Former NBA Star Leads Fan-Favorite ’70s Slasher Horror On Tubi

Tourist Trap is an iconic slasher film that hits all the right notes for a genre entry. Two groups of friends have their vehicles mysteriously break down while near an off-the-beaten-path museum on a rural highway. They seem to be making out okay as the museum owner, Mr. Slausen (Chuck Connors), offers to help them. The creepy vibes begin to set in as the teenagers are taken to Slausen’s museum, where they are greeted with realistic-looking mannequins that inhabit the place.

As it turns out, someone is killing lost tourists and turning them into these life-size dolls. To make matters worse, someone at the museum is also telekinetic and able to manipulate the mannequins to move around and even speak. Tourist Trap shows Connors as both Mr. Slausen and also his deranged and psychotic brother Davey, one character portrayed as an eccentric but harmless old man and the other as a maniacal killer.

But in Tourist Trap, things are not as they might seem. As the characters begin to die one by one, the horrible truth about Mr. Slausen and his museum come to light as the few survivors fight to escape the fate of being immortalized as one of the museum’s mannequins.

Before he was turning wayward teenagers into mannequins, Chuck Connors was a professional athlete that excelled at two sports. From 1940 until 1952, he played with various minor league baseball teams, both before and after his service for the U.S. army during WWII. Adding to his already impressive resume, Connors simultaneously played professional basketball for two years during that span.

Connors was part of the championship Rochester Royals (which later became Kansas City Kings and are now the Sacramento Kings), helping to lead the team to the NBA finals title during the 1945-46 season. The following season saw Connors as a part of the Boston Celtics, where he played most of the games as a starter. Connors was able to break through as a professional baseball player the next year and managed to rack up a brief career in the big leagues as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs.

Connors began acting in the early 1950s when he realized his career as an athlete was coming to an end. The Tourist Trap actor played a wide variety of characters in various sitcoms and westerns throughout the 1950s before landing the starring role as Lucas McCain in the hit TV show The Rifleman from 1958 to 1963.

Seeing a revered character actor like Connors cast as a psychotic killer in Tourist Trap was a hard turn from the typical roles that audiences saw him playing. But Connors proved that his versatility as a performer allowed for him to play what essentially amounted to a dual role in the film, as audiences are led to believe that his main Slausen persona is separate from the maniac that is picking off tourists one by one.

REVIEW SCORE

From the opening frames of Tourist Trap, audiences are drawn in by the chilling cinematic score assembled by Italian composer Pino Donaggio. The movie’s horrific tone is set in the first several moments as unseen forces animate several of the mannequins inside the old gas station and ultimately kill off one of the characters.

Tourist Trap‘s low budget (only $350,000) still managed to produce a 1970s slasher with terrifying special effects that will haunt your dreams. The mannequins, particularly when in motion, are the scene stealers. The only thing creepier than their appearances and movements are the noises that they make while tormenting Slausen’s prey.

Tourist Trap can be streamed for free with Tubi.