Raymond Ma – Through the Shattered Lens

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing SLEDGE HAMMER!, a cop comedy which ran on ABC from 1986 to 1988. The entire series can be found on Prime!

Trust him. He knows what he’s doing.

Episode 1.7 “All Shook Up”

(Dir by Jackie Cooper, originally aired on November 7th, 1986)

15 Elvis impersonators have been murdered in the city. Doreau wonders how anyone can be so evil. Sledge Hammer wonders about the person who draws the chalk outlines at crime scenes. “What type of life is that?”

Captain Trunk, who spends this episode dealing with a migraine, is upset that there aren’t more clues as to the identity of the murderer. Hammer suggests that it will be easier to solve the case once more Elvises have been murdered. To Trunk’s disappointment, Hammer turns out to be right. A woman witnesses the 16th murder and reports that the killer was not only dressed like Elvis but he was also carrying a golden microphone!

It’s time for Sledge Hammer to go undercover! Doreau enrolls him in a school for Elvis impersonators and then accompanies him to the National Elvis Impersonator Semi-Finals. The highlight of the episode is Sledge Hammer imitating Elvis. He can’t do the voice and he can’t do the dance moves but he’s totally convincing when he draws a gun and shoots it. Later, he shows off his karate moves and wins a trophy.

As for the murderer, he turns out to be the janitor (Raymond Ma) at the Elvis school. He feels that he’s the best Elvis in the world. Unfortunately, for him, he’s electrocuted when he accidentally holds his golden microphone too close to a live wire. With the city safe for Elvis impersonators, Sledge announces that he’s going to Graceland.

This week’s episode was just ludicrous enough to work. Between the Elvis puns and all of the bad singing and dancing, it kept me laughing (or, at the very least, smiling). As usual, David Rasche’s enthusiastic performance more than made up for any jokes that didn’t quite land. This was also a good episode for Anne-Marie Martin, who played Doreau’s relationship with Hammer with just the right combination of frustration and affection.

Sledge Hammer has left the building but he’ll be back next week.

In 1972, Lt. Steve Shepherd (William Katt) disappeared in the jungles of Vietnam. He was listed as being MIA and he was mistakenly presumed dead. Instead, he survived in the jungle and continued to fight his own war against the North Vietnamese. Eventually, he “married” a Thai woman named Thi Hau (Rosalind Chao). The North Vietnamese began to call him the “White Ghost.”

16 years later, Major Cross (Reb Brown) hears the legend of the White Ghost and arranges for a group of elite rangers to parachute into the jungle and retrieve Lt. Shepherd. However, Thi Hau has been captured by the Vietnamese army and is being held at one of their torture camps. Shepherd is determined to rescue her. As well, one the rangers (Wayne Crawford) has a personal issue with Shepherd that goes back to their time in Vietnam. He determined to get his revenge, no matter what the cost.

White Ghost came out at a time when films like Rambo: First Blood II and Missing In Action were bringing in the big bucks at the box office. Like those movies, White Ghost gives audiences a chance to watch as the Vietnam War is refought, this time with America as the victor. What sets White Ghost apart is that Shepherd not only has to destroy the Vietnamese prison camp but he also has to avoid his fellow Americans while doing it. This is a violent movie with an astronomical body count. The action is pretty much nonstop and, for once, not even the hero can escape without a scratch. Director BJ Davis was a stuntman and, not surprisingly, he gets fantastic work from the film’s stunt team. This film also owes a debt to Predator, with its jungle locations and its emphasis on booby traps. Karl Johnson appears as one of the Rangers and he looks so much like Jesse Ventura that I actually checked to make sure that it wasn’t him.

At first, William Katt seemed miscast as Steve Shepherd and he seemed to be in surprisingly good shape for someone who has spent sixteen years living in the jungle. By the end of the movie, though, Katt had won me over. He looked convincing shooting a machine gun and throwing grenades and his scenes with Rosalind Chao had enough depth that you cared whether or not he was able to rescue her. Reb Brown fans will probably be disappointed that he spends most of the movie behind a desk but, in the gloriously frenetic finale, he does finally get to do his trademark yelling.

White Ghost is an exciting slice of Namsploitation. At one point, there was a sequel planned that would have featured Shepherd fighting crime in America but unfortunately, it never happened.