A roadside museum full of wax mannequins turns out to have an owner who can move objects with his mind, and dummies that may not be dummies at all.

TOURIST TRAP (1979) strands a group of young travelers at Mr. Slausen's museum after their car breaks down on a desert road. Chuck Connors plays Slausen, the proprietor who welcomes them in, and whose collection of lifelike figures hides something far worse than taxidermy and glass eyes. Connors was best known as television's The Rifleman, a strange fit for a low-budget mannequin picture.

Director David Schmoeller, working from a script he wrote with J. Larry Carroll, keeps the violence mostly offscreen and lets the mannequins do the work. Telekinesis moves them through the museum's halls, their painted faces turning toward the stranded teens, and the line between living flesh and molded wax keeps collapsing. The production designer was Robert Burns, who made the same kind of desolate, handmade wrongness for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Pino Donaggio's score and Nicholas von Sternberg's cinematography give the film a fairground unease that outpaces its PG rating. Tanya Roberts, a year before Charlie's Angels, is among the trapped.

Stephen King singled the film out in Danse Macabre as his personal obscure pick, writing that it "wields an eerie spooky power."