An English-French-Russian co-production action flick shot in Montreal, Canada, but set in Las Vegas? And starring Lee Majors and Micheal Dudikoff? And pinching from the Alexandre Dumas classic? Did Cannon Pictures make this?

Nope.

A company known as Betar Entertainment made it. But don’t worry, they made 1988’s The Ultimate Weapon with Hulk Hogan, so it’s all good.

Well, not really. We are in the direct-to-video low-budget lands where there’d be no original bones buried in this Las Vegas desert of the Great White Sands. Yep, Hoss! We be got ‘er selves a Road House rip-off where Dumas is rolling over in his grave.

Ben O’Connor (Lee Majors) is a retired ex-CIA and Special Forces bad-ass who comes into a little cash via a high-stakes poker game. So he decides it’s time to retire and open up his dream jazz club in Las Vegas, with two of his ex-army buddies as his partners. And since that fourth Musketeer from the good ‘ol army days died during a mission (protecting the Russian president), they’ll employ his son (Michael Dudikoff) as their chief bartender. Romance, but of course, ensues between Dudikoff’s D’Artagnan (seriously, that’s his character’s first name) and Malila (Sabrine Karsenti, who you may remember from Battlefield Earth and The Crow TV series), the local Indian Reservation damsel-in-distress.

And the action ensues when Brad Wesley Kenton Crawford (if you’re a Dolph Lundgren completist, you know actor Martin Neufeld from his work in The Peacekeeper) and his sidekick Irina (Sylvie Varakine, who reminds of Brigitte Nielsen; know your Rocky IV references), a pair of bad-ass Russian gangsters who “own the town” of Indian Creek (no joke) and the cops (see?), decides to plow down the reservation to build a casino — and level the newly-minted club in the process — it’s time for lots of barroom brawling. Hell, yeah. It’s not a time to “be nice” anymore, baby! Hey, at least, unlike Road House, we have a timely message about the death of progress and how the white man screws the Indians.

Granted, Majors, as well as Dudikoff, are clearly past their action-primes in this rare, hard-to-find rip on Dudikoff’s Cannon halcyon days of action yore, but the duo carry the film’s French-Canadian unknown-to-U.S. cast with class. Chalk it up to my enjoyment off all things Dudikoff and my Majors nostalgia, but I liked this one in all of its low-budgeted action glory. But man, we sure do wish Sam Elliot would roll up just to deliver that line . . . and ride off into the sunset, because there’s no way to twist the name “The Musketeer Club” into a joke about a feminine hygiene product. (Douchesketeer? No, that’s not working for me, either. That’s something a dicky, frat-preppy college jock would say as he pants a nerd. Wade Garrette would never say that.)

Thank you, ye You Tube overlords
for not being a “double douche” and deleting this clip,
thus ruining the bit.

Musketeers Forever is scattered around the globe in a hard-to-find VHS tape and bogus grey-ripped DVD issued in multiple-region formats (dubbed in French — with and without subtitles), so know your zones. But guess what? Tubi TV comes through with a pretty clean English-language, free-with-ads upload to enjoy. So get your Dudikoff on this weekend and relive those good ol’ Cannon VHS days of yore. . . .

. . . And here we are, a year later as we end 2022, with an off-the-cuff review of an obscure Lee Majors flick spiking in reads. Why? Well, in addition to Tubi, Musketeers Forever now appears on those faux-retro UHF channels you’re pulling in with your free-TV antenna, such as Cozi and Antenna, as well as several Smart TV free-with-ad stream platforms. So, if you see it, do watch it. You’ll have fun with this forgotten Lee Majors romp.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

The ’80s were the comeback decade, for both William Shatner and Lee Majors returned to our small screens with T.J Hooker (1982 – 1986) and The Fall Guy (1981 – 1986)*, respectively. And both were shows good ol’ dad and I could enjoy together. And we were both equally perturbed when they were simultaneously cancelled.

Now you would think, with a second hit TV series, that Lee would have been back in mainstream Hollywood’s good graces and return to his stalled theatrical career from the early ’80s. But it seemed the contractual dust-up during the last year of The Six Million Dollar Man back in 1977 wasn’t forgotten. There’s two sides to the story: Majors either caught a case of the Tinseltown Flu to force Universal into accepting his Fawcett-Majors Productions as a series co-producer or he held out for a pay raise. Either way, the executive suites in la-la land don’t take kindly to their actors pulling a creative coup.

