The Woman Hunter has an all-star cast, with Barbara Eden in the lead, alongside Stuart Whitman, Larry Storch and Robert Vaughn. Like I said — it’s what I say is an all-star cast.
Most Giallo heroines are characterized by their wealth and potential mental issues. However, in The Woman Hunter, when Dina Hunter (Eden) survives a car accident and plans a trip to Mexico with her husband (Vaughn), who would have thought that the artist she hired to paint her portrait (Whitman) could be a jewel thief and a murderer?
This was written by Brian Clemens (Captain Kronos, And Soon the Darkness) and Tony Williamson (Adam Adamant Lives!, The Avengers). It is Clemens’ first U.S. work and Williamson’s only script made over here. It’s directed by Bernard L. Kowalski, who stepped in for John Peyser (The Centerfold Girls). I assume that everyone enjoyed shooting this on location in Acapulco. Larry Storch even brought his wife Norma along.
Thanks for joining us as we wrap up our second day of our three-day tribute to all things Bernard L. Kowalski!
He had to go through Roger Corman with Hot Car Girl, Attack of the Giant Leeches, and Night of the Blood Beast, then do TV series for the rest of the ’60s to get his shot at the major studio brass ring with Krakatoa: East of Java and Stiletto. But both of those films — as well as the David Janssen-starring western Macho Callahan — flopped at the box office, so it was back to TV for Bernard L. Kowalski. However, instead of the TV series of the ’60s, he now was in the TV movie business, in which he gave us Terror in the Sky, Black Noon, and Women in Chains. For his fourth TV movie, Kowalksi directed this script by TV series and TV movie scribeHoward Rodman (best known for the series Route 66 and the later Harry O, also the TV sci-fi flicks Exo-Man and the first Six Million Dollar Man TV movie). Was this a TV movie pilot film? Yep, you bet.
If you spent any time in front of the TV watching reruns of series from the ’60s and ’70s, and even into the ’90s, you’ll notice character actors Robert Hooks and Steven Brooks as our two cops who quit the police department to become private detectives — and come to hunt down a serial killer who has eluded the law for years. And they’re against the clock because notable western character actor Walter Brennan (John Wayne’s Rio Bravo) is out for vigilante justice to avenge the murder of a family member by the killer. And the always welcomed character actor-ness of Neville Brand as a racist, small town sheriff isn’t helping matters.
Yep, that is Richard Dreyfuss (Two Bernard L. Kolwaski flicks with future Jaws stars? Roy Scheider was in Stiletto, remember?) starting out his career. And that is the voice of the devil, Mercedes “Pazuzu” McCambridge, from The Exorcist. (Plot spoiler: she’s the killer and she’s off-the-hinges-great here; not that you don’t see that plot twist coming.) Also be on the lookout for Oscar actors Anne Revere (Supporting Actress winner for National Velvet) and her “sister” Catherine Burns (Supporting Actress nominee for Last Summer). Shelley Fabares, who did her share of car racing and Elvis flicks*, is the town’s pretty librarian girlfriend of Brooks that’s caught the creepy eye of Brand.
You can watch Two for the Money on You Tube. Grey market DVDs are easily available. It’s not that bad of TV movie thriller. Definitely not engaging TV series material in the manner of say, Starsky and Hutch (gotta go watch The Supercops from 1974 with my youth-buddy, Ron Leibman), but a serviceable TV flick, none the less.
* Of course we did all off the King’s — well, all three — racing flicks. What ensuing, trope-laden cliched movie site did you think your were surfing, here? Check out our “Drive-In Friday: Elvis Racing Nite” feature.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Editor’s Note: We reviewed this on May 22, 2020, as part of one of our many “TV Week” tributes. It’s back again for the second day of our three-day “Bernard Kowalksi Week” tribute to his drive-in features and telefilms. He directed this CBS film after working on numerous episodes of TV’s The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible, as well as the westerns Rawhide and The Wild Wild West.
Bernard L. Kowalski has a decent horror pedigree, directing Night of the Blood Beast, Attack of the Giant Leeches,Krakatoa: East of Java, Terror in the Sky and Sssssss. Here, he puts theterror on a slow boil and puts Reverend John Keyes (Roy Thinnes, constantly battling the occult) and his wife Lorna (Lynn Loring, The Horror at 37,000 Feet) against an unseen force bedeviling a small Western town named San Melas. There’s voodoo, devil worship and a mute young girl and a gunslinger possessed by the Left Hand Path.
