Tonight, from 1976, we have The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.
In this special, actor and comedian Paul Lynde celebrates Halloween with Betty White, KISS, Donny and Marie Osmond, Florence Henderson, Billy Barty, Margaret Hamilton (the original Wicked Witch of the West), and I’m going to guess a mountain of cocaine that was probably sitting backstage.
This special is definitely a product of a very certain era in America’s cultural history.
Since Sunday is a day of rest for a lot of people, I present #SundayShorts, a weekly mini review of a movie I’ve recently watched. Today’s movie is WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE from 1986.
Former CIA agent Nick Randall (Rutger Hauer) now works as a bounty hunter. After the authorities find out that Malak Al Rahim (Gene Simmons) is responsible for blowing up buildings in Los Angeles, Nick’s former employers request his assistance. With the help of his old friend Philmore (Robert Guillaume), Nick signs on to take Malak out and end his reign of terror!
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE is one of those movies I enjoyed watching back in the mid-80’s as a junior high teenager. Rutger Hauer makes for a badass bounty hunter and Gene Simmons makes for a mean villain. Robert Guillaume plays Hauer’s friend and primary law enforcement contact in the movie. He was just coming off his 158 episode run on the TV show BENSON (1979-1986). Although he was good in the film, I still remember being surprised when Benson kept saying the F-word. If you like 80’s action movies and Rutger Hauer, like I do, WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE is still a fun watch.
Five Fast Facts:
I’ve included the trailer for WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE below.
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 is currently streaming on Tubi!
This week, the second season with a two-hour long premiere! Crockett and Tubbs are going to New York!
Episode 2.1 and 2.2 “The Prodigal Son”
(Dir by Paul Michael Glaser, originally aired on September 27th, 1985)
The second season premiere of Miami Vice opens with a series of set pieces.
In Panama, Crockett and Tubbs visit a secret military base in the jungle and are disgusted to learn how the Panamanian military gets information about drug smugglers. Tubbs and Crockett find one horribly tortured man in a tent. Tubbs gives him a drink of water and gets what information he can from the man. Crockett and Tubbs leave the tent. A gunshot rings out as the involuntary informant is executed. When the shot rings out, both Crockett and Tubbs turn back to the tent in slow motion, stunned by the brutality of their allies in the Drug War. Indeed, it’s hard not to compare the scene to the famous photograph of a South Vietnamese general executing a communist during the Vietnam War.
The Vietnam analogy continues with the next scene. In the Everglades, Crockett, Tubbs, and the entire Vice Squad work with the DEA to ambush the Revilla cousins as they bring drugs into the U.S. Sitting in the swamp, Crockett compares the experience to Vietnam, suggesting that the war on the drugs is just as futile and as costly. And indeed, it’s hard not to notice that every drug dealer that Crockett and Tubbs has taken down over the course of this show has immediately been replaced by another. The Revillas are just another in a long line of people getting rich off of other people’s addictions.
After the bust goes down, Crockett and Tubbs arrives at a celebratory party, just to discover that almost of all of the undercover DEA agents have been murdered and Gina has been seriously wounded. There is something very haunting about this scene, with Crockett and Tubbs rushing through a penthouse and seeing a dead body in almost every room.
At a meeting in a stark office, the head DEA agent explains that his agency has been compromised and all of his undercover agents have been unmasked. Someone has to go to New York and work undercover to take down the Revillas but it can’t be any of his people. Since the Revillas are smuggling their stuff in through Miami, Miami Vice has jurisdiction. Paging Crockett and Tubbs!
Working undercover as Burnett and Cooper, Crockett and Tubbs visit a low-level drug dealer (played by Gene Simmons) who lives on a yacht and who gives them the name of a connection in New York City.
From there, Miami Vice moves to New York City, where Crockett and Tubbs meet a low-level criminal named Jimmy Borges (played by an almost impossibly young Penn Jillette) and they try to infiltrate the Revilla organization. Along the way, Tubbs meets up with Valerie (Pam Grier) and discovers that she has apparently lost herself working undercover. Meanwhile, Crockett has a brief — and kind of weird — romance with a photographer named Margaret (Susan Hess).
(“I like guns,” she says when Crockett demands to know why she stole his.)
