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!
Happy birthday, Eric Roberts!
4 Shots From 4 Eric Roberts Films
Star 80 (1983, dir by Bob Fosse, DP: Sven Nyvkist)
The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984, dir by Stuart Rosenberg, DP: John Bailey)
Runaway Train (1985, dir by Andrei Konchalovsky, DP: Alan Hume)
The Dark Knight (2008, dir by Christopher Nolan, DP: Wally Pfister)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting 1989’s Cutting Class!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime and Tubi! I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy!
Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!
This week, Freddy has a message!
Episode 2.9 “Monkey Dreams”
(Dir by Robert Englund, originally aired on December 3rd, 1989)
At a college science lab, Joe (Joseph Cali) tries to communicate with aliens. Next door, Jeannie (Sharon Mahoney) tries to teach her monkey to speak. When Joe starts getting strange messages on his computer, he thinks that it’s an alien code. Then it turns out that it’s actually just the monkey trying to type out its name on its own computer. Joe is then murdered by his bookie.
Meanwhile, Dr. Lynch (Sherman Howard) is using the monkey for some experiments to see how much pain a living creature can take. Dr. Lynch seems to change his mind when he hears the monkey speak. But it turns out that we were just seeing the monkey’s dream.
“Think about it!” Freddy tells us.
Freddy Krueger, animal rights activist? I guess it makes sense when you consider that Robert Englund directed this episode. The episode’s message was heartfelt but it seemed a bit out-of-place on a show about a undead child molester. Whatever message you want to deliver, Freddy Krueger probably isn’t the best one to do it.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988. The show can be found on Daily Motion.
This week, things continue to be awkward in Boston.
Episode 3.16 “Saving Face”
(Dir by Charles Braverman, originally aired on January 16th, 1985)
This episode of St. Elsewhere was even busier than usual.
Tough-as-nails Dr. Mary Woodley (Karen Austin) has been hired to oversee the ER. Dr. Fiscus isn’t happy about it. He’s going to have to work for a woman? Agck!
Dr. Cavanero is also not happy. Of course, the last time that St. Eligius hired a new female doctor, Cavanero told everyone at the hospital that she was a lesbian and, for some reason, this led to the doctor having to leave town. (It was the 80s.) Maybe, just maybe, there are reasons to have doubts about Cavanero’s professionalism.
Dr. Westphall shows Dr. Woodley around the hospital and, as usual, comes across as being the saddest man on the planet.
Dr. Westphall informs Jack that he will be allowed to continue on as a resident. However, Westphall also rather glumly states that he will be watching Jack from now on. Jack better not screw up or Westphall will “come down” on him. Personally, I think Westphall is too depressed to really do much of anything.
Feeling guilty about Murray’s death, Elliott brings Mrs. Hufnagle a ham. Mrs. Hufnagle has an allergic reaction and ends up back in the hospital. “She thinks I tried to kill her!” Elliott says.
A teenager (Tim Van Patten) brings in his pregnant girlfriend, who has OD’d. Dr. Woodley says she is required to call family services. Myself, I started shouting, “I am da futah!” as soon as Tim “Stegman” Van Patten showed up on the screen.
Dr. Caldwell performs extensive plastic surgery on a disfigured young woman. When Dr. Ehrlich says that the patient looks like she got hit with the “ugly stick,” Caldwell kicks Ehrlich off his team.
Nobody wants to work with Ehrlich! Dr. Craig declines to invite Ehrlich to his 34 year anniversary party. Cavanero agrees to take Ehrlich as her date. “What are you doing here!?” Craig snaps as soon as he sees Ehrlich in his living room.
Dr. Craig’s younger brother, William (Lou Richards), also shows up. He was invited at Ellen’s insistence, despite the fact that William and Mark haven’t spoken in over four years. Mark feels that William has wasted his life and his potential. But when William proves to be the life of the party, it becomes apparent that Mark is actually jealous of how likable his younger brother is.
In the kitchen, Mark and William have a long conversation. William admits that he’s struggling to pay the bills. Mark writes him a check. For a few minutes, the brothers actually reconcile.
However, Mark later hears William joking about how much money surgeon’s make and he loses his temper. In front of the entire party, he calls out William and reveals that he doesn’t have a dime to his name.
That night, after everyone else has left and William has gone to the guest room, Ellen tells Mark that he should apologize. Mark agrees and says he’ll do it in the morning.
Later, during the night, Mark steps out of his bedroom and discovers that William has gone home. He left behind the check, which he ripped in half. Mark stares at the check and starts to cry.
This was another episode that did a good job balancing the serious and the humorous. Dr. Ehrlich’s inability to say the right thing will never not be funny. For that matter, the same can be said of Dr. Craig’s general irritation with everything. And yet, seeing Dr. Craig break down and cry was truly heartbreaking. Dr. Craig and Dr. Ehrlich share an inability to socialize and a habit of screwing up even the kindest of gestures. Even when they try to do the right thing, they somehow always manage to screw it up.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly watch parties. On Twitter, I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday and I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday. On Mastodon, I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, I will be hosting #FridayNightFlix! The movie? 1967s The Trip!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, find The Trip on Prime, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! I’ll be there happily tweeting. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
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 1982 with….
