A strange meteorite crashes to Earth in the United States, and the near-tragedy combines the three-person Flying Angels acrobatic team—Scott Masterson (Michael Lembeck), Chuck Gavin (Chad Everett), and Beth O’Brien (Adrienne Barbeau)—with Ultra Heroes who have come from Nebula M7. A mysterious old man — Walter Freeman (Stacy Keach Sr.) — recruits the three to become Ultra Force and face a series of monsters, including King Maera.

According to Ultrafandom, “Between 1981 and 1983, Tsuburaya Productions established a planning department in the United States called ULTRA COM, with the aim of creating a film script titled Ultraman: Hero from the Stars. This film, written by Donald F. Glut, focused on the story of an Ultraman active in the United States. The initial plan was to produce a live-action tokusatsu film, with Jackson Bostwick and Anne Lockhart cast as the main actors.”

That eventually became this movie, jointly produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions and Tsuburaya Productions and animated by Studio Sign and Ashi Productions. It was initially intended to become a series. Still, it became a TV movie in the U.S. and a theatrical release in Japan as part of the 1987 Ultraman Festival with Ultraman: Terror on Route 87, Ultraman Ace: Giant-Ant Terrible-Monster vs. the Ultra Brothers and Ultraman Kids.

Also known as Ultraman U.S.A., this finds the new Ultras assisted by robots — Ulysses (William Callaway), Samson (Ronnie Schell) and Andy (Charlie Adler) — and operating out of a high-tech superbase under the Georgia National Golf Club that has a hangar that opens up near Mount Rushmore.  Now, Ultraman Scott, Chuck and Beth they’re ready to destroy the aliens from the planet Sorkin.

The U.S.A. Ultras also show up in the Ultraman Legend short, Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie and Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Destined Crossroad.

Directed by Mitsuo Kusakabe and Ray Patterson (who also made GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords and A Flintstone Family Christmas), this has a very American look — almost like how Bionic 6 and Mighty Orbots combined American and Japanese styles.

Also: Writer John Eric Seward isn’t a single person but a collective name for several people who worked together on the story.

This is a fun film, as all Ultraman films are, and feels quite a bit like Team America.

You can buy this Mill Creek release at Deep Discount and Amazon.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Cartier Affair was on the CBS Late Movie on May 5, 1988.

Curt Taylor (David Hasselhoff) is released from California State Prison, and to settle a debt to Phillip Drexler (Telly Savalas), he pretends that he’s gay and becomes the secretary for soap opera star Cartier Rand (Joan Collins). The goal? Steal her jewelry. But then he falls in love.

Rod Holcomb only made two theatrical films: Stitches, for which he used the pseudonym Alan Smithee instead of his name, and Chains of Gold, the only thing that John Travolta ever wrote. The rest of his career was spent in TV. The writer crew included Scarecrow & King creators Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad Buckner, who wrote the script from a story by Michael Devereaux.

What a guest cast! Ed Lauter, Randi Brooks as the Hoff’s girlfriend, Rita Taggart as the maid who wants to basically sodomize Hasselhoff, Charles Napier and Harry Reems as a cop! As for the film, well, it’s as good as a 1984 TV movie with Hasselhoff and Joan Collins should be. There’s one great scene where the Hoff is trying to run from mob henchman David (John Bloom, The Reaper from The Hills Have Eyes Part II, The Dark from The Dark, Frankenstein’s Monster in Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein). He keeps trying to talk his way out of it, while the hitman keeps telling him that he has to shoot him. Bloom was more than seven feet tall but had some great comic timing.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: All the Kind Strangers was on the CBS Late Movie on October 9, 1979 and November 25, 1980.

Let’s not judge Burt Kennedy for directing the Hulk Hogan vehicle Suburban Commando. Let’s remember him for something much better — All the Kind Strangers.

Written by Clyde Ware — a writer/director/producer who worked on shows like Airwolf and Gunsmoke, as well as TV movies like The Hatfields and the McCoys and The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd — this film reeks of backwoods menace. No wonder — Ware was born in West Virginia and his second novel, The Eden Tree, was a semi-biographical read which scandalized his hometown.