So after saddling up in the late ’80s as Mountain Dan alongside Dolly Parton (with Henry “The Fonz” Winkler directing!) in A Smoky Mountain Christmas and two Six Million Dollar Man-Bionic Woman telefilms, Majors made it back to the big screen . . . well, it was only a matter of time until Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus wrangled Lee Majors into one of their deadbeat, direct-to-video productions.

Granted, we love Cannon Films around the B&S About Movies offices, for their imprint was ’80s VHS-rental de rigueur, with all of the Death Wish sequels and Chuck Norris flicks, such as Invasion U.S.A. and The Delta Force series. And all of the Ninja-suffixed films. And all of our beloved Micheal Dudikoff flicks. In fact, by 1986, Cannon reached a production milestone of distributing 43 films in one year, as the studio broke away from their usual direct-to-videoesque potboilers to big-budgeted theatrical features such as (the less than stellar) Lifeforce and Masters of the Universe, (and the cheesily awesome) Cobra and Over the Top.

Sadly, by the time the Israeli cousins of the celluloid frontiers roped the services of Lee Majors, Cannon was in financial and creative ruins . . . and four years away from its inevitable demise. So, instead of putting Majors in a halfway decent flick sidekickin’ with Chuck Norris in something like Firewalker or slipping him into Roy Scheider’s role in (a pretty decent Elmore Leonard film adaptation) 52 Pick Up, our ex-Bionic stunt man ended up in Keaton’s Cop.

Huh?

You know, the 48 Hours Lethal Weapon buddy-cop rip-off film that paired Lee Majors with Don Rickles. Yes. You heard me right. Mr. Warmth from all of those The Johnny Carson Show reruns on Antenna TV. The guy who did all of those goofy “beach party” movies with Frankie and Annette back in the ’60s. The guy who you’ve seen many a-cable-replay times as casino manager Billy Sherbet in Martin Scorsese’s Casino. But the younger kiddies ’round these wilds of Allegheny country probably remember Don Rickles best as the acidic Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story. Oh, and if you’re a horror hound like most of B&S’s readers: Don was Manny Bergman in the (pretty cool) mobster-vamp hybrid Innocent Blood by John Landis.

But here’s ol’ Don . . . twenty-years later, following up his last big screen role in 1970’s Kelly Heroes with Clint Eastwood, in the Danny Glover role as Jake Barber: the aged detective sidekick paired with Mike Gable, a burnt-out, on-the-edge veteran cop with a penchant for throwing suspects out windows — and losing partners, via death. Oh, and speaking of Cobra . . . guess who their boss is . . . hey, it’s Art LaFleur rippin’ through a Xerox redux of his role from that Stallone flick. (Plot spoiler: we lose Don early in the movie, natch, and he’s not funny here; he plays it straight, as he did in Innocent Blood and Casino.) Oh, and speaking of Cobra, again: Remember the big “character development” scene when Marion Cobretti cut off a slice of three-day-old pizza with a pair of scissors? Well, Keaton’s Cop has one: Mike Gable brushes his teeth with beer. (Remember when Brian “Boz” Bosworth mixed that “health drink” in a blender during the “establishing scene” in Stone Cold (1991) and we wondered, “how can he drink that” . . . and it ended up being gruel for his bet iguana? Hey, all of these action flicks needed one of those “character development” moments, natch.)

So, I see you noticed the name of Abe Vigoda on the box. Yes, he from those endless AMC and TNT reruns of The Godfather and those old Barney Miller episodes you’ve Antenna TV-channel grazed as you surfed the couch after a long Saturday night of partying. Eh, maybe you remember Abe in The Cannonball Run II, The Stuff, or the oddest Christmas flick of them all, Prancer.

Anyway, Ol’ Abe is Louis Keaton, an aged-out mobster living his days incognito in a Galveston, Texas, nursing home. When Gable is dispatched to the nursing home to investigate a shooting, he comes to discover the intended target was Keaton and the shooter was a mob hitman. And since Barber and Vigoda go “way back,” Barber convinces the guff n’ grizzled Gable to take part of the action-comedy-romance (with a home nurse that is way too young for him) that ensues.

