Quinn Martin was the king of TV for two decades. His QM productions produced a string of successful television series — he had at least one television series running in prime time every year for 21 straight years — that includes Twelve O’Clock High, Dan August, Tales of the Unexpected, The F.B.I., The Invaders, The Fugutive, The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon and Barnaby Jones. He also produced sixteen TV movies, The Force of Evil, Code Name: Diamond Head, Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan and his lone theatrical movie, The Mephisto Waltz.

This was one of his last productions, other than four Dan August TV movies. This movie has a great pedigree, however, as it’s directed by Harvey Hart, who also directed The Pyx, and was written by Robert W. Lenski, who wrote Who is the Black Dahlia?, Mafia Princess and Farewell to the Planet of the Apes.

The Aliens are Coming was obviously a pilot that never got picked up. It’s a lot like The Invaders, as aliens are looking to possess humans. Sadly, the budget isn’t what it should be, so a lot of the inside of their ships just look like light shows.

I was quite possibly the only eight-year-old Max Gail fan when this came out, so I know we definitely watched the premiere on NBC. I would have had no idea who Matthew Labyorteaux was at this point in my life because I hated going to anyone’s house who had the gall to make me watch Little House on the Prarie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ken Shinsei the Star Wolf and the crew of the Bacchus 3 — drunken Captain Joe, angry Rocky, lovestruck Tammy, Dan and Billy — as they battle Ken’s old planet Valna Star and the forces of the evil emperor who looks nothing like Darth Vader, not at all.

As we mentioned in our review of the original Fugitive Alien, these stories were originally written by Edmond Hamilton, who grew up in the next town over from my childhood home between Youngstown, OH and New Castle, PA. He started his career writing for pulps like Weird Tales, spent 14 years writing for DC Comics and then published several novels. A year before his death, Toei Animation produced an anime of his Captain Future novels that became popular not only in Japan, but also in France, Italy and Germany. The very same year, Tsuburaya Productions adapted Star Wolf into a tokusatsu series and that’s where we get Fugitive Alien.

Sure, you could write this off as a Star Wars ripoff, but in truth, it could even be the other way around, as the first Star Wolf book was published in 1967.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: R.D already covered this one, but I figured that because we’re doing a week of science fiction movies, why not watch it again?

Fugitive Alien is an example of how strange something is when it’s translated into one language, then translated back into its original language. It’s a Japanese TV series — Space Hero Star Wolf — that was based on an American series of science fiction novels by Edmond Hamilton — The Weapon from Beyond, The Closed Worlds and World of the Starwolves — that were then dubbed and sent back to America as two movies somehow summarizing multiple episodes into an amazingly condensed narrative.

There’s a Star Wolf warrior named Ken — who supposedly comes from the planet Valna Star but was born on Earth — who is attacking our planet at some point in the near future. He doesn’t fully believe in his mission and stops his best friend from killing a human. When his friend dies, he becomes a, well, fugitive alien and joins the crew of the Bacchus 3, which is made up of Dan, Billy, Rocky, Tammy and Captain Joe.

Tammy may be in love with Ken, but he already has a lover named Rita. It just so happens that the friend that he killed was Rita’s sister, so now she’s been ordered by Lord Halkon to avenge her brother’s death. She tries to murder him, but their love is too strong, so of course, she gets killed in moments after that revelation.

If you watch this and it makes no real sense to you, remember how this movie basically played the telephone game with itself. And then realize that one of the writers was Keiichi Abe, who also wrote Time of the Apes.

This movie appeared in the UHF era Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the Comedy Central episodes, too. You can watch the latter on Tubi.

I’ve spoken a few times here about my father, who suffered a stroke in 2019 and has been dealing with memory issues since. I really owe it to the folks at the History Channel for creating programs that keep him positive and excited, as he really loves The Curse of Oak Island and Ancient Aliens. We’ve discussed both of these shows at length and even though he’s watched both of their runs many times, I’m always overjoyed that he can still recall past episodes and can discuss how he feels about them.

What surprised me was that Ancient Aliens has lasted for sixteen seasons so far, with this DVD release being of every episode of the thirteenth outing. For this season, living meme Giorgio Tsoukalos has assembled a crew of UFO experts to travel our mudball and the entire galaxy, heading everywhere from Tibet, Chile, Roswell and the Mediterranean to the Pleiades star cluster.

Along the way, you’ll learn about government coverups, DaVinci’s hidden alien messages, Area 52, the giants of the Bible, robots and two special longer episodes all about Mars and — you knew he’d show up sooner or later — the theories of Erich von Däniken.

If you love this show, this is the perfect package of an entire season worth of content at an affordable price. Plus, it’s allowed me to study even more things to talk to my family about, which is something worth treasuring. So thanks, occupants of interplanetary craft and lords of the UFO!

Featuring 16 full-length episodes, the Ancient Aliens: Season 13 DVD is available at retailers like Walmart for the suggested retail price of $19.98.

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, Thirst and 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.

Research for this came from TV Obscurities.

*I have also heard this referred to as The Curse of Dracula.

You can watch the fan edit of both movies — along with parts of the episodes — on YouTube.

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.

Thanks to TV Obscurities for their amazing research.

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.

You can watch this on YouTube.

You may notice that all week I’ve talked about how great 70s TV movies are. That’s because they have great pedigrees. Take a look at Night Slaves, which was based on a book written by Jerry Sohl (Die, Monster, Die!; The Crimson Cult and episodes of The Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and Star Trek) and directed by Ted Post, who amongst all things made The Baby.

Clay and Marjorie (James Franciscus and Lee Grant) are a couple on the outs who take a vacation after Clay nearly dies in an accident and has a metal plate inserted into his head. The town they decide to visit is certainly nice enough, except that every night, every single person lines up like a zombie, gets in a truck and returns in the morning.

Originally airing on September 29, 1970 on ABC, this has a great cast, including Andrew Prine, Leslie Nielsen, Virginia Vincent and Morris Buchanan.

I dream of a world where more TV movies get released on blu ray. Until then, we have YouTube.

A feel like a broken record saying this, but John Llewellyn Moxey made so many different styles of movies and I really love every single one.

Take this failed pilot, in which Cameron Steele (Christopher George!) is a former escape artist turned private investigator into the unknown. The unknown in this case being the secret formula that Doctor Henry Walding (William Windom) and his brother Charles (John Vernon!) had been working on. When thugs kidnap Henry and chain up our hero and toss him in the river, of course he can bring his escape skills out to save the day.

He’s also a rich playboy and the co-owner of a Vegas nightclub called The Crystal Ball with his friend Nicholas Slye (Avery Schreiber!). It’s filled with psychics and occult magic users who would have all made for plenty of great stories if this had actually become a series.

Man, with an adventure under an abandoned theme park and a scarred up Vernon as the heel and plenty of action, this whole movie makes me wistful for what may have been. Plus, it has appearances by William Schallert, Huntz Hall and Gloria Grahame!

You can watch this on YouTube.