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 is Harvey Keitel’s 86th birthday! Harvey Keitel is one of the great, fearless actors of our time (BAD LIEUTENANT, anyone). He has been working hard since 1965, and he’s still going strong today, adding up to a career that spans 60 years and counting. His work for great directors like Scorsese and Tarantino has been vital to the quality and success of those films. I really came to appreciate Keitel when he had somewhat of a career resurgence in the early 90’s when I was in my late teens. He’s just a great actor who makes everything he appears in better.
Today, in honor of Harvey Keitel’s 86th birthday, here are 4 Shots from 4 Films!
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!
Larry Wilcox sits in the director’s chair for this week’s episode!
Episode 3.20 “Tow Truck Lady”
(Dir by Larry Wilcox, originally aired on February 9th, 1980)
Danny (Chris Robinson) is a tow truck driver who is short on cash, in debt to a loan shark, and being forced to pay off his debt by stealing cars for the mob. Danny happens to be friends with Ponch and Jon. Ponch and Jon take it upon themselves to look after Danny’s daughter, Marla (Tonya Crowe), while Danny is out working. Of course, Danny is actually committing crimes during that time.
This was one of those episodes where a guest character, whom we’ve never seen before, suddenly becomes the main character and it throws off the entire episode. The majority of the episode is Danny arguing with the loan shark and Marla acting precocious. Jon and Ponch weren’t really that involved, until the big chase at the end of the episode. I guess it makes sense. Larry Wilcox was busy directing and I imagine Wilcox was probably more than happy to have a chance to point the camera at someone other than at Erik Estrada. From what I’ve read, the two co-stars may have played best friends but they couldn’t stand each other in real life. Wilcox apparently felt that the producers always sided with Estrada and it is impossible to deny that the show, which began with Baker and Ponch evenly matched, had become the Ponch Show by the time the third season rolled around.
(I should note that this episode does feature a pretty exciting highway smash-up, featuring cars flying through the air in slow motion. I always love that slo mo of doom!)
In the end, Danny does the right thing and turns on the loan shark. The loan shark is arrested. So is Danny. Baker says that he’ll arrange for Marla to live with his friend, Ellen (Liberty Godshall), until Danny gets out of prison. It’s entirely probable that Marla is going to be traumatized for the rest of her life but Ponch and Baker still share a good laugh at the end of the episode. Being a member of the Highway Patrol is fun!
I remember being so excited when it was announced that John Woo was making a sequel to HARD-BOILED, and that Chow Yun-Fat would be the star. Of course, the sequel was a video game, but I’ll take what I can get. I’m not much of a gamer myself (my prowess reached its peak with Mario Cart: Double Dash), but I proudly bought “Stranglehold” for my son so I could watch him play. It was pretty darn cool to be honest with you! I can’t believe it’s been 18 years since the game came out in 2007. Enjoy this blast from the past my friends!
Dolph Lundgren is Jack Crain, a Houston cop who teams up with FBI agent Larry Smith (Brian Benben) to investigate who is killing criminals in H-town. The killer is a drug dealer but not your everyday drug dealer. He’s an alien named Talec (Matthias Hues) and he’s figured out how to say “I come in peace,” but the rest of the English language is beyond him. “I come in peace,” turns out to be the scariest phrase you can hear when you’re being pursued by a white-haired, intergalactic mass murderer. His targets include Jesse Vint and Michael J. Pollard. This terminator wannabe is after character actors!
On the second-tier action stars of the 90s, Lundgren was the one who could actually act. Van Damme could actually do all the acrobatic stunts his characters did but he couldn’t show emotion like Lundgren. Steven Seagal seemed like he could handle himself in a fight but he lacked Lundgren’s self-aware humor. Lundgren plays Jack as almost being a parody of the type of hard-boiled cop who is always getting yelled at by the commissioner for wasting the city’s money. Brian Benben is remembered, by some, as the star of HBO’s DreamOn, the sitcom that convinced a generation of young men that there’s nothing women love more than obscure pop cultural obsessions. Benben is actually pretty funny in IComeInPeace. He’s the everyman who can’t believe he’s having to deal with an intergalactic drug dealer. Good heroes need a good villain and Matthias Hues is just right as the drug dealing alien who literally doesn’t know what he’s saying.
If you want to see a Terminator rip-off with nonstop action, a memorable villain, frequently (and intentionally) funny dialogue, an Al Leong cameo, and Dolph Lundgren as a hero who pushes people around just because he feels like it, IComeInPeace is the movie for you!
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!
I don’t even know how to describe this episode.
Episode 4.4 “The Big Thaw”
(Dir by Richard Compton, originally aired on October 23rd, 1987)
The Vice Squad raids a decrepit building, expecting to find drugs. Instead, they find a container that holds the frozen body of a dead reggae singer. Robillard Nevin died after eating a poisoned fish but his body was frozen so it could be thawed out once a cure had been found. Several different groups of people — including Nevin’s widow and, for some reason, Izzy — all want the body.
Wait …. what?
This is a MiamiVice episode? MiamiVice, as you may remember, is supposed to be a stylish and cynical show about two detective fighting a losing war against the Miami drug underworld. MiamiVice is the show that often ends with Crockett and Tubbs looking on in anger as they realize that all of their efforts have been for nothing. This is the show that often ends with a sympathetic character either getting shot or shooting someone else. This is the show in which there are no happy endings and every episode — at least in the past — seemed to conclude at the cost of Sonny Crockett’s soul ….
Well, you get my point.
What the Hell is this?
The fourth season of MiamiVice is off to an uneven start. That’s not a surprise. After four seasons, not every episode is going to be a winner. It happens to the best of shows. But, seriously, how did we go from Crockett and Tubbs driving in the middle of the night while Phil Collins sings InTheAirTonight to Crockett and Tubbs trying to protect a cryogenically frozen corpse? I guess the show was trying to keep things fresh by trying something new but this episode was just too ridiculous to work. Not even Tubbs bringing out his fake Caribbean accent could save this episode.
By the way, cryogenics and all that …. it doesn’t work! It’s waste of money! But, hey, whatever. Do what you want. It’s your life.
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 12th, we are showing STRATEGIC COMMAND (1997) starring Michael Dudikoff, Paul Winfield, Richard Norton, Amanda Wyss, Bryan Cranston, and Michael Cavanaugh.
This movie focuses on Rick Harding (Michael Dudikoff), a former Marines officer, who’s now working in the FBI as a chemical weapons designer. While packing up one night, a group of armed soldiers break into the FBI research lab. Interestingly, these soldiers are led by a man named Carlos Gruber (Richard Norton).
So, join us tonight for #MondayMuggers and watch STRATEGIC COMMAND! It’s on Amazon Prime. The trailer is included below:
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 1991’s EveofDestruction!
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 Eve of Destruction on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!
Through the Shattered Lens 