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 becomes the Barcelona Man.
Episode 6.2 “Tight Fit”
(Dir by John Florea, originally aired on October 17th, 1982)
After Ponch and his new partner Bobby thwart an attempt to steal a lockbox of diamonds from a photo shoot, Ponch is invited to become a jeans model. In fact, he even gets to appear on a giant billboard and star in a commercial as the shirtless Barcelona Man.
These episodes featuring Ponch getting “discovered” are always a bit silly. Ponch always acts like he’s modest and kind of embarrassed to be at the center of attention but it’s never convincing because it’s obvious that Erik Estrada is loving it. All it takes is one look at that big grin to know that Estrada is more than happy to be the shirtless Barcelona Man.
Now, to make clear, Ponch and Bobby did solve some crimes. They caught a jewel thief who crashed his car in an attempt to hide his crimes. They also busted a fashion photographer (Michael Haynes) who was coercing his underage models to pose nude and attend wild sex parties. One of the models was played by Kim Richards. She gets a scene where she attempts to jump off a ledge. Can you guess which member of the Highway Patrol saves her? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not Bobby!
Much like last week, this episode highlighted the total lack of chemistry between Erik Estrada and his new partner, Tom Reilly. Reilly spent most of this episode looking somewhat dazed and confused. Unlike Larry Wilcox, who always came across as if he arrested people in his spare time, Tom Reilly was a very unconvincing cop. After two episodes, it appears that Reilly’s main contribution to the show is to make Estrada seem convincing by comparison.
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 start the sixth and final season of CHiPs.
Episode 6.1 “Meet the New Guy”
(Dir by John Astin, originally aired on October 10th, 1982)
The sixth season of CHiPs opens up with some changes. Bonnie, Bear, and Turner are all gone. They’ve been replaced by Kathy (Tina Gayle) and Officer Webster (Clarence Gilyard, Jr.) Grossman (Paul Linke) is still providing comedic relief. Harlan (Lou Wagner) is still running the garage. Getraer (Robert Pine) is still the sarge. And Ponch (Erik Estrada) is still riding his motorcycle and flashing his grin.
However, this episode finds Ponch riding solo. Officer Baker is no longer his partner. This was because Larry Wilcox declined to return for another season, specifically because he felt that the producers only cared about keeping Estrada happy. On the show, it’s mentioned that Baker has relocated to Wyoming and he is now working on his father’s ranch. Ponch, however, is not without a partner for long. At the start of the episode, he meets Baker’s replacement. Bobby Nelson (Tom Reilly) is blonde and kind of spacey and he’s nicknamed “hot dog” because he likes to take risks. Ponch has been assigned to work as Nelson’s partner throughout Nelson’s probationary period. Getraer explains that Nelson reminds him of Ponch.
And really, that’s the problem. Ponch is a flamboyant motorcycle cop who smiles a lot and likes to take risks. Bobby is another flamboyant motorcycle cop who smiles a lot and likes to take risks. There’s not much difference between them. Even though Larry Wilcox and Erik Estrada didn’t get along behind the scenes, Baker and Ponch worked as a team because Baker was the opposite of Ponch. Baker was serious and by-the-book and he didn’t take unnecessary risks. Bobby, on the other hand, is pretty much just a blonde version of Ponch.
There is another problem as far as Bobby Nelson is concerned. Judging from this episode, Tom Reilly doesn’t appear to have been much of an actor. Larry Wilcox may not have had the most expansive emotional range but he was totally believable as a cop. Reilly, meanwhile, spends the entire episode looking somewhat spaced out. He delivers his lines in a flat monotone. From the start, there’s very little chemistry between him and Estrada. When Ponch complains about getting a new partner, one gets the feeling that he was expressing Estrada’s own feelings.
That said, this episode isn’t all bad. It opens with one of the most spectacular crashes in the show’s history. The tragic Dominique Dunne gives a strong performance as a teenage mother who sells her baby to a couple but then decides that she wants him back. This episode even manages to work quicksand into its finale. How can you not appreciate a show that makes use of quicksand?
