Marc Rocco was the adopted son of Alex Rocco, who we all remember as Moe Greene from The Godfather. He directed this film, as well as Where the Day Takes You. This Wilmington, North Carolina shot movie seems like the favorite of every woman I’ve ever dated and now, as we sit in quarantine, I must again watch it for my wife.
Oh man, this movie. Bobby Keller (Corey Feldman) runs right into Lainie Diamond (Meredith Salenger) at the same time that Coleman Ettinger (Jason Robards) and his wife Gena (Piper Laurie ) are trying to meditate into being soulmates forever and ever. This leads to that most dependable of all teenage tropes, the body switch film.
As Coleman lives Bobby’s life, he is haunted by him in his dreams and must deal with his best friend Dinger (Corey Haim) the rest of his waking hours, as well as Lainie’s boyfriend (William McNamara, Opera) and her mother (Susan Blakely, Over the Top).
So many favorites of mine are in this to try and make me feel better about watching it, like Harry Dean Stanton, Victoria Jackson and, yes, Alex Rocco. Lala Zappa is here as well, as she had agreed to be in the movie only if her boyfriend Haim was in the film too.
Michael Damian’s cover of “Rock On” was a big deal from this movie, with the Coreys and Salinger all appearing in the video.
If you ever wanted to have the lead singer of Starship, Mickey Thomas, sing a song with Mel Torme, this movie is the answer you’ve been looking for.
When this movie was made, both Coreys were getting into drugs and Feldman was all into the world of Michael Jackson, which is why there’s an extender dance sequence. That said — this is pretty much Corey Haim’s last big movie.
The dialogue in this movie upsets me to no end, much less the antics of both Coreys. But there are times when you must love your wife — especially when you are quarantined at home — and you give in and watch a movie with her.
I was telling someone who doesn’t watch movies like I do — well, that could be just about anyone — that this film has a cast packed with stars. That’s when I realized that Hollywood Boulevard has a cast that is all famous to me and probably me alone. I don’t care. These are my people. Join me as I celebrate them.
Candice Rialson, the inspiration for Bridget Fonda’s character in Jackie Brown, stars as Candy Wednesday, new in town and ready to be a big star. She gets an agent named Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, with the same name as his character in A Bucket of Blood) who can’t get her any work until she gets mixed up in a bank robbery.
Those of you who read the site know that I watched this movie specifically because Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov are in it. What kept me around was the fact that this movie is basically making fun of every Corman movie of this era, with the three girls formula and a script pretty much taken from the Bela Lugosi movie The Death Kiss.
Seeing as how this was directed by Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, there are a ton of inside jokes. Bartel’s director character, Eric Von Leppe, is the name of Boris Karloff’s character from The Terror. John Kramer’s character, Duke Mantee, is named for Bogart’s character in The Petrified Forest. Tara Strohmeier’s Jill McBain is named for Claudia Cardinale’s character in Once Upon a Time in the West. You also have a movie named Machete Maidens, almost every Corman director showing up in cameos, Forrest J. Ackerman popping up and Robby the Robot.
This movie was the result of a bet between producer Jon Davison and Roger Corman. Davison believed that he could make the cheapest New World Pictures movie ever, so he was given $60,000 and ten days.
Between Anchorman, Stepbrothers and The Campaign, Adam McKay has made plenty of funny films with Will Ferrell, who stars in this with Mark Wahlberg. Points for Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson playing against type here in a movie where two desk cops learn how to be the kind of supercops you only see on TV.
Allen Gamble and Terry “Yankee Clipper” Hoitz — called because he shot Derek Jeter and cost the team the World Series — are up against the villainous Sir David Ershon (Steve Coogan) in this one. It’s very much a hijinks ensue type of film, but I really enjoyed Michael Keaton as their Captain, Eva Mendes as Allen’s wife and Ice-T as the narrator.
Wrestling fans will be happy to know that Billy Gunn and Road Dogg show up, too.
I had fun with this one, as it’s written and edited really well. Your enjoyment of it depends on how much you like the leads, but it got a lot of laughs here.
Before Mark Steven Johnson made Daredevil and Ghost Rider, he wrote this movie. It reunites The Odd Couple team of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, pretty much letting them run the movie as Max Goldman and John Gustafson Jr., two neighbors who have been at war as long as they can remember.
Now, the arrival of Ariel Truax (Ann-Margaret) creates an even bigger battle, as her beauty and charm is desired by both men. There’s also plenty of great lines for Burgess Meredith as Lemmon’s father (he must have had him when he was 17, given their age difference) and the improbable, near science fiction writing as Kevin Pollak somehow scores Daryl Hannah.
Buck Henry has a nice turn as an IRS man and hey — Christopher McDonald plays a jerk. I mean, is anybody better at it?
