Runaway (1984, directed by Michael Crichton)

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

The year is 1991 and humans are using robots for everyday tasks. Because the budget is low and Michael Crichton had already done Westworld, none of the robots are humanoid or capable of original thought. The majority of them are boxy and they look harmless until they malfunction. All police departments now have a division of cops trained to deal with robots. Being a part of the “runaway squad” is not prestigious but it’s perfect for Sgt. Jack Ramsey (Tom Selleck), a good cop who suffers from a crippling fear of heights.

Ramsey and his new partner, Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes), investigate a murder that was apparently committed by a robot. Their investigation leads them to Jackie Rogers (Kirstie Alley) and her boyfriend, renegade scientist Charles Luther (Gene Simmons). Luther has not only programmed robots to kill but he’s also designed smart bullets that can lock onto a target’s unique body heat.

It’s hard to resist Runaway. Stalwart Tom Selleck vs an overacting Gene Simmons? Kirstie Alley as a neurotic femme fatale? Robots spiders that inject acid into their victims? Remote control smart bombs that chase cars down the highway? Countless point-of-view shots of the smart bullets tracking their victims? It’s an entertaining B-movie, no matter what you may think of the plot or some of the acting. I don’t know what logic led to Michael Crichton casting Gene Simmons as a crazed computer scientist but I’m glad that he did. Watching a movie like this, you can see why Tom Selleck remains a television star. He doesn’t have the bigger-than-life persona of a movie star. But Selleck’s mild persona works perfectly when matched up with Gene Simmons acting like the phantom of the park. And then there’s Kirstie Alley, playing a dangerous secretary with the right mix of sexiness and humor. Cynthia Rhodes may have been the female lead but Kristie Alley is the one who stole the movie.

When Runaway was first released in 1984, it was expected to be a hit but it was instead overshadowed by another film about killer future robots, The Terminator. Needless to say, the simple heroics of Runaway can’t compete with intense action of The Terminator and even Gene Simmons at his most unhinged can’t beat Arnold Schwarzenegger saying, “I’ll be back,” but Michael Crichton’s vision of a future full of killer roombas still feels prescient today.

Happy 80th Birthday to Tom Selleck – Celebrate with this clip from QUIGLEY DOWN UNDER (1990)!

Posted on January 29, 2025 by Bradley Crain

Tom Selleck has been a part of my life almost as far back as I can remember. I was seven years old when MAGNUM P.I. premiered on T.V., so I literally grew up on the adventures of Hawaii’s best private eye! Selleck is such a likable and charismatic screen presence.

My wife and I are celebrating his birthday by watching my very favorite Tom Selleck movie, QUIGLEY DOWN UNDER (1990). I love this scene where Wyoming cowboy Matthew Quigley first arrives at the Australian ranch of Elliott Marston (Alan Rickman), and then proceeds to prove his prowess with a long distance rifle to a bunch of smirkers.

Enjoy, my friends, and Happy Birthday, Mr. Selleck!

Film Review: Coma (dir by Michael Crichton)

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Michael Crichton’s 1978 film, Coma, tells the story of strange things happening at a Boston hospital.

Seemingly healthy patients are having complications during routine surgery, complications that leave them brain dead. Dr. Susan Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold) thinks that there’s something bigger going on than just routine medical complications. First, her best friend (Lois Chiles) falls into a coma while undergoing an abortion. Then, Tom Selleck falls into a coma while having knee surgery. Dr. Wheeler investigates and discovers that all of the patients were operated on in the same operating room and that all of them were shipped to a mysterious facility after their surgery.

Yep, it sounds like a conspiracy. However, no one is willing to listen to Dr. Wheeler. Not her boyfriend (Michael Douglas). Not Dr. George (Rip Torn), the chief anetheisologist. Not Dr. George Harris (Richard Widmark), the chief of surgery. Dr. Wheeler thinks that it’s all a conspiracy!

And, of course, it is. As the old saying goes, the only thing that a conspiracy needs to succeed is for people to be remarkably stupid and almost everyone in Coma is remarkably stupid. Admittedly, some of them are in on the conspiracy but it’s still rather odd how many people apparently don’t see anything strange about healthy people going into a comas and then being shipped to a mystery facility.

Coma is probably best known for the scene where Susan manages to sneak into the mystery facility and she finds herself in a room full of suspended bodies. Visually, it’s an impressive scene. It’s truly creepy and it also captures the detached sterility that most people hate about medical facilities. At the same time, it’s also the only visually striking moment in the entire film. Every other scene in Coma feels flat. Whenever I’ve watched this film, I’m always a little bit shocked whenever anyone curses because Coma looks more like an old made-for-TV film than anything you would ever expect to see in a theater.