Ray Milland shows up, proving that Old Hollywood is never to be trusted. Plus, there’s Gloria Grahame (Blood and Lace), Henry Silva (Almost Human, Megaforce, the epic Escape from the Bronx), stuntman Stan Barrett, Joshua Bryant (Salem’s Lot), a young Leif Garrett (Thunder Alley) and Jodie Foster’s brother, Buddy.
This 1970s made-for-TV horror neglects the Old West, so it is a strange film to start with. Then again, it also plays the Troll 2 trick of a town with a backward name and a connection to witches, but it doesn’t telegraph that. The ending—which moves to 1971—more than makes up for the slow-moving last 68 minutes. I love dreamy TV movies that take forever to get anywhere.
Editor’s Note: This review ran on December 28, 2020, as part of another one of our “TV Week” tributes — dedicated, in part, to TV airline disaster movies (see our end of the week Round Up). We’re bringing it back for our our second day of our three-day “Bernard Kowalski Week” tribute — a great director!
CBS-TV got its start in the airline disaster sweepstakes in September 1971 with this tale about transcontinental flight struck with food poisoning. To save the aircraft, the cabin crew locate a passenger with enough flying experience so that he can be coached by an experience pilot on the ground. Doug McClure, it goes without saying, is very good in his role as a Vietnam war ex-chopper pilot who’s called into action to safe the day.
While many write this off as a rip-off of ’70s airline disaster flicks — and, in a way, it is (which we will get to) — Terror in the Sky has it roots in an Alex Haley-written Canadian telefilm starring James “Scotty” Doohan, Flight Into Danger (1956). The CBC-TV screenplay was quickly rebooted as the Paramount Pictures features film Zero Hour! (1957) starring Dana Andrews — each deal with a “food poisoning” premise. Haley then took the premise and retooled n’ tweaked it again for the novel Runway Zero-Eight (1958), then again as novel Airport (1968), which, in turn, became the Burt Lancaster-starring Airport (1970). So, officially, Terror in the Sky is a bigger-budget TV remake of Zero Hour! and a loose cousin to Runway Zero-Eight. which aired on CBS-TV in September 1971.
As for Zero Hour!: Interest in the film was renewed in the ’80s when it was revealed that the Abrahams-Zucker Brothers’ (The Kentucky Fried Movie) Airplane!, which spoofed the Airport series of movies of the ’70s, was actually an almost verbatim comedy-remake of the film.
Yeah, you know why we love this, as it’s another airline disaster TV movie with bonkers casting: assisting Doug McClure are Roddy McDowall and Kennan Wynn, along with ’50s gents Kenneth Tobey (The Thing) and Leif Erickson (On the Waterfront).
Is the name of director Bernard Kowalski ringing any bells? It should. He gave us the Alien precursor Night of the Blood Beast, The Fast and the Furious precursor Hot Car Girl, and the giant monster mash classic Attack of the Giant Leeches, and the mad scientist romp Sssssss. Oh, and the western-horror about devil worshiping voodoo cowpokes, the most awesome TV movie ever, Black Noon (1971). And let’s not forget he closed out his career with TV’s Colombo, Airwolf, Knight Rider, and Jake and the Fatman.
It’s pretty amazing that the reboot of this venerable 80s show — which lasted seven seasons and only ended when star Richard Dean Anderson told TV Guide, “The only reason it went off the air was that everybody was ready to move on. I was physically exhausted and had no life.”
In the new series, Lucas Till plys Angus “Mac” MacGyver, an undercover government agent for the Phoenix Foundation, a covert agency that the rest of the world believes is a think tank. An Army EOD technician, Mac prefers to use non-lethal means to stop his enemies and excels, as always, at solving problems with unique scientific feats.
The new version of the show was created by Peter M. Lenkov — who created the comic RIPD that the movie is based on — and takes place inside the same universe as his other two shows, Magnum P.I. and Hawaii Five-O. Lenkov also wrote Demolition Man, Son In Law and the second and third Universal Soldier films. A sad thing to report is that he was removed from all of the CBS shows he created in 2020 because it was said that he fostered a “toxic work environment,” with Lucas Till telling Vanity Fair, “I’ve never worked this hard in my life, and I am fine with hard work. But the way Peter treats people is just unacceptable. I was suicidal that first year on the show, because of the way he made me feel. But the way he’s treated the people around me — that’s just my breaking point.”
