Directed by Gene R. Kearney, who wrote the script based on a story by Kurt van Elting, “The Other Way Out” starts with businessman Bradley Meredith (Ross Martin) returning home from a long vacation with his wife Estelle (Peggy Feury) just in time for his secretary to show him that a go-go dancer that he had some relationship with has died. Even worse, he soon learns that he’s being blackmailed.
He goes the whole way to an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, having to walk most of the way after crashing his car. There, he meets the grandfather of the dead dancer, Old Man Doubleday (Burl Ives), who puts him through hell to pay for the murder.
That said, if you’re expecting any real twists or turns, there really aren’t any in this story. There are dogs attacking the man and the promised Sonny, instead of being a brutal older brother ends up being a ten year old, but this feels like a ton of putting the pieces on the table and then not a single thing happens with them. Sure, it has a dark tone, but that’s really all it has.
Sherlock Holmes (Michael Pennington) has been taken out of cryogenic sleep by Watson’s ancestor Jane Watson (Margaret Colin), who is a private detective in Boston. He was infected by the bubonic plague by his enemy Moriarty and frozen until a cure could be found.
Using the alias Holmes Sigerson, the detective works with Watson to help her solve her cases. Holmes falls for Violet (Connie Booth), the daughter of a man killed in an FBI robbery, while Watson and an agent named Tobias (Nicholas Guest) have some glances between each other. This was a pilot for a series that was never picked up, so one assumes that Holmes and Watson would have ended up together if the show was ever a longer series. There’s a fun little Murder, She Wrote cameo as one of the characters is reading a book by Jessica Fletcher.
Shayne also wrote the TV movies Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady, which starred Christopher Lee as Holmes and Patrick Macnee as Watson, along with Morgan Fairchild and Engelbert Humperdinck, as well as a sequel to that TV movie, Sherlock Holmes: Incident at Victoria Falls. He also created the show Whiz Kids and wrote episodes of the show Legend, in which author Ernest Pratt (Richard Dean Anderson) plays the hero of his books, Nicodemus Legend, with the help of his friend Professor Janos Bartok (John de Lancie).
EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker didn’t air on the CBS Late Movie because ABC packaged “it with “Demon In Lace” as the TV movie The Demon and the Mummy.
“Among the philosophers, the great thinks and the common Joes of this world, no question is more controversial than truth. Remarkable as it may seem, I can attest that the following events did occur, whether you believe them to be true or not.”
Despite this great starting line from Carl Kolchak, this is sadly near the end of the series. Ramon Bieri returns as a cop, but no one realized that in “Bad Medicine” he was Captain Joe Baker, not Captain Webster. It also has the future Boss Hogg, Sorrell Booke, as a taxidermist named Mr. Eddy.
The story revolves around a 500-year-old Aztec warrior rising every 52 years to claim five victims. The mummified form of this monster of the week is played by Mickey Gilbert, who was also the villain in “The Ripper.” But the real reason to tune in is to see Erik Estrada, just a few years away from superstardom as Ponch on CHiPs, playing Pepe Torres. Estrada dressed as an Aztec priest? I’m here for it. He also has on a pink disco suit and plays the flute in a scene, so this is prime Estrada gold for you to mine.
The cast also includes Dorrie Thomson (Policewomen, Operation Petticoat), Merrie Lynn Ross (Class of 1984) and Sondra Currie (who played Zach Galifianakis’ mom in The Hangover movies).
Basically, this episode is very similar to the aforementioned “The Ripper” while giving us Kolchak versus the Aztec Mummy.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Prototype was on the CBS Late Movie on June 5, 1987 and January 28 and May 12, 1988.
Directed by David Greene (The People Next Door, Madame Sin) and written by the team of William Link and Richard Levinson, who wrote and created Columbo, Mannix, Blacke’s Magic, Scene of the Crime and Murder, She Wrote. They also wrote the movie Rollercoaster and the Doug Henning stage play Merlin.
Michael (David Morse) is a government experiment created by Dr. Carl Forrester (Christopher Plummer) and his team to be more human than human. The doctor sneaks Michael home over the holidays and even takes him shopping, which enrages his bosses. When it becomes clear that the military is planning on using creations like Michael to become killers, Forrester goes on the run, taking Michael back to the college he used to teach at. Michael learns that he has self-determination, which leads him to be the one who makes the final decision about his fate, which is setting himself ablaze like a monk or Richard Lynch.
Don’t be fooled by the artwork that appeared on the VHS boxes for this movie. Those make it seem like this is a Terminator remake remix rip-off. This is as far from that as you can get, a thoughtful movie about what would happen when an artificial human comes to life and self-awareness.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Mae West was on the CBS Late Movie on May 4 and August 11, 1987.
At the age of ten, I had a huge crush on Ann Jillian even if I had no idea why I felt that way.
Now I do and I still have that crush.