My point is that Coma is a remarkably boring film. It has a potentially interesting story but my God, is this movie ever a slog. It’s pretty easy to guess what’s going on at the institute so there’s not a whole lot of suspense to watching Susan try to figure it all out. When the truth is revealed, it’s not exactly a shocking moment. For that matter, you’ll also be able to guess which doctor is actually going to turn out to be the villain. There’s really no surprises to be found.

Coma was the second feature film to be directed by Michael Crichton. With the exception of the scenes in the institute, the visual flair that Crichton showed in Westworld is nowhere to be found in Coma. The film moves at a tortuously slow place. A part of me suspects that, as a doctor, Crichton related so much to the film’s characters that he didn’t realize how dull they would be for those us who don’t look at a character like Rip Torn’s Dr. George and automatically think, “He’s just like that arrogant bastard I worked under during my residency!” Call it the Scrubs syndrome.

For some reason, Coma is a film that people often recommend to me. I don’t know why. Trying to sit through it nearly put me in a coma.

Did You See The Sun Rise? (1982, directed by Ray Austin)

Posted on April 12, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Ivan (Bo Svenson) is a KGB colonel who, working under the guise of being a diplomat, has set up operations on Hawaii. During the Vietnam War, Ivan tortured and brainwashed an American POW named TC (Roger E. Mosely), placing a hypnotic suggestion in his brain on just the off-chance that Ivan would need a Manchurian candidate to do some dirty work at some point in the future. With the help of another former POW, Sebastian Nuzo (James Whitmore, Jr.), Ivan plans to activate TC and then use him to assassinate the visiting prime minister of Japan. What Ivan hasn’t counted on is that TC has two friends looking out for him, a club owner named Rick (Larry Manetti) and a laid-back, Hawaiian-shirt loving private investigator named Magnum (Tom Selleck).

Did You See The Sun Rise? Is it a movie or is it just a two-hour episode of the original Magnum P.I.? I think it’s both because, while it’s definitely an episode of TV series (it was, in fact, the premiere episode of Magnum‘s third season and the fact that it was a special, extra-long episode shows how popular Magnum was back in the 80s), it’s also good enough that it can stand on its own and be viewed and appreciated even by those who have never seen any other episodes of the show. For the most part, Magnum P.I. was a breezy detective show that mixed comedy and mystery-solving. Occasionally, though, the show would do a more serious episode and, more of than not, that episode would deal with Magnum, T.C., and Rick’s time in Vietnam. (At the time it premiered, Magnum was unique in that it was one of the only shows to feature characters who had served in Vietnam without portraying them as being unhinged, unemployable, or potential threats to society. Magnum and his friends had been effected by their experiences in Vietnam but, unlike someone like Rambo, they were not solely defined by their status as being veterans of what was then America’s least popular war.) Of those serious shows, Did You See The Sun Rise? is the best example.

There’s a lot to recommend Did You See The Sun Rise? It’s well-acted by series regulars Selleck, Manetti, Mosely, and John Hillerman. Bo Svenson plays a great villain and even his Russian accent is more credible than you’d probably expect it to be. The Vietnam flashbacks are handled well. The episode has an unexpected twist, one that daringly kills off one of the show’s semi-regular supporting characters. Even the entire Manchurian candidate plot, even if it is a little more out there than Magnum usually got, is handled well.

And then there’s that final scene. Did You See The Sun Rise? ends with a freeze frame of Magnum doing something that TV show heroes didn’t normally do in 1982. You can’t blame him, of course. It’s a satisfying ending but it still leaves you knowing that nothing is ever going to be same for any of these characters ever again. In that final scene, Did You See The Sun Rise? takes things further than most shows would have the guts to do. The ending may not seem as shocking today but you have to remember that this episode aired long before networks like HBO regularly challenged the assumptions of what a show’s main character could or could not do on television.

The original Magnum P.I., including Did You See The Sun Rise?, is available for free on Amazon Prime.

Film Review: An Innocent Man (1989, directed by Peter Yates)

Posted on June 18, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

Jimmie Rainwood (Tom Selleck) is an aeronautics engineer who, with the exception of once getting arrested for marijuana possession in college, has lived a clean and productive life. Mike Parnell (David Rasche) is a corrupt narcotics detective with a raging coke habit. When Parnell and his partner, Scalise (Richard Young), get a tip about a house where drugs are hidden, Parnell is so coked up that he gets the address wrong. They end up breaking into Jimmie’s house and, when Jimmie steps out of the bathroom holding a hair dryer, Saclise shoots him.