But a positive thing is that the series is actually pretty fun to watch. I wish that it had been a better experience for the people making it. Horror fans will also enjoy seeing appearances in season 4 from some of their favorite actors like Keith David, Peter Weller, Joshua Leonard (The Blair Witch Project) and Tobin Bell. The Tenderloins (James Murray, Sal Vulcano, Joe Gatto, and Brian Quinn), who you may know from Impractical Jokers, also appear as waiters in one episode.
This season also finds the Phoenix Foundation being rebuilt as a privately funded entity to go up against CODEX, a secretive organization that is coordinating multiple catastrophes to get the attention of world leaders. They also possess something called File 47, which is about the end of the world. Any time the team gets close to the truth, the agent from that group always commits suicide rather than reveal their plan.
There’s even an episode with Mac loses his short-term memory and must undergo a dangerous treatment that sends his brain back in time, where he meets numerous people from his past and the past of CODEX, such as Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, his mother, his evil self and even Nikolai Tesla, who helps him regain his memory and teaches him the secrets of Shiva, a superweapon he’s created.
Season 4 moves at a quick clip and it’s pretty cool that there’s an underlying story arc throughout the episodes. You can catch the DVD box set, which has just been released from Lionsgate and CBS Studios.
Just a few days after the end of the series Power, this is one of several new stories that continue the universe of the original show. Those shows will be Power Book III: Raising Kanan, which concerns the life of Kanan (50 Cent); Power Book IV: Force, which is rumored to be about Tommy (Joseph Sikora) and Power Book V: Influence, a political tale of Tate’s (Larenz Tate) rise to power.
Ghost is about Tariq St. Patrick (Michael Rainey Jr.), the son of James “Ghost” St. Patrick and Tasha Green-St. Patrick (Naturi Naughton). He wants to escape the heavy shadow of his father, but finds himself going down the same path into selling drugs. He also has to deal with the Tejada family, led by Monet Stewart Tejada (Mary J. Blige).
With appearances by Method Man and Redman, as well as Cooper Saxe (Shane Johnson) continuing to pursue the St. Patrick family, this Starz series won the Outstanding Drama Series in the 2021 NAACP Image Awards, which also saw Blige win Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.
While I’ve never watched the original series, I really enjoyed this show. It presents a world that I’d have no chance to ever be part of and immerses you in the lives of its characters.
The DVD set of season one has just been released and is a great way to catch up on the world of Power and get set for the new shows, with Power Book III: Raising Kanan starting on July 18 and Power Book IV: Force airing next January.
Courtney and Erica Enders started drag racing as kids and Erica became the 2014, 2015 and 2019NHRA Pro Stock drag racing champion. This Disney Channel film tells the story about how they had to work harder — because they were women — than the men they raced against. Erica (Beverley Mitchell, Saw II) even quit for a while until she realized that racing was her dream.
Along with her sister Courtney (Brie Larson, Captain Marvel), they with the NHRA Junior Dragster national title and prove themselves.
While not the gritty story of Heart Like a Wheel, you get the idea of how much the girls sacrificed to become winners. Originally airing on the Disney Channel on March 21, 2003, this was directed by Duwayne Dunham, who edited and directed Twin Peaks, as well as the Disney movies Halloweentown, The Thirteenth Year, Ready to Run and Tiger Cruise.
Somehow, CBS aired a movie starring Klaus Kinski and William Devane — together at least — on March 10, 1987. Even more amazing, the movie was written by Brian Clemens — yes, the man who created Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter — and directed by Michael Schultz, the man who made Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but also has Car Wash, Cooley High, Krush Groove, The Last Dragon and Disorderlies on his resume.
Dude, I love movies.
Based on Ray Brown’s The Tintype, it has Devane’s character losing his wife and son (Danny Pintauro from Who’s the Boss) to a drunk driver. Later, he attends an auction with his friend General Joe Brodsky (John Ratzenberger, yes Cliff Claven was in a movie with Kinski, wrap your brains around that nugget) where they buy some of Joseph Cole’s (yes, Kinski) trunks from a century ago. Devane believes that Cole was a time traveler, a fact backed up by the appearance of Georgia Crawford (Lauren Hutton!), who travels with him to Crossfire, CA to get to the bottom of everything.
