Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing 1st and Ten, which aired in syndication from 1984 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on Tubi.
This week, OJ has some wisdom to share.
Episode 3.8 “The Brink of Death”
(Dir by Bruce Seth Green, originally aired on November 4th, 1987)
There’s a lot happening in this week’s episode.
For instance, Bubba and Jethro now own the bar where all of the Bulls hang out. To be honest, I thought they always owned the bar but apparently, they didn’t. As I’ve said a few times in the past, the way these episodes were edited for syndication occasionally makes it a bit difficult to actually follow the storyline.
Wide receiver Billy Cooper (Michael Toland) was kidnapped by Stuart (Richard Tanner), the nerdy guy whose girlfriend Billy stole. Stuart wrapped up Billy in a straight jacket, forced him to wear a “Dumb Jock” label on his forehead, and then filmed him screaming in fear of a bunch of fire ants. Billy’s girlfriend dumped him because Stuart was “more interesting.”
But the main plotline dealt with Dr. Death, the defensive player who was played by Donald Gibbs. While playing against Oakland, many of the Bulls were tackled by Joe “The Terminator” Morgan (Andre Newman), a notoriously dirty player. Dr. Death decided to get revenge by tackling Joe Morgan during a kick return, even though Joe had signaled for something called a fair catch. (I guess that meant that no one was supposed to touch Joe.) Joe Morgan ended up in the hospital. The owner of the Oakland team pressured Joe to press assault charges against Dr. Death, who was already feeling guilty about injuring Joe as severely as he did.
It was up to O.J. Simpson to talk some sense into Joe Morgan. O.J. went to the hospital and told Joe that football was all about getting injured. O.J. asked Joe if this was the way he wanted to go out.
By appealing to Joe’s desire to be remembered as a killer football player, OJ is able to convince Joe to drop the charges.
In 2019’s A Karate Christmas Miracle, young Jesse Genesis (Mario Del Vecchio) believes that if he can become a black belt in four days, his father — who has been missing for a year — will return home. Jesse’s mother, Abby (Mila Milosevic) tries to get Jesse to understand that his father was abducted and probably murdered by a killer clown. Eventually, trying to understand what happened to her husband, Abby teams up with Elizabeth (Julie McCullough), a quirky law professor who is also psychic.
This is a strange film. Eric Roberts and Martin Kove are listed as co-starring in the film but actually, all of their footage appears to have been lifted from 2015’s Joker’s Poltergeist, a film that stylistically and thematically has next to nothing in common with A Karate Christmas Miracle. Scenes of Jesse practicing karate and trying to work his way up to black belt in just six days are mixed with scenes of Eric Roberts threatening to kill people and Martin Kove rambling about he wants to leave a movie theater to his daughter. The scenes just don’t mix but they do show that if Eric Roberts and Martin Kove aren’t available to do your bad movie, you can just lift scenes of them from an even worse movie.
Sitting through A Karate Christmas Miracle is a bit of a struggle. It’s only 81 minutes long but every scene still goes on for too long and the dialogue is full of overly quirky moments that probably sounded great in the writer’s head but which play out very awkwardly on film. This movie really made me appreciate films that are actually edited in a professional manner. We tend to take good editing for granted. This movie reminds us not to.
Now, to be honest, the story did have some potential. A child is so desperate for his father to return that he sets an impossible goal for himself. Seriously, in the right hands, this could have been a real tearjerker. But everything about A Karate Christmas Miracle just feels off. The film works itself towards an heartfelt ending that it really hasn’t earned.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about this film is that it’s still better than Joker’s Poltergeist.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
I swear, I will sit through the worst films for the promise of an Eric Roberts cameo.
Roberts is only featured in about two minutes of 2019’s The Savant. According to the credits, he was playing a character named Lonnie. At one point, he called the film’s hero, police officer Nick Tantino (Frank Giglio), and had a nonsensical conversation with him while he was arresting a random person. I’m not really sure who Lonnie was supposed to be and the scene had very little to do with the film’s story. In fact, the scene just randomly occurred. I’m going to guess that the film needed to be padded out and someone said, “Let’s call Eric Roberts and add another name to the cast.”
Eric Roberts is not the only familiar face to show up in the film.
Martin Kove plays a literature professor who is also a sensei. One of his former students, an evil District Attorney named Zane Carroll (played by Eric Etebari), calls him for advice.
Former TV actress Joyce DeWitt plays a detective. Her partner, who tells a lot of bad jokes, is played by comedian and former Howard Stern flunky, Jackie Martling.
Veteran genre actress Julie McCullough plays a judge, who screams at a defense attorney.
Thomas G. Waites, who was one of The Warriors, plays a police chief.
Robert Loggia shows up as Dr. Reno, a psychiatrist who bellows at everyone and who explains how the savant mind works. Of all the “names” in the film, Loggia gets the most screentime. Interestingly enough, Loggia died in 2015 and The Savant was released four years later. I’m not sure when The Savant was actually filmed but considering how messy the film is and how many plot points are brought up and then abandoned and also the fact that the characters often look totally different from scene-to-scene, I’m going to guess shooting went on for a while.
As for the film, it’s about an autistic savant named Anthony (Miguel Jarquin-Moreland) who beats up a bully. Nick, who has been assigned to work as a glorified security guard at Anthony’s high school, takes Anthony under his wing and trains him to be a MMA fighter. It turns out that the secret of communicating with Anthony is to speak to him in Spanish so we get several scenes of Nick calling him a “pendejo” in order to get Anthony to fight. The entire film builds up to a cage match between Anthony and his bully just for Nick to suddenly cancel the match and instead enter the ring to fight Zane, who is not just a district attorney but also the sensei of his own karate school.
Zane is determined to not only defeat Nick in the ring but to also destroy Nick’s career by telling the police about the time that Nick killed two men in Italy. The murders are not in the record because, according to Zane, they happened “before we had international law.” What? Anyway, Zane decides to create a false criminal record for Nick because Zane is jealous over the fact that Nick is falling in love with Anthony’s sister, a defense attorney named Cassy (Suzy Kaye). Zane even sleeps with Nick’s ex-wife to get revenge. Seriously, I love the fact that Zane is both a prosecutor and a sensei. I mean, how does he find the time?
There’s a lot of plot in this movie. None of it really makes sense but it’s hard not be amused at just how incoherent it all is. The film is full of random and seemingly unrelated scenes, like a lengthy sequence where a defense attorney argues that his client, a doctor, was performing euthanasia when he shot three heroin addicts in the head. “Free Dr. Clark!” the courtroom crowd chants. (Of course, Dr. Clark is never again mentioned after this scene. The shouts of “Free Dr. Clark” brought to mind the “Free Hat!” episode of South Park.) The Savant plays out like a fever dream, one that dares you to try to make sense of it all.
Well, good luck with that. I could sit here and spending hours write about all of the film’s plot holes. But what’s important is that this film featured a lot of Robert Loggia yelling and about two minutes of Eric Roberts. Plan accordingly.
Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:
Through the Shattered Lens 