Can One Man Make A Difference?
Now Playing: DIRECT ACTION
(2004)--Directed by Sidney J. Furie. Stars Dolph Lundgren, Polly Shannon, Conrad Dunn. He may be pushing 50, but direct-to-video action king Lundgren is still capable of belting bad guys as well as just about anyone. His recent work looks even more impressive when you put it up against the DTV films being made by his butt-kicking contemporaries Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal. Unlike Seagal, who has grown as lazy as he has fat in his middle age, and Van Damme, whose ego has reportedly scared talented filmmakers away from working with him, Lundgren has actually improved with age, growing into a relaxed, comfortable screen performer with great presence.

Working with veteran Sidney J. Furie may have something to do with that. The 72-year-old filmmaker has directed some of Hollywood’s biggest stars--from Frank Sinatra and Michael Caine to Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman. Never a highly acclaimed director, Furie has proven himself to be a talented craftsman who has helmed popular action favorites like THE IPCRESS FILE, IRON EAGLE, THE ENTITY and THE BOYS IN COMPANY C. Yeah, okay, he also made SUPERMAN IV, but we’ll blame Golan and Globus for that one. Furie might have to take the hit on GABLE AND LOMBARD, however.

During the 1990’s, Furie became virtually the only director of his era to segue comfortably into episodic television and direct-to-video features, pumping out one or two films per year. Some of them, like THE RAGE with Lorenzo Lamas and Roy Scheider, have been quite good. His first collaboration with Lundgren, 2003’s DETENTION, was Dolph’s first movie since returning from a shortlived retirement. They must have enjoyed making it in Hamilton, Ontario, because they returned for this Nu Image crime drama.

In DIRECT ACTION, Lundgren is Frank Gannon, an Ohio (though the Ontario license plates give away the illusion) police detective assigned to the Direct Action Unit, which takes the most dangerous cases. At 5:00pm, Frank plans to testify before a grand jury about the massive level of corruption and murder in his unit, which leads all the way up to his boss, Captain Stone (Dunn). Almost all of Gannon’s fellow officers appear to be dirty, as they attempt to prevent him from reaching the courthouse by threatening his life and framing him for multiple cop killings. Partnered with a female rookie (busy Canadian actress Shannon) on her first day on the job, Frank runs the gauntlet of automatic weapons and screeching tires, risking his career and his life to do the right thing.

Furie’s $7 million budget is a pitfall, since he could have used some extra dough for bigger chases and more stunts. The actors shoot off a lot of blanks, but the action is mostly held to some decent martial-arts fight scenes, a lot of shootouts and one exploding van. The action sequences may be medium-scale, but Furie does at least stage a lot of them, fluidly and accompanied by Adam Norden’s energetic score. Lundgren is still in good shape, and has no problem projecting believability as he snaps limbs and thumps heads. He and Shannon have good chemistry, but thankfully avoid a superfluous romance (especially considering the whole film takes place during one day).

DIRECT ACTION is no classic, no matter how hard it attempts to remind you of SERPICO (one character is even made up to resemble Al Pacino in that Sidney Lumet drama), but it is a well-made, straightforward action movie that doesn’t try to bop you over the head with extraneous camera movement, gimmicky editing and loud music. Greg Mellott’s screenplay is routine, but decades of experience have taught Furie how to spice up routine material, turning DIRECT ACTION into capable entertainment. Furie and Lundgren planned to make a third film together, THE DEFENDER, but illness forced the director to drop out, leaving it to Dolph to make his directorial debut.

The World Of Forensic Medicine
QUINCY buff (and Forrest Tucker fan extraordinare) Hal Horn posted this in the Comments section:

Great review, Marty. This was one of my favorite shows growing up, though I appreciate it on a much different level as an adult. As you know from an earlier post, I appreciate the almost BATMAN-like camp value of latter-day QUINCY M.E. more than the superb early episodes, but I definitely plan to give the new boxed set a look.

The first 3 seasons are really good TV IMO: only occasionally preachy, and with many wild, twisting mysteries to be sorted out. Really good stuff from about episode 1 to 50 or so, with Klugman in top form.

Around 55 episodes in (about the middle of the 1978-79 season) QUINCY M.E. gets preachier, and much campier, almost becoming another DRAGNET '67...and Klugman becomes a superhero of sorts, whose ability to land younger women rivals Paul Kersey's. Needless to say, I'm really, really waiting on the boxed sets of seasons 5 through 8.

