I’ve gone on and on about how when it comes to TV movies, John Llewellyn Moxey is the director to watch.
Working from a script by Lewis John Carlino (The Mechanic, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) and Sandor Stern (The Amityville Horror, Pin), Moxley puts together a compelling science fiction film here, with Steven Anders (Peter Graves) and his two children Deborah (Kathleen Quinlan) and David emerging from a cave to learn that a solar flare has turned most of humanity into dust. Those that survive often grow sick and after they die, turn into the same powdery remains.
The solar flares that cause the flash are also driving dogs and humanity insane — Day of the Animals was correct! — and drive the family home to Malibu to try and find the kids’ mother.
This is one downbeat film –1974 was a dark time — and it was actually the pilot for a series that may have taken things down an even more brutal path.
I mean, Peter Graves fights a house cat in this. If that doesn’t make you want to watch it, you really have no hope.
Originally airing on February 24 and March 3, 1991, this is based on the book by Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson. It’s all about a double murder on Palmyra Atol in which Duane “Buck” Walker (Hart Bochner, Die Hard) was found guilty and his girlfriend Stephanie Stearns (Rachel Ward) — defended by Bugliosi and Leonard Weinglass — was found innocent.
You know why I watched this? Because Tommy Lee Wallace directed it.
I’m no fan of Bugliosi — get me to go off some time about how he he lost a court case to the Process Church — but if you’re a big time lawyer and writer, you can get Richard Crenna to play you in a movie. Oh yeah! And getting Susan Blakely to play your wife!
Anyways, our protagonists end up taking a barely seaworthy ship out and about before getting lost and ended up living off the charity of the Mac and Muff Graham (James Brolin and Deidre Hall). Within a few months, they’ve stolen their ship and quite possibly left them for dead. That said, only a skull that may have been Mac’s has even been recovered.
You know, I found myself watching this because of Wallace’s name in the credits, but his talent as a director kept me with it for both parts.
John Llewellyn Moxey will never let you down. The man knew how to make TV movies filled with menace and dread. Take a look at his record of success — The House That Would Not Die, The Last Child, A Taste of Evil, The Night Stalker, Home for the Holidays, Where Have All the People Gone?, Nightmare In Badham County, Killjoy, Desire the Vampire — and see a group full of proven suspense winners.
Really, Moxley is making a giallo here. Stick with me.
First, just take a look at the VHS cover art for how this was sold overseas* as Soon, Amy, Soon.
Now let me let you in on the plot: After leaving class, 20-year-old art student named Amy Manning (Kathleen Beller, who is nearly the Edwige Fenech of 70s and 80s TV movies about young girls in trouble with roles in this, Are You in the House Alone? and Deadly Messages; she’s also married to Thomas Dolby, a fact that amuses me beyond belief) gets in her car and is menaced by a masked, leather-gloved and knife-wielding maniac who whispers, “Soon, Amy. Soon.”
This is not the first time this has happened and the cops refuse to help her any longer. Only her stepmother Adele (Mariette Hartley) believes her and urges her to visit psychiatrist Dr. Letterman (Keir Dullea, who knows a thing or two about American — err, Canadian — giallo-esque films thanks to Black Christmas).
Could Amy’s issues be daddy-related? After all, he drowned on a trip she was supposed to go on, leaving her in the care of her stepmother. Or is there really a killer coming after her? After all, he keeps showing up every time she’s alone. And he’s sent her flowers. Or maybe she ordered them herself!
This film understands that not all giallo is offing gorgeous female characters, but also the gaslighting that comes with driving the central character to explore her psychosis. And just how does that hunky new man (Gary Graham from the TV version of Alien Nation) fit in?
Originally airing on March 4, 1981 on CBS, this is a film that has so many twists and turns, even switching the main character partway through the film and amping up the psychological trauma. It benefits from a tight script by Jimmy Sangster, who also wrote The Legacy; Scream, Pretty Peggy; Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?; and tons of stuff for Hammer including Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Revenge of Frankenstein; The Mummy and more. He also wrote one of the best non-Bond Eurospy films, Deadlier than the Male.
This is the kind of movie that makes me realize why I love TV movies. A quick plot, some murky darkness, great performances and an amazing last scene reveal that made me literally leap from my seat. You gotta check this on out.
