Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 6.5 “Speedway Fever”

Posted on August 24, 2026 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, we meet the future of the Highway Patrol.

Episode 6.5 “Speedway Fever”

(Dir by Chuck Bail, originally aired on November 7th, 1982)

This week, we meet Bobby’s younger brother, Bruce Nelson (Bruce Penhall). Bruce is both a world motorcycle speedway champion and a student at the Highway Patrol Academy. He hopes soon to be riding a motorcycle in the name of the law, just like Bobby and Ponch.

Unfortunately, Bruce has a hard time following orders. He likes to show off when he’s riding his motorcycle. He’s a good driver and a good shooter, but he’s struggling at the Academy. And when things start to get too tough for him, he decides to walk away from it. It’s an impulsive decision that he regrets. Can Ponch and Bobby talk the head of the Academy into giving Bruce a second chance? Of course they can! Ponch and Bobby can do anything.

Bruce Penhall was a real-life speedway champion. The footage of Bruce Nelson winning his race is actually taken from one of Penhall’s actual races. Judging from this episode, Penhall was a likable, if somewhat stiff, actor. In fact, watching this episode, I couldn’t help but notice that Bruce Penhall had better chemistry with Erik Estrada than Tom Reilly did. One gets the feeling that the purpose of this episode was to introduce Penhall as a potential replacement for Reilly. If nothing else, Penhall brought a good deal of earnest energy to his performance and provided quite a contrast to Tom Reilly’s rather spacey acting style.

This episode wasn’t entirely taken up with scenes of Penhall racing. There were two storylines. The more annoying one featured three 16-year-old girls (one of whom was played by Moon Unit Zappa) who would hitchhike and then use a water pistol to rob whoever picked them up. The girls introduced themselves as being from the Valley and spent the entire episode saying stuff like “For sure!” and “Gag me with a spoon!” (I’m not kidding; they said that more than once.) Frank Zappa’s “Valley Girl” played on the soundtrack whenever the girls showed up. It was kind of embarrassing all around. Between this episode, the Moloch episode, and the UFO episode, this season appears to have found CHiPs desperately struggling to stay culturally relevant.

As for the other storyline, it featured two motorcycle-riding thieves who were robbing couriers on the highway. One of the thieves was Bruce’s best friend, Ray (Robert Romanus). What a coincidence! Romanus, of course, played Mike Damone in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which was probably still in theaters when this episode aired. He gives pretty much the same performance here that he gave in Amy Heckerling’s film. In the end, this episode left you wondering just how Mike Damone eventually ended up going so bad.

The episode ends with Bruce not only winning the world speedway championship but also returning to the Academy. It looks like the Highway Patrol is getting some new blood, and not a minute too soon!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Hunter 1.14 “The Snow Queen: Part Two”

Posted on July 30, 2026 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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing Hunter, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1991. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, the story of the snow queen comes to a close.

Episode 1.14 “The Snow Queen: Part Two”

(Dir by Richard Colla, originally aired on March 30th, 1985)

The second part of The Snow Queen saga opens with a stylish action sequence. As Huey Lewis sings I Want A New Drug on the soundtrack, we watch as both Molinas (Dennis Franz) and Hunter approach, from opposite sides, the boat where Sally LaPone is hiding out with one of her friends. Molinas is approaching the boat so that he can murder Sally for the mob bosses in New York. Hunter, on the other hand, is approaching the boat to try to save Sally’s life. The guards that surround the boat have no idea what’s going on and they end up getting into a gunfight with both Molinas and Hunter. Molinas, being the sleaze that he is, pretends that he drew his gun to help Hunter as opposed to killing Sally.

Meanwhile, at a club, a smitten Vic Terranova (Dennis Farina) pushes McCall, who is working undercover, to take the stage. Shots of McCall performing are mixed with shots of Molinas and Hunter shooting people and Sally once again escaping.

