Tag Archives: F. William Parker

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 3.25 “The Gift of Life”

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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, the third season comes to a close.

Episode 3.25 “The Gift Of Life”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on May 6th,1987)

Jonathan and Mark’s new assignment finds them working as bodyguards for a businessman named Richard Benson (Leslie Nielsen).  Richard is in charge of a company that pollutes the ocean.  He owns an apartment building were people people are forced to live with rats.  He makes no apologies for being greedy.  He has Jonathan and Mark accompany him to a parking garage so he can offer someone a bribe.

Eventually, Jonathan just comes straight out and says, “I’m angel.”  Jonathan did that a lot over the course of season 3 and it always kind of bothered me.  It was as if Jonathan decided he couldn’t be bothered to maintain his cover story.  Richard doesn’t believe in angels, though he does accept the Bible that Jonathan gives him.  Jonathan instructs him to read it before going to sleep.

That night, someone shoots Richard while he’s reading his Bible.  Jonathan and Mark appear to him and give Richard a tour of all the misery that he’s caused by being greedy and selfish.  Jonathan forces Richard to look at a dead seagull.  Richard is then allowed to relive the past seven days of his life so that he can do some good and have a chance to get into heaven.

Wow, that sounds intense, right?

And I guess it would be, except for the fact that it’s now impossible to watch Leslie Nielsen without laughing.  Before everyone rushes off to comment, I am fully aware that Nielsen spent decades as a dramatic actor before emerging as a comedy superstar.  I’ve reviewed a few of his serious films here on the site.  But the fact of the matter is that Nielsen’s comedy was so built around his deadpan delivery of absurd lines that even his serious performances leave you feeling as if everything’s building up to a punchline.  That’s the case here.  Jonathan, Mark, and Richard might be talking about environmental pollution and poverty but every scene leaves you wondering when Nielsen is going to say, “And don’t call me Shirley.”

Would the episode have worked better with someone else in the role of Richard?  Yes and no.  Another actor would not have left us waiting for punch lines that were destined to never come but the episode’s script would have still been incredibly heavy-handed.  Richard Benson has just died and Jonathan and Mark immediately show up and start yelling at him.  They make it clear that they don’t care if he goes to Hell or not.  That’s not a very good attitude for an angel to have.

Fortunately, Richard gets his second chance and he manages to survive a redo of the assassination attempt.  (Fortunately, he falls asleep with his Bible over his heart.  The Bible is thick and strong enough to stop the bullet so I’m going to guess that Richard was given a Catholic Bible as opposed to a wimpy Protestant one.)  And so, Richard goes on to be a better person and I imagine his company will end up going bankrupt as a result.

That’s it for Season 3!  Season 3 had some good episodes, like Codename: Freak.  It also had the worst episode of the show so far, Ghost Rider.  Next week, we’ll start Season 4!

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 2.12 “High Explosive”

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 Freevee!

This week’s episode is all about mistakes.

Episode 2.12 “High Explosive”

(Dir by Barry Crane, aired on December 9th, 1978)

This week’s episode features Jon Baker competing in a rodeo.  That’s not really a surprise.  Since the show began, it’s been established that Baker is a cowboy at heart and this episode is certainly not the first time that he’s mentioned growing up on a ranch in Wyoming.  (Larry Wilcox, himself, grew up in Wyoming and had some real-life rodeo experience.)  What is interesting is to listen to how the various actors pronounce the word rodeo.

Most of them, to their credit, pronounce it correctly.  A rodeo — that is, an event involving cowboys, steers, clowns, and all the rest — is pronounced “road-ee-oh.”  That’s how Larry Wilcox, Robert Pine, and the majority of the cast pronounce it.  Erik Estrada and Paul Linke, however, both pronounce it “Roe-Day-Oh,” as in the famous street in Beverly Hills.  Just a tip to any of our readers up north: Down here in the southwest, we pronounce it with a “dee” and not a “day.”

