Best Mystery Movies of 1974

A sorority house is terrorized by a stranger who makes frightening phone calls and then murders the sorority sisters during Christmas break.

Harry Kilmer returns to Japan after several years in order to rescue his friend George's kidnapped daughter - and ends up on the wrong side of the Yakuza, the notorious Japanese mafia...

Described (rather cheekily) by director Michael Snow as a musical comedy, this deft probing of sound/image relationships is one of his wittiest, most entertaining and philosophically stimulating films. In his words, the film “derives its form and the nature of its possible effects from its being built from the inside, as it were, with the actual units of such a film, i.e. the frame and the recorded syllable. Thus its ‘dramatic’ element derives not only from a representation of what may involve us generally in life but from considerations of the nature of recorded speech in relation to moving light-images of people.’”

A horror movie star returns to his famous role after years in a mental institution. But the character seems to be committing murders independent of his will.

The winner of the Miss World Virginity contest marries, escapes from her masochistic husband and ends up involved in a world of debauchery.

Wealthy big game hunter Tom Newcliffe has tracked and killed practically every type of animal in the world. But one creature still evades him, the biggest game of all - a werewolf.

Ten people are invited to a hotel for a weekend getaway by a Mr. U. N. Owen, who mysteriously isn't in attendance. When the group gets together for their first dinner, a record is played in which Mr. Owen accuses each guest of committing various unpunished crimes, which sets off a series of murders in the hotel.

After the death of his brother on the road, unemployed and unstable drifter Arthur Waldo stays for a while in the rural Australian town of Paris as the guest of the mayor, who hopes he will become a permanent member of the Paris population. Arthur soon realizes the quaint hamlet has a sinister secret: they orchestrate car accidents and rob the victims. Survivors are brought to the local hospital, lobotomized, and used for a local doctor's experiments.

Pride comes before a fall in John Bowen' adaptation of MR James' tale of a treasure hunt with a sticky end. Michael Bryant plays The Reverend Somerton whose self-assured intellectual arrogance masks a naked greed.