Late Night Retro Television Review: Sledge Hammer 1.9 “Magnum Farce”

Posted on October 9, 2026 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 Fridays, I will be reviewing SLEDGE HAMMER!, a cop comedy which ran on ABC from 1986 to 1988. The entire series can be found on Prime!

A man’s got to know his limitations.

Episode 1.9 “Magnum Farce”

(Dir by Charles Braverman, originally aired on November 22nd, 1986)

Someone is executing the criminals that the justice system fails to convict. The new district attorney, Ms. Collins (Janice Lynde), demands that the police discover who is acting as judge, jury, and executioner. Sledge Hammer is not happy about his new assignment. Not only is he having to go after people who hate criminals almost as much as he does but he’s also having to work for a woman.

When the latest victim holds up two fingers before dying, Sledge Hammer assumes that he’s saying he was shot by hippies. However, when the shell casings turn out to be from police-issued ammunition, Sledge realizes that the victim was actually signing that he had been shot by two cops. “I’m really bad at Charades,” Hammer explains.

Hammer and Trunk stage a fight so that the vigilantes will attempt to recruit Sledge Hammer. It works, even though Hammer accidentally knocks out Trunk. However, it turns out that the head of the vigilantes is none other than the liberal district attorney, Ms. Collins!

If this sounds familiars, that because this episode borrows a lot from the classic Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force. The vigilantes are even motorcycle cops, just like in the earlier film. Whereas Magnum Force was a rather grim film, this episode is silly even by the standards of Sledge Hammer. The two murders are largely bloodless, the dialogue is full of non-sequiturs, and the whole thing ends with Ms. Collins firing her gun at Sledge Hammer while Sledge calmly stands still because, according to him, women are terrible shots. The humor is nonstop and bizarre and the end result is the funniest episode since the pilot.

My favorite moment cames towards the end, when Captain Trunk burst into Ms. Collins’s mansion with several other police officers. When Hammer asks Trunk to explain to Collins the careful police work that went into uncovering her role as the head of the vigilantes, Tunk replies, “I live next door.”

For once, Sledge Hammer makes the city safe for criminals and it’s absolutely hilarious. He knows what he’s doing.

A Blast From The Past: Wait Until Dark (dir by Barry Davis)

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Malibu, CA will not be reviewed tonight so that we might bring you this special presentation….

My retro television reviews will return next week but, for now, why not enjoy something even better than me discussing my hatred of Malibu, CA? 1982’s Wait Until Dark is a videotaped record of a stage production of Frederick Knott’s classic play about a blind woman who is menaced by three criminals. (I assume it was filmed for PBS. According to Lettrboxd, this aired on television on June 20th, 1982.) This play was famously adapted into an Audrey Hepburn film in 1967. The production below gives us a chance to see how the suspense plays out in a theatrical setting. The cast, including Katharine Ross and Stacy Keach, is excellent!

And now, here is Wait Until Dark….

Goddess of Love (1988, directed by Jim Drake)

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

On Mount Olympus, “ages ago” according to a title card, Zeus (John Rhys Davies) is displeased with his daughter Aphrodite (Wheel of Fortune letter turner Vanna White). Aphrodite, who insists on being called Venus, has refused to marry every man or God that Zeus has found for her and she even started the Trojan War. Zeus says that Venus must learn what love means before she can rejoin the Gods. He then turns her into a statue (!) and sends her down to Earth.

How is she going to learn what love means as a statue? It’s obviously a pertinent question because, thousands of years later, she’s still set in marble and standing in a museum. Two thieves wheel her out to a courtyard and leave her there so they can pick her up later. Before the thieves return, Ted Beckman (David Naughton) and his womanizing friend, Jimmy (David Leisure), wander by. For some reason, Ted slides an engagement ring on Venus’s finger. Venus comes to life. She and Ted must now fall in love for real in order for Venus to return to Mount Olympus. The only problem is that Ted is a hairdresser and he’s already engaged to marry Cathy (Amanda Bearse).

A made-for-TV movie that unsuccessfully tried to revive the acting career that Vanna White abandoned for Wheel of Fortune, Goddess of Love is a spectacularly stupid movie that attempts to disguises its threadbare plot by being extremely busy. Not only do Ted and Venus have to overcome a lack of romantic chemistry and fall in love but the two thieves are also still looking for Venus and even Little Richard shows up as one of Ted’s employees. Venus not only accidentally burns down Ted’s business but also maxes out his credit cards. Philip Baker Hall plays the detective investigating the theft of the statue and gives a performance reminiscent of his classic Bookman turn from Seinfeld. It’s dumb but Vanna herself gives a far more engaging performance than the material requires or deserves. Some of her line deliveries are a little wooden but she still radiates the natural likability that made her an unlikely celebrity in the 80s. Goddess of Love should have cast Pat Sajak as Ted. Then it would have been a classic.

Airplane! (1980, directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker)

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Airplane!, which may be the funniest movie ever made, has made me laugh every time that I’ve watched it. And I’ve watched it a lot!

Whenever I’m getting ready to travel for my day job, I watch Airplane! Whenever I’m going to Baltimore or West Virginia for the holidays, I watch Airplane! Whenever I’m in a bad mood and I need something lighten me up, I watch Airplane! Whenever I’m in a good mood and I want to be in an even better mood, I watch Airplane!

