VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the January 3, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Sometimes, you just don’t get why people like some movies.

And that’s OK.

Video Archives featured two movies directed by Peter Hyams this reason, The Relic and Busting.

I just don’t see the love they’ve bestowed on Hyams. Maybe I’m not the right age, maybe I haven’t seen the right films, but none of it works for me.

And again, that’s fine.

Maybe you’ll find something to like in this movie.

Detectives Michael Keneely (Elliott Gould) and Patrick Farrell (Robert Blake) are cops that excel on the LAPD vice squad. Yet for all the arrests they bring in, they can’t get to the real person behind all the law breaking, Carl Rizzo (Allen Garfield). They still keep after him, but he has his men beat them into oblivion. Yet they keep coming back, even chasing their enemy into the hospital — and out — and finally have a chase between ambulances.

Even when this came out in 1974, the gay bar scenes were called out for homophobic they are. You can imagine how poorly they’ve aged since that time.

The one good thing I can say is that the massage parlor girl that they try to bust was Erin O’Reilly, who played the babysitter who, for some reason, decides to allow The Baby to nurse her. Actually, I really liked Gould and Blake in this. They work well as two cops who realize that life would be simpler if they just didn’t care or even took advantage of their knowledge of the law. But they’re too good to make that change.

I’m not giving up. I’m going to keep on watching movies by Hyams — I love Sudden Death, but I am from Pittsburgh — and hopefully one day I’ll understand.