I liked this director's Curse of the Vampire, but Specter of Terror is lousy. It is a thriller that seems to have been written in a day, shot in a week, and released the week after.
A stewardess (Maria Perschy) returning from a flight finds a strange man hiding in her car. After fleeing from the parking garage, the stewardess tells both her best friend and her psychiatrist boyfriend, but both are skeptical of her story. Furthermore, the stewardess later spies this man following her. Then, one night she wakes up, and the man is trying to strangle her. A neighbor frightens the man away. Just when the viewer thinks this will be another no-one-will-believe-the-woman-in-jeopardy story, the plot changes focus. It begins to follow the psycho, Charly Reed, forgetting about the stewardess. Charly is a typical 70's movie psycho. He is a deranged Vietnam veteran (living abroad), a voyeur, a photographer, and even has dolls all over his apartment (why? I guess just because that was standard issue for movie psychos at the time). The film follows Charly being questioned by the police, taking home and murdering a prostitute, and meeting another Vietnam veteran, one who keeps needling Charly until he inevitably explodes.
At the finale, Charly kidnaps the stewardess after she has followed him to his hideout (!). There is a dark night finale that was quite frankly hard to see on my copy. The film leaves the fate of at least one major character unresolved, but I doubt the filmmakers were too concerned. This film has a by-the-numbers, slapped together feel, that, even with a short running time, makes the film feel tedious. Speaking of the running time, my copy ran about five minutes shorter than the 81 minutes listed here. The print I saw was light on exploitation goodies . I don't know if the print was cut, but I doubt anything missing would have helped the overall film.