Jimmy Wheeler (Stacy Keach, Butterfly, Mountain of the Cannibal God) is a photojournalist traveling by car to Los Angeles. He runs through a small Southern town where he sees Gilbert, an adorable child, walking on the side of the road. Seeing that the kid is hefting some heavy groceries, Jimmy offers him a ride. As the road goes deeper into the woods, the rain increases. Soon, he realizes he’s trapped in a house of seven children.

The oldest, Peter (John Savage, Hair, The Deer Hunter), has hidden the fate of his mother and father from the town, using various resources to keep their power on and training vicious dogs to protect the children. Their father was a bootlegger and their mother a schoolteacher (what a match!); when she died, he drank until he fell from the roof.

The rest of the children — John (Robby Benson, who sings two songs on the soundtrack), Martha, Rita, James and Baby (named because their mother died before they could name him) — need guidance, so Peter sends the younger ones out to lure people to their home. Then, they evaluate whether or not they’ll be good parents. If they’re fit, they stay. If not, they’re free to go. Or that’s what the kids think. Evidence points to another, more grisly fate.

There’s a new mother already in the house. Carol Ann (Samantha Eggar, The Brood, Demonoid, Curtains) has been taking care of the children for some time. She has seen plenty of other father figures, and while she asks for help, she also knows that everything seems pointless.

Jimmy has to convince the kids that he’d make a good dad while trying to find a way to escape. But between the multitude of kids and dogs, as well as his car being sunk in the swamp, he starts losing hope as well.

I have two issues with this film. Things get wrapped up with way too neat of a bow. Jimmy gives a speech to the kids, which saves his life, and Peter asks him to walk him into town so that they can get some help. Jimmy doesn’t even talk about the police, and when you know that these kids have murdered numerous “kind strangers,” you have to wonder if he traded his freedom in for some complicity in the crimes. Second, as a photojournalist, Jimmy’s only camera is a Polaroid, which would not be good enough to be printed in the 1970s. I know that it makes good theater to have him show Gilbert the photo as it develops, but it’s a stretch.

All the Kind Strangers is a small-screen Deliverance, yet it has some fine acting from Keach and Eggar. It’s restrained, but there is more not seen than seen that makes this movie slightly scary.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Toughest Man In the World was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and September 14, 1988.

Mr. T’s first starring made-for-TV movie role has him playing, well, himself. Or Bruise Brubaker, a tough and scowling secret softy nightclub bouncer who is in charge of a neighborhood center. He’s a Vietnam vet, he has a mohawk to honor his roots, and he’s illiterate. And he’s gonna help kids, fool!

As he’s helping kids, he’s also trying to keep Billy (John P. Navin Jr.) from being part of the crime that rules the streets. He gets Tanker Weams (Tom Milanovich) to show up at the center but also screws up and promises everyone will be a winner in a fake charity giveaway, so he has no idea how to keep working people, kind of like Mr. T’s buddy Hulk Hogan and no, I won’t let death stop me from sharing stories of the Hulkster’s lies when they’re as funny as him being in Metallica or not getting the Foreman Grill deal because he missed one phone call.

Mr. T is a little like the Hulkster. Born Laurence Tureaud, he grew up in a family with twelve kids in Chicago, calling himself Mr. T so no one would call him boy. A city wrestling champion, he went to Prairie View A&M University on a scholarship but was kicked out in the first year. Then, he was in the army and tried out for the Green Bay Packers before inventing himself as he bounced at Dingbats Discotheque. He claimed that he was in more than 200 fights and that his chains were from the people he beat in fistfights. This turned into being a bodyguard for Steve McQueen, Michael Jackson, LeVar Burton, Diana Ross, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Leon Spinks — to Wiki name just a few — as well as whispered assassination and runaway tracking deals.

Then, ABC aired two of the World’s Toughest Bouncer contests, with Mr. T bloodying huge Tongan fighter Tutefano Tufi and defeating someone in the second in under a minute after saying, “I just feel sorry for the guy who I have to box. I just feel real sorry for him.” Sylvester Stallone saw this, cast him as Clubber Lang, and the rest was history.

After a role in Penitentiary 2, he was on The A-Team, had a cartoon, a cereal, was in D.C. Cab and even had a motivational video, Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool! Also: an action figure that told you to always respect your mother and a rap album, Mr. T’s Commandments. Also, he became a wrestler, backing up the Hulkster, and this is where it gets funny. Despite being in all those toughman fights, T was freaked out about the idea that his image would be destroyed by a wrestler going off script. Maybe the rumor that Bruiser Brody was getting paid big money to hurt him — this would have never happened, Brody knew that at some point in his career, he would work for McMahon — got to him. He kept no-showing almost until the day of the event.