Finally, this episode has one extended sequence that is so ludicrous that you just can’t help but smile while watching it. Two thieves have been robbing health clubs. They just happen to rob the one where Ponch is a member. (Fitness guru Richard Simmons plays Ponch’s teacher.) Ponch, clad only in a pair of black shorts and a motorcycle helmet, jumps on his motorcycle and chases after the robbers. The site of a half-naked Erik Estrada riding his motorcycle down the streets of Los Angeles is the perfect combination of silly and stupid.
This episode had its moments but I’m not really sold on Tom Reilly as a replacement for Larry Wilcox. We’ll see what happens!
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, the fifth season comes to an end.
Episode 5.27 “Force Seven”
(Dir by Leslie H. Martinson, originally aired on May 23rd, 1982)
When evil rich guy Nakura (John Rhys-Davies) steals a short-range missile from a military convoy, he informs the Mayor of Los Angeles that he will fire that missile at the city unless he’s paid a healthy ransom. The Mayor wants to send in the SWAT Team but one-eyed Lt. John Legarre (an eyepatch wearing Fred Dryer — yes, the star of Hunter) objects. Guns won’t do the job, Legarre explains. Why not send in Force Seven?
Led by Legarre, Force Seven is a secret division of the LAPD. Including Legarre, there’s only four of them. (So, why aren’t they Force Four?) Sly (Tony Longo — hey, Mad Dog from 1st & Ten) is tough and strong and also a ventriloquist. Cindy (Dona Kei Benz) is small but fast and doesn’t have a sense of humor. Rick Nichols (Tom Reilly) is a rebel cop who does things …. HIS WAY! What do they all have in common? They all know karate!
This doesn’t sound like an episode of CHiPs, does it?
Well, technically, it’s not. It’s a backdoor pilot. Ponch and Baker appear at the start of the episode, arresting an engineer who is carrying the schematics for the stolen missile. And they also appear at the very end of the episode, in which Getraer asks them if they remember that engineer they pulled over. However, neither Ponch nor Baker interact with anyone from Force Seven. I get the feeling that the Force Seven pilot was shot and then someone decided, “Why don’t we add Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox and disguise this as an episode of CHiPs?”
Imagine if you were a CHiPs fan in 1982. It’s the night of the season finale. You turn on the TV because you want to watch motorcycle chases and car crashes. Instead, you find yourself watching Fred Dryer wearing an eye patch and Tony Longo using a puppet to discuss elements of Eastern philosophy. That’s one reason why backdoor pilots have never made sense to me. They always seem like they would have just ticked off anyone who was watching.
Force Seven did not become a show. From watching this episode, I think it probably would have been enjoyably dumb if it had led to a series. As I already mentioned, Fred Dryer wears an eye patch. Tony Longo is made up to look like Sylvester Stallone. (His character is even named Sly!) There’s something kind of amusing about two guys who are so big that they could obviously just take anyone out with one punch instead choosing to drag out every fight with karate.
(Amusingly enough, in Force Seven, the mayor of Los Angeles was played by former real-life mayor Sam Yorty, who ran for President in 1972. The police commissioner was played by Ed Davis, the real life former chief of the LAPD who was serving in the California State Senate at the time and who later ran for the U.S. Senate in 1986.)
It is a little sad that this was Larry Wilcox’s final episode of CHiPs. Fed up with Estrada getting all of the good storylines, Wilcox did not return for Season 6. (His replacement would be played by Force Seven‘s Tom Reilly, though as a different character.) For the first two seasons, Wilcox was the main character while Erik Estrada was the comedic sidekick. However, by the time season 5 rolled around, it was clear that the producers were far more interested in Estrada than Wilcox. As an actor, Wilcox wasn’t a showy as Estrada but he was more believable a cop. In his final episode, Wilcox gets not a grand goodbye but instead appears only in two brief scenes.
Next week, we’ll start the sixth and final season!
When he was a young boy, Gregory Tudor was traumatized when he witnessed the gangland-style execution of the neighborhood ice cream man. He was retraumatized when he was sent to an insane asylum. Now, Gregory (Clint Howard) has grown up and he’s the ice cream man! Everyone in the neighborhood loves his ice cream but the local kids suspect that he’s using human body parts to get the flavor just right. It turns out that the kids know what they’re talking about.
