Daily Archives: May 19, 2025

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 3.21 “The Strippers”

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 Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983.  The entire show is currently streaming on Prime!

This week, the hills have eyes.

Episode 3.21 “The Strippers”

(Dir by Don Weis, originally aired on February 16th, 1980)

Calm down, boys, we’re not talking those types of strippers!

This episode of CHiPs finds Ponch and Jon searching through the California hill country for two rednecks who are stealing cars and stripping them for the parts.  One of the strippers is a fat guy who likes to sing while he’s working.  The other is a guy played by Evan C. Kim, who later played Clint Eastwood’s partner in The Dead Pool.  Baker’s girlfriend’s car gets stolen so this one is …. wait for it …. PERSONAL!  Of course, this being CHiPs, the episode is still mostly about Ponch even though Baker’s the one with a personal stake in the case.

It turns out that Ponch and Jon aren’t the only ones investigating crimes in the hills of California. The DEA is investigating a drug-running operation and they really don’t want to two motorcycle cops getting in the way.  (Doesn’t the DEA understand that motorcycles are cool?  At least they’re not bike cops like those schmucks on Pacific Blue.)  The head drug smuggler is played by Morgan Woodward, who was a veteran of the western genre.  The old cowboys are smuggling cocaine into Los Angeles.  It’s like an extremely depressing country song.  There’s no more cattle but there’s plenty of the devil’s dandruff to be sold.

If I seem to be rambling, it’s because there’s not really much to say about this episode.  Airing, as it did, late in the season, it’s hard not to feel that show’s writers were probably tired and out-of-ideas when it came to coming up with the plot for this one.  Ponch and Jon catch the car strippers who have information on the drug dealers.  The car strippers turn informant and hope that they’ll get a deal as a result.  Let’s hope so because prison is not a friendly environment to snitches.

This episode did feature one nicely-filmed accident scene, featuring multiple cars flying through the air (in glorious slo mo of doom!) and a bunch of broken glass.  Bonnie and Bear cleaned up the accident site so that Ponch and Baker could get back to searching for the car thieves.  That was nice of them.  It’s all about team work!

Brad’s “mini-review” of LOVE AND BULLETS (1979), starring Charles Bronson! 

Posted on by Bradley Crain

Charles Bronson is an Arizona cop who goes to Switzerland to bring back a gangster’s girlfriend (Jill Ireland). The gangster (Rod Steiger) sends a hitman (Henry Silva) to kill her so she can’t tell his crime secrets to the authorities.  

This isn’t one of Bronson’s best films, but it’s still a fun movie to watch on a chilly, rainy day. There are some good action scenes set in various cold & snowy European locations. This is Bronson in “Bond” mode which is kind of fun and different. And what can you say about a stuttering Rod Steiger screaming at his advisors about the meaning of “love.” It’s fun stuff when you like Steiger as much as I do. I do deduct half a star because Steiger gets so mad at one point that he turns over a table with some of the biggest, most scrumptious looking shrimp I’ve ever seen. That was completely uncalled for and wasteful, but not quite as wasteful as Bronson and Henry Silva in the same movie without an epic battle of some sort. The fact that they didn’t fight it out on the Matterhorn itself can only be described as a missed opportunity. 

Golden Needles (1974, directed by Robert Clouse)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

An ancient Chinese statue contains several acupuncture needles that, when placed correctly, can grant a man unstoppable vim and vigor.  It can also grant amazing sexual prowess, which is why every elderly crime boss in the world wants it.  In Hong Kong, a group of flamethrower-toting thugs steal the statue so that their boss, Lin Tao (Roy Chiao), can sell the statue to a Los Angeles mobster named Winters (Burgess Meredith!).  Winters’s agent in Hong Kong, Felicity (Elizabeth Ashley), decides to hire Vietnam vet Dan Mason (Joe Don Baker) to steal the statue from her so that she can not only take Winters’s money but also sell the statue herself.  Mason agrees, in return for money and sex.

Eventually, the action does move from Hong Kong to Los Angeles.  That allows Jim Kelly to make an appearance as Jeff, a buddy of Mason’s who helps him look for the statue and who takes part in one lousy fight scene.  It’s really a glorified cameo.  Robert Clouse previous directed Enter The Dragon, in which Kelly played the member of the heroic trio who didn’t survive.  There are actually a handful of Enter the Dragon cast members scattered throughout Golden Needles but, unfortunately, Bruce Lee was dead and John Saxon was apparently unavailable.

There are a few good action sequences in this film, though if you’re hoping to see Joe Don Baker lay down some sweet kung fu moves, you’re going to be disappointed.  Baker’s character throws people through windows but there’s not much finesse in his fighting style.  I still appreciated Baker’s performance in Golden Needles.  Clouse makes good use of Baker’s lumbering form, showing how out of place he is in Hong Kong.  Baker and Elizabeth Ashley make a good team and Burgess Meredith gives a performance that’s only slightly less subtle than his turn as the Penguin on Batman.  The film’s PG-rating keeps the violence from getting too extreme but it also probably made Golden Needles perfect for a Saturday matinee.

