Best Mystery Movies of 1981

In the midst of a searing Florida heat wave, a woman convinces her lover, a small-town lawyer, to murder her rich husband.

Kermit and Fozzie are newspaper reporters sent to London to interview Lady Holiday, a wealthy fashion designer whose priceless diamond necklace is stolen. Kermit meets and falls in love with her secretary, Miss Piggy. The jewel thieves strike again, and this time frame Miss Piggy. It's up to Kermit and Muppets to bring the real culprits to justice.

An honest marshal in a corrupt mining colony on Io, Jupiter's sunless third moon, is determined to confront a violent drug ring even though it may cost him his life. After his wife angrily deserts him, he waits alone for the arrival of killers hired by the company to eliminate him.

After a series of gory murders commited by mobs of townspeople against visiting tourists, the corpses appear to be coming back to life and living normally as locals in the small town.

Twenty years ago in the sleepy mining town of Valentine Bluffs, a fatal mining disaster occurred on Valentine's Day while some of the crew was decorating for a party. The sole survivor of the accident killed the remaining crewmembers and warned the town not to celebrate Valentine's Day again. When a group of teenagers decides to defy that order, a murderous maniac in mining gear begins dispatching townsfolk in bloody and creative ways.

A city cop is assigned to solve a bizarre set of violent murders where it appears that the victims were killed by animals. In his pursuit he learns of an Indian legend about wolf spirits.

Virginia is proud that she belongs to a clique. The best students at a private school. But before her 18th birthday, a gruesome set of murders take place and her friends are the ones who are falling prey. Could it be her? She suffers from blackouts due to a freak accident one year earlier. We soon learn the truth behind her accident and what is going on...

A masked killer, wearing World War II U.S. Army fatigues, stalks a small New Jersey town bent on reliving a 35-year-old double murder by focusing on a group of college kids holding an annual Spring Dance.

A truck driver plays a cat-and-mouse game with a mysterious serial killer in a van who lures young female hitchhiker victims on a desolate Australian highway.

Richard spots a man dumping a body, and decides to expose the man he thinks is the culprit with his friend Alex Cutter.

Damien Thorn has helped rescue the world from a recession, appearing to be a benign corporate benefactor. When he then becomes U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Damien fulfills a terrifying biblical prophecy. He also faces his own potential demise as an astronomical event brings about the second coming of Christ.

Bubba, an intellectually disabled man, is falsely accused of attacking a young girl. Disguised as a scarecrow, he hides in a cornfield, only to be hunted down and shot by four vigilante men. After they are acquitted due to lack of evidence, the men find themselves being stalked one by one.

After her husband dies of mysterious circumstances, a widow becomes increasingly paranoid of the neighboring religious community that may have diabolical plans for her.

New York's Odyssey Detective Agency is hired by two different clients to follow two women suspected of infidelity. Ladies' man John Russo trails Angela Niotes, the elegant wife of a wealthy Italian industrialist, while Charles Rutledge and Arthur Brodsky follow Dolores Martin, the beautiful young wife of a jealous husband. Their respective cases are complicated when John falls for Angela, and Charles falls for Dolores.

Daryll Deever is a janitor in an office building in New York, and a big fan of TV news reporter, Tony Sokolow. When a rich man is murdered in Daryll's building, Tony comes to cover the story and Daryll introduces himself to her. Thinking he may know something about the crime, Tony pursues him, and in order to keep seeing her, he pretends that he does. As the two of them play this game, the killers are watching, assuming that Daryll and Tony both know more about the crime than they do.

A romantic rivalry leads to an innocent woman's murder. Or is it a hoax crime, part of a cunning deception? At City General Hospital, two young doctors engage in a move-and-countermove rivalry over Laury Medford. It may be more than Laury's beauty that motivates the men. Her father is the hospital's chairman of the board. Marrying her would be an inside track to the chief of staff post. Meanwhile, a senior hospital staffer, who is the mother of one of the two doctors, plots to enhance her son's chances, a mysterious outsider who says he knew the dead woman tails the two men, and Laury may be more than she appears. Murder? Hoax? The answer isn't revealed till the final freeze-frame.

Twelve year-old Jamie Benjamin is a solitary misunderstood boy in his preteens. His classmates pick on him, his neighbors think he's weird and his parents ignore him. But now Jamie has a secret weapon: deep in the woods he has discovered a deep pit full of man-eating creatures he calls Trogs... and it isn't long before he gets an idea for getting revenge and feeding the Trogs in the process!

An Arab oil organization devises a plan to wreck the world economy in order to cause anarchy and chaos.