My favorite Quincy comedy moments (I know you mentioned the Ninjas episode in an earlier thread):
1) "Next Stop Nowhere"; the infamous Punk Rock episode, and every bit as hilarious as its reputation. Defies description.
2) "Bitter Pill"; classic scene: after about the third time a kid OD's from "lookalike" drugs, Quincy abandons trying to close the local head shop by legal means, and just marches in and starts demolishing the place with his bare hands! Priceless! Guest baddie is Simon Oakland.
3) "Never a Child" and a few others: the police just stand around, while the Big Q apprehends the child molester/murderer/etc. and brings him in. Monahan and Co. give Commissioner Gordon and Chief O'Hara a run for their money in the "incompetence" category. I didn't realize this was the case as far back as episode 1 though! Maybe I should watch these early ones again....

I still see the crusader daily via Channel 52 locally here, and I'm in the process of completing seasons 5 through 8, my favorites. Any favorite specific episodes?

As I recall, bad QUINCY is almost as entertaining as good QUINCY, but on an entirely different level. The ninja episode Hal refers to has Quincy investigating a murder that was performed using an ancient Asian death touch called dim mak or something like that. As always, he brings trouble upon himself by getting right in the murderer's face with his suspicions, earning him a visit that night from some ninja who kick Quincy's ass. I'll never forget hearing my brother yelling at me from a different room, "Get in here now! Ninjas are kicking Quincy's ass!", which is on a list of classic non sequiturs.

I haven't seen any of these QUINCYs in years, so I may have some details wrong, but there's another episode where Quincy forces a confession from a killer by dangling a rattlesnake in front of his face. I wonder if the defense attorney had any problem getting that admission tossed out of court!

Good to hear that the cops in the Quincyverse never get any smarter, although the show would have had to go off the air if they had. In the premiere, Quincy produces scientific evidence that proves that the suspect in police custody could not possibly have committed the murder, but Lt. Monahan just blows him off ("Get outta here, Quincy, I got work to do!").

Who's The Second Happiest Man In Los Angeles?
Now Playing: QUINCY, M.E.
Phil Spector, that's who. How worried do you think he is about his upcoming murder trial in the death of BARBARIAN QUEEN star Lana Clarkson? After O.J. and Bobby Blake and now Michael Jackson, how much evidence does a jury need to put these guys behind bars? In all three cases, the physical evidence was overwhelming (good grief, O.J. even left his own blood behind at the crime scene), but the L.A. jurors let the defendants walk anyway. Of course, these are the same star-struck morons that voted Arnold Schwarzeneggar as their new governor, a Chief Executive whose approval rating is lower and job performance worse than the guy he replaced, Gray Davis.

Speaking of murder, I caught last week's premiere of THE INSIDE, a new crime drama on the Fox network. Yeah, like the networks need another police procedural. Remember PROFILER, which hung around NBC's Saturday night schedule for several seasons in the late 1990's? Well, THE INSIDE is the exact same show, except with younger stars. You've got the young hottie with the "gift" for solving serial murders, the older male authority figure, the wisecracking and slightly less attractive woman sidekick, and the young male hottie for that oh-so-boring sexual tension. Add some creepy music stings, opening titles that rip off SE7EN, plenty of gory crime scenes, and you have PROFILER 2, now titled THE INSIDE. I have no idea what "The Inside" is; the pilot, written and directed by Tim Minear, neglected to mention that.

This ludicrously cast series is impossible to take seriously as long as 25-year-old model Rachel Nichols is its star. She's 25, but looks 17, and was, in fact, cast when the series' original premise was about an FBI agent going undercover as a high school student to fight crime. Nichols might have pulled that off, but when Minear took over the series and insisted on changing the format, he was reportedly forced by Fox to keep her on as the star. Prancing about in lip gloss and a constantly placid expression on her face, Nichols is about as believable as an FBI field agent as I would be in THE MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV STORY. Peter Coyote is authoritative as her boss, I suppose, but the show seems to be titled towards making him some sort of shadowy antagonist whose motives in the manner in which he treats the agents under his command are a little shady. Coyote plays a great asshole, however, as does Adam Baldwin as one of Nichols' partners, a wiseass named Danny Love.

The premiere of THE INSIDE finished fourth in its time slot, well behind a ballroom dancing show (!) and reruns (of YES, DEAR!), meaning you'll likely have little time to get into THE INSIDE before Fox cancels it.

