We love Bigfoot movies enough to have an entire Letterboxd list devoted to them. Ape Canyon offers something that no other film on that list does. It’s a life crisis film wrapped up in a need to find a living sasquatch.
Cal Piker (Jackson Trent, who also was in Bad Witch) reappears in the life of his sister Samantha (Anna Fagan) and demands that she go to Oregon with him to look for Bigfoot, a trip that he has paid for with her credit card.
The trip to Ape Canyon means facing danger and being guided by the Bigfoot Investigation Organization, which starts with everyone’s money being stolen and then the group left in the woods to die.
Just as much a road trip and exploration of what happens when life doesn’t live up to our dreams, Ape Canyon is anything but just another bigfoot movie. Joshua Land, its director, also co-directed the aforementioned Bad Witch, which also nicely sidesteps convention. I really liked how past meetings with the mysterious monster are only shown in animated form. And now, I’m interested to see what he and screenwriter Harrison Demchick do next.
Ape Canyon is available on demand from Indie Rights. You can learn more on the official Facebook page.
As part of the launch of Cliffhangers, NBC was really betting on Susan Anton. She’d started by singing commercial jingles for Muriel Cigarettes and the Serta Perfect Sleeper Mattress. She also had about thirty appearances on The Merv Griffin Show before getting one of the weirdest national TV show chances ever: a summer replacement variety series on ABC, Mel and Susan Together, produced by the Osmond Brothers.
He wasn’t a household name and no one knew who she was.
The show was off the air in four weeks, but she was picked as one of Time Magazine’s “Most Promising Faces of 1979.”
Fred Silverman remembered her when he moved to NBC and picked her for this show. The network even gave her NBC a special contract — just like the golden age of Hollywood — which had her make “an almost unprecedented number of appearances” to get known by the American TV audience.
She plays Susan Williams, who learns of the death of her reporter brother Alan, who was on the cusp of a major conspiracy story. An event was due to happen that would shock the world and someone had learned how to profit. His hit and run death didn’t sell with her. And seeing as how she’s also a reporter for The Dispatch, she picks up her brother’s work and tells her editor Bobby Richard (Ray Walston) that she has until May 15 — three weeks! — to learn the truth.
Starting with “Chapter 2: The Silent Enemy,” Susan would learn that a nuclear bomb had been built in America and was to be used to kill numerous world leaders during a peace summit at Camp David.
“Chapter 12: Crypt of Disaster” was part of the last episode of Cliffhangers that never aired in the U.S. Luckily, all of the episodes were edited into one movie, The Girl Who Saved The World. You can’t imagine my excitement when I watched this in syndication and learned how the story ended up.
1979 was Dracula’s year with the TV movie Vampire, Love at First Bite, the Frank Langella Dracula, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Salem’s Lot, Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula, Thirstand Nightwing all being released.
Let’s add one more.
The goal of The Curse of Dracula was to make the vampire a tragic hero devoid of camp. Michael Nouri was perfect for this. playing a bloodsucker who was also a professor of East European History at Southbay College in San Francisco.
His enemies were the grandson of his greatest challenge, Kurt von Helsing (Stephen Johns), and the daughter of one of his past loves, Mary Gibbons (Carol Baxter).
In this version of Dracula, the count has moved twety coffins packed with Transylvanian soil to America, but Kurt and Mary have used a computer to located and destroy twelve of them.To catch Dracula, Mary signs up for one of his night classes and at a party at his place afterward, she discovers that he knows who she is and just wants to be left alone.
The story started with “Chapter VI: Lifeblood” and would be the only Cliffhangers installment to reach its conclusion. It also gave birth to two movies, Dracula ’79* and World of Dracula. Ten chapters of The Curse of Dracula were produced, compared to eleven for Stop Susan Williams and twelve for The Secret Empire.
In the TV movie cut, Dracula removes the stake from his heart. That’s because there was a plan to create a Curse of Dracula TV show, but sadly, it was never to be.
It’s 1880 in Cheyenne, Wyoming. A group called the Phantom Riders are stealing gold, which gets U.S. Marshal Jim Donner (Geoffrey Scott) on the case. It turns out that these are no ordinary criminals. Instead, they’ve come from an Inner Earth alien city named Chimera.
The plot is lifted from the 1935 Gene Autry singing cowboy movie serial The Phantom Empire. There, Gene fights the Thunder Riders from a subterranean alien city named Murania.
With the series starting with “Chapter 3: Plunge Into Mystery” — Cliffhangers wanted to put people into the middle of the action — Donner is healing from being blasted with one of the Riders weapons. He later saves Maya (Pamela Brull), who is the daughter of Chimera’s overthrown ruler Demeter, with a whip just like Lash LaRue. Now, the city is commanded by her uncle orval (Mark Lenard, who was also Sarek, Spock’s father), a wheelchair riding maniac who wants to take over the world with the mind-controlling Compliatron, which is powered by gold.
There’s also another alien female named Tara (Diane Markoff) who is on the evil side yet has the hots for our hero. I remember being strangely attracted to her as a seven-year-old Sam and not knowing why.
