Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 4.9 “Crash Course”

Posted on August 18, 2025 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!

A recently released thief and a bank error are no match for the smiley charisma of Erik Estrada!

Episode 4.9 “Crash Course”

(Dir by Phil Bondelli, originally aired on January 4th, 1981)

Former getaway driver Sonny Matson (Don Stroud) has just been released from prison and he’s fallen back into his old habits. Everyday, he steals a different car and then robs a different business. His crimes are getting progressively more bold and Baker is determined to catch him.

Meanwhile, Ponch notices that he has an extra $4,000 in his bank account. Trying to do the right thing, Ponch reports the discrepancy. The bank accidentally drains all the money from his account. With his checks bouncing all over town, Ponch tries to get the bank fix their error. Good luck with that, Ponch! Luckily, when one of Sonny’s associates tries to rob the bank, it gives Ponch a chance to play the hero….

It’s The Ponch Show! Baker may be the one with a personal stake in capturing Sonny but Ponch is the one with big grin and the majority of this episode’s screentime. Whether he’s thwarting a bank robbery or recruiting all of his co-workers to help him find proof of the bank’s error, Ponch dominates. Poor Baker.

The best thing about this episode was Don Stroud’s performance as Sonny Matson. Stroud played a lot of low-level criminals over the course of his career. With his quick but unfriendly smile, his paranoid eyes, and his cocky attitude, Stroud is actually rather intimidating as Sonny. Whenever Stroud is onscreen, CHiPs actually feels a little bit dangerous! That this episode was memorable was largely due to Don Stroud and the hideous 70s decor of Ponch’s bank. Tacky and dangerous, that’s our CHiPs!

Brad reviews the romantic comedy THE OTHER END OF THE LINE (2007)!

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Bradley Crain

Back in 2019, I took my wife to Dallas, and while we were there, she asked if we could visit the South Fork Ranch. As many of you probably know, this is the setting for the wildly popular TV series DALLAS, that originally ran from 1978 through 1991 producing 356 episodes. She loved the series growing up and especially enjoyed watching it with her “granny” back in West Virginia. When we got back home from the trip, I hopped onto Amazon and purchased the entire original series for her, a set of TV movies, and even the series reboot that ran from 2012 through 2014, producing another 40 episodes. We watched everything over the next 6 months. The rebooted series starred, among others, Jesse Metcalfe as the grown up version of Christopher Ewing. My wife really liked him in the series, so he’s become one of our favorites that we like to watch on Hallmark and many other movies. The other day I watched a romantic comedy Jesse starred in called THE OTHER END OF THE LINE (2007). It’s currently streaming on Prime, so I decided to write up my thoughts on the film.

In THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, Shriya Saran plays Priya Sethi, a young woman working at a CitiBank call center in Mumbai, India. One day she gets a phone call from Granger Woodruff (Jesse Metcalfe), an American advertising executive, when he becomes a victim of identity theft. While working to resolve the situation, sparks being to fly during their conversations, and Priya, quite smitten with the handsome American, decides to travel to San Francisco to meet him in person. Through a variety of rom-com type circumstances, Priya ends up creating a false identity that she uses as she meets and spends time with Granger. As they continue to hit it off, her deception begins to create some serious complications. These issues come to a head when her very traditional dad, who expects her to marry a guy he’s chosen for her back in India, shows up in San Francisco. The blissfully ignorant Granger is suddenly made aware of Priya’s real life, and the two are faced with rather awkward and difficult decisions for how to move forward. Will Priya choose true love over cultural tradition? Will Granger take a chance and pursue her even though she’s been deceiving him? This is a romantic comedy, so you probably have a good idea how it might play out!

I enjoyed THE OTHER END OF THE LINE mainly because I’m an undemanding sucker for rom-coms, and I liked Jesse Metcalfe and Shriya Saran in the lead roles. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Saran on-screen before, but she’s extremely beautiful and charming, and I can definitely see why Metcalfe’s character would fall in love with her. I did! Metcalfe is good as the business obsessed American who has a bit more depth and heart than you might initially suspect. The leads carry what story there is just fine, and I found myself with a smile on my face as the end credits appeared. With that said, the story itself could be a bit of a problem to more demanding viewers. This has all been done many times before, and there isn’t anything unique to differentiate this film from countless others. Cliches abound as you can pretty much guess what’s going to happen from frame to frame. And the supporting characters aren’t much to write home about either. The “best friends” are exactly what you’d expect them to be, and not really in a good way. The supporting character that had the most potential for me was Saran’s dad. Unfortunately, he was set up to be a goofus for most of the film, so when he gets to flex his acting muscles at the end, the character’s more serious scenes don’t really hit home for me. On another positive note, I did enjoy seeing the contrast in the film’s settings in San Francisco and Mumbai, India. One of the funniest moments in the movie involves Metcalfe’s character’s attempt to get across Mumbai as quickly as possible while navigating different forms of the city’s public transportation.

Overall, I recommend THE OTHER END OF THE LINE to undemanding viewers who enjoy sweet, cookie cutter romantic comedies. I think there’s plenty to enjoy. However, if you watch the movie with one of those people who likes to make fun of everything, that person will have plenty of material as well!

Desperate Trails (1939, directed by Albert Ray)

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

The frontier town of Denton has become lawless, plagued by murders, robberies, and cattle rustling. The town’s sheriff (Russell Simpson) just cannot seem to bring peace to the streets. That’s because the sheriff is secretly responsible for all the crime. He’s working in cahoots with the town banker (Clarence Wilson) and he’s sets his sights on taking over a ranch owned by Frances Robinson. As was so often the case with B-westerns, it all comes down to stealing someone else’s land.

