Brad’s “Charles Bronson Movie of the Week” – MESSENGER OF DEATH (1988)

Posted on July 10, 2025 by Bradley Crain

*Charles Bronson and Gene Davis, together again 5 years after TEN TO MIDNIGHT (1983)*

A couple of years ago, I decided I would rank my favorite Charles Bronson films. The rules were fairly simple… 1) only starring roles, so movies like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and THE GREAT ESCAPE were excluded, 2) no TV movies were included, and 3) my rankings were based on how much I like watching the movies, and not on some BS critical consensus. It was an interesting undertaking, and while I’ve played around with the rankings a little bit, for the most part I’ve kept them the same from that initial ranking. Because I’m obsessed with Charles Bronson, it’s fun for me to write about him and share things about his movies. As such, about once a week or so, I’ll probably share a movie from my list, give my ranking, and talk a little bit about the films. These will not necessarily be reviews, but mostly just some basic thoughts on the films.

My first Bronson movie of the week is MESSENGER OF DEATH (1988), which I rank as 33rd out of 41 Bronson starring roles. What’s interesting is that even though that’s a pretty low ranking, I still enjoy the film for trying to do something different with Bronson at that point in his career in the late ’80s, mainly by casting him as a reporter and not as a cop. He destroys the opposition with superior investigative reporting skills, without having to resort to oversized handguns. Now that his filmography is complete, and has been for over 25 years, I’ve grown to appreciate the times Bronson tried something a little different (with the exception of LOLA). MESSENGER OF DEATH also benefits from a solid cast of veteran actors and actresses, including Trish Van Devere, Laurence Luckinbill, Daniel Benzali, Charles Dierkop, Jeff Corey, John Ireland, and Gene Davis. It’s fun watching these seasoned performers, many of whom have worked with Bronson in the past, do their thing. And last, but not least, with filming locations at the Colorado National Monument and the mountain town of Glenwood Springs, CO, it’s definitely a beautiful film to look at! The older I get the more I appreciate movies that get out of the cities and show us beautiful sights around the country and world. Jeff shared some of his own thoughts on MESSENGER OF DEATH back in 2017!

As of the date of this post, MESSENGER OF DEATH is streaming on Amazon Prime and Tubi if you want to watch it yourself. It’s a film that I’ve enjoyed more with repeat viewings. I’ve also included the trailer below for your viewing pleasure. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on MESSENGER OF DEATH, starring the legendary Charles Bronson!

Retro Television Reviews: Quarantined (dir by Leo Penn)

Posted on January 8, 2023 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 1970’s Quarantined! It can be viewed on YouTube!

The John C. Bedford Clinic sits atop a cliff overlooking the ocean. Though it may be a small hospital, it’s also widely respected. The clinic was started by John Bedford (John Dehner) and the majority of its employees are related to him. His three sons — Larry (Gary Collins), Bud (Gordon Pinset), and Tom (Dan Ferrone) — are all doctors and they all work at the clinic. Bud’s wife, Margaret (Susan Howard), is a psychologist and she also works at the clinic, encouraging the older patients not to give up hope in their twilight years. John Bedford is a stern taskmaster and his youngest son, Tom, resents always having his father and his older brothers staring over his shoulder. John and Larry explain that they are simply treating Tom the way that they would treat any new doctor. Tom isn’t so sure.

When the Bedfords aren’t hanging out in the tasteful ranch house that sits next to the clinic, they’re checking on their patients. As Quarantined opens, they’ve got quite a few to deal with. The most famous is Ginny Pepper (Sharon Farrell), a film star who has come to the clinic because she’s been suffering from back pain. Larry quickly diagnoses her as suffering from kidney failure and announces that she’s going to need to get an immediate transplant. Ginny is not happy to hear that and spends most of her time trying to make both Larry and Nurse Nelson (Virginia Gregg) miserable. Of course, it eventually turns out that Ginny’s not so bad.

Meanwhile, Margaret attempts to cheer up a dying old man named Mr. Berryman (Sam Jaffe) and an eccentric man named Wilbur Mott (Wally Cox) hangs out in the hospital hallway. Martha (Terry Moore) and Lloyd Atkinson (Madison Arnold) are at the hospital to visit their son, Jimmy (Mitch Vogel). Unfortunately, while in Jimmy’s hospital room, Lloyd suddenly collapses and subsequently dies. John takes one look at Lloyd and announces that Lloyd might have Cholera and, as a result, no one can leave or enter the hospital until the test results come back.

In other words, the John C. Bedford Clinic is …. QUARANTINED!

If you’re thinking this sounds a little bit dull …. well, you’re not wrong. Quarantined has a 73-minute running time and a large cast but it really does just feel like an episode of a not particularly interesting medical drama. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that this movie was actually meant to serve as a pilot for a show that would have followed day-to-day life at the clinic. Each member of the Bedford family is given a hint of characterization, just enough to suggest what type of situations they would get involved in on a weekly basis. Larry was the straight shooter who was dedicated to saving lives. Bud was the well-meaning middle child while Margaret was the one who encouraged the men to talk about their feelings. Tom was the idealistic but impulsive youngest child. John was the wise patriarch. They’re all kind of boring.

The same can be said of Quarantined as a movie. As directed by Leo “Father of Sean” Penn, the movie promises a lot of drama but it never really delivers and there’s something rather annoying about how casually John announces that no one is allowed to leave the clinic. He even calls the police and has them set up road blocks around the clinic. On the one hand, John is doing the right thing. No one wants a cholera epidemic. On the other hand, everyone’s so quick to accept that idea of John being a benign dictator that …. well, one can only imagine what a pain in the ass the Bedfords would have been during the COVID era.

As far as I know, there was never a TV show about the Bedford family and their clinic on a cliff. Personally, I’m okay with that.

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 #22: Messenger of Death (1988, directed by J. Lee Thompson)

Posted on January 22, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

messenger_of_death In rural Colorado, the three wives and all the children of Orville Beecham (Charlie Dierkop) have been murdered. Veteran journalist Garret Smith (Charles Bronson) discovers that Orville is the son of an excommunicated Mormon fundamentalist named Willis Beecham (Jeff Corey). Willis, who lives on a heavily armed compound, practices polygamy and wants nothing to do with the outside world. However, Willis’s brother, Zenas (John Ireland), long ago split with Willis and set up a compound of his own. At first, Garret suspects that Orville’s family was killed by Zenas. As Zenas and Willis go to war, Garret discovers that there’s actually a bigger conspiracy at work, one dealing with corporate greed and water rights. (Forget it, Bronson, it’s Chinatown.)

Messenger of Death was the 2nd to last film that veteran tough guy Charles Bronson made for Cannon Films. Especially when compared to the other films that he made for Cannon (10 To Midnight, Kinjite, Murphy’s Law, three Death Wish sequels), Messenger of Death features Bronson in a surprisingly cerebral role. While there is violence, very little of it is actually the result of anything that Bronson does. For once, Charles Bronson isn’t running around with a gun and blowing away bad guys. If Death Wish‘s Paul Kersey ever did start blowing away muggers in Colorado, Garret would probably be the first to condemn him in a carefully written editorial. The only time he fights is in self-defense and even then, it’s hand-to-hand combat. Instead, he spends most of the film doing research and asking questions. As a result, Messenger of Death is never as much fun as the other films that Bronson made for Cannon but it’s still interesting to see him playing a regular guy.