I finished the GREATEST AMERICAN HERO Season Two set tonight with "Lilacs, Mr. Maxwell", an extraordinary episode written and directed by its costar, Robert Culp. It's a mature, sensitive look at the emotional side of FBI agent Bill Maxwell (Culp), who we usually see as the stubborn, gung-ho, impersonal partner of supersuited crimefighter Ralph Hinkley (William Katt). In the second-season finale, Maxwell becomes smitten with an efficiency expert (portrayed by DESIGNING WOMEN's Dixie Carter) who turns out to be a KGB assassin ordered to kill him. It's not unlike the teleplays Culp turned out for his I SPY series in the mid-1960's in its attention to the gray areas surrounding honor among spies and duty to one's country. He manages to capture the series' inherent humor and adventure, but adds a dramatic angle unusual to the show, closing with a freeze-frame certain to leave a lump in your throat. I can't wait for the third (and final) season coming from Anchor Bay this summer.

With GAH back on the shelf, I opened Universal's new QUINCY, M.E. box set, which consists of 16 episodes from the first two seasons. QUINCY actually began as a spoke of THE NBC SUNDAY MYSTERY MOVIE, but after four feature-length episodes, proved popular enough to earn its own regular one-hour weekly timeslot, the only MYSTERY MOVIE series to do so.

Universal bills QUINCY as the "Original Crime Scene Investigator", and even though the C.S.I. franchises may not have existed without it, it's closer in its premise to CROSSING JORDAN. Jack Klugman stars as Quincy (first name unknown, even at the end of its seven-season run), a Los Angeles coroner unable to half-ass anything, turning up murders, coverups and police and political corruption and intrigue at an alarming frequency. As the series wore on, QUINCY moved away somewhat from standard mystery plots towards an "issue of the week" premise, as Quincy began examining social issues between murders. This was due to the painstaking day-to-day involvement of Klugman, who became notorious for battling network executives and firing writers and producers whom he felt weren't living up to the high standards he set for his show.

In the premiere, "Go Fight City Hall...To the Death", Quincy investigates the rape/murder of a young woman and ties it into the apparent suicide of her former boss and the apparent accidental death of a former co-worker six months earlier. One of the episode's weaknesses is the obvious incompetence of the police force, represented by Lt. Monahan (Garry Walberg, Speed in Klugman's THE ODD COUPLE series), who refuses to accept medical facts as evidence for the sake of expedience; Monahan's got a suspect in custody, and so what if Quincy's examination of the corpse proves the guy didn't do it.

The success of the series rested firmly on Klugman's shoulders, and he was more than up to the task. Let me be clear--Jack Klugman is a great actor. All you'd have to do to be convinced is to watch any of the four TWILIGHT ZONE episodes he did, including "In Praise for Pip", where he plays a lonely trumpet player, and "A Game of Pool", which pitted him against billiard shark Jonathan Winters. He also held his own in one of cinema's great dramas, 12 ANGRY MEN, against Henry Fonda and major stage stars like Jack Warden, Lee J. Cobb and Ed Begley. In the ten-year period between 1971 and 1980, he was nominated for an Emmy award nine times (five for THE ODD COUPLE, four for QUINCY, M.E.), winning twice (in addition to his 1964 Emmy for a DEFENDERS guest shot).

I won't get into the brilliance of THE ODD COUPLE now, but suffice to say that Klugman is great fun to watch as crusading coroner Quincy. Yeah, sometimes he goes a bit over the top and makes the character too abrasive and bullheaded, but that's part of the fun, seeing Quincy take on the Establishment singlehandedly and usually kicking its ass.

Plus, Klugman's exuberance inspired the wonderful SCTV parody QUINCY, CARTOON CORONER with Joe Flaherty's dead-on impersonation, in which Quincy's examination of Sylvester's flattened corpse sparks an investigation of Tweety.

I'm Buying Hooker In August

Wowee wow! I'm very impressed by this cover art. Sony this week released a sneak peek at the box art for T.J. HOOKER: THE COMPLETE 1ST AND 2ND SEASONS, which will hit stores August 9. Poor Jimmy Darren got left out--it must hurt to have less name recognition than Adrian (DANCE FEVER) Zmed--but the colors, the logo, the photos and the design of this box are really great. It's gonna look great on my shelf, that's for sure. The set features all 26 episodes from the first two seasons, including the complete 90-minute pilot. TV promos for each episode are expected to comprise the extras; come on, Sony, you couldn't get these actors to do commentaries?

For everything T.J. HOOKER and more, check out 4Adam30's bitchin' HOOKER site.