Truth be told: Even though this a pinch-o-rama rip off, Majors is solid here, the comedy is funny (both of the sometimes-intentional and non-intentional variety), and it’s nice to see a then 69-year-old Abe Vigoda digging in his heels and getting banged around with film’s promoted “hard-edged action.” But still. Lee Majors deserved better. Way better. Like the very similar Martin Brest-directed and Robert DeNiro-starring Midnight Run from 1988-better (which Majors’s old bosses, Universal, backed). But that’s how the dice in Hollywood roll across the green felts of fate.

No freebie streams? What the hell, You Tube uploaders? What gives, ye executives at Tubi TV? Ah, but we found a rental-stream on Amazon Prime. Keaton’s Cop has never been officially reissued on DVD, so watch out for those bogus-cum-defective grey market rips out there, kiddies.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

* Stock footage alert: Action scenes from our “Fast and Furious Week II” review of Flash and the Firecat ended up in The Fall Guy (the clip is included in the review).

Editor’s Note: This review originally ran on February 23, 2020, as part of our “Box Office Failure Week” of film reviews. We rerunning it as part of our “Leek Majors Week” tribute.

If you ever wondered: Is there a film with an almost $20 million dollar price tag that the acting and technical unions had to shut down because none of the actors or crew were paid? Is there a film that still hasn’t been released—thirteen years after it completed production? More importantly: Is there a film where Lee Majors (being a really good sport about his “pop culture” status) goes “Six Million Dollar Man” on Dan Conner’s ass? Is there a film where Lee Majors makes prank phone calls looking for “Phil McCracken” with Johnny Brennan of The Jerky Boys?

Yep. There is.

And that movie is this reported “remake” of director Sean S. Cunningham’s second post-Friday the 13th project, the 1983 teen comedy, Spring Break (here’s that film’s theme song by Cheap Trick). The story is a familiar one: a group of four friends who were bullied in high school decide to seek revenge against those now college freshman bullies during a Florida Spring Break in 1983. Shot in outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the film was produced by Big Sky Motion Pictures, the production company of the film’s writer and director, Mars Callahan, who’s best known for the acclaimed Poohall Junkies starring Chazz Palminteri and Christopher Walken (and the little seen What Love Is starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.).

While the title makes you think this is a direct-to-DVD knockoff of a Judd Aptow sex-joke fest, you’d be wrong. Spring Break ’83, co-directed by Sam Raimi associate Scott Spiegel (Intruder, co-writer of Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn), carries an $18 million dollar price tag and was intended as a theatrical release.

And look at that cast. The talent we love here at B&S About Movies is everywhere you look! It’s a B-Movie fan’s dream wet dream with Robert Davi (Maniac Cop II), Erik Estrada (Do or Die, the Hallmark Channel’s Dead Over Diamonds), Morgan Fairchild (American Horror House), John Goodman (C.H.U.D), Lee Majors (The Norseman), Joe Pantoliano (The Final Terror) Joe Piscopo (Dead Heat), Richard Portnow (Howard Stern’s dad in Private Parts), and Adrian Zmed (The Final Terror, William Shatner ‘80s TV series TJ Hooker). Fans of cable television’s Hannah Montana, iZombie, and Henry Danger (and its spin-off, Danger Force) will notice Andrew Caldwell in one of his earliest theatrical roles as “Mouth”; he’s also appeared in Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, Drillbit Taylor, and the latest Matrix installment, Revolutions (2021).

It’s been reported the film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. However, it actually didn’t screen at the festival: the film was shown at an (unnamed) venue in Park City, Utah, at the same time Sundance was taking place. Piggybacking the film onto the festival did nothing to help the film find a distributor. The film’s once official website now leads to a 404 error and the legal disputes over who owns the film’s negative still continues. . . . And we’re sure Lee has stories to tell. We wonder if he ever got paid?

About the Author: You can read the music and film criticisms of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He’s also a staff writer at B&S About Movies.

We ballyhooed the TV career of Jerry Jameson in our review of one of the few times the prolific director was called up to the bigs with the 1974 A.I.P release The Bat People. Jameson was also behind one of the ‘70s quintessential box office “disaster” smashes: Airport ’77, which was backed by Universal Pictures. And since this ABC-TV “Movie of the Week” was known during its overseas television and theatrical runs as Airport ’85, you know why Jameson is here . . . and where this film is heading. Of course, Lee Majors is here, and the reason he’s here is because Jameson directed Majors in several episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man. The duo previously worked together on High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane (1980) and The Cowboy and the Ballerina (1984). (Jameson also gave us the TV movie knockoff of 20th Century Fox’s The Towering Inferno with Terror on the 40th Floor (1974).)