*It was released in Brazil as The Eternal Escape, as Nightmare in France, Without Escape in Spain and Shadow of Evil in Germany.
My record collection as a kid was made up of stuff found in the cut-out bin. Albums were expensive and my family didn’t have much money, so much of what we got was stuff that no one else ever wanted, kind of like the Power! Records album for Gemini Man.
Yeah, I was kind of obsessed with that Neal Adams — well, his Continuity Studios at the very least — cover art. The Gemini Man TV show only played from May to October of 1976, with only the pilot and five episodes airing. It was made to be a cheaper version of David McCallum-starring The Invisible Man series, but with Canadian tuxedo-wearing, motorcycle-riding secret agent Sam Casey (Ben Murphy, Alias Smith and Jones) working for a government agency called Intersect (International Security Techniques), using the powers of radioactivity-given invisibility for fifteen minutes a day. Why fifteen minutes? Well, if he uses his powers any longer, he dies.
While the show died a quiet death over here in the colonies, the UK loved it, hence the album that I received — for some reason, discount chains in Western Pennsylvania got weird stuff from England, which would explain all the Letraset transfer sets I had as a nine-year-old — and a hardcover annual comic book.
Power! probably got the rights to this because it was made by Harve Bennett and they thought it would be the next Six Million Dollar Man (and hey, we just did an entire week of Lee Majors movies).
This film was assembled from two episodes — “Smithereens” and “Buffalo Bill Rides Again” — and sold to overseas markets, which was common practice with TV movies and even episodic TV in the 70s. They also took some footage from the pilot to explain our hero’s powers as well as footage and sound effects from Colossus: The Forbin Project. Oh yeah! Andrew Prine and Richard Dysart are in this!
This film has two fathers. No, not Greg Evigan and Paul Reiser, but two directors. They would be Alan J. Levi (who made The Return of Sam McCloud, Knight Rider 2000, The Stepford Children and the insane Blood Song) and Don McDougall (speaking of movies made from TV shows, he directed Farewell to the Planet of the Apes and Forgotten City of the Planet of the Apes, as well as Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge, which was “The Chinese Web” episodes of that series). It was written by Leslie Stevens, who directed Incubus, a movie that finds William Shatner speaking in the universal Esperanto language. He also directed the aforementioned The Invisible Man series, as well as creating The Outer Limits, developing the 70s Buck Rogers revival and writing the TV movie Probe. Oh man, he was also behind the Sheena movie and Return to the Blue Lagoon. What a career!
You can watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version on YouTube.
Paula and Robert Sims (Park Overall and Robby Benson) are in a bind. Their twelve-day-old baby has been kidnapped and they beg the public for help. Sadly, their daughter is soon found dead to great sympathy. But when the same thing happens three years later, well, that’s when the law — Sheriff Frank Yocom (Frank Forrest) and Agent Jimmy Bivens (Brion James) — get involved.
Originally airing on CBS on September 28, 1993, this was a ripped from the headlines movie based on the book by Charles Bosworth Jr. and Don W. Weber. It’s directed by Peter Levin, who also brought us A Killer Among Us, Deadly Nightshade, The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana and plenty of episodic TV.
This has a really solid supporting cast with Richard Thomas, Eileen Brennan, Nancy Cartwright, Robyn Lively (top that, TeenWitch!) and Cliff DeYoung.
Robert Sims comes off as a maniac, forcing his wife and daughters to sleep in the basement because of their smell and continually growing angry because he can’t have sons. And he’s the innocent one!
Now that I spoiled this, you can watch it on YouTube.
No, this isn’t a VHS retrofit of ABC-TV’s 1984 TV movie The Calendar Girl Murders starring Tom Skerritt. Haven’t you been following along at all this week?
So, we have Lee Majors starring in a watered down TV giallo for the USA Network (that eventually replayed on HBO) that grafts Baywatch onto Friday the 13th as a bunch of nubile young ladies frolic across the island sands à la Agatha’s Christie’s oft-used Ten Little Indians as plot fodder. Hey, what’s not to like when Lee’s costars are Adrian Paul from Highlander . . . and Jennifer O’Neill!
So, what do we have here? Ugh, do you really want to know?