Jimmie survives getting shot but that’s the least of his problems. In order to cover up their mistake, Parnell and Scalise frame Jimmie. They replace the hair dryer with a gun. They plant drugs in Jimmie’s house. Because of his previous marijuana conviction, no one believes Jimmie when he says he was set up. Convicted of a crime that he didn’t commit, Jimmie is sentenced to six years in prison. While his wife (Laila Robins) does everything that she can to get him released, Jimmie is preyed upon by the other prisoners. His only friend is Virgil (F. Murray Abraham), a veteran prisoner who shows Jimmie that he’s going to have to do some terrible things to survive being in prison.

As he showed when he directed Bullitt, the late Peter Yates was a director who could make even the most conventional genre material feel fresh and that is what he did with An Innocent Man. Made at a time when American leaders bragged about their devotion to the war on drugs, An Innocent Man is critical of both the police and a legal system that cares more about punishment than rehabilitation. Even if the plot is predictable, the film is gritty enough to make an impression. Jimmie is so victimized and Parnell and Scalise are so smug that, by the time Jimmie finally has a chance to orchestrate his revenge, you can’t wait to see the cops get what’s coming to them.

Part of the appeal of An Innocent Man is that it features actors who you normally would not expect to appear in a film like this. Tom Selleck, best-known for playing upright authority figures, plays a frightened man who is forced to sacrifice his humanity to survive. When the movie started, I was skeptical that Selleck could pull off the role but, by the end of the film, he had the thousand-yard stare of a man who had been to Hell and back. Meanwhile, David Rasche, best known for his work in sitcoms, is more than convincing as the most corrupt narc around. Best of all is F. Murray Abraham, playing the seasoned convict who knows how to get things done in prison. When he tells Jimmie that he has to “take of care of this,” even if it means committing a real crime, you believe him. By the end of An Innocent Man, nobody’s innocent anymore.

A Movie A Day #255: Her Alibi (1989, directed by Bruce Beresford)

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Tom Selleck is Phil Blackwood, a best-selling mystery author who is suffering from writer’s block. Paulina Porizkova in Nina, a beautiful Romanian who has been accused of murder. When Phil sees Nina being arraigned in court, it is love at first sight. He provides her with a false alibi and invites her to stay with him while he writes a book based on her case. At first, Phil thinks that she is innocent but he soon has his doubts, especially after Nina shows off her skills as a knife thrower.

1989 was a strange year for Australian director Bruce Beresford. On the one hand, he directed Driving Miss Daisy, which went on to win the Oscar for the best picture. On the other hand, he also directed Her Alibi, a disjointed comedy that feels like an extended episode of Magnum P.I. (Even Sellecks’ narration feels like a throwback to his star-making role. But if Phil is a best-selling writer, why does his narration sound so clunky and clichéd?) Her Alibi is a predictable film, not really bad but just very bland. It tries to duplicate the style of a classic screwball comedy but it lacks the bite necessary to make much of an impression. On the plus side, the great William Daniels was given a few good lines as Phil’s caustic agent and Paulina Porizkova was absolutely beautiful. The scene where Nina gives Phil a haircut almost makes the movie worth it.

One final note: When watching Her Alibi, be sure to pay attention to the scene where Phil holds up his latest novel. The book is so thin that it looks like it is only 20 pages long, at the most.

Hallmark Review: Jesse Stone: Lost In Paradise (2015, dir. Robert Harmon)

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Valerie Troutman

Well, it’s been 5 years since I last watched a Jesse Stone movie. That was Jesse Stone: No Remorse (2010). I remember that one being quite awful. This one isn’t. I hope this is a sign that Hallmark is pivoting when it comes to the material in their films. Yes, it’s just an average detective story, but it looks, feels, and uses much more adult material. Thank goodness! At times I feel like I’m watching Hallmark: The Heart Of Infantile Adults network. Yes, Jesse bitches a little bit about cellphones in this, but I buy that as part of his character, not as something put in to pander to people who don’t like cellphones. In fact, he really doesn’t complain about cellphones in general, but about texting.

The first question on your mind is probably whether you can jump into the series with this film. Yes, but you will feel like you have been dropped into a moving current. You really won’t be lost, but it seems to very much pick up where it left off. In this case, Jesse Stone (Tom Selleck) is working in Paradise, Massachusetts. The movie revolves around an unsolved killing that has been attributed to a man known as the Boston Ripper, played by Luke Perry. But it’s still an open case cause they really can’t quite pin it on him even though they have put him behind bars for three similar murders. Stone is curious to figure it out.

There’s also this subplot involving this girl that Stone finds on the street and helps out. It might have ties to earlier material, but the only tie to the material in this movie I noticed is that helping her is like preventing a possible future victim of someone like the Boston Ripper.

There’s honestly not much else to say. The case is somewhat interesting, but the movie really isn’t about the case in particular. It’s like the title suggests, Jesse Stone is lost in the metaphorical paradise and lives in the literal town of Paradise. It’s about a transitory period in his life. Heck, they even put up this title card at the start just in case you don’t pick up on that.