Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 4.3 “To Your Health”

Posted on July 14, 2025 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 Prime!

This week, Ponch solves all the world’s problems. Thank God!

Episode 4.3 “To Your Health”

(Dir by Barry Crane, originally aired on October 5th, 1980)

A farmer (Paul Gale) just wants to deliver his crops to various health food stores across Los Angeles but someone keeps sabotaging his truck. Ponch wants to get laid so he pretends to like health food so he can get closer to the women who lives with the farmer. Meanwhile, a kid keeps causing accidents whenever he goes windskating. The kid’s father isn’t paying enough attention to him so Ponch gives both of them a stern talking to. Ponch also helps the farmer make his deliveries and he saves the life of two women after a massive highway pileup. Baker just stands around looking grim.

It’s the Ponch Show!

This episode was a bit of a mess but it was CHiPs in its most distilled form. What little story there was only existed as an excuse for multiple car crashes. Every time the kid went windskating, he caused an accident. THREE MASSIVE, MULTI-CAR ACCIDENTS, all caused by this kid. I’m talking accidents that involve cars flying through the air in slow motion. This kid is going to get people killed! And yet, he never really gets in trouble for it. He gets scolded. He gets dragged down to the police station. But he’s always set free and apparently, he and his father somehow manage to get through episode without getting sued.

Meanwhile, that farmer wrecked his truck three times! You would think that the farmer would get a new truck after a while. And again, every accident seemed to lead to a car flying in slow motion through the air. Amazingly, no one was ever seriously injured.

Baker was concerned about both the farmer and the windskating kid but, in the end, it was Ponch who solved all the problems. In the past, Baker was always the one who gave the kids a good talking to. But now, it’s Ponch who has all the wisdom. Sorry, Baker. You’ve been replaced by the blinding smile of Erik Estrada.

Really, what can we say about this episode? Thank God for Ponch, right? Los Angeles would be doomed without him.

The Eric Roberts Collection: To Heal A Nation (dir by Michael Pressman)

Posted on May 26, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1988’s To Heal A Nation, Eric Roberts stars as Jan Scruggs.

When we first meet Scruggs, the year is 1971 and he’s taking his seat on a commercial airliner. When the blonde woman sitting beside him starts to flirt with him, Scruggs mentions that he’s happy because he’s finished up his tour of duty in Vietnam. Upon hearing that Scruggs is a Vietnam vet, the woman immediately requests to be moved to a different seat.

Eight years later, things haven’t gotten much better. Scruggs works for the Department of Labor in Washington D.C. He’s married to Becky (Glynnis O’Connor) but he’s struggling to deal with the past. He drinks too much. He has trouble sleeping. He doesn’t feel like he can open up about the things that he saw in Vietnam because nobody wants to talk about it. He was one of the thousands of people who served in Vietnam who now feel as if they’ve been abandoned by their country. However, after attending a showing of The Deer Hunter, Scruggs has a vision of a monument that that features the name of every American who was killed in the Vietnam Conflict.

Scruggs devotes the next several years of his life to getting the monument built, appealing to both the government and private citizens for funding. At first, everyone treats Scruggs and his efforts like a joke. Even some fellow veterans feel that Scruggs is pushing too hard and that he’s just going to end up embarrassing himself. But Scruggs refuses to give up and finally, with the support of a senator (Laurence Luckinbill) and a Texas millionaire named H. Ross Perot (Conrad Bachmann), Scruggs is able to make his dream a reality.

Based on the true story of the struggle to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., To Heal A Nation features a young Eric Roberts giving a nervy but likable performance as Jan Scruggs, a man who becomes so obsessed with building a monument to those who lost their lives in Vietnam that he occasionally seems like he’s close to going over the edge himself. It’s a good film for Memorial Day and one that still feels relevant today. The way that Scruggs was treated after returning from Vietnam is the way a lot of our veterans were treated and continue to be treated after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. We love our soldiers when they fight in popular wars that result in a definite victory. When they serve in an unpopular war, they’re often deserted by people who don’t want to be reminded of recent history. One can certainly see that in the attempts by the national media to gloss over what happened during our final days in Afghanistan. This film is a reminder that no one should be forgotten.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Who Is The Black Dahlia? (1975, directed by Joseph Pevney)

Posted on October 20, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

In 1947 Los Angeles, the body of 22 year-old Elizabeth Short is discovered in an empty lot. Short, who was nicknamed The Black Dahlia because she always wore black, was an aspiring actress who was violently tortured before being chopped in half. Her murder remains one of Hollywood’s most infamous unsolved crimes.