Molinas wants to kill Sally while McCall wants to use Sally’s testimony to take down Terranova and his drug-fueled empire. Hunter wants to stop Molinas from killing anyone else and Sally just wants to be left alone. The episode does a good job of switching from one character to the next, capturing the desperation of everyone involved. One especially memorable sequence features Dennis Franz showing Sally’s pictures to a group of teenagers outside of a punk club. Just from the reactions of Franz and the punks, one gets the feeling that the sequence wasn’t actually scripted. There’s a gritty authenticity to the action in this episode and it makes for compelling viewing.

Of course, this is an episode of Hunter so everything does eventually lead to another shoot out. Both Vic and Molinas go down in a hail of bullets and it’s actually kind of a shame. Both Farina and Franz did such a good job in these two episodes that it’s unfortunate that their characters won’t be able to return in the future. Franz, in particular, was brilliantly sleazy as the loathsome Molinas. If only he hadn’t pulled that gun on Hunter, Molinas could have been one of those recurring villains that audiences would love to hate.

Still, all things come to an end and, since this is Hunter, they end in gunfire instead of arrests. Sally survives but the final shot of the episode reveals that she’s been traumatized beyond belief by everything she’s seen and experienced. McCall’s hope was that Sally would get immunity in return for testifying against Vic. But, with Vic dead, Sally really doesn’t have any leverage that she could use to avoid jail.

Seriously, this was a dark episode! But it was a compelling one and I’m glad that, for once, Hunter showed that not everyone just shrug off violence and move on. Not everyone is Rick Hunter.

Film Review: Scream (dir by Byron Quisenberry)

Posted on February 13, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since today is Friday the 13th, I decided to review a film called Scream….

No, not that Scream.

This Scream came out in 1981. It’s a slasher film but instead of featuring the usual collection of teenage victims, the victims in Scream are largely a collection of middle-aged tourists who are played a motely collection of former sitcom stars and western veterans. Even Ethan Wayne, the son of John Wayne, makes an appearance, playing a potential victim named Stan.

The film imagines what would happen if a bunch of tourists who were exploring the Rio Grande decided to spend the night in an apparently deserted ghost town. Speaking for myself, I would have never decided to sleep in a deserted town, especially one that isn’t even on a map. I mean, those places are called ghost towns for a reason. Even if they’re not haunted by ghosts, they are probably home to snakes, spiders, and all sorts of bugs. Considering that these people have camping gear with them, I’m not sure why they decided it would be smart to just sleep in an abandoned building. This is where the film’s use of adult victims really backfires. It’s easier to accept teenagers and 20-something doing something stupid. When it’s a bunch of people heading towards 40 and 50 (and even older in some cases), you can’t help but feel that they have no one but themselves to blame.

The murders begin on the first night. Needless to say, the survivors decide to find somewhere else to sleep but they discover that their rafts have been cut apart. They’re trapped in the town. Some of them leave to try to find a nearby ranch. Everyone else stays in the town and tries not to fall victim to the unseen killer.

And then Woody Strode shows up.

Oh, poor Woody Strode. Woody Strode was in his late 60 when he appeared in this film. In his youth, he was one of the first black men to play in the NFL. When he went into acting, he became a favorite of John Ford’s. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, he was John Wayne’s best friend. In Sergeant Ruteledge, he had a rare lead role as man falsely accused of murdering a white woman. In Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, he was the gladiator whose defiant death sparked Spartacus’s rebellion. In Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West, he was one of he gunmen waiting for Charles Bronson at the train station. Woody Strode had a long career and he broke a lot of barriers.

In Scream, Woody Strode plays Charlie, who claims that he’s spent forty years searching for the invisible killer who is currently terrorizing the tourists. It must be said that Strode gives the best performance in the film. He delivers his dialogue with a natural authority and, if you needed someone to defend you from an invisible killer with a scythe, Charlie is definitely who you would want to call. That said, Charlie wanders off for a good deal of the film. We never really find out where Charlie went off to. He returns eventually but not before the remaining survivors have managed to do several stupid things.