Potpourri
Not much to report today, and not much time in which to do it, but I imagine I'll be too busy to post much over the weekend. Tolemite is coming to town tonight for a weekend of eating meat, drinking frosty Red Can, slurping Pop-Ice, and watching Crappy Movies. We're also planning to hit my company's picnic tomorrow, party with the Cohens' foosball table Saturday night, and plow our way through the dusty Gordyville flea market on Sunday. Doesn't leave me much time to scope women; maybe Cheeseburger and Shark Hunter can lure some over to the mighty grilling-and-foosball bash.

I have just about finished Season Two of THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO. Considering I haven't seen most of these episodes in more than 20 years, I'm surprised how familiar they seem. I guess they affected my young self more than I considered. I'm also relieved to see that, not only do they hold up all these years later (so many shows I liked as a kid positively suck now, i.e. CHARLIE'S ANGELS and WELCOME BACK, KOTTER), but they remain fairly consistent in quality. There are one or two clunkers in the second season, but for the most part, the shows are remarkably likable, and the second half of the season found the cast clicking together better than ever. I have only two more episodes to watch. One I recall vividly because of its catchy coming-attractions teaser ("Who? Woo? Woo. Woo who?") that won't be on the disc. The other was written and directed by costar Robert Culp, and is a remarkably mature, offbeat examination of his hard-bitten FBI character.

Culp was an interesting director who, unfortunately, didn't do enough of it. If you pick up Volumes 20 and 21 of Image's I SPY DVD collection, you'll hear some wonderfully complete and candid audio commentary tracks by Culp over the episodes that he wrote and sometimes directed. They're not only a nifty lesson in writing and directing television episodes, particularly shows that break the series' regular format, but also an excellent history lesson about I SPY--its genesis, casting, locations, production schedule and Culp's relationship with costar Bill Cosby.

Culp made only one feature as a director, 1972's HICKEY & BOGGS, which was released by United Artists, a studio known at one time for being artist-friendly. HICKEY is an interesting attempt at film noir reuniting Culp and Cosby as down-and-out private eyes looking for a missing girl and $400,000 from a botched bank robbery. The screenplay by Walter Hill (later a renowned director of terrific action films like THE WARRIORS, 48 HRS. and EXTREME PREJUDICE) is confusing and disjointed, but there's some good use of grotty Los Angeles locations, and Culp handles the action sequences well. The emphasis is on the squalid dicks portrayed by Culp and Cosby, very nihilistic losers trying to make a buck, and the atmosphere of a dusty Los Angeles out to kick the ass of a hopeful future, but the violence quotient is high for a PG features, including exciting shootouts in the L.A. Coliseum and the Dodger Stadium parking lot. Culp and Cosby eschew their familiar hip, wisecracking I SPY personas for seedier personalities, but the chemistry between them still remains. I doubt if this was a box-office hit during its original release--I SPY fans probably found it too downbeat--and it isn't easy to find today (this needs a legit DVD release badly), but fans of the private eye genre should keep an eye out for this one. Young Michael Moriarty and James Woods appear in small roles, and other familar supporting faces belong to Robert Mandan, Jack Colvin, Ed Lauter, Bill Hickman, Roger E. Mosley, Lou Frizzell and Isabel Sanford.

Trim And Stylish...Hell, Yeah!

I have to thank my friend Robert Richardson for sending me one of the funniest images I have seen in a long time. Man, I sure wish I had some of them karate pants. As Robert says:

"I don't know about you, but when I'm kicking the ass of faceless ninjas and karate wannabees in some dingy back alley, it always embarasses me to tears when the crotch of my jeans goes rrrrrrrriiiiiippppp due to lack of reinforcement."

I also Love the copywriter's Odd Approach to capitalizing Random words in The Sell copy.

It Makes Me Stupid And You A Whore
Now Playing: THE OCTAGON

Yesterday, we looked at FORCED VENGEANCE. Today, we check out another early Chuck Norris movie, his fourth starring role: 1980’s THE OCTAGON, produced and released by an independent studio called American Cinema, which also made GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK and A FORCE OF ONE with Chuck. Even though I didn’t see it until it played on HBO in the early 1980’s, THE OCTAGON is the first Norris film that I remember wanting to see. American Cinema was noted for saturating television and radio airwaves where their films were playing with advertisements, and I clearly recall seeing trailers for THE OCTAGON and wanting to see it. Unfortunately, my parents had a policy against taking my younger brother and me to R-rated movies, so I had to wait until late-night pay cable telecasts to finally see it.