Ah, you gotta love those generic VHS potboiler covers of yore.
Well, piggish Rex Kingman (cast-against-type Lee Majors) is a magazine mogul none to happy that one of the models “he made” has giving him the professional brush now that’s she’s a TV star. And she’s quickly dispatched via straight razor by a Halloween-masked marauder (Richard Nixon, is that you?). And . . . off we go to some tropical island to save the King’s ready-to-go-under-can-only-be-saved-by-a-swimsuit-edition magazine with a hot, ponytailed photographer (Paul) and Lee’s right-hand madam, oh, we mean editor and ex-lover, Kate Brannigan (O’Neill). But guess what? Our rubbery ex-president is also on the island, fully equipped with rifle scopes, explosives, and shiny implements of giallo destruction. Oh, snap! That establishing murder wasn’t real? What? That was Kate’s nightmare? Oh, so, nix Richard Nixon . . . and cue the red-herring creepy groundskeeper — the one in need of a bath, a shave, and a few treadmill sessions — before settling down with a nice cigar as he jerks to those Polaroids of the girls he taped to the wall next to his cot.
This is a film where, deaths be damned, the magazine must be saved, so it’s a kill-and-camera snap world. And since this a cable TV giallo, the slash is lacking, the blood is missing, and (plot spoiler, stop reading!) it’s all a big dupe set up by Kate — with the models in on the scam — to push the tyrannical Kingman over-the-edge. So, not only do we have ol’ Aggie in the script model, we have a soupçon of oh, Henry James’s Turn of the Screw — only with the always pleasurable-to-see Bobbie Phillips in a bikini draped across tree trunks, riding horses and jet skis, and running in slow-mo montages to pad out the film’s lack of plot and short run time.
Seriously, this isn’t all that bad — in a porn, uh “adult thriller,” kinda way. In fact, if you used this USA potboiler’s production values — and cast a bunch of known porn-to-mainstream actresses, like Michelle Bauer, Marilyn Chambers, Traci Lords, Linnea Quigley, Moana Pozzi, and Teri Weigel in the cast — and upped the skin quotient in a direct-to-DVD release model, we’d be onto something other than this red, white and blue blade-dull giallo.
While it would be very cool to see Lee Majors in a real, bloody Neapolitan insect-and-junk-science-driven-killer romp, you’ve seen worse watered down U.S. telefilm horrors. Check it out for yourself on You Tube. Oh, and be sure to check out our review of Lee and Jen’s other film we reviewed this week, the much better he-man actioner, Steel.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Although cable TV chipped away at their audience, the Big Three networks were still in the theatrical knockoff movie business, with ABC-TV airing this disaster tale on February 18, 1991. While, at first, it reminds of the A-List blockbuster The Towering Inferno (1974), the real inspiration here is Ron Howard’s Backdraft, released that same year. And since we named dropped Jerry Jameson during our “Lee Majors Week” review of Starflight One, we’ll have to mention Jameson’s more timely TV movie lookalike with 1974’s The Blazing Tower, which circulated on the U.S. home video and overseas theatrical marketplace as Terror on the 40th Floor.
The difference between that influential Irwin Allen epic is that this harrowing tale is based on a real life fire that broke out on the 12th floor of the 62-floored First Interstate Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles on May 4, 1988, and raged into May 5. As result of the building’s sprinkler system not operating at full capacity, along with the main water valves that supplied the fire pumps turned off due to building construction, the fire quickly spread upwards to the 16th floor. And not only was there mechanical failure, but human failure at the hands of security guards ignoring smoke alarm warnings.
Of course, as with any TV film based on “real events,” dramatic licenses are taken with incidents tweaked and buoyed by composite and fictitious character creations. To that end we have familiar ’80’s TV actors Lisa Hartman and Peter Scolari as two trapped survivors on the 37th floor. Keener TV eyes will pick up on the somewhat lesser known, ’80s small screen stars in the fire brigade with Paul Linke (CHiPs), Ronald William Lawerence (Hunter), John Laughlin (The White Shadow), and yes, that’s the always great Micheal Beach, aka Taddarius Orwell ‘T.O.’ Cross from FX’s Sons of Anarchy, just starting out his long TV career and on his way to recurring roles in Under Suspicion, ER, and Third Watch, but these days, you know his work in The 100 and Chicago P.D. Also look out for a young Angela Bassett just starting her career with support roles in various TV series and telefilms. Lee Majors heads the cast (but everyone else is here a bit more than him), as Sterling, the stoic, no nonsense Deputy Fire Chief working against the endless array of errors exacerbating the tragedy.
