Daily Archives: November 21, 2024

Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 3.3 “For The Love Of Larry”

Posted on 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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!

This episode features a very good boy.

Episode 3.3 “For the Love of Larry”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on October 8th, 1986)

At the start of this episode, we find Jonathan and Mark on a dangerous assignment.  They’re in the city and apparently, they’re working as undercover cops and trying to catch a local drug dealer.  At least, I assume that the people working with Jonathan and Mark were supposed to be cops.  None of them were in uniform so I guess they have just as easily been a neighborhood vigilante group.  As Jonathan and Mark prepare to confront the dealer, Jonathan says that the scourge of drugs is the greatest threat that American will ever face.

It’s a heavy assignment but it doesn’t really seem like a Highway to Heaven sort of assignment.  Usually, Mark and Jonathan are specifically assigned to help someone.  This time, though, it appears that they’ve just been assigned to help the cops do their job.  Jonathan and Mark don’t really do anything that any other cop couldn’t have done.  Mark gets excited when the dealer tries to shoot him because he’s convinced that God is causing the bullets to miss him.  Only after the dealer is captured does Jonathan reveal that God didn’t do Mark any favors.  Mark just got lucky.

Mark’s earned a break!  He and Jonathan drive off to another one of those small towns that always seem to show up on this show.  They rent a cabin for a few days.  However, Mark’s attempts at relaxation are continually interrupted by a dog.  First, the dog runs in front of the car.  Then, the dog somehow shows up at the cabin.  Even though Mark took the dog to a shelter, the dog somehow managed to get out and track Mark down.

Eventually, Mark and Jonathan figure out that they need to follow the dog.  The dog leads off the main road, to an overturned car that is hidden away in the woods.  A father and a son, both badly injured but still alive, are in the car.  Jonathan and Mark are able to rescue them but then they notice that the dog is in the back seat and was apparently killed in the crash.

The camera pans up to the sky and gets lost in the clouds.  Suddenly, the dog’s ghostly form appears and seems to actually wink at the audience, letting us know that the dog may have died but his spirit stayed on Earth long enough to rescue his owners.  (The Larry of the title is the son of the dog’s owner.)

Did this episode make me cry?  You better believe this episode made me cry!  I’m not even a dog person and I was still sobbing at the end of this episode. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s an earnest sincerity at the heart of this show that makes it effective even when it should be silly.  Having the dog appear in the clouds is the type of thing that a lot of shows probably would have screwed up.  In lesser hands, it would have been too heavy-handed and overly sentimental to work.  But, on this show, it does work.  It helps that the dog was cute.

This was a simple episode but sometimes, it’s the simple episodes that work the best.

Retro Television Review: Malibu, CA 1.19 “Jason’s New Job”

Posted on 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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing Malibu CA, which aired in Syndication in 1998 and 1999.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, I continue to torture myself by watching this dumb show.

Episode 1.19 “Jason’s New Job”

(Dir by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on February 28th, 1999)

Frustrated with always being the one who is accused of screwing things up at the restaurant, Jason decides to get a new job.  That seems a bit petulant on his part, especially when you consider that Jason is the one who is always screwing everything up.  But anyway….

Jason ends up working at a gym.  His job title is Customer Relations.  His actual job is cleaning up after people.  He’s a janitor, basically.  Meanwhile, at the restaurant, Peter hires another waiter, who is also named Jason and who is totally responsible.  He’s so responsible that Peter and Scott start calling him “Super Jason.”

And I’ll say this …. as stupid as this show is and as much as I regret deciding to watch and review it, the Super Jason thing was kind of funny.  Mostly it was funny because the other Jason is such a douchebag that it’s fun to watch him get humiliated.

Anyway, Super Jason “cleans out” the restaurant.  Peter thinks that means that Super Jason is really working hard to keep the place clean but no, actually, Super Jason stole the cash register, the deep fryer, the security cameras, and just about everything else he could get his hands on.  What’s funny is that, even when Peter and Scott are looking at their now empty restaurant, they still keep calling the guy Super Jason.

Suddenly, a food critic shows up.  She’s not amused when she’s told that she can’t have what she wants because the kitchen has been cleaned out.  She’s going to give the restaurant a bad review!  Oh no!  Oh wait, there’s Ordinary Jason with a plate of food.  He saves the day by making her order.  How does he do that when there’s no supplies left in the restaurant?  Who knows?