In this made-for-television movie, Ronny Cox and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. play the two detectives who are assigned to investigate Short’s murder. Though they struggle to find any clues identifying who could have killed Short, they do learn about her life and how she went from being a naïve innocent who came to Hollywood with stars in her eyes to being a hardened and cynical woman who may have been supporting herself through sex work when she was murdered. The film makes use of frequent flashbacks, in which Elizabeth Short is played by Lucie Arnaz. Her friends and acquaintances are played by familiar television faces like Henry Jones, Mercedes McCambridge, June Lockhart, Brooke Adams, Donna Mills, and Tom Bosley. Also be sure to keep an eye out for Sid Haig, playing a tattoo artist.

What Elizabeth Short went through over the course of her short time in Hollywood was probably too graphic to be put on television in the 70s but this movie still does a good job of recounting the basic facts of her life and murder. Because the film is based on fact, no one is ever arrested for Short’s murder. The only suspect is a doctor who turns out to have an alibi. The movie instead focuses on Short trying make it in Hollywood and discovering that it’s a cruel town. Lucie Arnaz was far better than I was expecting in the role of Elizabeth and brought a lot of vulnerability to the role. The film ended with a title card, asking anyone who had information about the murder of Elizabeth Short to call the LAPD. The case remains open to this day.

Cleaning Out the DVR: Scared Straight! Another Story (dir by Richard Michaels)

Posted on August 4, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Who is ready to be scared straight … again!?

Scared Straight! Another Story is a made-for-television movie from 1980. As you can tell by the name, the movie was inspired by the documentary Scared Straight! and the addition of Another Story to the title would lead one to suspect that this was actually a follow-up or continuation to that documentary and I guess it kind of is. A group of teenagers, all of whom have been in trouble with the law, are sent to a prison where they are finger-printed, forced to stay in a cell, and then yelled at by a bunch of prisoners who assure them that they don’t have what it takes to survive in prison. Then, just as in the documentary, the teenagers leave the prison. Some of them continue to get in trouble and some of them are scared straight. As for the prisoners, they remain imprisoned.

The main difference is that, instead of featuring real prisoners and real delinquents, Scared Straight! Another Story is a dramatization. As a result, the prisoners are saying the same thing that they said in the first Scared Straight! but now the prisoners themselves are played by actors who will be familiar to anyone who has watched enough old TV shows. The prisoners may be yelling about how much life sucks but the viewer knows that they are all actors and, as a result, Scared Straight! Another Story lacks the rough authenticity of the first film. (It also doesn’t help that most of the profanity from the original documentary has been replaced with softer expressions of disgust.) The film again makes the argument that the Scared Straight program can turn someone’s life around but it’s not as effective because, again, the troubled teens are all actors. The viewer knows that they’re actors. Their lives have already been turned around.

Surprisingly, the scenes of the prisoners yelling are the least effective parts of this film. Instead, Scared Straight! Another Story works best when it is exploring everyone’s life before and after the trip to the prison. Stan Shaw, in particular, is effective as a prisoner who is inspired to take part in the program after he comes across the body of an inmate who has been driven to suicide. Also well-cast is Terri Nunn, playing Lucy, the girlfriend of a small-time drug dealer. Both she and her boyfriend are scared straight but it turns out to be too little too late as her boyfriend is eventually sent to jail for the crimes that he committed before the program. (There’s an interesting scene, one that I wish had been explored in greater detail, where Lucy’s father observes the scared straight program and, instead of understanding that prison is a terrible place to send a kid, reacts by saying that the prisoners are all getting what they deserve.) Finally, Cliff De Young, who has played a lot of corrupt government agents and out-of-touch teachers over the course of his career, gets a sympathetic role as Paul, the idealistic juvenile probation officer who sends three of his clients to the program. The program works for two of them while the other eventually ends up joining the inmates who previously tried to warn him. If nothing else, the film deserves some credit for admitting that the Scared Straight program isn’t going to magically reform everyone who attends.