This was directed by Donald Petrie, who has sadly infiltrated my DVD player more times than I’d like to claim, thanks to movies like Opportunity Knocks, Mystic Pizza and MissCongeniality.
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were strongly considered for the leads, which would have made this a very different movie.
This is a great set-up from the PR for this film: “A “Diablo Rojo” bus driver, his helper, a priest, and two policemen fall victim to a mysterious spell and end up lost somewhere in the Chiriqui jungle, where they will have to survive the creatures that inhabit the roads, with the old bus as their only refuge.”
Diablo Rojo, or Red Devil, is the name given to the colorful buses that race through the streets of Panama, taking tourists all over and nearly ending their lives with insane driving.
The first movie for director Sol Moreno and the first horror film to come out of Panama, Diablo Rojo PTY makes use of the folklore of its country. I know nothing of Panama’s legends, so this was an interesting trip into the complete unknown.
I now have learned that by the time they are 33, Panamanian witches must commit an act of atrocity worse than eating a baby. I also now know of La Tulivieja, a short woman whose breasts are so full that she must drag them around, followed by ants that drink the milk.
This is a film that has one foot in the 1950’s and another in today, with practical gore and neon hues. It’s unlike anything else that will come out this year, which is an achievement that I mean as a compliment.
You can watch this on Amazon Prime. For more information, check out the official Facebook page.
The ABC Friday Night Movie for November 28, 1980, The Babysitter was directed by Peter Medak, who was also in the chair for movies like The Changeling, Cry for the Strangers, Zorro the Gay Blade, Romeo Is Bleeding, Species II and The Ruling Class. What an amazing lineup of films to have on your resume and such a disparate list of movies.
Dr. Jeff Benedict and his wife Liz (TV movie supercouple William Shatner and Patty Duke) have moved from Seattle to Chicago. Between their daughter Tara (Quinn Cummings, The Goodbye Girl) and the demands of housework, Liz isn’t doing so well. That means they bring in a live-in nanny named Joanna Redwine (Stephanie Zimbalist, before Remington Steele) and that’s when things go to seed.
Before you can say movie of the week, Joanna has Liz drinking again and convinced that Jeff has a mistress. While that game is afoot, she’s also trying to convince Jeff that loading his clown into her cannon while wifey is passed out is beyond a good idea
This is when you fire the babysitter. That said — if they did, we would not have the next hour and change of this movie.
Before it’s over, the bodies of the last family Joanna killed — wrapped in plastic a half decade before Laura Palmer — have showed up, she’s wearing Patty Duke’s lingerie and served up a dinner of raw beef tongue. The family is lucky that they know John Houseman, who saves them all.
I have a weakness for both made for TV movies and ones where babysitters slowly drive a family insane. This movie is at the center of this magnificent cycle and must be experienced. These TV movies are exploitation films, with small budgets and insane stories, that scream at you the entire time they are on the screen.
From the Editor’s Desk: Both of these “hard science” TV movies were produced, in part, by ABC-TV as weekly series pilots — which the network, passed. Regardless of the twenty-years difference between the films, fans have confused the two films — as result of mistaking Gary Lockwood starred “in a TV movie about miners on the moon.”
So, lets review Earth II . . . and examine the elusive, out-of-print and distribution Plymouth.
You wanna see a movie directed by Uncle Rico’s dad, you know from Napoleon Dynamite . . . well, since we just finished off “James Bond Month,” Lazlo Hollyfeld from Real Genius?
Then this is your movie.
Earth II is directed by Jon Gries’s pop, Tom, whose bat-shite crazy TV series resume lead him to directing Jim Brown and Burt Reynolds in 100 Rifles, Charlton Heston in Will Penny, Charles Bronson in Breakout and Breakheart Pass, along with with the ultimate Charles Manson document, 1976 Helter Skelter. Tom Gries died on January 3, 1977, shortly after — and amazingly, somehow, making Muhammad Ali not look completely incompetent — completing 1977’s The Greatest (but it’s still pretty bad, even with Ernest Borgnine of Marty in it).
But let’s get back to Earth II.
As we all know, 2001: A Space Odyssey was a game changer and everyone wanted back in the sci-fi game. So here we have Gary Lockwood — Frank Poole from Kubrick’s classic — as well as Mariette Hartley from Gene Roddenberry’s endless cycle of post-Star Trek endeavors, mainly Genesis II. Yep, that’ s Anthony Franciosa (Tenebre), Lew Ayres (Battle for the Planet of the Apes), and Hari Rhodes (Malcolm MacDonald from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) along for the interstellar intrique.