Meanwhile, Murray and Tracy are convinced that they (and Stads) have been cursed with bad luck.  They convince Stads to put on a bird costume and dance on the beach.  A guy who likes Stads sees Stads doing it and cancels their date.  Stads is like, “My friends betrayed me!”  Seriously, when did lifeguards get so whiny?

This episode was pretty stupid, if slightly (and just slightly) more amusing than the typical episode of Malibu, CA.  As I watched, I thought about the show’s pilot, in which both Jason and Scott were sociopathic, Peter was a cool surfing legend, Stads was the tomboy lifeguard, Murray was crazy, and Samantha was the girl that Jason and Scott were both in love with.  The pilot introduced us to the principal of the high school and suggested that she and Peter were in love with each other.  Now, 19 episodes in, Scott is the responsible one while Jason is an immature douchebag.  Peter is now a dorky restaurant owner.  Stads is whiny.  Samantha is so bland that it’s easy to forget that she’s on the show.  Neither the high school nor the principal have been seen since the pilot.  And Murray and Tracy are probably the only redeeming things about this show, if just because Brandon Brooks and Priscilla Inga Taylor really throw themselves into playing those ludicrous characters.

Next week …. oh, who cares?  It’ll be dumb whatever it is.

 

COWARD OF THE COUNTY – the boundary pushing country song turned into a TV movie

Posted on by Bradley Crain

When I was a kid our family loved Kenny Rogers.  I remember listening to songs like “Lucille,” “The Gambler,” “Daytime Friends,” “She Believes in Me,” and “Lady” on my dad’s vinyl records. I would have been no older than second or third grade, and me and my siblings would really belt out “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.” But the one Kenny Rogers song that affected me more than any of the others was the “Coward of the County.” If you know the lyrics of the song, then you know what I’m talking about.  As a kid of around 8 years old, the story about Tommy, Becky and the Gatlin Boys was a little more mature than what I was used to. I remember not even being sure what exactly happened to Becky, but I knew it was bad.  I also remember a TV movie based on the song starring Kenny Rogers, so you know our family watched it.

The TV movie premiered in 1981 and stars Kenny Rogers as Matt, a preacher who likes to drink, gamble, and cavort with the ladies. His nephew Tommy (Fredric Lehne) is a nice young man who already seems to have a bit of a reputation as someone you can push around. We learn this about Tommy at the town Christmas carnival when Jimmy Joe Gatlin wins a cake at a cake-walk (do y’all remember those things?) and proceeds to shove it in Tommy’s face. Tommy grabs Jimmy Joe by the arm to make him stop, but then he walks away without fighting back. It’s right after this confrontation between Tommy and Jimmy Joe that Matt makes an announcement to the crowd that the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor, placing our story in 1941. Immediately the young men of the town, including Jimmy Joe Gatlin, start making their plans to join the military and head out for boot camp. And I tell you, this Jimmy Joe is a real jerk. Before he leaves, he tells the local beauty Becky that she’s “his” girl whether she likes it or not even though she’s telling him she’s not his girl. Jimmy Joe also stops to call Tommy a coward and ask him why he’s standing there with the men when he hasn’t even joined the military. We soon learn that Tommy has a very specific reason for not fighting. You see, his dad died in prison. He had to go to prison for killing another man in a fight, and before he passed he away, he asked his son to promise him that he would never fight. With the bully Jimmy Joe out of town, Tommy and Becky begin seeing each other and fall in love. That part of his life is happy, but everywhere Tommy goes he’s reminded that young men are fighting and dying for their country while he’s still at home. He really wants to keep his promise to his dad not to fight, but he feels he should fight for his country. After eight weeks, Jimmy Joe returns and tries to reclaim Becky as his girl. Becky tells him that she loves Tommy and they are getting married. Jimmy Joe doesn’t take the news well so he heads out and starts drinking. Full of drunken courage, he and his brothers head back to Becky’s house and he forces himself on her. When Tommy finds out what happened to Becky, he’s finally had enough and he confronts Jimmy Joe Gatlin and his brothers. He breaks his promise to his dad and beats the crap out of the Gatlin brothers. As the words of the song would say, “sometimes you have to fight to be a man.” Soon after, Tommy enlists in the service because with Becky he truly has something at home worth fighting for.