Norris plays Scott James, a martial arts superstar who retired from competition after seriously injuring an opponent. Now he just works out and hangs around the site of the latest big match with his karate pal A.J. (Canadian Art Hindle, who’s got the feathered hair thing going big time). Trying to describe THE OCTAGON’s plot is pretty tricky, since it doesn’t make too much sense, and scripter Leigh Chapman (DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY) throws in too many scenes that have no purpose. For example, Hindle is having a conversation on the street with another competitor (played by a pre-GHOSTBUSTERS Ernie Hudson). He seems a bit distracted, and finally cuts off Hudson to dash across the street, presumably to meet or follow someone. We never find out who. There’s also a scene in a cocktail lounge that begins with nearly a minute of some drunk whining about having no peanuts. I presume the actor playing the drunk was related to one of the moviemakers, since the character, dialogue and scene itself serve no function whatsoever. Borscht Belt comic Jack Carter also appears in two scenes as some character--I’m not sure who--trying to convince Norris to get back into the ring. Even though the scenes take place on different days, Carter is wearing the exact same outfit in both. It’s possible some things were left on the cutting room floor, since Dann Cahn’s editing is choppy all the way through.

Anyway, Scott and A.J. attend a dance recital, and Scott, after meeting the lead dancer (pretty Kim Lankford, then a regular on KNOTS LANDING) backstage, asks her to dinner. His plans for romance are foiled after he takes her back to her place, only to discover that an army of ninja have slaughtered her entire family. During Scott’s battle with them, the dancer too dies. The next day, he meets sexy heiress Justine (Karen Carlson from THE STUDENT NURSES), who tries to trick him into hiring on as an assassin. She wants to murder a man named Seikura, whom she believes murdered her father. Scott knows Seikura (Tadashi Yamashita) well; they grew up together in Japan as brothers, but Seikura was forced to leave after shaming their father.

There’s much more going on in director Eric Karson’s film, including a secret training base for ninja assassins run by Seikura in Central America; a crusty old mercenary with a hoop earring played by B-movie vet Lee Van Cleef (who later played a ninja in the NBC TV series THE MASTER); and the “octagon” itself, which is never referred to by name and, despite giving the film its title, is never explained or showcased very well. It’s actually an impressive set--an eight-sided obstacle course filled with blade-wielding ninja who leap out of every corner and behind every barrier. Norris’ climactic tangle in the octagon is the best scene in the movie, even if you hardly understand the plot to that point. No kidding--I’ve seen THE OCTAGON five or six times, and even by concentrating on following the story, I’m still not clear on several plot point. It’s possible Karson (OPPOSING FORCE) was aware of his story’s pitfalls, since he in no way skimps on the action, throwing in several well-choreographed (by Chuck and his brother Aaron) karate battles along with a few explosions, a car chase, some bullets and even a burning man. It’s still hard to take seriously, though, because of the film’s gimmick of illustrating what’s going through its hero’s head by having Chuck dub his thoughts in a low whisper and playing them back with a laughable echo effect (“Seikura-ah-ah-ah...why-why-why-why? My brother-er-er-er-er.”). It’s perfect for the OCTAGON drinking game though--just pound one every time you hear Chuck’s thoughts on the soundtrack.

THE OCTAGON isn’t one of Norris’ best films, but it isn’t boring, contains a cool score by Richard Halligan, and is a reminder of what unassuming fun exploitation flicks used to be. The supporting cast includes Carol Bagdasarian, whose father Ross, better known as “David Seville”, created the Chipmunks, Australian martial artist Richard Norton, who actually plays two roles, but is covered from head to toe in ninja wear in one of them, Brian Libby, who next played a zombie in the Norris film SILENT RAGE, and Chuck’s son Mike as teenage Chuck in a flashback.

One other point of interest is screenwriter Leigh Chapman, who began her Hollywood career as an actress, playing supporting roles as “The Girl” in ‘60s television shows like THE MONKEES and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., and supplemented her income by writing action/adventure scripts for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and THE WILD, WILD WEST. In the ‘70s, she wrote OCTAMAN, an awful homage to CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON; DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY, a bonafide drive-in classic starring Peter Fonda (and coming to DVD this summer from Anchor Bay); and STEEL, a rugged adventure starring Lee Majors as the leader of a motley crew of construction workers. I wonder how many other kung fu movies have been written by women.

