Retro Television Review: Pigs vs. Freaks (dir by Dick Lowry)

Posted on February 11, 2024 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 Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1984’s Pigs vs. Freaks! It can be viewed on YouTube.

In the late 1960s, a small town is divided between the conservative older generation and their rebellious hippie children. Former high school football star Doug Zimmer (Patrick Swayze) has just returned from fighting in Vietnam and, unlike many of his former classmates, he is firmly on the side of the establishment. He wears his hair short. He has a job as a cop. He tries to keep his younger sister, Janice (Penny Peyser), from hanging out with hippies like his former best friend, Neal (Grant Goodeve).

Neal is also the son of the local police chief, Frank Brockmeyer (Eugene Roche). Though Frank and Neal have different political beliefs and Frank is always telling Neal to get a haircut, they still have a respectful relationship. When Neal complains that cops like Doug and his partner, Sgt. Cheever (Brian Dennehy), are always harassing the hippies who want to play football in park, Frank suggests a football game between the hippies and the police. When Neal agrees, the game becomes known as “Pigs vs. Freaks.”

While Frank coaches the Pigs and signs a few former athlete as police reservists, Neal recruits his former little league coach, a bearded guru who now goes by the name of Rambaba Organimus (Tony Randall) to serve as the Freak’s coach. He also places a call to a former football star named Mickey South (Adam Baldwin) and talks him into coming down from Canada to play in the game. Of course, Mickey is wanted by the FBI for dodging the draft so it might not seem like a great idea for him to risk federal prison for an exhibition football game but no matter! Who cares that there are now two federal agents watching the Freaks practice? There’s a game to be won!

Pigs vs. Freaks is an amiable mix of comedy and drama. Some of the comedy, like Tony Randall’s bearded guru and Stephen Furst’s perpetually frantic hippie linebacker, is a bit too broad but there’s enough moments of dramatic insight that it’s easy to overlook those flaws. I appreciated the fact that both the Freaks and the Pigs are treated fairly, with both sides getting a chance to make a case for themselves. When they first appear and start harassing the hippies for playing football in the park, it’s easy to dismiss both Doug and Cheever as fascists but a later scene, which is very well-played by both Brian Dennehy and Patrick Swayze, establishes them as just being two men who are confused by the direction of the world. Swayze, in particular, gives a strong performance that reveals the vulnerability underneath Doug’s tough exterior. As for the hippies, Mickey South is no self-righteous crusader but instead someone who feels the Vietnam War is wrong but who is also someone who both misses and loves his home country. Adam Baldwin does a wonderful playing him and is well-matched with Grant Goodeve, who plays the most reasonable hippie that one could hope to meet.

It’s a likable film and well-intentioned, a portrait of two opposing groups brought together by the love of one game. Some will cheer for the Pigs. Some will cheer for the Freaks. I cheered for both.

Smash-Up On Interstate 5 (1976, directed by John Llewellyn Moxey)

Posted on February 12, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Smash-Up On Interstate 5 begins with ominous shots of a crowded California interstate. It’s the 4th of July weekend and old people are returning home, young people are looking for a party, and Sergeant Sam Marcum (Robert Conrad) of the California Highway Patrol is looking for a killer. When one car swerves into the next lane and hits another, it leads to a chain reaction as hundreds of cars, trucks, and one motorcycle crash into each other. While the vehicles crash, we see the people inside of them. There’s Buddy Ebsen! There’s Vera Miles! There’s Sue Lyon (of Lolita fame) on the back of a motorcycle! In a voice-over, Sam tells us that the accident will be classified as being due to “mechanical failure” and that 14 people are going to die as a result. He might be one of them.

Smash-Up On Interstate 5 is a 70s disaster film so, after the pile-up, the movie flashed back 48 hours and we get to know everyone whose lives are going to eventually collide on Interstate 5. Erica (Vera Miles) is recently divorced and trying to get back into the dating scene. Albert (Buddy Ebsen) is trying to bring some joy to his terminally ill wife’s final days. Lee (Scott Jacoby) and Penny (Bonnie Ebsen) are the hippies who are trying to get to Big Sur without getting arrested. Burnsey (Sue Lyon) loves her biker boyfriend. Some of them will survive the pile-up. Some of them will not.

