Editor’s Note: This review originally ran on November 22, 2018. We are rerunning it as part of our “Lee Majors Week” of film reviews.

When I was a kid, there was an urban legend that Lee Majors moved to a small town outside Youngstown, Ohio, because the locals didn’t care what a big star he was. Everyone had an encounter with him, but many found his wife Farah Fawcett to be off-putting. I don’t know if these stories are true, but I want them to be. I do know that Lee and Farah did inspire the song “Midnight Train to Georgia,” though.

Let me sum this one up in short sentences: Priceless emeralds. Hidden jewels. Hungry piranha. Model shoot. Late 1970’s decor. Exotic Rio de Janeiro locations. Suspicion. Jealousy. More piranha.

Other than Lee Majors, this film is a cavalcade of my favorite stars. Well, maybe not favorite. But close. Karen Black is here! And there’s  Margaux Hemingway, who is as good at being a supermodel as she is bad as an actress. And here’s James Franciscus (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) as the main guy you’re supposed to hate. And is that the doctor from Total Recall, Roy Brocksmith? Former NFL quarterback, NHRA drag racer and December 1980 Playgirl centerfold of the month Dan Pastorini come on down! Wow! It’s Anthony Steffen from The Night Evelyn Came Out of Her Grave! And finally, it’s the man whose The Sixth Sense ruined the syndicated episodes of Night Gallery, Hour Magazine host Gary Collins, the bane of my childhood!

This whole mess (but we love it here at B&S!) is directed by Antonio Margheriti, who we all know and love as the creator of perhaps the finest movie ever made, Yor, Hunter from the Future. The film was also one of three films that Fawcett-Majors Studios co-produced in 1979 — the others being Steel (also reviewed this week, look for it) starring Lee, and Farrah’s Sunburn . . . with Art Carney and Charles Grodin!

Killer Fish is more caper than Jaws rip-off. But hey, how many movies have Lee Majors sitting in a limo with a cane that has a crocodile’s shrunken head on it, much less him swimming through piranha? And that’s why Lee rocks our VHS world at B&S About Movies.

Editor’s Note: We originally ran this review on January 30, 2019, as part of our “Viking Week” of film reviews. We’re rerunning it as part of our “Lee Majors Week” of reviews.

Look, I can hear you laughing. An 11th-century Viking prince — played by Lee Majors of all people — sets sails for North America to find his missing father, who has been captured by Native Americans. Yes, it’s ridiculous. But it’s also directed by Charles B. Pierce, who brought us The Town That Dreaded Sundown, The Bootleggers, and The Legend of Boggy Creek.

Along with Majors, the film also boasts a packed cast: Cornel Wilde (Gargoyles, Sharks’ Treasure), Mel Ferrer, Jack Elam, Christopher Connelly (Hot Dog from 1990: The Bronx Warriors), NFL Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, former Tarzan Denny Miller (always remembered as Carol Brady’s ex-college football star boyfriend, Tank) and Kathleen Freeman (Sister Mary Stigmata from The Blues Brothers). Well, in my world it’s a star-studded cast!

It also features Jimmy Clem as Olif. In addition to being in nearly every one of Pierce’s films, he was also famous for owning and breeding one of the most respected and revered Brahman cattle herds in the world.

The major highlight of this film is the wacky mask that Lee Majors wears, along with his little mustache. It’s really quite breathtaking. Really, this movie is beyond ridiculous and it’s kind of shocking that it ever made it to the screen. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t love it and won’t try to put it on if you ever visit my house, dear reader. It’s the perfect movie to be enjoyed alongside all manner of mind-altering substances!

How did this make it to the big screen? It was a Fawcett-Majors co-production (made the same year as the studio’s Somebody Killed Her Husband starring wife, Farrah) with Charles Pierce and AIP Studios working the distribution; as result, it was Pierce’s first film with a major Hollywood studio. Courtesy of a pretty cool interview with Lee by the AV Club, as he talked about his work on Ash vs. Evil Dead, it’s learned Lee took the deal as result of being paid $500,000 and 10% of the profits — and that it shot in sunny Tampa, Florida. To that end: many of the vikings are played by Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And let’s not forget that Lee was, himself, an ex-high school and college football player, so he had a fun time — as he says in interviews — on this shoot.

Shout! Factory released this movie on a double disk with The Barbarians. You can get it right here.

