Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 4.10 “Forty Tons Of Trouble”

Posted on August 25, 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, two sets of thieves cause trouble!

Episode 4.10 “Forty Tons Of Trouble”

(Dir by Gordon Hessler, originally aired on January 11th, 1981)

A group of criminals is stealing equipment from construction sites and selling it on the black market. An attempt to steal a loader leads to it rolling down a Los Angeles street until Baker is able to jump onto it and crash it into a (hopefully) abandoned building. Getraer points out that Baker just destroyed a building. Baker shrugs and says he’s always wanted to do that.

A different group of criminals is stealing parts for their drag racer. The CHiPs have their own car entered into the drag races. Of course, it’s driven by Ponch.

After two accidents on the highway and several chases, Baker and Ponch (but mostly Ponch) capture the bad guys. Paula Kohl (Mary Louise Weller), the owner of Kohl Construction, appreciates the efforts of Baker and Ponch (but mostly Ponch).

In other words, this was a typical episode of CHiPs. Still, it’s memorable because of the supporting cast. Amongst the construction site thieves is Robert Englund. Englund thinks that Sarge (Taylor Lacher) is taking to many risks when it comes to trying to steal loaders and bulldozers but Sarge is like, “I got it under control.” Meanwhile, amongst the drag race thieves, is Chris Mulkey. Mulkey doesn’t get to do much but he does get two scenes where he smirks at Ponch. Sadly, both characters end up getting arrested during this episode but have no fear. Robert Englund went on to play Freddy Krueger. Chris Mulkey went on to play the sleazy but strangely likable Hank Jennings on Twin Peaks.

As for the rest of the episode — hey, I don’t ask for much from CHiPs. As long as there’s a good crash scene and a lot of cool cars, I’m happy. This episode delivered. One could ask why Ponch is always the one who gets to do the cool things, like driving in the race and taking Paula out on a fancy date. Earlier seasons usually tried to portray Ponch and Baker as being equals. This season, though, has clearly been The Ponch Show. It’s a legitimate criticism but …. eh. Sometimes, you just want to watch a chase or two.

Late Night Retro Television Review: CHiPs 3.14 “Wheeling”

Posted on March 31, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Things get weird in California.

Episode 3.14 “Wheeling”

(Dir by Barry Crane, originally aired on December 8th, 1979)

This is one of those weird episodes where Ponch and Jon just keep running into the same people over and over again.

Artie (Paul Gale), Don (Ray Vittie), and Alan (Ron Lombard) are all in wheelchairs but they’re not going to let that stop them from enjoying life and, far more dangerously, playing tag while driving on the highway. Artie’s van taps Alan’s car. Alan taps Don’s car. Don tries to tap Artie’s van. It’s dangerous and Ponch and Jon, when they see it, promptly pull the three men over. Ponch is impressed with Artie’s joie d’vivre. As usual, Baker is less impresses and is like, “You — of all people! — should understand the danger!” (I swear, poor Larry Wilcox. While Erik Estrada got to smile through each episode, it always fell on Wilcox to be the killjoy.)

That said, both Jon and Ponch came to admire Artie and his determination to make sure that all of his wheelchair-bound friends get the most out of life. They even help Artie present a fancy new wheelchair to Brent (David Gilliam), a surfer who has not been able to bring himself to leave the hospital ever since he learned that he will never walk again.

Artie and the gang help out Jon and Ponch as well. Jon and Ponch are searching for a blue car that was involved in a street race that left one teenager with a broken leg. The teenager’s father, Harry (Taylor Lacher), has been speeding up and down the freeway, searching for the car. Harry even made a citizens arrest, though Delgado (Fil Formicola) had an alibi for the time that Harry’s son was injured. While Delgado makes plans to sue Harry for false arrest. Artie happens to spot the blue car that Jon and Ponch are looking for. Way to go, Artie!