Screenwriter Jeffrey Bloom’s career goes back to some late ’70s episodes of Starsky and Hutch (and a couple of David Soul-starring TV movies) and the popular VHS Jaws-knockoff, Blood Beach, which he also directed. In the director’s chair — and in his final TV project — is Robert Day, whose writing and directing efforts date back to Tarzan in the early ’60s. Bringing us a wealth of TV series episodes and movies across all three networks, we know Day best at B&S About Movies for the late ’70s de rigueur witchcraft flick, The Initiation of Sarah.
This is one of those old TV flicks that, while it lacks the dramatic punch of Backdraft or the thespian skills offered by Paul Newman and Steve McQueen in The Towering Inferno, this is, none the less, a well-down film rife with credible, practical in-camera effects on-a-budget that still holds up in today’s CGI world.
Originally airing on ABC on December 14, 1986, this Henry Winkler-directed made-for-TV movie has pretty much everything you want out of a holiday film: Dolly Parton as a disillusioned country star. Dan Hedaya as a sleazeball. Bo Hopkins as a lawman. David Ackroyd! John Ritter as a judge. A witch! Rance Howard! René Auberjonois! And Lee Majors as Mountain Dan!
This is a completely ridiculous story perfect for the holidays — or to be honest any time — and it gets by because I cannot and will not dislike anything Dolly ever does. I mean, she somehow made it through Rhinestone intact. And the fact that a Christmas movie exists where Dolly is menaced by not just Bo Hopkins, but a witch in love with Bo Hopkins and is saved by Lee Majors, well, I’m beyond all in.
Many tried to bring this tale of American Airforce pilot and CIA operative Francis Gary Powers to the big screen — an incident that occurred on May 1, 1960. The single-jet engine plane of the title, the U-2, was nicknamed “Dragon Lady” by its maker, Lockheed Aircraft, to work as a high-altitude reconnaissance craft for all-weather intelligence gathering. Flown successfully throughout the late ’50s over China, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam, the plane was actually shot down twice: the second time, which resulted in the dealt of pilot Major Rudolf Anderson, Jr., was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Image of ’80s home video VHS repack courtesy of Paul Zamarelli/VHS Collector.com.
In fact, back in 1962, Roger Corman hired Robert Towne (later of Chinatown fame) to whip up a script, I Flew a Spy Plane Over Russia that, thankfully, was never filmed. It took prolific TV producer Charles Fries — who not only brought us the first live-action adaptation of Spiderman (the recut TV pilot became an overseas theatrical hit, reaching #1 in Japan) but also gave us the Star Wars-infused The Martian Chronicles and the witch romp The Initiation of Sarah — to get it on the air on September 29, 1976, for NBC-TV. Fries’s other films? Well, there Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction, Are You In the House Alone?, and Secret Night Caller, just to name a few. He even went theatrical with Amicus’ Tales from the Crypt. Just look at that IMDb page! We could do a month-long tribute on his films alone. And while we haven’t delved deeply into the resume of his Academy Award-winning director (1955’s Marty), Delbert Mann, Mann’s extensive TV resume includes one of the movies we really love around here, the early ’70s possession flick, She Waits.
Lee Majors — Powers’s preferred choice was Martin Sheen! (and Powers had some pull, since this was based on his best-selling paperback, but he lost out to the network) — shot this, his seventh TV movie (including his three, pre-series Steve Austin movies), while working on The Six Million Dollar Man. And while Sheen would be have been wonderful, Lee shines in his role as Powers. Keen eyes of all things ’70s and ’80s TV will notice Noah Berry, Jr. (from TV’s The Rockford Files) as his dad, along with a cast rounded out by Lew Ayers, William Daniels, Nehemiah Persoff, and James Gregory (who worked with Lee on The Big Valley and came to be know for his work on TV’s Barney Miller, but we love him around here for his work as Ursus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes).