Sandy often fantasizes about her mothers’ boyfriend Robert. She pleasures herself while she watches them make love. One evening Robert sees Sandy watching as they make love and the next day while she is in the bathroom he invites himself in. Things start to get hot and heavy when Sandy’s mother catches the two of them about to have sex. Ashamed Sandy runs away from home. She hitches a ride to New York where her sister Denise lives.

A Boston police detective investigates a series of gruesome decapitations of various college coeds, committed by a helmeted, black-leather clad serial killer.

Egyptologist Erica Baron finds more than she bargained for during her long-planned trip to The Land of the Pharoahs - murder, theft, betrayal, love, and a mummy's curse!

When the teenagers in a small Illinois town start getting murdered, the police chief makes a connection to the mysterious scientific experiments being done at the local university and must stop them before his own son is dragged into the deadly scheme.

This zany send-up of teen slasher flicks features a maniacal psycho known as the Breather, who stalks –and murders– promiscuous students at a suburban high school. The fanatical killer's unusual weapons include paper clips, blackboard erasers and eggplants.

Jessica Simmonds returns from overseas to find her retired professor father in a bitter public fight to save the historic Sydney waterfront houses on Angel Street. After her father's mysterious death, she joins forces with local residents and a union leader against corrupt forces. Based on the real life mysterious disappearance of Juanita Nielsen.

A young woman escapes from a mental hospital during the chaos of a nearby multiple-car accident. She is mistaken for a shock victim and is driven to her sister's house by a rescue volunteer. Then the real story begins...

A young art student frantically tries to prove that she is being stalked by a mysterious man who has threatened her life, and finds her sanity questioned by her stepmother, the family attorney, and even a psychiatrist.

When two mysterious deaths mar an otherwise pleasant weekend in the English countryside, unflappable flapper Lady Eileen Brent teams up with the dashing Jimmy Thesinger to solve the dastardly deeds. Their sleuthing leads them into a world of espionage and international intrigue as they discover a secret society known as "The Seven Dials" and the attempted theft of top-secret government documents.

When a 747 crashes shortly after take-off, the sole survivor is the pilot. Virtually unhurt, he and the investigators look for the answers to the disaster. Meanwhile mysterious deaths occur in the community and only a psychic, in touch with the supernatural, can help the pilot unravel the mystery surrounding the doomed plane.

A New York writer of gothic fiction finds her mansion full of ghosts from a brothel massacre.

The first of three private-eye movies created by Robert Blake about rugged Joe Dancer as the forerunner to a prospective but unrealized series after the retirement of his "Baretta" character. In the initial outing, Blake, as Dancer, follows a trail of bodies through a maze of corruption involving a politically ambitious Beverly Hills family.

Famous detective Charlie Chan is called out of retirement to help a San Francisco detective solve a mysterious series of murders. With his bumbling grandson as his sidekick, Chan also encounters an old nemesis known as the Dragon Queen who is the prime suspect.

Mickey Spillane's hard-hitting '50s private eye, Mike Hammer, returns to television in the guise of Kevin Dobson to track down the killer of his best friend who was driving Hammer's car. Joining in the hunt are the detective's Girl Friday, the ever-hopeful Velda, and his cop friend, Pat Chambers.

Sarah Jane Smith arrives at the home of her Aunt Lavinia in the cozy village of Moreton Harwood, only to find that Lavinia is nowhere to be found and that the Doctor has left her a parting gift in K·9 Mark III. With the help of K·9 and Lavinia's young ward Brendan Richards, Sarah Jane starts investigating her aunt's disappearance. In the process, they discover that Moreton Harwood is home to a coven worshipping the pagan god Hecate and preparing for a human sacrifice...

A preacher whose ancestors were Druids battles Satan, who has taken the form of a huge snake.

In the 19th century, a wealthy Northern woman marries a Louisiana plantation owner and then becomes suspicious about his first wife's death.

A group of friends on a rafting trip down a river stop in at an old ghost town to spend the night. Soon their rafts disappear, and then they begin to be eliminated one by one by a mysterious killer.

A heavy fog cuts the small isolated Scottish island off from the mainland, and dentist Michael Gaffikin has just discovered a dismembered corpse on the golf links. Michael and his artist girlfriend, Fiona Patterson, assist the local law enforcements in searching for the murderer. However, as the body count rises and the surrounding circumstances turn increasingly bizarre and gruesome, everyone begins to wonder if the killer is a human or an unimaginable creature...

A teenage boy who runs off to join the circus as a side show puppeteer stumbles onto the dark secrets of the fellow performers.

A family gathering attempting to establish just who exactly inherits the family's possessions leads to deception, incest, and quite a lot of murder