But then, after all of this, Artie and his friends decide to race on Harry’s street. Harry goes crazy. He jumps in his car and takes off after Artie’s van, not realizing that Artie was the one who helped the police catch the guy who hit Harry’s son. It leads to a huge accident at a construction site. The van flips over. Harry’s car flips over. Harry breaks his leg. Artie’s breaks both of his arms. The judge sentences Harry to serve as Artie’s manservant until Artie’s arms heal. Everyone has a good laugh, including Harry.

What a weird episode! I mean, its heart was definitely in the right place. The whole point of the episode was that Artie and his friends were just as capable as anyone who could walk. That’s a good message. But, then, out of nowhere, Artie is suddenly involved in a street race and Harry is trying to crash into his van. And then, at the end of it, everyone finds it all to be terrifically amusing. And somehow, Ponch and Jon manage to be at the scene of every incident involved Harry, Artie, and Artie’s friends. Like, seriously, what are the odds? There are other highway patrolmen in California.

Again, a strange episode. As always, the scenery was nice. It’s always fun to see what the world looked like in 1979. And I appreciated that this episode made a strong case for people not taking it upon themselves to make a citizens arrest because, seriously, people who do that tend to be so obnoxious.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. It was just weird enough to be fun. Drive safely out there!

Walking in the footsteps of MR. MAJESTYK – taking my love of cinema on down the road (Part 3)!

Posted on December 27, 2024 by Bradley Crain

Some of my favorite trips have been related to my obsession with movies and Charles Bronson. Today, I share a wonderful day that my wife and I spent in Southern Colorado. I hope you enjoy!

In September of 2022, my wife and I attended two different out of state weddings. First, we drove to Casper, WY, and officiated a wedding for the children of some of Sierra’s long time friends. After leaving Casper, we headed towards Estes Park, CO, for another friend’s wedding. While sitting on the deck of our lodge in Estes Park, listening to a beautiful Rocky Mountain stream flowing down below, an amazing idea just hit me like a brick, and I wouldn’t let it go. So, I started researching the filming locations for Charles Bronson’s MR. MAJESTYK because I knew it was filmed in southern Colorado. While Sierra slept, I began planning out a route for our tour of the locations. The next morning I hit her up about my plan, and she was game. Man, I’m a lucky guy!

I always tell my friends on my “This Week in Charles Bronson” Facebook page that my visit to Southern Colorado on September 6th, 2022 was one of the great days of my life. As we visited the filming locations for MR. MAJESTYK in Canon City, Manzanola, and La Junta, I felt like I was hanging out with the spirit of Charles Bronson. One of the most interesting things about the experience is how similar the locations looked in 1974 and 2022, a span of 48 years. It’s so important to find that woman in life who let’s you be you, and Sierra spent time with me as I made videos of my experiece, reenacted certain scenes from the movie, and took pictures at every specific location I could find. We ended up spending that night at a hotel in Dodge City, KS, which somehow seems like the perfect ending to a fairy tale of a day!

I shared the picture at the top from the interesting “tunnel” locations in Canon City, Colorado. This was our first stop of the day. There’s an interesting scene in MR. MAJESTYK where melon farmer Vince Majestyk (Bronson) lures hitman Frank Renda (Al Lettieri) into his hunting country which featured those amazing rock tunnels. I always thought they were so cool. This is actually a hiking trail called The Tunnel Drive Trail that runs alongside the Arkansas River and Royal Gorge Route Railroad.

After leaving Canon City, we went to the town of Manzanola. This is the town where the bar and cafe sequences are filmed in MR. MAJESTYK. In the movie, the bar was painted white. For some reason, they’ve gone for pink at this point!

It was in Manzanola where I reenacted a scene where Vince Majestyk walks across the street to supervise the hiring of his melon picking crew. I found out that it’s actually a very busy highway, US Route 50, to be exact. I tried to cross the street about the same place where Charles Bronson did, but I also had to try to not to get run over. You can see a car passing by as I walk in the picture below. I made sure that interesting “triangle” doorway was present in both pictures.