You can watch a truncated, 45-minute clip on You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Well, this TV sci-fi’er really is the whole enchilada when discussing the career of Lee Majors, isn’t it?
Colon’d and suffixed as “The Moon and the Desert” when it aired as a two-part episode during its syndication run (and served as its overseas title in some quarters), we meet Steve Austin, an astronaut that’s made three moon landings. During a test flight crash in a space plane prototype, he looses his right arm, left eye and both legs. His friend and personal physician, Dr. Rudy Wells (played by Marin Balsam, who did not return for the subsequent films or series), recruits Austin for an O.S.O project (O.S.I in the series) overseen by Oliver Spencer (played by Darren McGavin; the character and actor did not return for the subsequent films or series): creating a cyborg through the installation of bionic parts onto a human body. As the reluctant astronaut deals with his new body and recruitment as a government agent (he returned to space in few series episodes), he accepts his first mission to rescue a valuable hostage asset in Saudi Arabia.
The TV movie’s high ratings and overseas success quickly justified the production of two more prefixed U.S. telefilms (again, theatrical features overseas): Wine, Women and War and The Solid Gold Kidnapping. The concept then went to series and ran for five seasons from 1974 to 1978. All three telefilms would be reedited into two-part series episodes for its syndication (with scenes being re-filmed with Martin E. Brooks, who portrayed Rudy Wells in the series, and Richard Anderson, who portrayed O.S.I head Oscar Goldman).
Upon the 1978 dual-demise of The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff, The Bionic Woman, Majors returned for three more U.S. telefilms/foreign theatricals: The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1987), Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (1989; starring wheelchair-and-bionic Sandra Bullock!), and Bionic Ever After (1994).
Multiple Sites.
It all began back in 1972 when Cyborg, Martin Caidin’s best-seller, was optioned for a film adaptation by Harve Bennett for Universal Pictures — and, at first, the film retained the book’s title. Elements of Caiden’s subsequent sequels of the continuing adventures of Steve Austin — Operation Nuke, High Crystal, and Cyborg IV — while not directly adapted, had various elements worked into the subsequent series. (You can read an in-depth review of the book-to-film translation at ManaPop and get the lowdown on all of the wonderful toys inspired by the series at Toys You Had.)
Bennett’s first choice for the title roll was Monte Markham, who worked on Bennett’s previous sci-fi telefilm, 1972’s The Astronaut. To ease the sting of losing the part due to studio executive interference — in preferring Majors’s more experienced pedigree courtesy of his work in the well-received and highly-rated series The Big Valley and Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law — Markham appeared in two episodes as race-car-driver-turned-into-new-and-improved-cyborg Barney Miller/Hiller: “The Seven Million Dollar Man” and “The Bionic Criminal.”
After the 1978 series cancellation, and prior to their production of the three 1987 to 1994 U.S TV movies, Universal cut another another foreign-only theatrical in 1980 from the two-part 1976 episodes, “The Secret of Bigfoot” and “The Return of Bigfoot.” As with Battlestar Galactica before it, which was also cut into three foreign theatrical sequels, Universal licensed several paperback tie-ins based on the series’ episodes. (You can watch the series version of “Secret” at NBC.com with Part 1 and Part 2, as well as “Return” Part 1 and Part 2.)
During our “Lee Majors Week” review of Starlight One, we named dropped the 1969 Gregory Peck sci-fi’er Marooned. So we should mention that film was also based on Caiden’s 1964 novel of the same name. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century fans may have picked up Caiden’s 1995 Rogers sidequel/adaptation, A Life in the Future, in which Buck was refitted with bionic parts.
A big-budgeted theatrical — not only for Steve Austin, but Colt Seavers’s adventures in The Fall Guy — have been ballyhooed for years, with Mark Wahlberg as Austin. This Screen Rant article from May 2020 wraps up the film’s production history. Lee has stated that, if he’s given a significant part with substance, and not just a cameo walk on, he’s willing to be involved in both productions. So, it’s fingers crossed for Lee!
You can watch the 1973 theatrical cut of The Six Million Dollar Man on the FShareTV platform. In 2010, upon the release of the 40-disc, 100-hour DVD box set of the series (hey, it’s only $239.95!), Lee sat down with Vanity Fair for an extensive interview about the series and its lasting pop culture status.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
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