Smash-Up On Interstate 5 is an above average made-for-TV movie. It’s got a notable cast and the movie does a good job of mixing together’s everyone’s subplots. For instance, Burnsey and a group of bikers show up in the background of several scenes and harass Erica at one point long before the crash on the interstate. It’s only a 100-minute film so the film doesn’t go into too much detail about everyone’s past but we learn just enough to make everyone stand out. The crash itself is intense, even when seen today. Made before the days of CGI, this is a film where the stunt crew definitely earned their paycheck.

Tommy Lee Jones plays a patrolman who is also Sam’s brother-in-law. I was surprised when I first saw him but as soon as I saw the strained smile and heard the accent, I knew it was him. Jones’s role is small and probably could have been played by anyone but the mere presence of Tommy Lee Jones definitely makes this film cooler than it would have been otherwise.

One final note: This film was directed by the made-for-TV horror specialist, John Llewellyn Moxey. Be sure to read Gary Loggins’s tribute to this often underrated director.

A Movie A Day #141: Breakheart Pass (1975, directed by Tom Gries)

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

California. The 1870s. Sheriff Pearce (Ben Johnson) boards a train with his prisoner, an alleged outlaw named John Deakin (Charles Bronson). The train is mostly full of soldiers, under the command of Major Claremont (Ed Lauter), who are on their way to Fort Humboldt. The fort has suffered a diphtheria epidemic and the soldiers are supposedly transporting medical supplies.

However, it’s not just soldiers on the train. There’s also Gov. Fairchild (Richard Crenna) of Nevada, his fiancée (Jill Ireland), the Reverend Peabody (Bill McKinney), and a conductor named O’Brien (Charles Durning). As the train continues on its journey, it becomes obvious that all is not as it seems. People start to disappear. A man is thrown from the train. Two cars full of soldiers are separated from the train and plunge over a cliff. There is also more to Deakin than anyone first realized and soon, he is the only person who can bring the murderers to justice.

In both real life and the movies, Charles Bronson was the epitome of a tough guy, so it’s always interesting to see him playing a more cerebral character than usual. There are some exciting and surprisingly brutal action scenes, including a scene where Bronson fights a cook (played by former professional boxer Archie Moore) on top of the speeding train, but Breakheart Pass is more of a murder mystery than a typical action film. If Louis L’Amour and Agatha Christie had collaborated on a story, the end result would be much like Breakheart Pass. Bronson spends as much time investigating as he does swinging his fists or shooting a gun. It’s not a typical Bronson role but he does a good job, showing that he could think as convincingly as he could kill. Acting opposite some of the best character actors around in the 70s, Bronson more than holds his own.

Apparently, back in 1975, audiences were not interesting in watching Bronson think so Breakheart Pass was a disappointment at the box office and it is still not as well known as Bronson’s other films. However, even if you’re not already a fan of the great Bronson, Breakheart Pass is worth discovering.

A Movie A Day #33: Two-Minute Warning (1976, directed by Larry Peerce)

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

For the longest time, I thought that Two-Minute Warning was a movie about a gang of art thieves who attempt to pull off a heist by hiring a sniper to shoot at empty seats at the Super Bowl. As planned by a master criminal known as The Professor (Rossano Brazzi), the sniper will cause a riot and the police will be too busy trying to restore order to notice the robbery being committed at an art gallery that happens to be right next to the stadium.

I believed that because that was the version of Two-Minute Warning that would sometimes show up on television. Whenever I saw the movie, I always through it was a strange plan, one that had too many obvious flaws for any halfway competent criminal mastermind to ignore them. What if the sniper was captured before he got a chance to start shooting? What if a riot didn’t break out? The sniper spent the movie aiming at empty seats but, considering how many people were in the stadium, it was likely that he would accidentally shoot someone. Were the paintings really worth the risk of a murder charge?

Even stranger was that Two-Minute Warning was not only a heist film but it was also a 1970s disaster film. Spread out throughout the stadium were familiar character actors like Jack Klugman, John Cassevetes, David Janssen, Martin Balsam, Gena Rowlands, Walter Pidgeon, and Beau Bridges. It seemed strange that, once the shots were fired and Brazzi’s men broke into the gallery, all of those familiar faces vanished. When it comes to disaster movies, it is an ironclad rule that at least one B-list celebrity has to die. It seemed strange that Two-Minute Warning, with all those characters, would feature a sniper shooting at only empty seats. For that matter, why would there be empty seats at the Super Bowl?