We were hoping to have lunch at “The Majestyk Cafe” in Manzanola, but it was closed the day after Labor Day in 2022. I found the owners’ thoughts on Colorado’s mask mandates at the time to be interesting. Check out the picture of the door below. If I ever make it out that way again, hopefully we’ll get to check out their lunch special!

After leaving Manzanola, we went to La Junta where we visited a few more locations. You can see below that La Junta’s Police and Fire department building is still using the same signage.

One of the best scenes in the entire film is the sequence where they break hitman Frank Renda out of the prison transport bus. That scene is also filmed in La Junta. It starts at the Zavala Building with one of Renda’s henchman putting a stocking over his head. You can see a plaque that says “Zavala Building” behind Taylor Lacher below. We found that spot.

I took so many more pictures that day. I also recorded several videos as I visited the various locations. They are documented as the “Adventures of the Colorado Crains” on the This Week in Charles Bronson YouTube page. It was an awesome day, and I hope you enjoyed a few of the highlights!

More Of Bronson’s Best: Mr. Majestyk (1974, directed by Richard Fleischer)

Posted on July 2, 2016 by Jedadiah Leland

Mr_Majestyk_movie_poster What happens when you combine the great tough guy writer Elmore Leonard with the great tough guy actor Charles Bronson?

You get Mr. Majestyk, one of Bronson’s finest films.

Vince Majestyk (Bronson) may be a former U.S. Army Ranger instructor and a decorated Vietnam vet but now that he has returned home to Colorado, all he cares about is running his watermelon farm. With a lucrative harvest approaching, Majestyk hires a group of unionized Mexican migrant workers, led by the fiery Linda Chavez (Linda Cristal), to pick his crops. When a local criminal named Bobby Kopas (Paul Koslo) shows up and demands that Majestyk hire his drunken crew instead, Majestyk does what Bronson does best. He gives Kopas an ass-kickin’ beat down.

After Kopas charges him with assault, the local police arrest Majestyk and, despite his request that he be allowed three days to finish harvesting his crop, Majestyk is thrown in jail. Also in the jail is a Mafia hitman named Frank Renda (Al Lettieri). Renda may be a tough guy but nobody’s tougher than Vince Majestyk. When Renda’s associates attempt to hijack a prison bus, Majestyk ends up hijacking it instead. Majestyk plans to hold Renda hostage until the police agree to give him his three days of freedom so he can get back to his farm. Renda even offers to pay him off but Majestyk doesn’t care about his money. He just cares about melons.

Because he was the only 1970s action star who could be believable as both a decorated combat veteran and a no-nonsense watermelon farmer, Charles Bronson is the only actor who could have brought Mr. Majestyk to life. Before he became an actor, Bronson worked for a living. From the age of ten until he enlisted in the Army, Bronson worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines, earning one dollar for each ton of coal that he mined. Though Bronson was never a great actor, his legitimately working class background allowed him to bring an authenticity to a role like Vince Majestyk that most other actors would have lacked. When Bronson says that all he cares about is bringing in the harvest on time, you believe him just as much as you believe him when he’s beating up Paul Koslo or hijacking a prison bus.

The rest of the cast is full of good 1970s actors who have never really been given their due. Al Lettieri may be best known for playing Sollozzo in The Godfather but he also does a good job as Frank Renda. Paul Koslo plays another one his sleazy villains here and does a great job as Bobby Kopas.

Mr. Majestyk was directed by Richard Fleischer but, with its colorful characters, working class hero, and modernized brand of frontier justice, the film is clearly the work of Elmore Leonard. Though Mr. Majestyk is credited as being based on a novel by Leonard, Leonard actually wrote the screenplay before the novel.