4 Shots From 4 1982 Films
The House By The Cemetery (1982, dir by Lucio Fulci)
The New York Ripper (1982, dir by Lucio Fulci)
Friday the 13th Part II (1981, dir by Steve Miner)
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 Hunter, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1991. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!
Today, we start a new series.
Episode 1.1 “Hunter”
(Dir by Ron Satlof, originally aired on September 18th, 1984)
Ah, Hunter.
Hunter is one of those shows that, up unitl now, I’ve never really specifically felt the need to track down and binge but I’ve still seen a handful episodes. Some of that is because Hunter is a mainstay on the nostalgia channels. If you fall asleep while watching an old episode of Fantasy Island, there’s a good chance that you’re going to wake up to an episode of Hunter. Hunter is also a mainstay on both Prime and Tubi. Again, if you fall asleep watching your favorite Eric Roberts movie, there’s a decent chance that you’re going to wake up to an episode of Hunter.
I have to admit that every episode I’ve seen has been entertaining. It’s the epitome of an 80s cop show, in all of its action-filled, simplistically-plotted glory. Rick Hunter (played by former football player Fred Dryer) is a cop who gets results by doing things his way. “His way” typically involves shooting a lot of people. (Hunter’s catch phrase? “Works for me.”) Hunter’s partner is Dee Dee McCall (Stepfanie Kramer), a cop who gets results by doing things her way. “Her way” typically involves going undercover and …. uhmm, shooting a lot of people. And while I am certainly aware of the dangers of police overreach and I generally don’t support shooting anyone without just cause, it’s still fun to watch Hunter and McCall break every regulation in the book. In almost every episode that I’ve seen, Hunter and McCall end up shooting so many people that the action ends up verging on self-parody. Fortunately, both Dryer and Kramer appeared to be in on the joke.
(From what I’ve seen, I should also mention that Fred Dryer appears to have been a slightly better actor than some of the other former pro athletes who have decided to go into acting. He may not have had a huge amount of range but he was still better than most of the basketball players who showed up on Hang Time. If nothing else, he was better at showing emotion than OJ Simpson.)
Hunter premiered with a 90-minute made-for-television movie. The action starts with Los Angeles Police Detective Rick Hunter crammed into a beat-up car that has definitely seen better days. Because Hunter is the son of a mobster, he’s not totally trusted by his fellow detectives. Because he’s a cop, he’s not totally trusted by the mob. And because he’s a shoot-first renegade, all of his partners end up going to the hospital. Captain Cain (Michael Cavanaugh) is trying to get him to quit the force and that means only allowing him to drive the department’s worst cars, not allowing Hunter to respond to most calls, and trying to partner him up with bowtie wearing moron, Bernie Terwilliger (James Whitmore, Jr.)
Hunter knows that LAPD regulations will allow him to pick his own partner if he can find someone willing to work with him. The problem is that no one wants to put their life on the line. Finally, Hunter tracks down Sgt. Dee Dee McCall, the widow of a fallen officer. Nicknamed the “Brass Cupake” (cringe!), Dee Dee is currently working undercover as a prostitute and is trying to take down Los Angeles’s biggest pimp, King Hayes (Steven Williams). Hunter has a proposition for her. Since neither wants a partner and they both prefer shooting first and asking questions later, why not pretend to work together? They’ll check in and out at the station together but, otherwise, they’ll separate and work their own cases once they hit the streets. McCall agrees.
Unfortunately, Captain Cain is not dumb. He figures out exactly what they’re doing and he tells them that he will have people watching them to make sure that they are actually working together. Luckily, McCall has just arrested King Hayes. Hunter shows up as McCall is handcuffing Hayes and immediately sees that Hayes’s bodyguard is driving his car straight at them.
“You want this guy?” Hunter asks.
“That would be nice,” McCall replies.
Hunter, much like Dirty Harry, proceeds to fire several bullets into the car windshield, causing the car to flip over.
With King Hayes and his bodyguard now taken care of, it’s time for Hunter and McCall to investigate the murders of two blonde women who both enjoyed hanging out at country western bars. McCall puts on a blonde wig and goes undercover at a honky tonk. Hunter is shocked to see that she is being stalked by Dr. Bolin (Brian Dennehy), the psychiatrist who the LAPD brought in to examine all of their detectives. As a viewer, I was not particularly surprised to discover that Dr. Bolin was the killer. You’re not going to cast an actor like Brian Dennehy on a show like Hunter and then just have him spend the entire episode sitting in his office. McCall and Hunter work together to stop Bolin before he kills again.
