears its genre credentials on its sleeve. The roadside café with the bright red sign reading "Beer" is a nice set piece. The happenings inside the café with the hostile locals are very tense and entertaining. The proceedings do have a play like quality. Ned Beatty is great as one of the hostile locals. This man played so many diverse roles in the 70s.The ending and the plot resolutions were a bit of a disappointment. The revelations at the end does call into question the behavior of the locals at the beginning of the film.There were quite a few films with the rural folk vs urban values in the 70s. While it is not as good as Deliverance or Wake in Fright, Dying Room Only is pretty tense and intriguing for the most part.The background score reminded me of Morricone's noisy and jarring music for Ecce Homo (1968).The final scene was very interesting. Duel, which came out a couple of years before Dying Room Only had a similar scene at the beginning of the film.I hope to check out more films by you, Philip Leacock.Best Regards, Pimpin.

Mr_Ectoplasma Cloris Leachman stars as Jean Mitchell, an upperclass Los Angeles woman traveling through the desert with her husband. The two stop by a rundown shack of a diner to grab something to eat, but are met with hostility from the cook (Ross Martin) and a local yahoo (Ned Beatty). After using the restroom, Jean returns to an empty table, and increasing aggression from the cook and patron who insist that they don't know where her husband has gone.There was something remarkably charming about the television films of the 1970s; for being small screen productions, so many of them were of a much higher caliber than television demands ("Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," "Home for the Holidays," and "Dark Night of the Scarecrow" come to mind). "Dying Room Only" is another film to add to the list of exceptional made-for-TV horror/thrillers.Scripted by Richard Matheson and based on his short story, the film here is structurally solid; the pacing is refined, the cues on point, and the cranking of suspense is incremental and tantamount. While the motifs and archetypes in place here are not particularly original (the vanishing man/woman; upperclass Californians vs. desert tumbleweeds), the presentation of the story here is done remarkably well. Moody cinematography of the landscapes and the nighttime chase scenes are almost a prototype for Tobe Hooper's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," which came the following year (check out Leachman's chase scenes toward the finale). On top of it all, solid performances from respectable actors take the cake here. Leachman is fantastic and sympathetic, while Martin and Beatty both play up the sinister country boys to a T.Overall, "Dying Room Only" is a classy thriller that exceeds the parameters of the television film as we've come to know it. Moody cinematography and the slow buildup of unease really elevate a script that, while not particularly original, is still masterfully written no less. A solid thriller and superbly entertaining watch best-suited for a warm summer evening, when the sun is going down and anyone could disappear into the darkness. 8/10.

stevenfallonnyc I just saw "Dying Room Only" for the first time in over 30 years, and this is a typically great 70's TV-movie thriller. A couple (Cloris Leachman looking pretty good, and hubby Dabney Coleman) stop at a lonely desert cafe (in the daytime, not the nighttime as the summary here states) and the husband disappears as the wife is in the ladies room. The only two possible witnesses (the cafe cook and customer Ned Beatty, in a great sleazy role) are saying nothing. What happened? Where did the husband go? The movie then takes off to have Cloris Leachman trying to figure it out, since she is getting almost no help at all from anyone. Is even the local cop in on it, whatever "it" may be? Everyone is suspect. Nighttime comes, and danger looms....I do agree with the reviewer that stated this film could have been better in the second half. The first half is amazing - very suspenseful and thrilling. The second half kind of veers into "typical" fare but is still decent.A bunch of familiar 70's faces round out the small cast. Especially since the film is fairly short at about 1:13 (most TV-movies back then were 90 minutes with the commercials) this is definitely a fun watch.

a_l_i_e_n This TV movie is obviously the inspiration for the 1998 Kurt Russell thriller, "Breakdown". But in this earlier version the story is told from a distaff point of view as a woman (Cloris Leachman) desperately searches through a grim little community for her missing husband. Menacing locals Ross Martin and Ned Beatty get to play bad guys for a change and do a great job as they stymie Leachman's efforts at every turn. The music is well arranged and atmospheric. The final showdown is reasonably suspenseful. Oh, and you get to see a young Dabney Colemon as Leachman's husband- well, for a minute anyways as he soon vanishes in the first act. Trouble with this movie is, like his rather pedestrian work in "When Michael Calls", director Phillip Leacock's uninspired direction doesn't bring home the thrills that this interesting story (written by Richard Matheson, author of "Duel") had the potential of delivering. A great premise, but not a great movie. If you want to see a superior version of this story, just rent the unofficial remake, "Breakdown".