Ice Cream Man almost feels like a zero-budget precursor to Stranger Things, with the kids knowing what’s happening in their town while the majority of the adults are too self-absorbed to notice. One of the kids is a Macauley Culkin look-alike known as Small Paul (Mikey LeBeau). He comes to admire Gregory and his murderous devotion to ice cream. The movie’s really stupid but it’s clearly not meant to be taken seriously and Clint Howard really throws himself into his role. One thing that makes Ice Cream Man enjoyable is that you know Ron Howard had to sit through it because his brother’s in it.
The most interesting thing about Ice Cream Man is the number of recognizable actors who appear in tiny roles. David Warner is the town’s reverend. David Naughton is a clueless father who is married to Sandahl Bergman. Jan-Michael Vincent is a detective. Olivia Hussey is Gregory’s former nurse. Former baseball player and future senatorial candidate Steve Garvey plays another parent. With the exception of Vincent, it’s hard not to believe that the members of the cast didn’t have anything better to do. Never underestimate the appeal of a quick paycheck.
Clint Howard has said that a sequel is in pre-production. The Ice Cream Man will return.
Earlier this month Lisa posted a scene from Slaughterhouse Rock that she likes, but she said she hadn’t actually seen the movie. She might as well have slapped me across the face with a steel gauntlet. Well, I’ve seen Slaughterhouse Rock now. Twice in fact. Probably three if you count all the rewatching of segments I had to do while writing this review because I was still confused. I can assure you that scene is the most entertaining thing about this movie. Lisa is right, that scene does show parts from earlier in the film. I love that it even flashes back to pointless scenes like when one of the kids slips while climbing up onto Alcatraz Island. Or a quick shot of one of the girls talking in a restaurant. It’s like they reached that part of the film and ran out of money because they blew it on effects from earlier in the film. That, and it was probably in Toni Basil’s contract that they let her dance a little in this movie. Oh, by the way, this is one of two rock horror films that star Toni Basil. I already reviewed Rockula. Why are there two of these?
So let’s get this review over with so I can subject myself to more films of questionable quality. The film starts out with some dreamlike scary scenes that end with someone’s hand getting chopped off. Then a guy wakes up to find his hand missing. Of course he wakes up again because he was still in a dream. Cut to the opening title card. We find out that not only Toni Basil was involved in this, but Devo too. And then we find out that the cinematographer on this movie is Nicholas Von Sternberg. The son of famed director Josef Von Sternberg. I bring that up because the first film he is credited with shooting is Dolemite (1975). That film is famous for numerous reasons including the boom mic popping in from the top of the frame.
I mention it since I’m pretty sure there is a scene in this movie where the boom mic pops in on the left hand side of the shot. I wish I had watched a higher quality copy of this movie, but here’s the shot anyways.
But back to the story. That kid is Alex Gardner (Nicholas Celozzi) who has been having some weird dreams lately. Cut to the outside of a college building and we learn that Alcatraz has been closed down temporarily because of a tragic incident. A rock band called Body Bag broke off from the tour group and was later found dead. That’s Sammy Mitchell’s (Toni Basil) band. Since his dreams seem like they are taking place in a prison, his friends think there must be a connection. The next group of scenes are either stupid 1980’s teenagers in a horror movie stuff, creepy unreal stuff, or one of the very few shots in this movie that are actually of Alcatraz.
In here is one of the dumbest scenes in the movie. They obviously thought it was really cool and built atmosphere, but it’s actually just really frustrating and confusing like most of this movie. It takes place in a restaurant where the scene starts with this person picking up some food to take to a table. The camera moves in slow motion around this restaurant for what feels like an eternity. Then a voice kicks in. Who is saying it? Is it the people we are looking at? The camera is still moving so I guess it can’t be. It takes close to another 10 seconds before the camera slow motion moves some more and finally settles on a girl and Alex talking at a table. My god! Was it so hard to cut that shorter? This is especially frustrating because the rest of the scene is actually done rather well. It uses close ups of his eyes and other peoples faces combined with angles and playing with the sound to build up to a hand breaking through the wall behind him. None of which required that unnecessarily confusing roam through the restaurant. Likely, that stuff was padding. There’s a lot of stuff that feels like padding in this movie.