As with most all U.S. TV movies, Earth II was an overseas theatrical feature, known as Killer Satellites, and it pushed its 2001, Apes, and Star Trek connections (Mariette Hartley was in one of that series’ popular episodes as Spock’s love interest) in its marketing materials. And it worked. But the foreign box office was better than the U.S. TV ratings; as result, Earth II wasn’t picked up for a weekly series as intended. But Gary Lockwood didn’t mind; he’s on record as saying he hated working on the production, eschewing it overly complex, sociopolitcal plotting.
Since this is very easily obtained as a still-in-print DVD and VOD stream, the reviews on this (rife with plot spoilers) are many. The basic gist of the story, if you haven’t guessed, is about a “second Earth,” that is, an orbital international space station. When things go amiss in Communist Red China and a nuclear missile comes to threaten the station’s 2000-strong pacifist inhabitants, they search for a way to solve the problem — without violence.
So, is Lockwood right?
Yeah. This is a bit slow to the point of boring. And it is complex, way too much for the young minds sci-fi-on-TV was geared for. And that complexity also resulted in the cancellation of the Planet of the Apes TV series and for Roddenberry’s Genesis II (and its reboots as Planet Earth and Strange New World) not going to series. Natch for Rodenberry’s The Questor Tapes.
But in terms of science accuracy, Earth II is stunning and the special effects are effective — just remember: in 1970 years. One can’t help but wonder if the creators behind TV’s Babylon 5 and the later SyFy Channel Battlestar Galacticareboot pinched from this classic TV movie (and we all know the debates regarding Babylon 5 vs. Star Trek: Deep Space 9). If you enjoy your sci-fi with intelligence, without the Lucasian Flash Gordon trimmings, then this “Before Star Wars” romp is for you.
This one is widely available on DVD and all the usual VOD platforms, but we found a free version — a really clean rip — over on You Tube.
Earth II was one of the many films we didn’t get around to reviewing during our month-long Star Wars ripoffs and galactic droppings month. You can catch up on those films with our Before and After Star Wars explorations. And since there’s a little bit o’ post-apoc in Earth II, be sure to check out our two-part post-apoc blowout with our Atomic Dustbins, Part 1 and Part 2. And since were on the subject of both Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, be sure to check out our “Exploring (Before “Star Wars”): The Russian Antecedents of 2001: A Space Odyssey” featurette.
Plymouth (1991)
“Remember that TV movie about miners on the moon?”
Did you hear the one about the 8 million dollar TV movie — the most expensive ever made, in part by ABC-TV — that no one watched? Well, they watched, but forgot all about it, soon after. Then they wracked their brains years later trying to remember the film, scouring the Internet to find it?
Well, it wasn’t a tween-teen fever dream. The film is real. And it was made a lot later than you remember, because you’re remembering Earth II (1971), itself another, well-made TV movie pilot (and overseas theatrical) produced by MGM-Warner Bros. for ABC-TV. So, yes, in 1990, you really did read an article about Plymouth’s production in Starlog Magazine — complete with that memory-haunting, (now, easily Googled) black and white production still of miners decked out in Alien (1979)-styled miner-space suits exiting a pressure hatch (also, the lead, here isn’t Gary Lockwood, but the always likable Dale Midkiff).
Plymouth — which debuted on Sunday, May 26, 1991 — was a co-production between ABC-TV, Walt Disney Studios (their Touchstone PIctures arm), and Italy’s Rai uno radiotelevisione. As result of Rai’s involvement, Plymouth played as a theatrical feature (?) in the Eurasian marketplace. It eventually turned up on European television (in the U.K. in July 2001), and as a Spanish-language Argentinian VHS. After its stateside debut on ABC-TV, Plymouth replayed once more as part of ABC-TV’s “The Wonderful World of Disney” that aired on Sunday nights (which ended production in 1997).
Then, Plymouth vanished from stateside television. It’s never been syndicated for UHF-TV nor for the retro-channels, such as the sci-fi-centric Comet. While DVDs are in the market, they’re grey market DVDr, since Plymouth has never officially been issued to VHS or DVD in the United States.
During a 1998 interview regarding the 30th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), actor Gary Lockwood, who starred in Earth II, said he hated working on the ABC-TV project due to “its complexities.” And that’s the problem with Plymouth: too complex (expensive) for its own good. Lockwood, of course, was referring to Earth II’s plotting — and Plymouth has its plot complexities. So, yeah, this isn’t Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999 or its predecessor, U.F.O: so no goofy aliens, here. But Plymouth is dangerously close to Battlestar Galactica territory via its plot and character departments.
Sure, Plymouth, like Earth II, is a “hard science fiction” piece that deals with the physical and psychological challenges facing the first moon base colony populated by the citizens of a Northwestern U.S. mining-timber town displaced by a corporation’s Chernobyl-Love Canal-styled disaster. UNIDAC, the company responsible, also operates a financially-failing helium-3 mining operation on the moon. A deal is stuck: the citizens of Plymouth, Oregon, will move to the moon and run the operation.