The brains behind this production is Henry Winkler — and “The Fonz” made sure John Dkystra’s contributions to the film were front and center in those promo materials. And the Airport series* of films were box-office hot in the ’70s and, as we learned from our 2020 end of the year “TV Movie Week” tribute, the Big Three networks relished stuffing their disaster hangers with a slew of low-budgeted airline action flicks**. So, Star Wars meets Airport, it is!

And to whip that pitch into shape, TV scribes Robert Malcolm Young and Peter R. Brooke didn’t take any chances in concocting their Star Wars TV cash-in: they simply pinched from the 1969 Gregory Peck sci-fi borefest that was Marooned (1969) — and changed out the “Ironman One” capsule from that film with Starflight One, an SST-styled supersonic jet successor, and the Doppelganger Rescue shuttle with the Columbia. The script also bears striking similarities to the 1982 novel Orbit by Thomas Block (Amazon Kindle), but those similarities were chalked up to coincidence and not plagiarism. And if it all seems a bit familiar, like ABC-TV’s SST Death Flight familiar from 1977, then it probably is.

As is the case with the Big Three network flicks of the pre-cable epoch, the passenger cabin is loaded with lots of familiar character actor and TV series faces, in this case we have Hal Linden, Lauren Hutton, Gail Strickland, George DiCenzo, Tess Harper, and the always game Ray Milland — who you’ll remember was in ABC-Universal’s Battlestar Galactica feature film, but opted out of the series. And yes, that is Terry “Uncle Bernie” Keiser on board — who also co-starred with Majors in Steel (1980; also reviewed this week).

So, the poster . . . along with the Star Wars and Airport connections says it all, right?

Okay, so we have the big, media-covered maiden flight for Starflight One, a hypersonic jet that can travel from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia, in two hours. Of course, there’s romance and corporate intrigue on the flight, with Cody Briggs (Lee Majors) two-timing his wife Janet (Tess Harper) via Erica Hansen (Lauren Hutton), a media relations rep with the airline run owned by, you guessed it, they ubiquitously gruffy Ray Milland. And we’ve got a greedy crook using the flight to transport some stolen gold out of the country, and Terry Keiser is on board as an equally greedy communication magnate stressed out over launching that crucial Saturn V stock footage (off the cost of Australia!) to put his satellite into orbit to corner the world’s TV market.

Uh, oh. The Saturn V goes FUBAR and the rocket debris scatters into Starlight One’s flight path. To avoid disaster, Briggs climbs the jet — and stumbles into orbital velocity. And the Starlight has no heat shields . . . thus the film’s alternate VHS home video titling as Starlight: The Plane That Couldn’t Land. So, while Dykstra’s on his union-mandated lunch break, it’s time to cue that shuttle Columbia stock footage (not once, but twice!) to deliver emergency fuel on the first flight, and some flimsy flexible conduit to save the 70-plus passengers on the second flight. Bottom line: If you want to see a very game Hal Linden drifting through a flexi-space tunnel to safety, then this is your film.

Truth be told, in spite of its low-budget, Dykstra’s effects are pretty good . . . well, those those outer space scenes of astronauts drifting about is more of the Salvage I variety, really. And more like when Battlestar Galactica: TOS tanked in the ratings and the effects went to cheesy feldercarb courtesy of budget cuts. So, sorry, please leave those “Star Wars” claims at the spacegate, Kubrick. This was certainly fun-filled when we were Lucas-drunk in our tweens and early teens, but this — unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running (which Dykstra also worked on), and Star Wars — doesn’t hold well to the test of time. But it’s still a hell of a lot better than that stranded-in-space hokum Murder In Space (1985) starring the not-even-they-can-save-it-cast of Wilford Brimley, Michael Ironside, and Martin Balsam — a detective-cum-murder mystery-in-space TV movie plotting trope that didn’t get better with the likes of Murder by Moonlight (1989) and Trapped in Space (1994).

You can stream Starlight One on Amazon Prime or through EPIX’s own Amazon platform. You can also check out the trailer and TV promo.

* We reviewed all of the Airport movies with our “Watch the Series: Airport” feature.

** You can catch up with all of those TV movie airline disaster flicks with our “Airline Disasters TV Movie Round-Up” 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.