Ten years before Crystal Gayle was nearly killed by Another World‘s Sin Stalker, another country music legend perfected her own version of the final girl dance on an 1977 episode of celebrated detective show Starsky and Hutch. That offering’s terrified canary was multi hit making Lynn Anderson, in her one major acting role. But lest one discount the macabre charms of this vibrant blonde entertainer, Anderson’s connections to the genre are multi-fold. Her songs have been utilized in such fin-tastic genre projects as Jaws, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged and (the less amphibian) Zodiac. (If those aren’t scary enough for you, Anderson’s other major television credit that year was an appearance on the notoriously belittled The Brady Bunch Variety Show.)

Here, the Rose Garden singer is Sue Ann Grainger, an on-the-rise Honky-Tonk chanteuse. Luckily for Sue Ann, series regular Hutch (David Soul) is a big fan. As the creepy calls she’s been receiving for months turn deadly, the sun tossed officer and his partner Starsky immediately get in line to help save the day. In between confidently performing songs from Wrap Your Love All Around Your Man, her current LP, Anderson does an admirable job of acting out her character’s path from casually confident to completely frightened. With that latter emotion in full display, the best sequence occurs when Sue Ann’s tormentor (a raspy, shifty eyed Joshua Bryant) traps her in a recording studio, taunting her maniacally from the booth. Veteran television director George McCowan, who also helmed Frogs (with Ray Milland & Joan Van Ark) and the television terror Murder on Flight 502, does a skilled job with this scenario, using reflective surfaces and layered angles to cinematically capture his heroine’s traumatized actions. 

Ultimately, like many a Laurie Strode wannabe, Sue Ann decides to take her fate into her own hands, confronting her attacker in an abandoned warehouse. Thankfully, with the help of the series’ titular duo, she lives to produce another backwoods love ballad or two. Anderson herself continued with her musical career throughout the decades, even earning a Grammy nomination in 2005 for a Bluegrass effort, before her untimely death of a heart attack in 2015. (Girl Group sound enthusiasts, meanwhile, are encouraged to check out her late ’60s recordings on Chart Records – an era that many vinyl connoisseurs determine to be her best.)

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!