An aside. A few weeks before Mania, Mr. T and Hogan were on the USA Network show Hot Properties. According to Remind Magazine, “After some encouragement from Mr. T, Hogan agreed to demonstrate a chokehold on host Richard Beltzer, but ended up applying too much pressure and rendering him temporarily unconscious. Belzer recovered quickly enough to send the show to a commercial break, but he officially filed a $5 million lawsuit against both guests in 1987. The case was settled quietly in 1990.”

They also hosted Saturday Night Live the night before the show, a last-moment replacement for Steve Landesberg.

Roddy Piper, Bob Orton and Paul Orndorff, Mr. T’s opponents at Mania, may not have liked this outsider and made him nervous, but they knew where their money was coming from. That’s why the stories — Hogan wrote that “security at Madison Square Garden resisted letting Mr. T’s entourage into the building the day of the show. He was distraught by the confrontation and declared that he would just leave. The Hulkster, however, took credit for finding the actor and talking him down, getting him to see through the planned main event attraction. Paul Roma claimed that he even no-showed a few years later, as Mr. T was to manage the Young Stallions — started.

OK, another aside. Wrestlers are notoriously full of shit. There’s no way a big payday guy like Mr T was going to be with enhancement talent like the Young Stallions. And Hogan’s book isn’t non-fiction.

Then again, comedian Chris Burns once said, “I can – again, inside baseball – tell you Piper was not a fan of Hulk Hogan, moreso, Mr. T. I mean, rest in peace, Roddy, I don’t think he’d have a problem with me telling this story. He legitimately was going to kill Mr. T. I’m not kidding around. He said, he thought, “You know what? If I just back suplex him and arch it a certain way, he lands on his neck, they can’t tell me that I did it on purpose.” Piper had that thought several times, and then was like, “I’m not gonna mess up WrestleMania like that.”

Roddy Piper, also a wrestler, was probably full of shit a lot of times.

Anyways, back to Mr. T in a TV movie.

He falls for Leslie (Lynne Moody), beats gangsters and ends up knocking everyone out, including running through a wall like he’s on Takeshi’s Castle. It’s as stupid as you want it to be, and I wanted it to be really stupid.

This was directed by Dick Lowry. Yes, the same man who made Smokey and the Bandit 3. It was written by Vincent Bono, Dick Guttman and, of all people, Hammer writer Jimmy Sangster. How did that happen?

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Stepford Children was on the CBS Late Movie on June 29, 1988.

The second of three TV movie sequels — there was also Revenge of the Stepford Wives, directed by Robert Fuest, and The Stepford Husbands — The Stepford Children is based on the Ira Levin novel The Stepford Wives and the films that came after.

Laura and Steven Harding (Barbara Eden and Don Murray) have brought their kids, David (Randall Batinkoff) and Mary (Tammy Lauren), to Stepford, Connecticut, the same place where Steven’s first wife died. Laura just wants to become a lawyer, but Steven joins the Men’s Association, which is still turning wives into robots. It’s also turning the kids into homework-obsessed drones.

David and neighbor girl Lois (Debbie Barker) start hanging out, as they both love motorcycles. Laura becomes friends with Lois’ mom, Sandy (Sharon Spelman). And she soon learns that while she lets her kids be who they want to be, her husband seems obsessed with making them perfect.

During a school dance, everyone starts to dance to big band standards and when David and Mary switch it up to some rock and roll, they do more than lose control. They freak out and the cops have to come, as the Stepford Children have not been programmed for 80s music. All the men of Stepford chase Lois, causing a motorcycle crash and then David sees them removing her arms at the hospital. The next day, she shows up brand new and dumps him.

A movie that somehow has “replacement Ginger” Judith Baldwin, James Coco, Dick Butkis and Hedwig and the Angry Inch star John Cameron Mitchell all in it? Yes, and it ends in the most astounding of ways, as the entire town must die for the humans to live.

Directed by Alan J. Levi and written by William Bleich, this is way more entertaining than you’d expect. Usually, I say fuck those kids, but this time I rooted for them.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.