Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 2.21 “CHP BMX”

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee!

This week, Ponch saves us all.

Episode 2.21 “CHP BMX”

(Dir by John Florea, originally aired on March 3rd, 1979)

The California Highway Patrol is sponsoring a BMX racing team! Sindy and Baker are the coaches while Ponch is …. well, Ponch is mostly just hanging out. He does find time to flirt with Ms. Ramirez (Mina Vasquez), a teacher who hopes that joining the team could help out an at-risk student named Danny (Kirk Calloway). Danny likes to vandalize things. He’s on his way to juvie if Ponch can’t reach him …. hey, you know the drill. By this point, we all know how this show works. Of course, Ponch is going to reach the kid. With that dazzling smile, Ponch can do anything.

It’s Getraer who has the most to deal with during this episode. After his son is struck by a car, Getraer becomes so distracted on the job that he messes up the arrest of a drug dealer (Henry Olek). Told by his superiors to take a week off while his son recovers, Getraer instead starts to tail the dealer on his own. Getraer is determined to put the man in jail. Fortunately, Ponch is there to help catch him. Is there nothing that Ponch can’t do?

Seriously, when I watch an episode like this, I can understand why Larry Wilcox apparently did not enjoy working with Erik Estrada on this show. While Baker humbly does his job without asking for any special recognition, Ponch is portrayed as being so perfect that you half-expect him to start walking on water. The theme of this episode — and really, the theme of much of the second season — has been that Ponch can ultimately do no wrong. Even when it looks like Ponch has screwed up, he ultimately turns out to be infallible. He’s more than just a member of the California Highway Patrol. He’s St. Ponch of Los Angeles, saving souls while riding his motorcycle amongst the heathens.

It probably sounds like I’m being critical of this episode but I actually enjoyed it, for much the same reason that I enjoy most episodes of CHiPs. The car and motorcycle stunts were spectacularly filmed and the scenery was nice to look at. Even though it rains through a good deal of this episode and Getraer, Baker, and Ponch aren’t exactly hanging out in the most glamorous sections of Los Angeles, this episode still manages to make L.A. look like the loveliest city in the world.

And really, even Erik Estrada is entertaining. It’s easy to laugh at his big smile and his less-than-subtle acting technique but that’s just Estrada being Estrada and, in the world of CHiPs, it works.

The important thing is that everything works out. Danny wins his race. Getraer’s son gets out of the hospital. And maybe Baker will get to do something more than smile at Ponch next week. We’ll see!

Monday Live Tweet Alert: Join Us for Broken Path!

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasion ally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie ! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.

Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 2008’s Broken Path!

It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Broken Path on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!

Enjoy!

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 3.8 “Better Living Through Chemistry”

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!

This week, Tubbs’s cover is blown …. again.

Episode 3.8 “Better Living Through Chemistry”

(Dir by Leon Ichaso, originally aired on November 14th, 1986)

While working undercover as Ricardo Cooper (and yes, I’m pretty sure I heard the fake Caribbean accent at the start of this episode), Tubbs is stunned to discover that his former partner from New York, Clarence Batisse (Victor Love), is now working as a DJ at a club owned by a local drug lord.

Tubbs is even more shocked when Clarence announces to the entire club that “Ricardo Cooper” is actually an undercover cop.

Somehow, and it’s not really made clear how, Tubbs is able to escape the club without getting shot. Sonny also somehow manages to convince the drug dealers that he didn’t know that Tubbs was actually a cop. So, Sonny “Burnett” continues to play his part in the undercover operation while Tubbs tries to figure out why Clarence blew his cover.

Clarence is bitter. His career with the NYPD came crashing down when he shot a bookie during a raid. Clarence claimed the bookie had a gun but the gun was never found. Tubbs didn’t see the gun and refused to lie for his partner. However, when Tubbs realizes that Clarence has been reduce to working for a drug lord, he sets about to try to clear Clarence’s name.

Meanwhile, informant Izzy (Martin Ferrero) has been hired to babysit the drug lord’s chemist, nerdy Henry Luna (Nelson Villamor). Luna has developed cocaine that is so pure that most people can’t even survive doing one hit. The Vice squad know that, if the cocaine hits the streets, it will lead to a gang war. But then Luna does a hit of his own cocaine and falls over dead.

Tubbs does manage to clear Clarence’s name but it doesn’t matter. Clarence has gone so far over to the dark side that he sets up Tubbs and Crockett to be attacked in a surprise raid. Tubbs and Crockett kill the bad guys and, at the end of the episode, Tubbs takes Clarence into custody. A good cop has gone very bad….

