EDITOR’S NOTE: The Uncanny was on the CBS Late Movie on May 29, 1980 and December 11, 1981.

In 1977, legendary Amicus co-founder Milton Subotsky joined with  Canadian producer Claude Héroux (Scanners, Videodrome) to create a portmanteau movie in the grand Amicus style. The uniting story for this concerns a paranoid writer played by Peter Cushing who is trying to convince a publisher (Ray Milland) that cats are evil and that his book is the only way to save the human race.

Directed by Denis Héroux (Naked Massacre, Valerie) from a screenplay by Michel Parry (Xtro), this is a film that I’ve neglected over the past few years and can happily say lived up to my hopes for a fun anthology film.

The film begins the Montreal of 1977, as writer Wilbur Gray (Cushing) visits publisher Frank Richards(Milland) to discuss his new book. The writer is convinced that cats are actually Satanic creatures here to destroy humanity. He tells three stories to explain:

London 1912: Miss Malkin rewrites her will, leaving everything to her cats instead of her ne’er do well nephew Michael. The maid Janet, who is in love with Michael, tries to steal the will, but Miss Malkin catches her. Janet kills her, but the cats avenge her death.

Quebec 1975: Lucy (Katrina Holden Bronson, the adopted daughter of Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland) is an orphan who now lives with her aunt Mrs. Blake (Alexandra Stewart, who is also in Because of the Cats, which is appropriate). Her parents have died in a plane crash so she is allowed to keep her cat Wellington, who is an awesome fat black cat. However, her cousin covets the cat and any attention she can get. She’s played by Chloe Franks, who was the go to young girl in horror for this era, with appearances in Trog, The House That Dripped Blood (she’s Christopher Lee’s daughter), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and Tales from the Crypt (she’s Joan Crawford’s daughter). This section combines two of my horror loves — evil kids and Satanic hijinks.

Hollywood 1936: Actor Valentine De’ath (Donald Pleasence) replaces the blade of a fake pendulum to kill his actress wife, which gives him the opening he needs to give his young mistress a chance at acting. He didn’t count on her cat avenging her. This chapter features Samantha Eggar (Demonoid, Welcome to Blood City), Sean McCann (Starship Invasions) and the always awesome John Vernon (Curtains, National Lampoon’s Animal House).

This story has one of my favorite movie tropes, as when Cushing discusses Pleasence’s character, he holds up a photo that is in truth a publicity still of the actor as Blofeld and his cat Tiddes from You Only Live Twice.

For all the cat love in this, cinematographer Harry Waxman (The Wicker Man, The Beast In the Cellar) threatened to leave the film when he felt that the production was abusing cats.

That said — this is pretty much everything you want from an anthology. Modern filmmakers littering on demand services with their short films all assembled into one movie should take a moment and watch this to see how it’s done.

You can get this from Severin and watch it on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Golden Needles was on the CBS Late Movie on October 8, 1980 and May 29, 1981.

Golden Needles begins with an elderly asian man being treated to various needles that literaly rise both him — and his member — back from the dead, at which point his grinning harem guides him out of the room just in time for a group of flamethrower-spraying masked troopers to kill every single person with fire.

That’s how you start a movie.

As for the actual film, well, various groups are fighting amongst themselves to gain possession of a very special statue that has golden needles within it. If they inserted in the right areas on a man, he will gain super sexual skills. Or die, if things are done wrong.

Director Robert Clouse made Enter the Dragon and this finds him teaming up again with Jim Kelly, along with 70s sex symbol — I mean, I guess — Joe Don Baker. God bless American-International Pictures for making this movie and getting the cast they did, which includes Elizabeth Ashley (Windows) as Baker’s love interest and one of the people who wants the statue, Burgess Meredith as the nude man painting bad guy and Ann Sothern as a brothel owner.

You have to love a movie that has the credit “Jim Kelly’s Fight Sequence Choreographed By Himself” and then realize that that fight is filled with nude men trying to take a shower and their rear ends being used for comedy.

This movie is just the way I like them: filled with Joe Don Baker love scenes, karate and a PG rating for a film that starts with fire murders in a massage parlor.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mitchell was on the CBS Late Movie on October 1, 1980.