My Best Hat. Shit.
Now Playing: FORCED VENGEANCE

Once upon a time, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was arguably the most prestigious film studio in Hollywood. By 1981, MGM was producing and distributing Chuck Norris movies. Hey, there are those of us who don’t consider that a big step down. Norris was a very busy star in those days; SILENT RAGE from Columbia, an interesting hybrid of martial-arts action and mad-scientist horror, came out just three months before FORCED VENGEANCE saturated theaters in the summer of 1982.

Norris, playing his seventh leading role in five years, stars as Josh Randall, a Vietnam vet and troubleshooter for the Lucky Dragon casino in Hong Kong. Randall isn’t just an employee of the Dragon’s owners, elderly Sam Paschal (David Opatoshu) and Sam’s half-Jewish/half-Chinese son David (Frank Michael Liu), but an unofficial member of the Paschal family. So when a local mobster named Stan Rahmandi (Michael Cavanaugh, still a familiar face on TV and in DTV features) murders the Paschals for refusing to sell him their business, it ain’t like if your boss or mine got killed. Randall is really steamed, especially since the local fuzz want to frame him for the killings. With his girlfriend Claire (Mary Louise Weller) and party girl Joy Paschal (Camila Griggs), now the sole owner of the Lucky Dragon and Rahmandi’s next target, in tow, Josh bounces around Hong Kong with a price on his head, dodging bullets, nunchakus, knives and flying feet from every two-bit street hood and hitman wannabe in the city.

James Fargo, who cut his teeth on a couple of Clint Eastwood hits (THE ENFORCER and EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE), directed FORCED VENGEANCE in Hong Kong at a reasonable clip. Given that Franklin Thompson’s screenplay drags a bit in the middle and Norris’ obvious liabilities as a leading man, the 90-minute R-rated feature comes across very professionally. Rexford Metz’s camera captures Hong Kong very well indeed, and William Goldstein’s score provides period flavor without lapsing too far into cliched “Asian-style” music. The subject matter is surprisingly rough for a Norris film, presenting a pair of rapes, a couple of somewhat grisly deaths, and a horrible broken-back injury resulting in paralysis. To compensate, Thompson sprinkles a few one-liners into the script, which are not spoken by Norris with the kind of comic timing that will remind you of Henny Youngman, but do lighten the load a bit. Adding some unintentional laughs is the spotty narration, which allows us to “read” Chuck’s thoughts occasionally (“Asshole.”). It isn’t as funny as the freaky whispering, echoing narration in THE OCTAGON (“My brother…brother…brother…”), but it is less necessary.

Norris was just about to hit his peak as a major movie star. A year later, Orion released what I believe to be his best film, LONE WOLF MCQUADE, and a year after that, in 1984, Chuck began an exclusive contract with Cannon that produced his best-remembered action pictures like MISSING IN ACTION and THE DELTA FORCE. His two Orion films--MCQUADE and the tough Chicago policier CODE OF SILENCE--are the best in his filmography, but the jingoistic Cannon cheapies seem to be the ones most commonly referenced today. I have a soft spot, though, for the early Norris works. His American Cinema “trilogy” found him battling sinister CIA operatives (GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK), a super-karate serial killer (A FORCE OF ONE) and an army of ninja running a training camp for terrorists (THE OCTAGON). In Avco-Embassy’s AN EYE FOR AN EYE, he fought druglord Christopher Lee’s army in a Bondian climax, and an indestructible serial-killing zombie (!) was his foe in SILENT RAGE--certainly a more interesting mix than the Commies and terrorists Chuck tackled in his Cannon days.

But whomever he puts the smack on, you can always count on Norris to deliver a good time. My memories of FORCED VENGEANCE are of watching it a dozen times on HBO, usually late at night with my brother and our friends. Now I can see it as many times as I want--and in its original 1.85:1 ratio--on Warner Home Video’s new DVD. The mono soundtrack isn’t going to blow out your speakers, and the colorful anamorphic image isn’t going to evoke the cinematography of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but they’re perfectly fine for a 23-year-old Chuck Norris chopsocky flick. The only extra is a theatrical trailer, which is efficient, but lacks the menace that Ernie Anderson’s voiceover brought to Chuck’s A FORCE OF ONE, which is kind of a dog of a film, but has a promising trailer.

Believe It Or Not, I?m Walking On Air
Now Playing: THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO

I’ve been having a great time with Anchor Bay’s season sets of THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO. I was an eighth-grader when it debuted on ABC in the spring of 1981, and it didn’t take long for it to become one of my favorite TV shows. Of course, 13 is a pretty good age to start watching the show, especially since I was also a fan of superheroes and of GAH creator Stephen J. Cannell’s particular style of action/adventure.

