Thriller is called the best horror show ever made for TV but for me, One Step Beyond beats it for sheer, bone-chilling consistency. There were some truly great horror episodes yet there were more crime and suspense stories than the superb horrors people remember. Choose A Victim is one of the better crime shows with Larry Blyden, Vaughan Taylor and Susan Oliver. It strongly feels like an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Many of the Thriller crime shows did. (AHH produced some horror stories that rivaled, often surpassed Thriller, like The Jar and The Sign of Satan.) Blyden is an aging beach bum living on the edge in a bungalow near the ocean in a small California town where he sponges off the pointy-bra wearing, stacked owner of an amusement park shooting galley, Tracey Roberts. His personality is similar to his unforgettable role as thief Rocky Valentine in one of the greatest Twilight Zone episodes, A Nice Place To Visit; cocky, obnoxious, pushy, grasping. Blyden meets Susan, an heiress living with her controlling uncle. Finding out her address, he stupidly tries to burglarize her bedroom while she sleeps. She wakes up and he threatens her, which she finds sexually attractive and they begin an affair. Eventually she gets him to kill her uncle. But it's all a game on her part. The plot has enough holes to drive a bus through. Blyden turns in his usual fine job but he is not a handsome chick magnet kind of actor and it's unlikely that a girl who looks like Oliver, or Roberts for that matter, would fall for him. He walks around town in ridiculously tight denim shorts like a cruiser from a Tom of Finland painting. An actor like John Erickson or Gary Conway would have made the story more plausible. That Oliver could date Blyden in secret in a small town without being seen is an unlikely situation to hinge a murder plot on. When it seems that Oliver will get away with it, justice prevails in a muted climax. Sadly, Blyden was robbed and murdered by thugs in Morocco in 75 and Oliver passed from cancer in 1990.
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