As for the rest of the episode, it’s all about mistakes.  For instance, ambulance driver Brad Holmes (Steve Oliver) loses his job after he gets arrested for reckless driving.  Desperate for money and not wanting to tell his wife that he lost his job, he agrees to transport a huge amount of old and unstable dynamite and he steals an ambulance with which to transport it!  Not smart.  Brad is an even worse driver with the explosives in the ambulance.  Ponch and Baker chase him down and Brad crashes on a playground.  While Ponch and Baker arrest Brad, a bunch of kids pick up the dynamite.  UH-OH!  Fortunately, Brad helps Ponch and Baker get the dynamite back.  He asks Ponch and Baker to put in a good word with the judge.

(Yeah …. I don’t know how many good words you can really put in for someone who used a stolen ambulance to transport highly unstable explosives through a heavily populated area of Los Angeles.)

Meanwhile, 14 year-old Barry (Ike Eisenmann) accidentally shoots a car with his pellet gun.  The car crashes.  The driver, Mary Barnes (Roseanne Katon), survives with minor injuries but her sister nearly dies.  Mary says that she wants to press charges against Barry.  She doesn’t care that he’s only 14.  Baker and Ponch arrange for Mary to spend the day at the rodeo with Barry, so that she can see that he’s just a scared kid who didn’t mean to hurt anyone.  Barry is from Utah and lonely and Baker and Ponch feel sorry for him.

But you know what?  The fact of the matter is that Barry is 14.  He’s not some 10 year-old kid.  He’s a teenager.  He’s old enough to know better than to shoot a pellet gun around a busy highway.  Barry is a lonely kid and that sucks.  But again, he nearly killed someone and he caused a huge wreck.  I’m on Mary’s side.  Throw the book at Barry.  Letting Barry get away with doing something that stupid isn’t going to be good for him or anyone else.  Mary, however, disagrees with me.  Barry’s off the hook and he even gets to go to the rodeo.

What a frustrating episode!  Ponch and Baker let me down but at least one of them knows how to pronounce rodeo.

A Movie A Day #157: Pacific Heights (1990, directed by John Schlesinger)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Michael Keaton is the tenant from Hell in Pacific Heights.

In San Francisco, Patty (Melanie Griffith) and Drake (Matthew Modine) have just bought an old and expensive house that they can not really afford.  In order to keep from going broke, they rent out two downstairs apartments.  One apartment is rented by a nice Japanese couple.  The other apartment is rented by Carter Hayes (Michael Keaton).  Carter convinces Patty and Drake not to check his credit by promising to pay the 6 months rent up front.  The money, he tells them, is coming via wire transfer.

The money never arrives but Carter does.  Once he moves into the apartment, Carter changes the locks so that no one but him can get in.  At all hours of the day and night, he can be heard hammering and drilling inside the apartment.  Even worse, he releases cockroaches throughout the building.  When Drake demands that Carter leave, the police back up Carter.  After goading Drake into attacking him, Carter gets a restraining order.  Drake is kicked out of his home, leaving Patty alone with their dangerous tenant.

Pacific Heights is the ultimate upper middle class nightmare: Buy a house that you can not really afford and then end up with a tenant who trashes the place to such an extent that the property value goes down.  As a thriller, Pacific Heights would be better if Drake and Patty weren’t so unlikable.  (When this movie was first made, people like Patty and Drake were known as yuppies.)  Much like Drake’s house, the entire movie is stolen by Michael Keaton’s performance as Carter Hayes.  Carter was not an easy role to play because not only did he have to be so convincingly charming that it was believable that he could rent an apartment just by promising a wire payment but he also had to be so crazy that no one would doubt that he would deliberately infest a house with cockroaches.  Michael Keaton has not played many bad guys in his career but his performance as Carter Hayes knocked it out of the park.

One final note: Keep an eye out for former Hitchcock muse (and Melanie Griffith’s mother) Tippi Hedren, playing another one of Carter’s potential victims.  Her cameo here is better than her cameo in In The Cold of the Night.