The pilot of Hunter was actually a lot of fun. The pilot may have been violent but it still had a sense of humor. The show understood that the sight of 6’6 Fred Dryer crammed into a dented station wagon would not only make the viewer smile but it would also go a long way towards humanizing Hunter as a character. He may be big and cocky and quick to shoot people but he also has terrible luck when it comes to cars, police radios, and bystanders. At one point, he even gets pepper-sprayed by Dee Dee’s neighbor. As for Dee Dee, I liked the fact that she was capable and tough without being a stereotypical action girl. I also appreciated that she and Hunter chose to work together. I feared, initially, that the pilot would be full of scenes featuring Hunter whining about having to work with a woman and I appreciated that the show went the opposite direction. From the start, Hunter respects Dee Dee as a cop and it’s made clear that she has nothing to prove to him. If anything, Hunter has to earn her respect.
Of course, the main appeal of Hunter is that both Dryer and Kramer looked good holding a gun and yelling at people to “freeze!” As opposed to the wishy washy police procedurals of today, the pilot of Hunter was absolutely shameless about giving the viewers what they wanted as far as bullets and car chases were concerned.
This was a good pilot. Watching it, I could understand why the show ended up running for 8 seasons. And, every Thursday, I’ll be reviewing Hunter. I look forward to the action!
That is the question at the heart of 1994’s Freefall.
Played by Eric Roberts, Grant Orion claims to be a former Hollywood stuntman who now spends most of his time jumping off of cliffs and skydiving. When photographer Katy Mazur (Pamela Gidley) first spots Grant, he is climbing to the top of a cliff in Swaziland and jumping off. Katy, who has been sent to the country to get a photograph of a taita falcon, finds herself obsessively snapping his picture. Later, after she meets Grant, she ends up cheating on her fiancé with him. The fiancé in question is Dex Dellums (Jeff Fahey), who is not only engaged to marry Katy but who is also her editor. He’s the one who sent her to Swaziland in the first place.
Who is Grant Orion? (And who, in the world, actually has a name like Grant Orion?) After Grant saves Katy from some gunmen, he explains that he’s not only a former stuntman but he’s also an agent of Interpol. However, Dex claims that Grant is lying. Dex tells her that Grant is a former stuntman who was run out of Hollywood after a stunt went wrong and now, he’s basically a mercenary. Katy doesn’t know who to trust as violence breaks out all around her.
Freefall starts out as a standard erotic thriller, with Roberts and Gidley exchanging smoldering looks and uttering heated dialogue. Before long, though, it turns into a thriller with Katy not being sure who to trust. There’s a lot of gunfire. There’s a lot of over the top action. Some of the scenes of action are so over-the-top that the film almost feels like it might be a parody. The plot itself is next to impossible to follow but who needs a plot when you’ve got Eric Roberts and Jeff Fahey sharing the screen together? Roberts is all smoldering intensity while Fahey seems to be having the time of his life playing the smarmy Dex.
Along with getting the best out of Roberts and Fahey. director John Irvin also manages to get some truly beautiful shots of the mountains of Swaziland. Though the scenes of Roberts climbing the mountains were clearly done by a real stuntman (and not Grant Orion), they’re still effectively shot. When we first see Grant jump off the mountain, the imagery is breath-takingly beautiful. At times, it’s hard not to regret that the entire film wasn’t just about Grant jumping off of mountains. All of the gunfire gets in the way of the main attraction.
Today, we’re so used to seeing Eric Roberts in small cameo roles that it’s easy to forget that he started out his career in starring roles. Freefall is a silly film but it’s undeniably entertaining, in the way that the best direct-to-video erotic action thrillers often were. Don’t even try to follow the plot. Just enjoy the mountains and the scenes of Roberts and Fahey competing to see who can out-smolder the other.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
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 Decoy, which aired in Syndication in 1957 and 1958. The show can be viewed on Tubi!
This week, Casey is haunted by the past.
Episode 1.27 “The Sound of Tears”
(Dir by Marc Daniels, originally aired on April 14th, 1958)
A wealthy young man has been gunned down in a New York park. It falls to Casey to deliver the news to both the man’s mother (Muriel Kirland) and the man’s ex-fiancée, Wendy Jenkins (Suzanne Pleshette). At first, Wendy is the number one suspect but, as she investigates, Casey comes to suspect that the killer was actually Susan Connor (Molly McCarthy), a family friend who had fallen in love with the victim.
This is an interesting episode, in that it reveals a bit of Casey’s past. Usually, Casey doesn’t let her personal feelings get in the way of doing her job but, in this episode, she finds herself thinking about the day that a policewoman told her that her husband had been killed in the line of duty. Casey has a unique understanding of the pain that the three women are feeling and Beverly Garland does a good job of showing the anguish that Casey is going through.
Unfortunately, the rest of the episode isn’t quite as good as Garland’s performance. From the start, Susan is portrayed as being so obviously unhinged that it’s not really a surprise when she turns out to be the killer. None of the guest cast, including a young Suzanne Pleshette, are as convincing as Beverly Garland is in the lead role. Indeed, Charles Mendick — cast of Lt. Doyle — gives one of the worst performances that I’ve ever seen on this show.
On the plus side, this episode does feature some good location footage of 1950s New York. The noirish black-and-white imagery nicely fits the melancholy story. The cinematography captures the world in which Casey lives, one in which pain doesn’t just go away after a few years and the guilty are often as traumatized as those they victimize.
Through the Shattered Lens