Sure, the IMDB description says, “A young girl and her dog make a daring journey into the wilderness where she discovers the true meaning of nature, sacrifice and life.”

The truth is that this movie feels like it was shot cinéma vérité style, with no one cluing the grandfather that he was in an actual movie as he rants and raves. He also has flashbacks to when he was young and was in a gang that continually yells, “The strength of the wolf is the pack! The strength of the pack is the wolf!”

Also, this is a family-friendly movie that features a young girl nearly dying and a dog being bitten by a snake not just once, but twice and the second time, we know it’s coming which makes seeing a gorgeous animal brought low twice as painful.

Then, after we go through a journey through the desert that feels like we just did it ourselves, the film becomes about a prom and Jean’s date’s sister fixing her up in what should be Pretty Woman style mirth but ends up feeling like the central relationship in Bound if you know what I’m talking about — and as the great man says — and I think you do.

Wait, I can hear you wondering, “Where is Lee Majors?”

He plays a rock.

I’m not joking, Majors is the voice of a Spiritual Stone that ends up fixing everything. I have no idea who wants to see a movie where a young girl nearly loses her dog, goes to the prom, loses her grandfather and there’s a rock with the same voice as Steve Austin.

But man, I’m glad I saw it, because the scene still makes me laugh just remembering it.

You can watch this on Tubi. And you totally should, but you know, do all the drugs first.

William Wyler is the most nominated director in Academy Awards history, as well as the only director in Academy history to direct three Best Picture-winning films (for which he also won Best Director*), for directing thirty-six Oscar-nomimated performers and for being the director of more Best Picture nominees than anyone else.

For his final movie, he decided on a script by Jesse Hill Ford and Stirling Silliphant that was in turn based on Ford’s 1965 novel The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones. While a work of fiction, it was based on an actual event that had happened in  Humboldt, Tennessee, where Ford lived. This movie did him no favors in that town**. Silliphant’s life may not have been so turbulent, but he did write The SIlent Flute with Bruce Lee, as well as the film he won an Oscar for writing, In the Heat of the Night.

The titular L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne) is a wealthy funeral director in Tennessee looking for a lawyer to represent him in his divorce from his much younger wife Emma (Lola Falana), who is having an affair with police officer Willie Joe Worth (Anthony Zerbe) which has left her with child.

The problem is that Jones is black and Worth is white.

Worth begs Emma not to contest the divorce, but she wants to keep living the moneyed life she has become accustomed to. Worth ends up beating her and then works with his partner Stanley Bumpas (Arch Johnson) to arrest Jones after he refuses to drop his case. Yet the man becomes shocked at what he’s done and at how cold Bumpas is as he goes about making the crime look like black-on-black crime.

Worth is willing to goto jail, but the crime is covered up by attorney Oman Hedgepath (Lee J. Cobb), but justice somewhat wins out, as Sonny Boy Mosby (Yaphet Kottot) gets revenge for a beating he endured by killing Bumpas. Hedgepath loses the love of his family, with his nephew Steve (Lee Majors) leaving the firm and taking his wife Nella (Barbara Hershey in one of first roles) away from all of this madness.

There is a major moment in film history here. This film marks the first time that a black man killed a white man on screen in an American movie.It was also the debut of both Falana and Brenda Sykes. And it has blood the color of an Italian horror movie.

*Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives and Ben-Hur.

**Ford dealth with numerous threats, mainly from white residents of Humboldt, when it came to this story and the ensuring movie, as well as his second book,The Feast of St. Barnabas. When black players were barred from the high school football team post-integraton, Ford’s son, the team captain, began to receive death threats of his own. This may be the reason why Ford shot a 19-year-old black soldier, Pvt. George Henry Doaks Jr., when he saw the man’s car in his private driveway and believed he was someone out to hurt his son. In a strange moment of fate, Doaks’ female companion was related to the woman who had served as the basis for this story. He was initially indicted on a charge of first degree murder but, in what could be cruel irony, he benefitted from the same Southern justice he had written against. All along, he claimed that he had fired his rifle and not aimed, hoping to scare off the car. The incident pretty much ruined his life and he never finished another novel. His life took him on a journey from liberal to far right conservative, writing for the USA Today, in which he defended Oliver North and complained about the ACLU. After a book of his letters was published and he went through open heart surgery, he grew depresse and shot himself in 1996.

You can watch this on Tubi.