At this point, a plot to kill President Grover Cleveland — yes, really — emerges and Forest Tucker, James Avery, Tracy “Bob the Goon” Walter, Tim Russ (Tuvok!) and Terry Funk — again, what is going on with this movie — all appear.
I really think that the real time travel in this movie is me going back in time and making it happen before my bedroom is crushed Donnie Darko-style.
There are nine Super Giant films and all of them were brought to the U.S. by Medallion Films, who turned them into four movies. This story would be The Artificial Satellite and the Destruction of Humanity and The Spaceship and the Clash of the Artificial Satellite combined to make one longer film. So basically, this would be the fifth and sixth parts of the story. If you want to get caught up, you’ll need to check out Atomic Rulers of the World and Invaders from Space. When you finish this one, you can get the rest of the story in Evil Brain from Outer Space.
Starman is a human-like being created from the strongest steel by the Peace Council of the Emerald Planet. He’s been sent to our planet to protect us from the Sapphire Galaxy, who are blowing up the Himalayans. To make their plan move quicker, they kidnap Dr. Yamanaka and his family and force him to use his spaceship — yes, he just so happens to have a spaceship — to decimate the Earth.
Strangely enough, this movie has a death star and a weapon that destroys planets. I mean, Star Wars would never steal anything from a Japanese movie, right?
When Colonel Cliff “Rocky” Rhodes (ubiquitous ’60s biker flick stalwart Jeremy Slate), commander of an astronaut crew, mysteriously disappears through an airlock during a mission orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, it appears to be a simple case of suicide . . . or was he murdered? In the vastness of space, and with their communications array damaged, only one of his crewmates can be the murderer. Who among the crew had a reason to kill Col. Rhodes?
Back on Earth, in Mission Control, George Maharis (TV’s Route 66; Murder on Flight 502 and SST: Death Flight), Cameron Mitchell, and Sandy Kenyon (The Doors tome Down on Us) work on the case while Susan Oliver (yes, the Green-skinned girl from Star Trek) frets as the put-upon wife. The ship’s crew stars Star Trek alum Robert Walker, Jr. (“Charlie X”), TV actor John Carter (The Andromeda Strain; fellow TV flick Earth II), and William Bryant, whose long TV career began in the ’50s and lasted into the late ’80s. Margaret O’Brien, who stars as Mrs. Rhodes, won an Oscar for Outstanding Child Actress* for Meet Me in Saint Louis (1944), starred in Jane Eyre (1943), The Canterville Ghost (1944), and continues to work in television and indie films. She’s currently in production on her 75th project, Love Is in Bel Air (2021).
Sadly, as I fondly as recall this flick, the adult screenwriter in me today sees this as a Bechdel test failure: why not have either Susan Oliver or Margaret O’ Brien in a meatier role as an astronaut? Well, this is set in the same present-day Apollo-Saturn V-Skylab era that’s just a few nautical miles down the equator from Marooned (1969) penned by Martin Caidin of The Six Million Dollar Man (1973) fame. Men ruled the stars back in the Kennedy-era and women didn’t conquer space until the far-flung “future” in Project Moonbase (1953), Gog (1954), King Dinosaur (1955), and Angry Red Planet (1959) — even though they were stuck wearing sensible corked-wedged mules and smart black ballet slippers to go with their waist-tailored and pegged flight suits, and smart gauchos with knee-high boots. And screaming and imploring men to “do something” and shoot everything in sight.
But I digress. Again. . . .
Is the odd-looking “New Line” log on the box the same studio later acquired by Turner Broadcasting and merged into Warner Brothers?Your guess is as good as ours.
So . . . why are we here reviewing another Cameron Mitchell (Space Mutiny) sci-fi epic?
Well, it’s another “TV Week” at B&S About Movies . . . and all of that talk concerning Cameron Mitchell and his family’s galactic oeuvre for Allan Sandler and Robert Emenegger’s Gold Key Entertainment — which we discussed at length in our previous review of the studio’s 1981 release, Lifepod — got me to thinking of this ABC-TV movie obscurity (part of the “Wild World of Mystery” shingle) originally broadcast on June 17, 1974. Since I was Apollo crazy and still into my Matt Mason toys, I remember watching Death in Space when it first aired, then again in a post-Star Wars world during a late-night, local UHF-TV rebroadcast — pre-VCR (damn it).