Golden Needles is an enjoyable oddity.  See it if you’re a Joe Don Baker fan.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 4.5 “Child’s Play”

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 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, Sonny is too quick to fire his gun.

Episode 4.5 “Child’s Play”

(Dir by Vern Gillum, originally aired on October 30th, 1987)

This is a dark, dark episode.

While breaking up what appears to be a case of domestic violence between Annette McAllister (Danitra Vance) and Walker Monroe (Ving Rhames), Sonny thinks that he spots someone holding a gun in the next room.  Sonny fires through the wall, hitting a 13 year-old boy who Annette claims is her son, Jeffrey.  While Jeffrey McCallister lies in a coma, a guilt-ridden Sonny starts to think about his ex-wife and their son, Billy.  They live upstate and it’s been a while since Sonny visited.  When Sonny does visit, he learns that his ex-wife’s fiancé wants to adopt Billy after the wedding.

Meanwhile, back in Miami, it turns out that there is no Jeffrey McAllister and that the boy who Sonny shot was actually a child soldier, recruited into a gang at an early age so that he couldn’t be sent to prison if arrested.  It turns out that Walker and Annette are both involved in a gunrunning operation that is headed up by Holliday (Isaac Hayes).  It all leads to one of those patented Miami Vice-style action sequences where Crockett, more or less, allows Walker to fall to his death.  Sonny is definitely not in a good mood for the majority of this episode.

Child’s Play could have just as easily been titled The Don Johnson Emmy Submission Episode.  This episode revolves entirely around Crockett and his feelings of guilt over shooting a child and also his fear of losing his son.  Johnson does a pretty good job in this episode.  Over the course of season 3 and the first few episodes of season 4, it really has sometimes seemed as if Crockett was losing his edge.  This episode presents us with the return of self-destructive, end-of-his-rope Sonny and not even Johnson’s mullet can distract from the drama.

Thematically, this episode is pretty bleak.  We never really learn much about the kid who was shot by Crockett, other than that he has a pretty sizable criminal record for a 13 year-old.  By the end of the episode, he’s woken up from his coma but, assuming that he is capable of leaving the hospital, he’s still wanted on several murder charges.  The kid basically has no future, even if he does make it to adulthood.  Meanwhile, Sonny’s son is growing up without his father and, when Sonny does visit him, there’s really not much of a connection between the two of them.

In other words, everyone’s doomed.  This was not a happy episode but, then again, Miami Vice was rarely a happy show.

#MondayMuggers presents YOUNG GUNS (1988) starring Emilio Etevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Charlie Sheen!

Posted on 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. Tonight, Monday May 19th, we are showing YOUNG GUNS (1988) starring Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Charlie Sheen, Dermot Mulroney, Casey Siemaszko, Terence Stamp, Jack Palance, Terry O’Quinn, Brian Keith, and Patrick Wayne.

This movie focuses on a group of young gunmen, led by Billy the Kid (Emilio Estevez), who become deputies to avenge the murder of John Tunstall (Terence Stamp), the rancher who took them in, gave them jobs, and taught them how to read. But when Billy takes their authority too far, they soon find themselves to be the outlaws and the ones being hunted down.

Join us tonight for #MondayMuggers and watch the extremely fun YOUNG GUNS! It’s on Amazon Prime. The trailer is included below:

Monday Live Tweet Alert: Join Us For Final Justice!

Posted on 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 occasionally 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 1984’s Final Justice, starring Joe Don Baker! I picked it so you know it’ll be good.

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, find the movie on YouTube, Tubi, or Prime, hit play at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!  The live tweet community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.   

See you soon for some Joe Don excitement!

Scenes That I Love: Pete Townshend and The Who at Woodstock

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today is Pete Townshend’s 80th birthday and today’s scene that I love features Pete Townshend (as a member of The Who) performing at Woodstock in 1969.

Roger Daltrey later said that this was the worst gig that they ever played and The Who did end up going on stage early in the morning, with the sun rising as they performed See Me, Feel Me.  The majority of The Who’s performance was not included in the initial release of the Woodstock documentary but the noticeably grainy footage would later be included in various rereleases.

Unfortunately, no cameras recorded the moment when Pete Townshend became the hero that 1969 needed by kicking a ranting Abbie Hoffman off of the stage.  But, audio of the incident survived.

Here is The Who at Woodstock:

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Albert Pyun Edition

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

Today, on what would have been his 72nd birthday, we celebrate filmmaker Albert Pyun!

It’s time for….

4 Shots From 4 Albert Pyun Films

The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982, dir by Albert Pyun, DP: Joseph Margine)

Cyborg (1989, dir by Albert Pyun, DP: Philip Alan Waters)

Captain America (1990, dir by Albert Pyun, DP: Philp Alan Waters)

Kickboxer 2 (1991, dir by Albert Pyun, DP: George Mooradian)