I’ll just start out by addressing the elephant in the room that Becky was raped by Jimmy Joe, and that’s what it took for Tommy to finally fight. I sure wish the cake to the face or the many times the Gatlin boys called him yellow would have been enough, but unfortunately it took something that horrible. I didn’t really understand all of this in 1981, and it’s pretty crazy that a mainstream country song told this story to be honest. Also, you might be surprised that Kenny Rogers is more of a peripheral character as the wandering preacher of the story. The main character, Tommy, is played by Fredric Lehne. He’s a likable actor who’s still very busy to this day on TV. I enjoyed seeing Lehne because he was very good in a movie that was filmed here in Arkansas called GREATER back in 2016. The movie tells the tragic, but inspirational story of Brandon Burlsworth, a former walk-on who became an All-American offensive lineman for the Razorbacks. Sadly, he died in a car accident in 1999 after being drafted to play professional football for the Indianapolis Colts. Lehne played an important role as a coach who helped get the very best out of Burlsworth. As a frequent attendee of Razorbacks home football games, I watched Burlsworth play many times in person and the whole state loved him. The news was devastating to our state, and the movie about his short, but very meaningful life is very special to me.

There were a couple of other things that I found interesting about COWARD OF THE COUNTY. First, I wondered if it was just a coincidence that the bad guys were the Gatlin Boys, especially considering that Larry Gatlin and his brothers were contemporary country music stars along with Kenny Rogers. According to the songwriters, they thought the Gatlin boys had a great ring to it and worked great for the song, better than anything else they could come up with. According to Larry Gatlin, he thinks they should have chosen a different name, but he was also a good friend with Kenny Rogers. Finally, the movie was partially filmed in Covington, GA, which has a very unique Courthouse with a large clock tower. Covington, which is about 35 miles east of Atlanta, is affectionately known as the “Hollywood of the South” due to the large number of movies and TV shows filmed there. To name just a few, THE CANNONBALL RUN, MY COUSIN VINNY, and the TV show THE VAMPIRE DIARIES were all filmed in Covington. My wife and I stayed the night in Covington on our way to Myrtle Beach in 2020 and visited the downtown area before we headed on. As soon as I saw that clock tower in COWARD OF THE COUNTY, I knew that it was filmed in Covington.

DEATH WISH 3 – The movie I’ve watched more than any other!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

I’m on Day 3 of my discussion of Charles Bronson’s DEATH WISH series in chronological order. This series has brought me countless hours of entertainment over the last 40 years, so enjoy and let me know your thoughts!

DEATH WISH 3 is a very important movie to me. I recently closed my celebration of Charles Bronson’s 103rd birthday movie marathon on November 3rd with another viewing of DEATH WISH 3, the film that turned me into the only Charles Bronson superfan in Toad Suck, Arkansas. After a day of celebratory viewings of CHATO’S LAND, 10 TO MIDNIGHT (on VHS), FROM NOON TIL THREE, COMBAT: HERITAGE (on VHS), THE SEA WOLF (on VHS), and the original DEATH WISH, I had no choice but to watch DEATH WISH 3, a movie I have watched well over 100 times over the course of my life. DEATH WISH 3 is one of only four Charles Bronson films that I have seen on the big screen, as I was able to watch it at the Mahoning Drive-In in Lehighton, PA in June of 2022.