Now, if you know your sci-fi the way we know you do, then you know the whole “murder mystery in space” plotting of this ’70s galactic progenitor was done to a lesser and lesser effect with the Canadian TV romp — which also aired in the U.S. as a first-run Showtime movie — Murder in Space (1985), and the Viacom/CBS-TV production Murder by Moonlight (1989) that, to make it all the more confusing, aka’d in the home video realms as “Murder in Space.” Courtesy of their respective directors, Steven Hilliard Stern (The Ghost of Flight 401 and This Park is Mine) and Michael Lindsay-Hogg (the Beatles “What If” flick Two of Us), and respective stars in Michael Ironside and Martin Balsam, and Brigitte Nielsen and Julian Sands, both films also ran as overseas theatrical features. The effects, sets and costumes are fine, but look cheap in the post-Star Wars environs and each feel like Battlestar Galactica: TOS and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century two-part episode rejects.
Mattel’s Major Matt Mason courtesy of SyFy Wire. Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks have been trying for years to get a feature film made.
Sadly, like Don Kirshner’s lost-to-the-ages TV rock ‘n’ roll horror, Song of the Succubus, the only known surviving copy of the English language print of the Agatha Christie-inspired space mystery of Death in Space is stored at the Library of Congress. Never released in an English-language VHS (as far as our research indicates), this Charles S. Dubin-directed telefilm was, however, issued as a dubbed VHS throughout Europe (which is where our image comes from).
In spite of the “Red Scare” blacklisting frenzy of the 1950s (along with Dalton Trumbo, the Award-winning writer of Roman Holiday and Spartacus; the subject of the Brian Cranston-starring Trumbo), Charles S. Dubin, fortunately, was able to build a prolific resume (mostly for CBS-TV) consisting of over 100 series (including 40-plus episodes of M*A*S*H; a few Kung Fu episodes) and TV films dating back to the early ’50s. Making his first bow in the sci-fi genre with the one-season anthology series Tales of Tomorrow, he made his feature film debut with the early rock ‘n’ roll flick Mister Rock ‘n’ Roll (one of five films starring famed disc jockey Alan Freed).
William Bryant starring in the much easier to find King Dinosaur (1955).
Of his many TV movies, Dubin’s best known are his take on Cinderella (1965; starring Ginger Rogers!, Walter Pidgeon!, and Celeste Holm?) and Murdock’s Gang (1973; Janet Leigh), with the best VHS-distributed of them — courtesy of William Shanter starring (more Star Trek connections!) — being The Tenth Level (1976). That same year he directed his second and final feature film: the car-crashin’ hicksploitation romp, Moving Violation** (1976). And, if you’re a TV movie airline disaster connoisseur (Did you check out our last “TV Movie Week” back in December dedicated to those films?), he directed the Arthur Hailey-penned (Airport) International Airport (1985) starring Gil “Buck Rogers,” aka “The Polish Sausage,” Gerard.
The western-bred scribe behind the Brother typewriter is the one and only Lou Shaw, who not only tweaked the dialog on the U.S. version of Hannah, Queen of the Vampires, aka Crypt of the Living Dead (1973), and wrote The Bat People (!), but many-an-episode of Lee Major’s The Fall Guy*˟, as well as an aborted attempt to turn Westworld into the series Beyond Westworld (and Dubin directed the failed series version of Logan’s Run!).
Image Left: Robert Walker, Jr. from the Euro-VHS of Death in Space courtesy of todocoleccion.net. Image Left: ABC-TV promotional still of Jeremy Slate courtesy of Worthpoint.com.
Sigh . . . what I would give to see this faded childhood memory, again, that I’ll always pair with almost-the-Six Million Dollar Man Monte Markham’s The Astronaut (1972). Mill Creek Entertainment or TV distributor Park Circus (Do those Lane Caudell flicks in your library, too, Park Circus) needs to get in touch with the Library of Congress and get this one out on DVD or on the air of the national retro-channels Antenna or Cozi. Other lost TV movies I want to find — that are not uploaded online, anywhere — are the Adam West-starring Curse of the Moon Child (1972) and the ABC-TV “Wild World of Mystery” entry Distant Early Warning (1975) starring Micheal Parks.
Ah, those hazy, snowy memories of TV yore that haunt your ol’ analog memory cores — and reviews that connect Oscar winners to Star Trek guest stars and the guy who wrote The Bat People. You gotta love ’em.
* Read the tale of Margaret O’Brien’s stolen and 40-years returned Oscar at The L.A Times.
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