Directed by Lee Phillips (The Spell, Sweet Hostage) and written by E. Arthur Kean, this has Jillian as Mae West and takes you through enough of her career to see how she went head-first against small-minded censors. Jillian is great in it and has several performances of West’s songs, too.
James Brolin is Jim Timothy, her manager and former love interest, while Roddy McDowall plays her co-writer Rena Valentine — based on Julian Eltinge — and Piper Laurie is West’s mother Matilda. I wouldn’t depend on this film for factual accuracy, but if you’d like to see JIllian pretty much put on a one woman show, it’ll definitely deliver on that. The costumes are pretty great, too.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Honeyboy was on the CBS Late Movie on January 29, June 25 and December 21, 1987.
Erik Estrada is pretty much going to get a whole week of movies on this site before too long but until then, let’s look at this movie, in which he plays Rico “Honeyboy’”Ramirez, the son of a boxer (Hector Elizondo) who never made it and walked out on his family.
This was an NBC TV movie of the week and came out while Estrada was fighting with his bosses on CHiPs over his salary. He was replaced on that show by Bruce Jenner, but came back for the last season.
To get to the top, Honeyboy gets a PR agent named Judy Wellman, played by Morgan Fairchild, so this movie had some incredible wattage when it came to early 80s TV starpower. He’s on a quest to win the title from Tiger Maddox (Jem Echollas), who claims that the fight promoter that got Honeyboy this far worked all his fights like pro wrestling matches. Or, you know, pro boxing for the most part.
Of course the third act is all Honeyboy chasing away everyone who got him this far, but if you know boxing movies, you know he’s going to win. I kind of loved the scene between Sugar Ray Robinson — that’s really him — and Honeyboy’s father. Their title match was as far as he got and Sugar Ray is pretty much giving him a little bit of recognition and you can see that Emilio doesn’t want it but really does want it and it’s some masterful acting for such a small moment in such a tiny TV movie and man, I’ve been thinking about it for several days and it still makes me choke up a little.
This was directed by John Berry, who co-wrote the script with Lee Gold. Berry was a member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater and ended up blacklisted in 1950. He had agreed to direct a short documentary on the Hollywood 10, the group that had refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee as they tried to find Communists in Hollywood. After directing He Ran All the Way, Hollywood 10 member Edward Dmytryk — who had been jailed for contempt of Congress — named Berry as a Communist when he was released from prison as part of his hope to get work in Hollywood again.
Settling in Paris, he co-directed Atoll K, the last comedy film of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and spent the rest of his career there, even after being permitted to make movies in Hollywood again, like The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker didn’t air on the CBS Late Movie because ABC packaged “it with “Legacy of Terror” as the TV movie The Demon and the Mummy.
The monster of the week this week is a succubus, a demon who reanimates the corpses of freshly dead women to coerce young men into sexual situations, at which point it sucks the life out of them. And best of all, one of Kolchak’s other enemies shows up, Captain “Mad Dog” Siska, played again by Keenan Wynn. He was last in “The Spanish Moss Murders.”
Illinois State Tech is a wacky school, what with Morticia Adams — Carolyn Jones — as the registrar, Jackie Vernon (the voice of Frosty the Snowman and the star of Microwave Massacre) as a coach and Andrew Prine as Prof. C. Evan Spate, the archaeology professor who Carl tries to pry info about the Mesopotamian demoness out of.
It ends as all episodes must with Carl pretty much alone against supernatural evil, trying to smash a stone tablet with a hammer while demonic winds blow in and threaten to overwhelm him. That said, Spate actually covers for him, which is more than anyone else has done in this series.
Vincenzo has plans to turn the paper into an upbeat and dignified place, which seems to suggest that there’s no place for Carl in that world. I wonder what he would have thought about AI content creation.
Directed by Don Weis and written by Michael Kozoll and David Chase, this also played in syndication as The Succubbus.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Chiller was on the CBS Late Movie on May 6, 1988.
Miles Creighton (Michael Beck, Xanadu) is frozen at the point of death, but begins to thaw ten years later. His mother decides to see if he can be saved and a miracle surgery brings him back — without a soul! His mother Marion Creighton (Beatrice Straight) doesn’t believe that her son could be evil, much less be killing people, yet it’s true. He even tries to kill friend of the family Reverend Penny (Paul Sorvino) and his stepsister Stacey (Jill Schoelen) is next on his list.
Directed by Wes Craven — this came out on VHS as Wes Craven’s Chiller — and written by J.D. Feigelson (Dark Night of the Scarecrow), Chiller has an amazing moment when the zombie CEO tells the priest ““I’ll tell you what’s on the other side. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You die and there’s simply darkness. No streets of gold. No harps. No halos. No angels and saints. It’s all here, so you better live it up, holy man, because this is all there is.”