The third entry in the DEATH WISH franchise begins with Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) riding a Go Big Red Trailways bus into New York City. Since this is an odd numbered DEATH WISH film, it takes place in New York. The even numbered films take place in Los Angeles. Kersey looks kind of grumpy as he rides into town. I would definitely avoid sitting next to him if I was a passenger on the same bus that day. We learn that Kersey’s coming into town to visit his old buddy, Charlie. Unfortunately, his arrival coincides with members of a violent street gang breaking into Charlie’s apartment and beating him to death. Just after the punks go running away from the scene of the crime, Kersey walks into Charlie’s apartment to find the man clinging to his last breath of life and asking Kersey to “take care of his things, until I get back.” Some of Charlie’s neighbors had called the police a little earlier, and they arrive just in time to find Kersey standing over the body, so they arrest him for his old buddy’s murder. This seems reasonable since Kersey is the only person wearing a sports jacket and button up shirt in this gang infested area. Kersey is taken to the police station where a group of cops commence to beating the crap out of him in hopes of getting a confession. After a few punches to the gut by the cops and the old “you can have water if you tell us what we want to know” routine, Lt. Richard Shriker (Ed Lauter) enters the room and promptly asks “Who’s this dude?” You see, Kersey is going under the alias Paul Kimble, but Shriker recognizes the dude as Paul Kersey, the vigilante from the original DEATH WISH. Shriker goes on to explain that he was with the New York PD the night they brought in a vigilante with a bullet in his leg who was out like a light. Having the vigilante in town again, light bulbs immediately go off over Shriker’s head and he quickly hatches a plan. It seems a gang of criminals, led by Mandy Fraker (Gavan O’Herlihy) has taken over the community and police have been powerless to stop them. First, it’s really hard to catch the gang members because some of them can run really fast, and second, when they finally do catch them, the gang members have lawyers who can get them off. Lt. Shriker decides he’ll let Kersey out of jail, but only if Kersey is willing to resume his vigilante ways, shoot some of the creeps, and even throw some street info the police department’s way so they can get a few busts. Paul Kersey immediately agrees even though he seems kind of tired. You can’t help but wonder if Kersey might be needing the release that only can be achieved through violence against creeps. In short order, Kersey sets up shop in his old buddy’s apartment so he can take care of his things, gets to know the local residents, waits for an arsenal of African big game pistols and rocket launchers to arrive via UPS, makes love to public defender Kathryn Davis (Deborah Raffin), and eats all sorts of local delicacies like stuffed cabbage and broiled chicken. As an added bonus, the neighborly Bennett (Martin Balsam) just happens to have a couple of Browning machine guns in his closet that he was somehow able to smuggle home from World War II. It’s against this backdrop that Kersey sets out to wage a one-man war against the violent gang that has turned the corner of Sutter and Belmont into hell on earth!

There’s not much I can say about DEATH WISH 3 that hasn’t already been said.  It’s a wild, over the top action film that would mark the 6th and final film that Bronson would work on with director Michael Winner.  It would also be Charles Bronson’s last film that would rise to #1 at the U.S. box office when it premiered on November 1st, 1985.  It features some fun performances, especially from Ed Lauter as Lt. Shriker, Gavan O’Herlihy as gang leader Mandy Fraker, and Kirk Taylor as the gang member known as the Giggler who “can really move,” but who’s still not fast enough to outrun a bullet! A pre-Bill and Ted’s Alex Winter also plays a gang member named Hermosa, continuing the series tradition of casting actors as street creeps who would go on to be a bigger star a few years down the road. DEATH WISH 3 is not a great movie in the traditional sense, but it’s one of the most enjoyable movies ever made if you’re in the right frame of mind. 

DEATH WISH 3 is the movie most responsible for my obsession with Charles Bronson. I received it as a Christmas present in 1986 when I was thirteen years old, and I proceeded to watch it almost daily for months. It was the only Bronson film I owned on VHS so I would watch it almost every night unless I had a basketball game, or I had been able to rent a different Bronson film from the video store.  I know every line in the film and no other movie holds more nostalgic value in my life. DEATH WISH 3 is a 5-star movie in my book in so many ways that have nothing to do with critical acclaim. As long as I’m breathing, long live DEATH WISH 3!!!

BONUS: We completed a roundtable a few weeks back on the THIS WEEK IN CHARLES BRONSON PODCAST, where we spend the entire episode discussing what we love about DEATH WISH 3. I had a blast on the episode with my partner in crime Eric Todd, as well as fellow “Buchinsky Boys” Chris Manson & David Mittelberg. We even throw some love TSL’s way during the episode. Give it a listen if you get the chance!

Music Video of the Day: Bobblehead Doll by The Folk Implosion (2024, dir by John Davis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Me: “It’s about time someone wrote a song about those adorable bobblehead dolls!”

Smart Person: “Actually, Lisa, I think this song is about the mindless conformity of people who just nod along with whatever is happening in the world….”

Another Smart Person: “Or, it’s about the desire to live in a world where you can always be as happy and untroubled as the bobbleheads….”

Me: “Bobbleheads are so cute!  Remember when Angela gave Dwight a custom-made bobblehead on The Office and then Dwight threw it away after she wouldn’t choose between him and Andy?”

Smart Person: “Why would anyone choose Andy?”

Another Smart Person: “That was one of those Office stories that went on for too long.”

Me: “Indeed.”

Enjoy!