The federal government sends Marshal Johnny Mack Brown to bring some order to the town. Working undercover, Brown gets hired as Robinson’s ranch and he quickly chases off all of the bad ranchhands, He brings his friend, singing cowboy Bob Baker, onboard to work as the ranch foreman. With Fuzzy Knight providing comic relief, Brown sets out to thwart the next stagecoach robbery and to expose the evildoers of Denton.

This was the first western that Brown made with Universal Pictures. Bob Baker, who had previously been the star of the studio’s B-westerns, was demoted to second lead and, eventually, he quit making films for Universal all together. Unlike Baker, who was angry at being demoted, Fuzzy Knight was always happy to provide sidekick duty and would go on to co-star in all of Brown’s Universal westerns. From the start, Brown and Knight had the chemistry that made them a good B-movie team.

Desperate Trails is a typical B-western but, as always, Brown elevates things with his performance. From the minute that Brown rides into town, he screams authenticity. He’s pretty tough in this film, which includes a scene where he coolly takes care of a gang of outlaws with just one rifle. The best performance here comes from Russell Simpson, who gets angrier and angrier as the film goes on and all of his plans fall apart.

For fans of the B-western genre, Desperate Trails has a lot of entertainment to offer.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 4.16 “Honor Among Thieves”

Posted on August 18, 2025 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, a man kills for his dolls.

Episode 4.16 “Honor Among Thieves?”

(Dir by Jim Johnston, originally aired on March 4th, 1988)

A serial killer named Paul Delgado (John Bowman and no, we’re not related as far as I know) is killing girls in Miami. He believes that he’s being ordered to kill by his collection of dolls and, when he’s speaking as a doll, he uses a high-pitched voice. He picks women up at carnivals or on the beach and he kills them by injecting them with 100% pure cocaine. He poses their bodies with a doll beside them.

Because of the cocaine connection, homicide detective Jarrell (Dylan Baker) approaches Castillo. Castillo explains that his best men are working deep undercover, trying to take down a drug lord named Palmo (Ramy Zada). That’s right, this is yet another episode where Crockett pretends to be Burnett and Tubbs pretends to be Cooper and somehow, they’re able to get away with it despite the fact that their cover has been blown in almost every previous episode.

Delgado works for Palmo and things get even more complicated when it turns out that Delgado is Crockett and Tubbs’s connection inside Palmo’s operation. When Palmo discovers that Delgado is the killer, he puts Delgado on trial. The jury is made up of other drug dealers. Since Crockett is pretending to be a lawyer, he’s assigned to serve as Delgado’s defense counsel. Palmo tells Crockett that, unless he’s acquitted by the drug dealer jury, he’ll reveal that Crockett and Tubbs are working undercover….

This was a weird episode, It didn’t really work because Delgado was a bit too cartoonish to be taken seriously. Perhaps if the show had just made him a serial killer who killed women with cocaine, it would have worked. But the show had to go the extra step and have him talk to his dolls in a high-pitched voice. As well, this was yet another episode where we were forced to wonder if people in the Miami underworld just don’t communicate with each other. After all the drug lords that have been busted by Crockett and Tubbs, you would think that word would eventually get out about “Burnett” and “Cooper.” I mean, their cover gets blown in nearly every episode. Frank Zappa put a bounty on Crockett’s head in season 2! And yet somehow, Crockett and Tubbs are still able to walk into a drug lord’s mansion, introduce themselves as Burnett and Cooper, and not automatically get shot.

There were some definite problems with this episode but it was weird enough to at least hold one’s attention. As opposed to the episodes with the aliens and the bull semen, this episode didn’t seem like it was trying too hard to be weird. Instead, it just was genuinely weird. It was watchable and, as far as the fourth season of Miami Vice is concerned, that definitely counts as an accomplishment.

Live Tweet Alert – #MondayMuggers present JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE (2006)!

Posted on August 18, 2025 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, August 18th, we’ll be watching JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE (2006), starring Jesse Metcalfe, Ashanti, Arielle Kebbel, Sophia Bush, Brittany Snow, Penn Badgley, Jenny McCarthy, Terrell J. Ramsey, and Taylor Kitsch.

The plot: Three ex-girlfriends of a serial cheater set up their former lover to fall for the new girl in town so they can watch him get his heart broken.

I’ll admit I’ve been watching some Jesse Metcalfe films lately. Just yesterday I watched the Hallmark Christmas movie CHRISTMAS NEXT DOOR (2017) and the culture clash romantic comedy THE OTHER END OF THE LINE (2007). I enjoyed them both. Sierra wants to go back and watch the DALLAS T.V. series reboot where Jesse played a grown-up Christopher Ewing! Keeping with that theme, tonight we’ll be watching a very young Jesse as he deals with a plot of revenge from a group of beautiful but scorned young ladies. I’ve never actually watched the film, but it sounds like an enjoyable way to spend 90 minutes. If that sounds fun to you, join us on #MondayMuggers and watch JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime! See the Trailer below:

Monday Live Tweet Alert: Join Us for Escape From New York!

Posted on August 18, 2025 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 1981’s Escape From New York.

If you want to join this watch party, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Escape From New York on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!

Enjoy!

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special 1989 Edition

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More 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, we pay tribute to the year 1989! It’s time for….

4 Shots From 4 1989 Films