The Candy Snatchers

There was an interview with Sherwood Schwartz talking about The Brady Bunch. He was talking about the trip they took to Hawaii. There was a scene where Peter was in bed in the hotel and realizes there's a huge tarantula on him.

Christopher Knight didn't want to do the scene. He didn't want the thing on him. But he did it. They asked Schwartz how he felt about that. He shrugged.

There's more to being an actor than saying your lines, he said.

Well.

I watched a 1973 movie called The Candy Snatchers which took this to extremes.

It was the story of three kidnappers. Their victim is a Catholic schoolgirl named Candy, played by 20-year-old Susan Sennett.

The character, Candy, goes through almost the entire movie tied up, blindfolded and gagged. And, to avoid continuity errors, the actress playing her remained tied up, bindfolded and gagged pretty much the entire time she was on the set each day. She said in the commentary track that they would prop her up in a chair between shots.

They drag her into a van, they drive her into the hills, and they bury her alive. They drop her in a hole (she said they really dropped her, but not as far as it looked), she's in a box. They lay boards over the box then begin shoveling dirt over it. There's a tube that allows in air.
There was no reason for the actress to actually be in the coffin as they bury it. But they left her in there as the did this. She was screaming and crying---the actress said that she wasn't acting. She was, she said, freaking out. She later suffered clausterphobia and she said that all that time being blindfolded made her overly sensitive to sound ever since. There was a rape scene on top of that, and they didn't even invite her to the premiere which was held in Florida where the actual kidnapping it was based on had taken place.

Surprisingly bad movie. The writer/director was a TV script writer. So it was surprising that the script had so little going for it. The kidnappers had no motive other than general greed. Candy's stepfather didn't want to pay the ransom and was poisoning the girl's mother, also out of generalized greed.

There's an autistic kid who sees the girl being buried. He's the one witness to it and he can't tell anyone.

This kid's mother was played by Bonnie Boland (who appeared in an episode of the Brady Bunch.) The parents and the autistic child are invited to dinner with the father's boss at work. He's a salesman, and if things go well, he might get his own territory!

But the boss tries to talk to the kid. The parents explain that he doesn't talk.

"Doesn't talk?" the boss says. "Did you hear that, mother? He doesn't talk! Whoever heard of a kid who doesn't talk! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW! HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW! HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW!"

I didn't understand what he found funny. But, in spite of his seeming amusement, the boss was deeply offended by the child's inability to speak, so the father wasn't going to get his own territory. So they come home and the mother drags the kid off his bed and severely beats him. Such an odd scene for a comic actress.

Anyway, a grim, nasty, cheap, ugly movie.

There's no reason why it should have been this bad. The auteur was a professional writer. Even if they didn't have money, they could have taken time to find some decent locations. That doesn't cost anything.

It's shameful that that poor girl suffered like this, especially for such a lousy movie.