I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw Airplane! but I know I wasn’t yet ten. While a lot of the humor went over my head at that young age, it did not matter because I laughed at all the sight gags, like the heart hopping around on the doctor’s desk and the line of passengers waiting to “calm down” the hysterical woman. I laughed when Ted Stryker (Robert Hays) and Elaine (Julie Haggerty) got covered in seaweed while making out on the beach. I laughed at the people dying while listening to Ted’s story, even though I didn’t fully understand that it was because of Ted boring them to death. I loved it when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar got annoyed with the kid in the cockpit, even though young me really didn’t know who Kareem was other than he was a basketball player. Otto the autopilot was the coolest character around. Stephen Stucker’s Johnny made me laugh with his nonstop energy. “Excuse me, stewardess, I speak Jive.” “And don’t call me Shirley.” “It looks like I picked the wrong time to stop sniffing glue.” Every time I heard them, I laughed at all of those lines. I didn’t have to understand why Lloyd Bridges was suddenly upside down. I just knew it was funny.

As I got older and rewatched the film, I started to pick up on the humor that earlier went over my head. I traveled to Turkey when I was twelve and our tour guide spent an hour telling us that Midnight Express was not a fair representation of her country. After that, I suddenly understood why Captain Oveur (Peter Graves) wanted to know if Joey had ever been to a Turkish prison. I came to appreciate Julie Hagerty and Lorna Patterson as the two flight attendants. Airplane! still made me laugh but I came to understand that it was also a love story. What adolescent boy watching Airplane! didn’t want to be Robert Hays, not only landing the plane but also getting kiss Julie Hagerty at the end of the movie?

And then, as I learned more about the movies, I realized that Airplane! was a pitch perfect parody of the disaster genre and I came to understand the brilliance of casting actors like Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, Peter Graves, and especially Leslie Nielsen in this film. From the first time I saw the movie, Nielsen always made me laugh because he had the best lines and he delivered them with deadpan perfection. But, as I got older, I came to understand that Nielsen was doing more than just saying funny things. He was sending up his entire career. I’m a part of the generation who grew up laughing at Leslie Nielsen the comedy superstar and it’s always strange for me to see him in one of his older, serious roles. I have Airplane! to thank for that.

There’s so much to say about Airplane! I could write a thousand words just talking about my favorite jokes and one-liners or how much I enjoyed Stryker’s flashbacks. It’s my favorite movie and one that still makes me laugh even though I know all of the jokes by heart. (I’ve always thought Howard Jarvis waiting for Stryker to return to the taxi was one of the best, though underrated, jokes in the movie.) Airplane! is close to 50 years old and it’s still just as funny today as when I first saw it.

In fact, I think I’ll go watch it right now!

Back to School #56: 10 Things I Hate About You (dir by Gil Junger)

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A few nights ago, my sister Erin and I watched the 1999 high school-set romantic comedy 10 Things I Hate About You for like the hundredth time. Seriously, we love this movie so much and, in fact, just about everyone that we know seems to love it as well. 10 Things I Hate About You is one of those films that brings people together. If you like this movie, I’ll probably like you.

(Want to see true displays of spontaneous sisterhood? Go to Girlie Night at the Alamo Drafthouse when they’re showing 10 Things I Hate About You. You will walk out of the movie with a hundred new best friends.)

Why do people love 10 Things I Hate About You? There’s a lot of reasons. I love Heath Ledger singing Can’t Take My Eyes Out Of You. I love watching Joseph Gordon Levitt at his most adorable. I love that it’s a film about two sisters, largely because I have three older sisters and there is so much about the scenes between Kat (Julia Stiles) and Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) to which I could relate. I love the film’s quirky sense of humor and its unapologetically big heart. I love the way the film’s script expertly balances cynicism with sentimentality and humor with warmth. I love the fact that movie takes in place in beautiful houses and features beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes. What Erin and I especially love about this film is that, as played by Julia Stiles, Kat is just a kickass chick.

Of course, there’s a reason for that. Much as how the superficially similar Clueless was adapted from Jane Austen’s Emma, 10 Things I Hate About You is adapted from Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew. Oddly enough, Shakespeare’s plays seem to translate well into stories about high school. Maybe it’s because his characters are so often motivated by jealousy, romance, and — it must be said about some — by pure stupidity. 10 Things I Hate About You is definitely one of the best of the teen Shakespeare films.

Taking place at an upper class high school, 10 Things I Hate About You opens with Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) arriving for his first day at Padau High School and quickly befriending the only slightly less adorable Michael Eckman (David Krumholtz). Cameron wants to ask out the beautiful and innocent Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) but Bianca’s overprotective father (played by Larry Miller) has decreed that Bianca can only date if her older sister Kat (Julie Stiles) is also dating. The problem is that all of the boys at school are scared of the outspoken Kat.

So, Cameron convinces the hilariously vapid male model Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan) to pay the school rebel, Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger, so handsome and charismatic and sexy), to ask Kat out on a date. Joey, you see, wants to date Bianca as well but Cameron is sure that he can win Bianca away from Joey…

Yes, it’s all a little bit complicated but then again, Shakespeare often is. For that matter, so is high school.

What matters is that all of this leads to a collection of classic scenes and classic dialogue. What’s my favorite scene from 10 Things I Hate About You? There’s so many that it’s difficult to narrow it down to just one. There’s the huge party where Joey continually strikes a pose and a drunk Kat ends up dancing on a table. There’s the wonderful scene where Patrick serenades Kat. Or how about when Kat reads the poem that gives the film its title. But for me, my favorite scene is that one where, after spending nearly the entire film as rivals, Kat and Bianca finally talk to each other as sisters. Bianca demands to know why Kat won’t go to the prom. Kat tells Bianaca about her own previous history with Joey. It’s a low-key and heartfelt scene, wonderfully played by both Larisa Oleynik and Julia Stiles, and I love it just because I’ve had similar conversations with all of my sisters.

I suppose this is where I should make some clever comment about having “10 things I love about 10 Things I Hate About You” but actually, there’s more like a 100 things I love about 10 Things I Hate About You.

This movie makes me happy every time I see it.

And, really, what else can you ask a film to do?