Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, a detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on You tube!
This week, Griff gets a storyline! Who? Oh yeah, Griff! He’s like the photographer who hangs out at the detective agency sometimes. He was played by Eddie Cibrian and he was listed in the opening credits so I guess he was supposed to be a major character, despite never doing or even saying anything.
Anyway, on to this week’s episode….
Episode 1.19 “Epilogue”
(Dir by Reza Badiyi, originally aired on April 27th, 1996)
Griff is concerned about his old friends, RJ (Jared Murphy) and Rene O’Gill (Julianne Morrs). Their mother has just recently died and Rene suspects that she was murdered by their stepfather, Robert Houston (Ben Murphy). RJ, meanwhile, is a junky for both adrenaline and amphetamines and his girlfriend, Candy (Carmen Electra), seems like she might be a bad influence. Both RJ and Rene are due to receive a good deal of money from their trust funds and, if anything happened to them, that money would go to Robert.
Wanting to learn the truth about her mother’s death, Rene hires Mitch and Ryan to investigate. Because Mitch is a terrible private eye, he decides to have Donna go undercover to discover if Robert is hiding anything. Keep in mind that Donna does not work for the detective agency, has got a club to run, is already training to become a lifeguard, and has absolutely no investigative experience. And, of course, it turns out that there really wasn’t any need to have Donna go undercover because, just as Mitch is terrible at investigating stuff, Robert is terrible at covering up the fact that he’s a murderer.
How does Mitch solve this case? When he discovers that someone has been calling Rene’s answering machine and getting her messages without her knowledge, Mitch says, “Dial Star 69.” That’s the extent of Mitch’s detective work in this episode.
(Answering machines and Star 69, could this show be any more of a product of the 90s?)
The main problem here is that the episode revolves around Griff and his romantic feelings for Rene but since Griff is a character who has only appeared in a handful of episodes and never really made much of an impression, it’s hard to really get either emotionally or mentally involved with his story. When RJ is killed during a jet ski race, Griff gets upset and blames Robert but again, we don’t know Griff, we don’t know RJ, and we don’t know Robert.
The best that can be said about this episode is that it features some fun flirtation between David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon, though not nearly enough. Probably the most interesting thing about this episode is that it tries to be noticeably more racy than previous episodes and the editing often feels so abrupt that it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there was a more explicit version of the episode made for Europe. Carmen Electra plays a femme fatale here and she does do a good job of being playfully evil. Later, she would join the cast of regular Baywatch, playing a different character who didn’t murder anyone.
Next week …. oh, who knows? I just want to get to the second season already. That’s when all the aliens and undead Vikings start to show up.
New York. The prohibition era. The Coll Brothers, Vincent (Christopher Bradley) and Peter (Jeff Griggs), are sick of working for the Irish gangster, O’Malley (William Anthony La Valle). They want to hang out at the Cotton Club with big time gangsters like Lucky Luciano (Matt Servitto), Legs Diamond (Will Kempe), and Dutch Schultz (Bruce Nozick). Vincent has fallen in love with Lotte (Rachel York), a singer at the club but the club’s owner, Owney Madden (Jack Conley), makes it clear that Lotte is too good for a low-rent thug. After killing O’Malley, Vincent and Peter go to work for Dutch Schultz but soon, they grew tired of the low wages that Schultz pays them. The Colls decide to strike out on their own, leading to all out war with New York’s organized crime establishment.
Mad Dog Coll was one of two gangster movies that Menaham Golan produced, back-to-back, in Russia. In fact, Mad Dog Coll may be the first American film in which Russia stood in for America instead of the other way around. Though this film was produced after Golan broke up with his longtime producing partner, Yoram Globus, Mad Dog Coll still has a definite Cannon feel to it. It is low-budget, fast-paced, unapologetically pulpy, and entertaining as Hell. For a Golan production, the performances are surprisingly good. Bruce Nozick steals the entire movie as crazy Dutch Schultz. None of it is subtle but it is enjoyable in the way that only a Greydon Clark-directed, Menahem Golan-produced gangster film can be. 1920s New York is recreated on Russian soundstages. The threadbare production design and cardboard cityscape brings a Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker-era Dr. Who feel to the movie. All that is missing is The Master brewing up moonshine and the Daleks exterminating the Chicago Outfit.
Through the Shattered Lens 