With Crockett and Tubbs leaving Miami for New York in order to get revenge for a colleague who was wounded during an operation, The Prodigal Son almost feels like the pilot in reverse. Also, much like the pilot, the exact details of The Prodigal Son‘s story are often less important than how the story is told. This episode is full of moody shots of our heroes walking through New York while songs like You Belong To The City play on the soundtrack. (There’s also a song from Phil Collins, undoubtedly included to bring back memories of the In The Air Tonight scene from the pilot.) It’s all very entertaining to watch, even if the story itself doesn’t always make total sense. Indeed, you really do have to wonder how all of these criminals keep falling for Sonny’s undercover identity as Sonny Burnett. You would think that someone would eventually notice that anyone who buys from Sonny Burnett seems to get busted the very next day.
Stylish as the storytelling may be, this episode actually does have something on its mind. Those lines comparing the War on Drugs to the Vietnam Conflict was not just throwaways. Towards the end of the episode, Crockett and Tubbs follow a lead to the offices of J.J. Johnston (Julian Beck, the ghost preacher from Poltergeist II). The skeletal Johnston is an investor of some sort. He has no problem admitting that he’s involved in the drug trade, presumably because he knows that there’s nothing Crockett and Tubbs can do to touch him. Upon meeting the two cops, he immediately tells them exactly how much money they have in their checking accounts. He points out that they’re poor and they’re fighting a losing war whereas he’s rich and he’s making money off of a losing war. Beck gives a wonderfully smug performance as Johnston and it should be noted that, of all of the episode’s villains, he’s the only one who is not brought to any sort of justice. Val almost loses herself. Tubbs and Crockett don’t even get a thank you for their hard work. The somewhat sympathetic Jimmy Borges ends up dead while the Revillas were undoubtedly been replaced by even more viscous dealers. Meanwhile, J.J. Johnston relaxes in his office and counts his money. This is the No Country For Old Men of Miami Vice episodes.
This episode is also full of familiar faces. Charles S. Dutton, Kevin Anderson, Anthony Heald, Miguel Pinero, James Russo, Bill Smtirovich, Zoe Tamerlis, Paul Calderon, and Louis Guzman, they all show up in small roles and add to show’s rather surreal atmosphere. This is Miami Vice at its most dream-like, full of people you think you might know despite the fact that they’re doing things of which you don’t want to be a part.
As for the title, The Prodigal Son is Tubbs and he is tempted to stay in New York City. But, in the end, he joins Crockett on that flight back to Miami. It’s his home.
In 1978, KISS appeared to have it all. The band was famous for both their makeup and their anthemic stadium rock. They had just released not only a new studio album but also four solo albums. They had starred in their own Marvel comic and gained notoriety for supposedly allowing their blood to mixed in with the comic’s ink. Teenagers loved KISS and parents and religious leaders feared that the band’s name stood for Knights In Satan’s Service. KISS had everything except for motion picture stardom.
KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park was supposed to change that. The film starred Anthony Zerbe as Abner Devereaux, an engineer and an expert at animatronics who loses his job at Magic Mountain and seeks revenge by using robot versions of KISS to drive the audience of their concert to riot. Fortunately, the real members of KISS are not just rock stars but also alien beings who descend from the heavens and shoot lightning bolts from their eyes. (Gene Simmons can breathe fire.) The real KISS isn’t going to allow their fan to be manipulated by a robot version of the band, which leads to a battle between KISS and the robots that protect Abner’s underground lair.
KISS Meets The Phantom of the Park aired on NBC on October 28th, 1978. It was later given a theatrical release in Europe, where it was re-edited and retitled Attack of the Phantom. Since then, it has become a very difficult film to see. (On Amazon, old VHS copies go for several hundred dollars.) One reason why the movie is so hard to see is because the members of the KISS hated the movie and felt that they were portrayed as being clowns instead of super heroes. Even though the members of the band have since mellowed out about the film (with Gene Simmons suggesting it should be viewed on a double bill with Plan 9 From Outer Space), KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park is still a film that is more talked about than actually watched.
While looking for clips of the movie on YouTube, I came across an upload of the entire film. The only problem was that all of the dialogue was dubbed into German and that’s not a language that I speak. Still, figuring that you have to take your opportunities when they’re available, I decided to watch. I figured that the dialogue might not actually be that important and it wasn’t. I was able to follow the plot just fine. (The only weird thing about watching the move in German was listening to the members of the band speak in something other than a New York accent.) Fortunately, there’s actually more singing than talking in Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park and the songs are untouched and in English. KISS plays Magic Mountain in the film and they actually performed a real concert for filming. Those are real fans of the band going crazy whenever Gene Simmons sticks out his tongue.
