Looked like a TV movie

This doesn't have a tv movie look at all. It has a dated look, but watch syfy tv movies to see how bad they look, even though they are new films.

The Will Smith version was pretty weak actually. The alternate ending on the blurry would have made it better, but the cgi night creatures were so bad it dropped them below the psychotic family from the Omega Man.

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I agree with Cosmodrone; the lighting was pretty bad for a theatrical release - it and some sets made some scenes feel like an an early episode of Star Trek. Harsh unseen overhead lighting in candle light scenes? Wigs and makeup were terrible. The helicopter "emergency" scene is unintentionally funny because you see the reflection of a stationary tree on the windshield the whole time!

Maybe if you're watching it on VHS it looks like a TV movie, but in 2.35:1 there's scope to this film. If lighting's your beef... There was a true art to lighting black and white compositions, but color was less difficult and time-consuming. By the early '70s the old movie studios like MGM were on the verge of collapse so they cut corners as much as possible -- and poor lighting is a common flaw of many studio-financed films of that era. Look at any of the "Planet of the Apes" sequels (from rival studio Fox) and you'll see similarly shoddy lighting work. It was quicker and cheaper to flat-light everything and certainly no one at the time anticipated hi-def or even home video.

Boris Sagal was mostly a TV director and that probably accounts for a lot of the feel. He only did a handful of theatrical projects, and per IMDB page for Sagal, they appeared to be low budget projects at that.

But he made a daughter with big jugs, so we'll call it even...