Now apparently these kids are taking some sort of class on the metaphysical in college because of course we can’t just have the kids go to Alcatraz of their own volition. No, Alex’s teacher finds out about his dreams after he freaks out in class. It’s her and this Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) scene that finally push them to take a small boat out to the island.
Once we arrive on the island then the film really starts to have issues. The problem is since this was obviously not shot on the island, what you are seeing are small separate sets. In a well directed movie, this wouldn’t necessarily be an issue, but here it is. You never really have a sense of space. How long is that hallway? Where is this exactly? Where is it in relation to the other sets? All of these problems are what make the film feel like a lot of just people walking and talking. To where? Who knows? And who cares.
After getting grabbed by a hand and pulled somewhere else, we meet Sammy Mitchell. She starts to tells us the story behind all of this and that she has been reaching out to him in order to bring him to the island. Expect there to be a reason she reached out to him specifically? Only in your dreams. We now learn about her fascination with the occult and that she let some demon out. Apparently, all the people who have died on the island are the source of his power and are trapped on the island by his power. She then explains how this guy allowed in something more evil than the guy could have imagined. Then it cuts away to someone else for a bit. We then come back to her, and he asks why she chose him. Her answer is that she needs a living being to open a door at the end of a tunnel in order to release all the souls trapped on the island. Now comes the stock footage dance that Lisa posted.
While all this is going on, we have the other kids wandering around the island. One of them includes Alex’s brother Richard (Tom Reilly). Richard becomes possessed by this demon. I love the scene with this one girl that he has shortly after getting taken over. It’s like that ridiculous dry hump sexual assault scene from the game Phantasmagoria. Only this scene actually makes some sense since the bad guy did have a history of that sort of thing whereas in the game it’s really random.
With Alex out of his body, the movie now has an excuse for how it can show us, and him, scenes from the past really explaining things. Okay, what’s going on is that apparently Alcatraz was a military outpost before it became a prison. And of course there was a really nasty guy who liked to hire girls, then eat them. After he couldn’t hire hookers and eat them anymore, he fed off the locals. The Native Americans finally got fed up with him and burned him. Unfortunately, he apparently had learned enough about magic that this didn’t do him in really. He had made a pact with the devil according to Sammy. I love the dialogue from the ghosts that almost sound like Sean Connery’s famous opening credits lines from Highlander (1986) that were recorded in a bathroom. Also, I love the quick anti-drug line they threw in with Basil’s exposition dump.
After Basil finally shuts up, although she keeps popping in from now on, the movie basically comes down to a D.W. Griffith cross cutting sequence. On one end you have people fighting the demon and on the other you have Alex (out of body) walking down the tunnel to open the door. Just as the camera seemed to take forever to move through the restaurant, Alex takes his sweet time walking through this tunnel. Almost like they shot all the other scenes of the kids fighting the demon, figured out how long they ran, then shot enough of Alex walking down the tunnel so they could keep cutting back to it. During this is where this lack of a sense of space really comes into play. The demon keeps pounding against a wall in some place and that somehow has an effect on Alex in the tunnel. The demon is hitting his hand against the wall, and then it cuts to Alex’s body to show his hand twist, which then seems to have an affect on his soul moving through the tunnel. It’s all very confusing, and since it’s the climax, it really damages the movie.
At the end, as far as I can tell, Basil joins souls with Alex in some fashion. There’s something there because he can suddenly play the piano at the end. I don’t care.
This film was disappointing. I wasn’t a fan of the opening stuff, but they should have stuck with it all the way through. Yes, they could have improved on the sense of space issue, but I could have forgiven that if I felt trapped and held in a suspenseful atmosphere. Instead, they had to explain things, bring in Toni Basil, the dance number, the ridiculous outfits on her, and comedy bits from other dead people.
In other words, you can skip this one. If you must have Toni Basil in a rock related horror film, then go with Rockula. It’s not great, but it’s better than this. Plus you also get Thomas Dolby and Bo Diddley in that one.
Through the Shattered Lens 