Despite some good performances, Scared Straight! Another Story lacks the rough edged authenticity of the documentary. It’s just not as effective when you know that everyone, including the prisoners, could go home at the end of the day. Today, this is one of those films that is mostly interesting as a historical artifact. Apparently, there really was a time when anything could inspire a TV movie.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #84: The Forbidden Dance (dir by Greydon Clark)

Posted on May 23, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

DANCE!

I love to dance, I loved to teach others how to dance, and I love watching other people dance. If you’ve been reading my reviews for a while, then you know that I can not resist a film that features a lot of dancing. It doesn’t matter if the director is inept. It doesn’t matter if the script makes no sense. It doesn’t matter if the actors don’t have a bit of acting talent to use to their advantage. As long as the film features a lot of dancing, I’m happy.

Seriously, people, when in doubt … DANCE!

Let’s take the 1990 film The Forbidden Dance, for instance. Now, if I wanted to be nit-picky, I could probably find a lot to criticize about this film. I mean, this film even has a pro-environmental message and you know how annoyed I can get with message films. And you know what? You can do a google search and you can find all sorts of insanely negative reviews of this film.

But you know what?

I don’t really care about any of that. This is, at heart, a dance film. It features almost non-stop dancing, so I really can’t be too critical of it. Add to that, it also features memorable performances from Sid Haig and the late Richard Lynch. Unfortunately, neither Haig nor Lynch get out on the dance floor because, if they had, The Forbidden Dance would have been legendary.

The Forbidden Dance begins in the Brazilian rain forest. A tribe of Native Brazilians is happily dancing and basically not bothering anyone. As we learn later on in the film, the dance that they are doing is called the Lambada and apparently, the Brazilian government tried to ban it “because it was too sexy.”

(Amazingly enough and according to Wikipedia, the Lambada apparently was an actual dance craze back in 1990. The Forbidden Dance came out on the exact same weekend as a competing film about the Lambada. That film was called, appropriately enough, Lambada. Strangely enough, two years ago, I randomly reviewed that film for this very site.)

Anyway, all the dancing and the fun is interrupted by the arrival of Benjamin Maxwell (Richard Lynch), a mercenary who works for a Big Evil Corporation. Maxwell tells the tribe that they might want to stop dancing and leave because the rain forest is going to be destroyed.

Naturally enough, the tribe’s king responds to this by sending his daughter, Nisa (Laura Harring), to America. Accompanying Nisa is Joa (Sid Haig), a witch doctor. However, Nisa and Joa’s attempts to invade the headquarters of Big Evil Corporation results in Joa being arrested.

(Incidentally, you might recognize Laura Harring from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, where she played a similarly mysterious character who was lost and hunted in Los Angeles.)

Left to fend for herself, Nisa gets a job working as a maid for a wealthy family. And while neither Mr. nor Mrs. Anderson has much interest in the backstory of the help, their son Jason (Jeff James) is a different story. As Jason’s mother complains, Jason doesn’t have much interest in anything other than dancing. And, when Jason spots Nisa dancing in her bedroom, he becomes intrigued with her. Ignoring the snobbish reactions of his wealthy friends, Jason asks Nisa to teach him the Lambada!

And hey! Guess what! There’s going to be a dance contest and it’s going to be televised! What better way to get a platform to protest the destruction of the Brazilian Rain Forest then by winning the contest? Standing in the way of this plan: Benjamin Maxwell (who, in one icky scene, demands that Nisa dance for him), Jason’s parents and friends, and the fact that, through a complicated series of events, Nisa ends up being forced to dance in the sleaziest club in Los Angeles.

So, look — there’s all sorts of things that I could say about The Forbidden Dance but it features a lot of dancing so I’m inclined to be generous towards the film, especially since Laura Harring and Jeff James both know how to move and look really good dancing together. I mean, the word Dance is right there in the title. The film promises dancing and it delivers. Plus, it also delivers Sid Haig and Richard Lynch at their demented best.

So, why complain when you can … DANCE!?