The movie itself is definitely a product of its time and not meant to be taken seriously. The members of KISS are both aliens that descend from the heavens and rock musicians and they are never seen without their makeup. Even when they’re hanging out at a hotel pool, they are in full costume and they’re wearing their makeup. When the members of the band enter the Phantom’s underground lab, they have to fight a series of very 70s robots, including some that know karate and two who have lightsabers. For better or worse, it’s a very silly move that epitomizes an era. The special effects are cheesy, the members of the band often look straight at the camera, and the rest of the cast does what they can with what they’ve been given. Anthony Zerbe plays the Phantom with a hint of empathy while Deborah Ryan is the ingenue who searched for her missing boyfriend while Beth plays on the soundtrack. Keep an eye out for Brion James, playing a security guard.
Overall, the band probably would have been smarter to just release a concert film but then the rest of us wouldn’t have the fun of watching Paul Stanley face off against a robot version of Bruce Lee. KISS Meets The Phantom of The Park is worth watching at least once, even in German!
As you can tell from watching this video, this from the period of time where KISS was performing without their trademark makeup. All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose was their second single from the album Lick It Up and, while the video itself got some airplay on MTV, the song failed to chart in the U.S. Compared to their success in the 70s, KISS struggled through the 80s and the early 90s. Taking off the makeup and essentially looking like every other hard rock band that was around at that time did not help.
Today, All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose is best-remembered as the song in which Paul Stanley raps. The majority of the song was written by KISS’s then drummer, the late Eric Carr and Carr was initially not happy with the decision to have Stanley rap one of the verses. However, later, Carr said that Stanley rapping was actually what the song needed to distinguish itself from the rest of the album and that the rap was probably the reason why All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose was eventually released as a single.
The video is a hard rock fantasy, with the members of KISS walking around a burned-out city and running into criminals, circus performers, and, of course, barely dressed women. This was probably a video that KISS could only have made during the period when they weren’t wearing their makeup. The Demon and the Starchild would have looked out-of-place wandering around the city but Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Eric Carr, and Vinny Vincent fit right in.
In retrospect, it’s hard not to be amused that, back in the 70s and 80s, so many parents groups viewed KISS as being a threat to young minds. (There are people who still believe that KISS stands for Knights In Satan’s Service.) I would guess that few of those concerned parents actually listened to any of the music that they were so concerned about. Instead, they just saw songs with titles like All Hell’s Breakin’ Loose and jumped to their conclusions.
Enjoy!
Today’s edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film Trailers is dedicated to the memory of Sage Stallone, the founder of Grindhouse Releasing. When Sage Stallone passed away last week, most news reports concentrated on the fact that he was the son of Sylvester Stallone. However, even more importantly, Sage Stallone was responsible for helping to introduce people like me to the old grindhouse classics that would have otherwise faded into obscurity.
1) I Drink Your Blood (1970)
I know I’ve shared this trailer before but, with the news of Stallone’s passing, I felt it was only appropriate to share it again. I Drink Your Blood is perhaps the best film ever released by Grindhouse Releasing.
2) Cat In The Brain (1990)
This trailer is kinda disgusting but, at the same time, cats are just soooooooo cute, no matter what they’re doing! This film was directed by (and stars) Lucio Fulci.
3) The Swimmer (1968)
I was actually surprised to discover that this film was released by Grindhouse Releasing because it doesn’t really strike me as being a grindhouse film. That said, I haven’t seen the actual film. I’m just read the John Cheever story that inspired it and I’ve seen the trailer, which I like a lot. And so, here we go.
4) Weapons of Death (1976)
This crime film was directed by the underrated Italian filmmaker, Mario Caiano. Franco Nero is not in it but he really should have been.
5) Never Too Young To Die (1986)
Does John Stamos have a reality show yet? I thought I read somewhere that he did.
6) Steel and Lace (1991)
There’s a lot of mullets in this trailer.
What do you think, trailer kitty?
Harry, The Trailer Kitty
Through the Shattered Lens 