Mitchell reveals a lot of misconceptions.

First: Joe Don Baker was once presented as the kind of sex symbol who didn’t just get Linda Evans in bed, he was kind of angry about it.

Second: Mitchell was not intended to be riffed on. And yet here we are, with a movie that most people know from the final episode that Joel was on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Then again, critics hated this when it came out in 1975. Vincent Carnaby said, “Mitchell, starring Joe Don Baker as a hard-nosed Los Angeles detective named Mitchell, has a lot of over-explicit violence, some gratuitous sex stuff and some rough language, yet it looks like a movie that couldn’t wait to get to prime-time television. Perhaps it’s a pilot film for a TV series, or maybe it’s just a movie that’s bad in a style we associate with some of the more mindless small-screen entertainments.

Mitchell spends what seems to be the greater part of the film climbing in and out of automobiles, driving automobiles, chasing other automobiles, parking automobiles, and leaning against the body of automobiles that are temporarily at rest. Once he smashes a hoodlum’s hand in the door of an automobile.

The climax, for a giddy change of pace, features a police helicopter in pursuit of a high-speed cabin cruiser. Automobiles sink when driven onto water.”

He could have been right. After all, the cut that aired on the CBS Late Movie was heavily edited with scenes shot just for TV, eliminating most of the violence, nudity and profanity. It also has the death of John Saxon’s character happen off screen, where we hear about his death on the radio. Keep in mind that he’s presented as Mitchell’s arch enemy.

Mitchell (Baker) is after Saxon’s character, Walter Deaney, but learns from the Chief of Police (Robert Phillips) tells Deaney is wanted for “every federal law violation in the book” and  “FBI property.” This doesn’t stop Mitchell, who wants to go after him instead of staking out James Arthur Cummins (Martin Balsam), a crime boss shipping in heroin. To get him off the case, Deaney hired $1,000 a night call girl Greta (Linda Evans) to keep him busy. Instead, Mitchell arrests her for possession and even turns down a bribe. Soon, Deaney and Cummins are working together to kill our slovenly hero.

If you enjoy larger men battling, this has Baker fighting Merlin Olsen. I mean, we’ve already imagined a world where a high priced sex worker wants to sleep with Baker for free. Why not?

Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, Sahara) and written by Ian Kennedy Martin, this also has a great theme song, “Mitchell” by Hoyt Axton.

“My my my my Mitchell
What do your Mama say?
What would she do
if she knew you
were fallin’ round and carryin’ on that way…
Crackin’ some heads, jumpin’ in and out of beds
and hangin’ round the criminal scene…
Do you think you are some kind of a star like the guys on the movie screen…

Well oh my my my Mitchell
What would your captain say?
If he knew you was hangin’ round
Eatin’ with the crooks and shootin’ up the town
Know you been out there, roundin’ up the syndicate
succeedin’ where the others have failed
Oh my my my Mitchell
You shoot ’em just to get ’em in jail
When they take a look in the record book, they’ll find you got a lot of class…

The whole shebang, arrestin’ painted ladies for a little grass
Oh my my my Mitchell!”

Supposedly, Baker was so upset by this being on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that he threatened to fight anyone from the show if he saw them. That didn’t stop them from also doing another of his movies, Final Justice — another movie in which he uses an orange to prove how he is going to destroy someone — on the show.

You can watch this without riffing on Tubi. They also have the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Billy Jack was on the CBS Late Movie on November 14, 1980 and November 20, 1981.

You may have thought that Billy Jack was dead after The Born Losers, shot in the back while trying to do the right thing. The truth is, he was just getting started. An anti-authority film, this movie struggled to be made, with American International Pictures pulling out while it was being made. Then, 20th Century Fox stepped in but refused to distribute the film. Auteur Tom Laughlin would not release the sound for the film, making it unreleasable until he could own the film himself, getting Warner Brothers to distribute it. He was unhappy with how Warner Brothers sold the film, so he sued them and finally released the movie himself.

At the heart of the film, the movie presents a conundrum: the only way to achieve peace is to repeatedly beat the stuffing out of people.