This was a weird episode. It was technically a Tubbs episode but it seemed like the majority of the running time was taken up with Izzy babysitting the chemist. Izzy is one of those supporting characters who works best in small amounts. Building almost an entire episode around him just serves to highlight that there’s really not much depth to Izzy as a character. He’s cowardly and he talks a lot. It’s funny until it isn’t, which is another way of saying that it gets old after ten minutes. The comedy of Izzy and the Chermist didn’t really fit in with the scenes of Tubbs trying to clear his former partner’s name. The tone of the episode was all over the place, making this a rare Miami Vice episode that didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be.

On the plus side, the drug lord owned a club that was full of motorcycles and where Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer was the most popular song. There was one very exciting shoot-out at the club. That was a good thing. Otherwise, this was Miami Vice at its least effective.

HOOSIERS and a son of a basketball coach!

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Bradley Crain

HOOSIERS is based on the true story of a small high school winning the Indiana state basketball championship in 1954. Gene Hackman plays Coach Norman Dale, the once successful college coach who gets a second chance when he’s hired to coach high school basketball in the tiny town of Hickory, Indiana. It takes some time for Coach Dale to whip the talented, but undisciplined young men into a team, and it also takes a little time for local legend Jimmy Chitwood to decide that he will play basketball again. Chitwood had stopped playing prior to the arrival of Coach Dale, but after watching the way the coach goes about his business, he decides he’ll give it another go. After a rough start, the team starts playing good basketball and starts piling up wins as they make their way towards a potential state championship.

HOOSIERS was released when I was 13 years old, and it has been one of my favorite movies for almost 40 years. Why, you might ask? I’ll start by giving you a little Bradley Crain family history. First, basketball was my life growing up. My dad was a teacher and high school basketball coach. From the earliest days I can remember, my dad was teaching me how to play basketball. He taught me the proper techniques for shooting, and through lots of practice I became very good at it. I’m one of those people who could be referred to as a “gym rat.” The only things I wanted to do growing up were play basketball and go fishing. I have a brother who is one year and 5 days older than me, and he loved basketball too. The competition between the two of us made it difficult at times at home, but it also pushed us to get better. Second, I grew up in a small rural community in Arkansas known as Toad Suck, and I went to school in the small town of Bigelow, Arkansas. Bigelow was classified as a “Class B” school for sports purposes. This was the smallest classification that you could be in, and my class consisted of approximately 40 students. Finally, when HOOSIERS came out I was in junior high and my dream was to win a high school state basketball championship. Our teams were good, and I was still young and naïve enough to believe anything was possible. We even won the district championship my 9th grade year, which was the year after HOOSIERS was released. Alas, the chips didn’t fall our way, and even though we won a lot of basketball games over the next few years, there were no state championships. Now back to the movie!

One of my favorite things about HOOSIERS is the cast of young men hired to play the members of the team. So often in movies, the actors that are supposed to be good at basketball are clearly not. That’s not the case in HOOSIERS. These guys can act and are talented basketball players as well. And what can I say about the cast that includes a marvelous Gene Hackman as the coach, and Dennis Hopper as the friendly, but alcoholic dad of one of the players who “knows everything there is to know about the greatest game ever invented.” Hopper is phenomenal, and his work was recognized with an Oscar nomination. Finally, as the team is making its way towards the championship, each player is given a moment to shine and do their part to help the team. I liked that. It all makes for an exciting and heartwarming true story that pretty much anyone can enjoy. I still love the movie now just thinking about it!

#MondayMuggers – Why THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS?

Posted on November 18, 2024 by Bradley Crain

Every Monday night at 9:00 Central Time, my wife Sierra and I host a “Live Movie Tweet” event on X using the hashtag #MondayMuggers. We rotate movie picks each week, and our tastes are quite different. I decided early on that I would only program movies that have meant something to me over the years. Tonight, Monday November 18th, we’re watching THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS starring Chow Yun-fat, Mira Sorvino and Michael Rooker.

So why does THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS mean something to me, you might ask?! The main reason is a matter of timing and its star, Chow Yun-fat. I personally discovered Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat in the late spring of 1997 and was in full obsession mode when I read that he was making his American film debut with THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS in early 1998. To say I was pumped about this movie would be quite the understatement, and I was at a theater in Conway, Arkansas the very day of its wide release on February 6, 1998. Director Antoine Fuqua, making his directorial debut, tried to make a stylish film that would appeal to fans of John Woo, who served as Executive Producer on THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS. It worked on me, and over the next few years I purchased the movie in every format imaginable. I’ve owned it on bootleg VHS, regular VHS, DVD, and special edition blu ray. Looking back on the film now, I realize that it’s an exercise in style over substance, but that’s certainly okay. It doesn’t take away the fact that it came out at a time in my life when I was primed for maximum movie impact. You can never go back and replicate those times in your life, but you can celebrate them. Sierra and I will be doing just that tonight on #MondayMuggers at 9:00 CST. THE REPLACEMENT KILLERS is available for streaming on Amazon Prime. Join us if you’d like!