Scream is a pretty dull film, one that doesn’t even take advantage of its potentially atmospheric location. Watching it, one gets the feeling that everyone involved just made it up as they went along. It’s interesting to see a slasher film in which the victims are not a bunch of teenagers or camp counselors but otherwise, Scream is nothing to scream about.

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.

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #46: Walking Tall (dir by Phil Karlson)

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

About 50 minutes into the 1973 film Walking Tall (not to be confused with the 2005 version that starred Dwayne Johnson), there’s a scene in which newly elected sheriff Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker) gives a speech to his deputies. As the deputies stand at attention and as Pusser announces that he’s not going to tolerate any of his men taking bribes from the Dixie Mafia, the observant viewer will notice something out-of-place about the scene.

Hovering directly above Baker’s head is a big, black, almost phallic boom mic. It stays up there throughout the entire scene, a sudden and unexpected reminder that — though the film opens with a message that we’re about to see the true story of “an American hero” and though it was filmed on location in rural Tennessee — Walking Tall is ultimately a movie.

And yet, somehow, that phallic boom mic feels oddly appropriate. First off, Walking Tall is an almost deliberately messy film. That boom mic tells us that Walking Tall was not a slick studio production. Instead, much like Phil Karlson’s previous The Phenix City Story, it was a low-budget and violent film that was filmed on location in the south, miles away from the corrupting influence of mainstream, yankee-dominated Hollywood. Secondly, the phallic implications of the boom mic erases any doubt that Walking Tall is a film about men doing manly things, like shooting each other and beating people up. Buford does have a wife (Elizabeth Hartman) who begs him to avoid violence and set a good example of his children. However, she eventually gets shot in the back of the head, which frees Buford up to kill.

As I said earlier, Walking Tall opens with a message telling us that we’re about to watch a true story. Buford Pusser is a former football player and professional wrestler who, after retiring, returns to his hometown in Tennessee. He quickly discovers that his town is controlled by criminals and moonshiners. When he goes to a local bar called The Lucky Spot, he is unlucky enough to discover that the bar’s patrons cheat at cards. Buford is nearly beaten to death and dumped on the side of the road. As Buford begs for help, several motorists slow down to stare at him before then driving on.

Obviously, if anyone’s going to change this town, it’s going to have to be Buford Pusser.

Once he recovers from his beating, Buford makes himself a wooden club and then goes back to the Lucky Spot. After beating everyone up with his club, Buford takes back the money that he lost while playing cards and $50.00 to cover his medical bills. When Buford is put on trial for armed robbery, he takes the stand, rips off his shirt, and shows the jury his scars. Buford is acquitted.

Over his wife’s objections, Buford decides to run for sheriff. The old sheriff, not appreciating the competition, attempts to assassinate Buford but, instead, ends up dying himself. Buford is charged with murder. Buford is acquitted. Buford is elected sheriff. Buford sets out to clean up his little section of Tennessee. Violence follows…

On the one hand, it’s easy to be snarky about a film like Walking Tall. This is one of those films that operates on a strictly black-and-white world view. Anyone who supports Buford is good. Anyone who opposes Buford is totally evil. Buford is a redneck saint. It’s a film fueled by testosterone and it’s not at all subtle…

But dangit, I liked Walking Tall. It’s a bit like a right-wing version of Billy Jack, in that it’s so sincere that you can forgive the film’s technical faults and frequent lapses in logic. Walking Tall was filmed on location in Tennessee and director Phil Karlson makes good use of the rural locations. And, most importantly, Joe Don Baker was the perfect actor to play Buford Pusser. As played by Baker, Pusser is something of renaissance redneck. He’s a smart family man who knows how to kick ass and how to make his own weapons. What more could you ask for out of a small town sheriff?

In real life, Buford Pusser died in a mysterious car accident shortly after the release of Walking Tall. Cinematically, the character of Buford Pusser went on to star in two more films.