Also, the Navajo Green Beret Vietnam War veteran and hapkido master known as Billy Jack is played by director (as T.C. Frank), producer (as Mary Rose Solti) and co-writer (as Frank Christina) Tom Laughlin, who is totally white. That said, the role of Billy Jack is anything but the way that Native Americans had been portrayed up until the early 70s.

Laughlin was also a muckraker, really in the best of ways. He’d written the film nearly two decades before after seeing the way Native Americans were treated in Winner, South Dakota, the home of his wife Delores Taylor. What took so long to get it to screen? Well, beyond building his acting career, Laughlin also quit acting in 1959 to start a Montessori preschool in Santa Monica, California.

After the school went out of business, he went back into acting and after the Billy Jack series, he was set to change the world with Billy Jack Enterprises, which had plans for a new Montessori school, a record label, an investigative magazine, books, a distribution company and more message-laden movies, including films for children. Yet the last movie, Billy Jack Goes to Washington, didn’t connect with audiences. Or, as Laughlin charged, it was the fault of Warner Brothers illegally selling the television rights to his films. Or even Senator Vance Hartke, who he said told him that, “You’ll never get this released. This house you have, everything will be destroyed.” in front of Lucille Ball, angered that the film correctly pointed out how senators were owned by lobbyists.

There was going to be a fifth film, The Return of Billy Jack, that ended in the 2000s when Laughoun got hurt and the money ran out. He claimed for years that it would get made with the title changing to Billy Jack’s Crusade to End the War in Iraq and Restore America to Its Moral Purpose, Billy Jack’s Moral Revolution and Billy Jack for President, with the plan to have Billy Jack and President George W. Bush debate each other.

Man, I wish that was made.

That said, the original Billy Jack is an incredibly strange movie, a film made of a singular vision.

Billy Jack is the defender of the Freedom School, a school full of happy children taught my Laughlin’s real-life wife Delores, who are assaulted from all sides by the horrible folks of the redneck town where, for some reason, they have decided to make their home. A movie this strange demands a run-on sentence like that to describe it.

This is the kind of movie where the hero must face off with a snake and purposefully be bitten with venom so that he can become brothers with the snake, as well as have a theme song “One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack),” which was recorded by Jinx Dawson and her band Coven, whose album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls is as metal as it gets, even featuring a black mass as its second side.

You don’t really watch Billy Jack. It washes over you. The words I use to describe it aren’t enough. It’s absolutely ridiculous in the finest of ways and I really want you to experience it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Ultimate Warrior was on the CBS Late Movie on July 2 and November 24, 1982 and February 6 and July 15, 1986.

There had been post-apocalyptic movies before — End of the World came out in 1916 — and the genre was already a big deal by 1975, following The Omega Man and Soylent Green. So when most people believe that end of the world movies started in 1979 with Mad Max, they’d been around long before.

The Ultimate Warrior is pretty much a western — all good post-apocalyptic movies are — with a frontier town under attack. That town would be a small fort in what’s left of New York City, a place led by Baron (Max Von Sydow). One of his followers is a former scientist named Cal (Richard Kelton), who has developed plague resistant seeds that grow in the dead soil, creating a desert in the wasteland.

And, just like every western — and again, post-apocalyptic movie — there are gangs of bad people making the lives of good people hard. One of those gangs is led by Carrot (William Smith!) and Baron is so worried about them that he hires on a loner gunslinger — or fighter — named Carson (Yul Brynner).

Even with his abilities, the settlement is still doomed. So Baron sends his pregnant daughter Melinda (Joanna Miles) away from the citty with the goal of building a new world on a North Carolina island. But escaping the city isn’t easy and it costs nearly everyone their lives and Carson his hand, but the ultimate warrior is nothing if not resilient. Or deadly.

Director and writer Robert Clouse knew how to make a movie with fights as the main draw, as he directed Enter the Dragon and Game of Death with Bruce Lee, as well as Black Belt Jones with Jim Kelly, Golden Needles, Force: Five, The Big Brawl with Jackie Chan, Gymkata with Kurt Thomas, two China O’Brien movies with Cynthia Rothrock and Ironheart with Bolo Yeung. He also made the animal attack movies The Pack and the rats on the loose film Deadly Eyes.

And yes, this movie is where the wrestler got his name from.