The combination of Elmore Leonard and Charles Bronson makes Mr. Majestyk one of the best action films of the 1970s.

majestyk_rifle

The Daily Horror Grindhouse: The Devil Times Five (dir by Sean MacGregor and David Sheldon)

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Initially released in 1974 and also known as Peopletoys, Tantrums, and The Horrible House on the Hill, Devil Times Five is one of a handful of films made about murderous children targeting and killing adults. In the case of Devil Times Five, the children are five escapees from a mental hospital and the adults are a group of largely unlikable people who have gotten snowed in at a ski lodge.

(In a film like this, it helps that the victims are all too unlikable to really care about.)

When watching Devil Times Five, it helps to know a little something about what went on behind the scenes. Apparently, original director Sean McGregor was fired when it turned out that, after several weeks of filming, he only had 38 minutes of usable footage. Several weeks later, a second director, David Sheldon, was brought in to reshoot a good deal of the movie. Unfortunately, by the time that Sheldon arrived, the majority of the cast had moved onto other projects and the main killer kid (Leif Garrett) had gotten his hair cut for another movie, meaning that he had to wear an ill-fitting wig for the reshoots.

And the end result is a truly weird movie, one that is full of odd continuity errors and strange scenes that were obviously only included to pad out the film’s running time. Among the most obvious of the continuity errors is the insistence that the characters are snowed in despite the fact that there appears to be hardly any snow on the ground outside. (This, of course, was largely due to the fact that the reshoots were done in sunny California.) As for the padding, perhaps the most infamous example is the scene where the five children attack and beat to death their doctor. This entire scene is shown in slow motion. It lasts five minutes.

Seriously — and if you doubt me on this, be sure to read Stacie Ponder’s review of the film over on Final Girl — five minutes is a really long time. It’s certainly a long time to watch someone get beat to death, especially when the scene is underlit and sepia-toned. It starts out as disturbing but, after the 2nd minute or so, it just gets boring. And then about 4 minutes in, you start to laugh because you’re just like, “How much longer can this crap go on?” And then, at the 4:30 mark, you start to get bored again. Around the 4:55 mark, I realized that I had forgotten who they were killing or why. And then it was finally over. Yay!

Incidentally, this is one of those films where, whenever one of the kids is going to kill someone, the kid suddenly starts moving in slow motion. It was kind of like the music in Jaws. If the kid picked up an axe but was still moving at normal speed, you knew not to worry. But the minute that slow-mo started, you knew someone was about to die.

Of course, it takes a while to get around to the killings. Devil Times Five clocked in at about 88 minutes. I would guess that roughly 65 of those minutes were pure filler. We spend a lot of time getting to know the adults at that ski lodge and, for the most part, they’re loathsome. The oldest and grumpiest of them is even called Papa Doc, perhaps after the infamous Haitian dictator. (And let’s not even start on the film’s nominal hero, Rick, who has a pornstache, a comb over, and an extended nude scene.) All of the adults spend a lot of time talking about their crumbling marriages and their dying dreams and it’s all very angsty for slasher film about a bunch of killer kids. There’s even an extended cat fight between Julie (Joan McCall) and Lovely (Carolyn Staller), which involves a lot of rolling around on the floor while the 70s “wah wah” soundtrack plays in the background.

Once the killings do start, however, Devil Times Five actually starts to live up to its potential. These are some mean little kids! Once they start their rampage, we get axes in the back, spears to the throat, immolation, death by swing, and one really disturbing scene involving a bunch of bear traps. However, Devil Times Five is probably best known for the piranha scene. You can legitimately wonder why someone would keep piranhas at a ski lodge but there’s still no denying that you don’t want to take a bath with them.

(Making the piranha scene all the more icky that the victim in the bathtub is played by the mother of two of the actors who played the killers.)

Devil Times Five makes for a strange viewing experience. It starts out as nothing but filler and then suddenly, almost out of nowhere, the entire film goes batshit crazy. Devil Times Five has slipped into the public domain, so you can watch it for free on YouTube if you want. But I suggest tracking down the Code Red DVD, which comes with a fascinating commentary track and an entertaining and candid interview with several members of the cast.