Cannell, along with TV veteran Roy Huggins, created THE ROCKFORD FILES, which was the first Cannell show that I remember watching. Obviously, its star, the wonderful James Garner, was the heart and soul of the series, to this day the best private eye series in television history. But Garner or not, ROCKFORD couldn’t have been as great as it was without its scripts, which focused more on character and dialogue and less on plot than most TV crime dramas did. You can usually tell a Cannell show just by listening to the characters speak. Very few television writers have such a unique ear for interesting dialogue (David Milch, who oversaw NYPD BLUE during its heyday and later created DEADWOOD, is one working today), and Cannell’s is one reason for his overwhelming success as a producer of television programs during the 1970’s and ‘80s. Other Cannell shows you likely remember are THE A-TEAM, HUNTER and 21 JUMP STREET, but even some of his failures were damn good shows: TENSPEED AND BROWN SHOE (which starred Ben Vereen and Jeff Goldblum as detectives), RICHIE BROCKELMAN, PRIVATE EYE (a ROCKFORD spinoff starring Dennis Dugan), UNSUB (a C.S.I.-like procedural that was about a decade ahead of its time), WISEGUY (a highly acclaimed drama about Ken Wahl as an undercover organized crime operative) and STINGRAY (an adventure with Nick Mancuso).

When ABC decided they wanted to do a series about a superhero, Cannell would seem to have been the perfect go-to guy. Except Cannell didn’t know anything about superheroes and had never been a comic-book reader. So he had the idea to do a show about a superhero who wasn’t particularly good at it. He couldn’t fly very well, didn’t know how to use his powers (or even what they were), but still managed to stop the bad guys using his ingenuity. Cannell wrote the two-hour pilot episode himself, and recruited writer Frank Lupo and much of his ROCKFORD FILES staff, including producers Juanita Bartlett and Jo Swerling, Jr. and composers Mike Post and Pete Carpenter to help lay the ground work for the series.

Cannell’s pilot, which was later nominated for an Emmy award for Best Writing in a Comedy Series, sprang from a “what if”. What if a nice-guy, slightly liberal high-school teacher and a hard-nosed, Commie-hating FBI agent became reluctant partners in crime-fighting, because they were abducted by alien beings in a flying saucer and given “red jammies” that imbued its wearer with superpowers like invulnerability, telekinesis and the ability to fly? The genius of Cannell’s premise is that he took it a step further. Now say that the teacher, named Ralph Hinkley, lost the instruction booklet and didn’t know how to use the suit. Whereas most superheroes were larger-than-life beings, the “Greatest American Hero” was just a regular guy--not wealthy, not overbearingly handsome, not overly brave or macho. Just a regular guy thrust into an extraordinary situation, one that he had to try to take control of for the good of mankind.

The pilot pitted Ralph and his new unlikely partner, the FBI agent (called Bill Maxwell), against a group of white supremacists planning an assassination, but the story takes second place to setting up the characters and their relationships. The third point of GAH’s magic triangle was Pam Davidson, a beautiful, smart attorney who was handling Ralph’s divorce and also happened to be his girlfriend. She was in love with Ralph, but not so enamored of the suit, realizing right away that it--and Ralph’s new extracurricular vocation--would put a crimp in their relationship. She and Ralph were not too thrilled with Maxwell either, since he stood far apart from them in age, patience and politics. By the end of the pilot, the three have begun to accept their fate, that--for some unknown reason--they were chosen by the “green guys” to do good things, and their friendship is born.

I believe that casting is 70% of any successful television series, and that’s the department where Cannell definitely got GAH right. The pilot starred curly-haired blond William Katt in the title role of Ralph Hinkley. Katt, whose big break was probably as Sissy Spacek’s prom date in CARRIE, was being groomed as the next Redford when he played opposite Tom Berenger in BUTCH & SUNDANCE: THE EARLY DAYS. That film flopped, and Katt turned to TV, even though it was a role in which he would have to run around in goofy-looking tights and a cape, a costume he despised. Pam was Connie Sellecca, a gorgeous brunette who had been a regular on the short-lived FLYING HIGH and BEYOND WESTWORLD. Her eye-candy quotient was obvious, but it came as a nice surprise to Cannell when he found that she was also a good actress and could play comedy quite well. The icing on the cake was longtime leading man Robert Culp, whose first television series was the ‘50s western TRACKDOWN, but became an international star during the mid-’60s opposite Bill Cosby on I SPY, which earned Culp three consecutive Emmy nominations as Best Actor in a Dramatic Series (ironically, he lost all three times to neophyte actor Cosby, who received much advice from his more experienced co-lead). Culp remained a very busy actor after I SPY, playing guest shots on nearly every network series, it seemed, and playing supporting roles and leads in features and TV-movies.