That wasn’t the strangest thing about Two-Minute Warning, though. The strangest thing was that Charlton Heston was in the film, playing a police captain. In most of his scenes, he had dark hair. But, in the scenes in which he talked about the art gallery, Heston’s hair was suddenly light brown.

Recently, I watched Two-Minute Warning on DVD and I was shocked to discover that the movie on the DVD had very little in common with the movie that I had seen on TV. For instance, the television version started with the crooks discussing their plan to rob the gallery. The DVD version opened with the sniper shooting at a couple in the park. In the DVD version, there was no art heist. The sniper had no motive and no personality. He was just a random nut who opened fire on the Super Bowl. And, in the DVD version, he did not shoot at empty seats. Several of the characters who survived in the version that I saw on TV did not survive in the version that I saw on DVD.

What happened?

The theatrical version of Two-Minute Warning was exactly what I saw on the DVD. A nameless sniper opens fire and kills several people at the Super Bowl. In 1978, when NBC purchased the television broadcast rights for Two-Minute Warning, they worried that it was too violent and too disturbing. There was concern that, if the film was broadcast as it originally was, people would actually think there was a risk of some nut with a gun opening fire at a crowded event. (In 1978, that was apparently considered to be implausible.) So, 40 minutes of new footage was shot. Charlton Heston even returned to film three new scenes, which explains his changing hair color. The new version of Two-Minute Warning not only gave the sniper a motive (albeit one that did not make much sense) but it also took out all of the violent death scenes.

Having seen both versions of Two-Minute Warning, neither one is very good, though the theatrical version is at least more suspenseful than the television version. (It turns out that it was better to give the sniper no motive than to saddle him with a completely implausible one.) But, even in the theatrical version, the potential victims are too one-dimensional to really care about. Ultimately, the most interesting thing about Two-Minute Warning is that, at one time, an art heist was considered more plausible than a mass shooting.

A Movie A Day #10: The Longest Yard (1974, directed by Robert Aldrich)

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Once, Paul “Wrecking” Crewe (Burt Reynolds) was a superstar NFL quarterback. That was until he was caught up in a point-shaving scandal and kicked out of the league. When a drunk Crewe steals his girlfriend’s car, gets into a high-speed police chase, and throws a punch at a cop, he ends up sentenced to 18 months at Citrus State Prison.

The warden of the prison, Rudolph Hazen (Eddie Albert), is a football fanatic who, at first, is excited to have Crewe as an inmate. The prison guards have a semi-pro football game and Hazen wants Crewe to coach the team and help them win a national championship. Though initially reluctant and just wanting to do his time, Crewe relents after witnessing and experiencing the cruelty of the prison system. Crewe forms The Mean Machine, a team made up of prisoners, and agrees to play an exhibition game against the guards.

At first, the members of the Mean Machine are just looking for an excuse to hit the guards without being punished but soon, they realize that they have a chance to win both the game and their dignity. But Hazen is not above blackmailing Crewe to throw the game.

When it comes to understanding the Tao of Burt, The Longest Yard is the place to start. Starting with a car chase and ending with near martyrdom, The Longest Yard is the ultimate Burt Reynolds film. Paul Crewe ranks alongside Deliverance’s Lewis Medlock and Boogie Night‘s Jack Horner as Reynolds’s best performance. Before injuries ended his athletic career, Reynolds was a college football star and, on the prison’s playing field, he holds his own with the large group of former professional football players who were cast to play the guards and the prisoners. The Longest Yard’s climatic football game takes up over an hour of screen time and reportedly, the action was largely improvised during shooting. Unlike most movie football games, the one in The Longest Yard looks and feels like a real game.

The Longest Yard was directed by Robert Aldrich, who specialized in making movies about anti-authoritarians fighting the system. The scenes of Crewe recruiting and training The Mean Machine are very reminiscent of Aldrich’s best-known movie, The Dirty Dozen. With its combination of dark humor, graphic violence, rebellious spirit, and Southern-friend melodrama, The Longest Yard is a movie that could only have worked in the 1970s. The Adam Sandler remake may have made a lot of money at the box office but it still comes nowhere close to matching the original.

For tomorrow’s movie a day, it’s the best film of 2016, which also happens to be about a football player in prison.