I tend to prefer Craven’s small screen movies to so many of his big screen efforts. This one has a pretty bad script, to be honest, that has some interesting ideas of the beyond and never really shows us some important things, like why everyone thinks Miles is so great. Instead, we only know the blue-faced tyrant strip-mining his father’s company.
That said, if you’re up late, it’s certainly a good movie to be half-awake to.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Road Raiders was on the CBS Late Movie on June 22, 1990.
Directed by Richard Lang and written by Mark Jones (Leprechaun) and Glen A. Larson, The Road Raiders was a pilot that wasn’t picked up and aired as a TV movie.
It stars Bruce Boxleitner — who had just finished Scarecrow and Mrs. King — as Captain Rhodes, a disgraced soldier accused of being a deserter who is hiding from officials in the Philippines during World War II. When an officer comes to arrest him and dies, he takes that man’s identity to get back to the actual fighting. Teaming up with Harlem (Reed R. McCants), Lt. Johanson (Susan Diol), Crankcase (Noble Willingham), Einstein (Stephen Geoffreys), Schizoid (Mark Blankfield) and the twin brother muscle of Black and Blue (David and Peter Paul, the Barbarian Brothers), he just might save the U.S. Army from Japan, which is represented by Clyde Kusatsu, John Fujioka and Tia Carrere.
It feels a little like The A-Team, a bit like The Dirty Dozen, and it’s an anachronistic take on the war. The Barbarian Brothers even drove a monster truck at one point. This all means that if this had been a series in 1989, there’s more than a complete chance that I would have watched every airing.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Poor Devil was on the CBS Late Movie on August 8, 1977.
Sammy Davis Jr. battled racism throughout his career, even from the wings of the stage as his Rat Pack cohorts would call him racist names like smokey.
In an interview with Roots author Arthur Haley in Playboy, the entertainer talked about the first time he came up against his race: in the Army. He was beaten for looking at a white female commanding officer while she was giving him orders, with his body covered with anti-black graffiti and covered in turpentine. That night, as in every night he served, he was still asked to perform for the troops. That’s when Davis learned he’d have to fight to be respected. And once he was in, he’d stay in by any means necessary — even coming off as insincere.
Despite being a member of the Hollywood crowd, Davis still could never be a full member. His romance with white girls like Kim Novak rubbed people the wrong way. And even though he was a large financial supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, he still had a complex relationship with the black community.
For example, he earned plenty of ire when he supported Nixon in 1972. Although he was originally a Democrat and supported JFK in 1960 and RFK in 1968, John F. Kennedy would go on to revoke an inauguration invitation to “Mr. Show Business” because he married white actress May Britt. So maybe his conversion makes sense because Nixon invited him to be the first black guest at the White House.
Once, Jack Benny asked Sammy about his handicap on the golf course. He answered, “Handicap? Talk about a handicap. I’m a one-eyed Negro Jew.”
That said — it’s also believed that Davis was introduced to Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan at an orgy at the nightclub that he owned, The Factory. This also makes sense. There are plenty of stories about how Sammy loved the free-swinging sex scene of the 70s, even learning how to deep throat from the woman who introduced it to the zeitgeist, porn star Linda Lovelace.
Anyways — I could go on about Sammy Davis Jr. He was a fascinating man — who could smoke four packs of cigarettes a day, draw and fire a Colt Single Action Army Revolver in a quarter of a second and was able to both be a parody of himself and parody himself seemingly at the same time. But today, we’re here to discuss a strange TV pilot that Davis was in, one that would lead to him accepting an honorary second-degree membership in the Church of Satan.
Originally airing on February 14, 1973, on NBC, Sammy would star as Sammy in this series pilot. He’s a demon who has screwed up for the last thousand or so years and now wants to succeed and prove himself to his boss Lucifer, who is played by Christopher Lee. If you don’t immediately stop reading this and go watch this show, allow me to share this photo of Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee CBE, CStJ, with a gorgeous head of hair.
To win over his boss, Sammy has to convince Burnett J. Emerson (Jack Klugman!) to sell his soul. In return, he’ll get revenge on his boss (Adam West!) and gain wealth for seven years (and then go to Hell for eternity, which is a lot like Miami, only less humid).
Davis would flirt with The Church of Satan for some time, painting one fingernail red, wearing the Baphomet medallion and flashing the horns from time to time before dropping out by the mid-1970s (around the time that Anton LaVey went into seclusion).
One wonders where this show would have gone if it had become a weekly series. Would the Devil tempt a new celebrity every week? Would Klugman stick around? Would LaVey make a cameo?
All we have is this pilot, which is filled with Satanic imagery, a lack of a laugh track and plenty of early 1970s strangeness. What a weird time to be alive, one that we’ll never truly comprehend today. Still, if all that came of this was this photo of Davis with LaVey and future Temple of Set leader Michael Aquino, I’ll consider it a success.
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