Plymouth completed production in 1990, remained shelved for year, and then was passed over as a series replacement. ABC-TV declined to purchase the series because, “It just didn’t meet our needs.” (And they probably knew another BSG flop when they saw one.)
While the production values are stellar (Lockheed served as tech advisors), and the writing (from director Lee David Zlotoff of TV’s MacGyver fame) and acting are on equal: this is all too “Battlestar Galactica on the moon,” with little action and too much human yakity-yak drama: e.g., a UNIDAC worker and Plymouth citizen (the town’s female doctor) engage in forbidden love that leads to an outlawed pregnancy, teen-bickering love, a souped-up moon buggy prototype (no, not Brad Pitt’s Ad Astra!), and the mischievous son of the town’s now pregnant doctor as the series’ resident “Boxey,” skirting (weekly, if this went to series) security protocols, as he finds himself (and a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt) trapped in a construction-mining tunnel. Oh, and a solar flair hits the moon, which increases cancer risks. You see where this is going: no space battles, no aliens. But, eventually: juvenile delinquent moon buggy racing.
If Plymouth did go to series — as did NBC-TV’s 1993 to 1996 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea reimaging, seaQuest DSV (by producer Steven Speilberg and writer Rockne S. O’Bannon) — it would have, in order to survive in the ratings, ditch its “hard science” trappings for aliens, etc. (and SQV brought on a talking dolphin!), which caused Roy Scheider quitting that show. Yeah, Plymouth probably would have gone “Daggit,” too, for the kids, and brought on the eventual human androids kerfuffles.
You can learn more about the production of Plymouth at the “Say, Hello Spaceman” blog in a discussion about the impressive space suits’ creation, as well as the suits’ repurposing in Unearthed (1991), The Outer Limits: The Voyage Home (1995), and Star Command (1996). The “Beamjocky” blog on Live Journals also delves into the suits and the “hard science” of helium-3.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Could a major infectious disease cripple America? This TV movie presents this far-fetched…wait, I’ve been inside my house for two months because of one? Never mind. This movie is quaint by comparison to the life we’ve been living.
Dr. Hannah Cole (former bionic Lindsay Wagner) finds herself investigating an epidemic while her Tom Wopat-plated husband takes the kids camping and gets sick.
How did the disease start? A lab? A bat? Nope. Bad shrimp on an airplane, the kind of thing that would give Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the sweats. Here it gets into a coke mule’s stomach. He gets cut open for the drugs, everyone dies and the world pays the price for that sweet, sweet white powder trade.
If you love Elizabeth Pena and enjoy movies where people just rant exposition at you, have I got some great news for you! You can watch this on YouTube:
Someday, scholars will speak in awe of the post-Star Trek Satanic twosome of Shatner films, which would be this movie and The Devil’s Rain! Until then, maniacs like me will yell into the uncaring silence and tell you that for a shining moment — or literally two — the once and future Kirk would die twice (spoilers be damned, again literally) while facing off with the Lord of the Flies.
Originally airing on CBS on February 13, 1973, I first learned of this movie in a TV Guide Book of Lists that featured Anton LaVey discussing the most Satanic TV moments of the last decade. This movie has it all: Mario Bava lighting, a cursed altar, Shatner drunk and railing against humanity, and finally, a bunch of Old Hollywood actors daring to sacrifice a young child to the Left Hand Path.
Sure, the flight from London to New York is supposed to be mainly cargo — that druid altar I hinted at before — but the plane still has plenty of talent on board. There’s Captain Ernie Slade (Chuck Connors), as well as an architect (Roy Thinnes, who would enter this territory again in The Norliss Tapes) and his wife (Jane Merrow, Hands of the Ripper) who have placed said altar on board. There’s also Paul Kovalik (Shatner), a priest who has lost his way, and super-rich Glenn Farlee (Buddy Ebsen, who makes it extraordinary as it’s basically Jed Clampett and Barnaby Jones against Satan). You also get Tammy Grimes — whose daughter Amanda Plummer looks just like her — as well as Lynn Loring (also in the occultist BlackNoon), Paul Winfield, France Nuyen (Code Name: Diamond Head), Will Hutchins, Darleen Carr (she’s in the TV remake of Piranha), Russell Johnson (The Professor!) and H. M. Wynant (Hangar 18).
Some people have the wrong idea that this movie, shot on the sound stages at CBS Studio Center, is one of Shatner’s worst films. They’re wrong. This movie is everything. Near the end, my wife looked at me and said, “This is pretty intense for TV.” I told her that life was cheap in 1973.
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