The story expanded to have a greedy mine baron working with the evil side of Chimera, a giant spider, a mine collapse and even spaceships. But sadly, we’d never see these episodes in America. “Chapter 13: Partisans Unchained” and “Chapter 14: Escape to the Stars” would only play in Europe and we wouldn’t even get a compilation movie for The Secret Empire like the other two serials, Stop Susan Williams and The Curse of Dracula, had.
It’s funny because a lot of critics hated this segment, thinking that science fiction and cowboys had no business being in the same story. Maybe they didn’t know about the serial it was based on. Maybe no one was really ready for serials. But if they could have only released this two years later, when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, this may have been a bigger success than it was.
When Fred Silverman became president of NBC in June 1978, he immediately ordered sixty pilots for new shows, as he felt that nearly the entire roster of 1978-1979 shows might not make it. Seeing as how he couldn’t start until June after leaving ABC, that meant that he’d need to be ready for mid-season replacements.
The network canceled Chico and the Man, The Bionic Woman, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, Police Woman, CPO Sharkey, What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? and James at 16, proposing to replace them with The Waverly Wonders, Legs, Coast to Coast, The Eddie Capra Mysteries, W.E.B., The Sword of Justice, Dick Clark’s Live Wednesday and Operation Runaway.
As the jiggle trend faced backlash — Silverman had been the proponent of these shows where shapely women showed up in little to no clothing — he decided to tone down Legs, changing it from a tale of women doing anything to make it as chorus girls and re-emerging as a sitcom called Who’s Watching the Kids? Operation Runway and Coast to Coast were dropped and an educational show about doctors, Lifeline, was added.
Within weeks, W.E.B. — a series about the inner workings of a television network — and The Waverly Wonders were both canceled. And by November, Grandpa Goes to Washington, Swords of Justice, Lifeline, The Eddie Capra Mysteries and Who’s Watching the Kids were all canceled. Even two fill-in shows, David Cassidy–Man Undercover and Project U.F.O. also died.
Replacing them would be one of the biggest mid-season replacement orders of all time. They would be Diff’rent Strokes (one of the few bright spots on NBCs 1979 lineup), newsmagazine Weekend being given a weekday show and nine new programs: Supertrain (one of the biggest failures in TV history), Little Women, Mrs. Columbo, Sweepstake, Hello, Larry (which was another botch for McLean Stevenson after leaving M*A*S*H*), Turnabout, Brothers and Sisters, B.J. and the Bear and Cliffhangers*.
Cliffhangers was three simultaneous chances at making a hit for the network, taking three different genres — science fiction, adventure and horror — and making three unique stories, which would be The Secret Empire, Stop Susan Williams and The Curse of Dracula.
You can only imagine how excited a seven-year-old version of me was, someone who stayed up until 4 AM to watch the old Flash Gordon serials on Sunday mornings, now getting to see three totally new serials.
Well, I was excited until this show ran up against Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley, getting destroyed in the ratings and ending after only ten episodes.
It had plenty of talent on board. Beyond series creator Kenneth Johnson, who also created The Bionic Woman, V, the Alien Nation TV series and developing The Incredible Hulk for TV, writers included Andrew Schneider (Northern Exposure, The Sopranos), Sam Egan, Richard Christian Matheson (the son of Richard Matheson) and Jeri Taylor (Star Trek).
The three stories (which we will get more in-depth on later today) were:
The Secret Empire: A new version of The Phantom Empire, in which a cowboy learns of an alien city underground. This series had a cool trick where the scenes above ground were in sepia and the secret empire was in color.
The Curse of Dracula: After six hundred years, Dracula (Michael Nouri) has grown tired of immortality and is looking for the love of a woman to make him mortal. This was edited into two movies, Dracula ’79 and World of Dracula. It’s the only story that reached its conclusion by the end of the series.
One of the major issues audiences had with this show was that the stories began in the middle, with Williams beginning with “Chapter 2: The Silent Enemy,” Empire with “Chapter 3: Plunge Into Mystery” and Dracula presenting “Chapter VI: Lifeblood.” You can only imagine that people felt confused and left pondering if they’d missed something.
The goal was for these shows to gain in popularity and spin-off to make their own shows, at which point they’d be replaced by new cliffhangers. Sadly, this never happened.
John Llewellyn Moxey really knew how to make the made of TV movie work for him. This time, he has Pam Dawber and David Soul as high rise neighbors who fall for one another when they start spying on one another via binoculars and telescope. The crazy thing is, this movie is made in 1983, and the female lead is the one that initiates the voyeurism.
Writer Jeffrey Bloom also wrote and directed Blood Beach and Flowers in the Attic. Here, he makes a tense script that brings in a killer who might just be the flute-playing Soul.
Through Naked Eyes also has John Mahoney, Donald Moffat, Dennis Farina and Ted Levine in small parts as police officers.
Much like nearly every TV movie that was made in the 70’s and 80’s, this is better than anything you’ll watch made in 2021.
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