According to Katt, he and Sellecca initially did not get along with the more serious-minded Culp, but after the two men sat down together and hashed out their differences, relations warmed up. Whatever their relationship off-screen, in front of the cameras, the three stars worked together like a well-oiled machine. The chemistry and camaraderie among the characters was warm and real. Like Jim Rockford, like Hannibal Smith and his A-Team, like Sonny Spoon, like the JUMP STREET kids, Ralph, Pam and Bill were people you liked, who you wanted to root for. And that, above and beyond the action and special effects, is what made THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO a smash hit. In those days of just three networks, it wasn’t enough just to be popular with a particular demographic; you had to appeal to everybody. The kids liked the superheroics and the slapstick comedy of Ralph falling out of the sky, while their parents enjoyed the characterization and the zippy dialogue. Culp especially must have enjoyed the words Cannell’s writing staff put into his mouth, because he recited it so well, whether referring to a big-boned heavy as a “big bag o’ gristle” or urging Ralph to stop jabbering because “it’s makin’ my eyes water here.”

THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO was a hit right out of the box, tying ONE DAY AT A TIME for 12th place in the yearly Nielsen ratings and scoring a #2 hit in BILLBOARD with the theme song, “Believe It Or Not”, penned by Post and Stephen Geyer and sung by Joey Scarbury. It dropped out of the Top 20 in its second season, though, and was moved to a disastrous Friday night timeslot, where it was hammered opposite DALLAS and KNIGHT RIDER. It was seen infrequently in syndication, since there were only 42 hour-long episodes. But now, thanks to Anchor Bay, you can see the first two seasons, uncut, on DVD (with Season Three coming later this year).

What worked about the series works even better on DVD, now that you can see the completed episodes without syndication cuts (but with, unfortunately, replacement music for songs that were not licensed for home video release; this includes Scarbury’s essential cover of “Eve of Destruction” in the episode “Operation: Spoilsport”). The downside is that the visual effects, particularly the flying, look even worse than they did in 1981. In order to shoot the visual effects quickly and cheaply, Cannell hired a company called Magicam, which shot the flying scenes on videotape and then transferred the finished composite footage to film. They weren’t convincing to my 14-year-old eyes, and today they appear amateurish and grainy. The physical effects--mostly Ralph falling out of the sky or stopping moving cars or tossing bad guys through the air--hold up pretty well, thanks to ace stunt coordinator Dennis Madalone. But the rough stuff isn’t what will keep you interested as you look at the series through contemporary eyes. What does trip your trigger are the characters, how they react to each other, and how they react to extraordinary and often life-threatening events. That they love each other, despite their differences, is certain. That you’ll love watching them is equally certain.

Trailer Trash
Now Playing: DAVE
Before the 7:45pm showing of THE LONGEST YARD at the Beverly Cinemas last night, we were subjected to 19 (!) minutes of commercials. That's right--19! Meaning the 7:45pm show didn't actually begin until 8:04pm. 19 minutes is fucking ridiculous. And, yes, I count trailers as commercials. A trailer is a commercial. It's somebody trying to sell you a product you don't want. And believe me--most of these trailers were for movies nobody wants.

Before I get started...I haven't watched FRIENDS in years. When the hell did Courteney Cox buy her new boobs? Good Christ, I couldn't concentrate on the first ten minutes of the movie, I was so mesmerized by her new cleavage. I think it's too late in her career to help her, but I was glad for the glimpse I got.

Now on to the seven trailers I endured last night:

THE ISLAND--I saw this movie when it was called LOGAN'S RUN. It's directed by Michael Bay, which likely means it will suck. It has lots of quickly cut CGI effects, which likely means it will suck. It has Scarlett Johansson, who is hot as hell, but not an actress I get particularly jazzed about. Something that made me laugh is a line Ewan McGregor says to Scarlett: "Now do you believe me when I say the island doesn't exist?" Well, dammit, the movie is called THE ISLAND, so there had damn well better be an island! It's not titled MAYBE AN ISLAND, MAYBE NOT.

WAR OF THE WORLDS--I saw this movie when it was called INDEPENDENCE DAY. Tom Cruise blah blah stuff blowing up blah blah more noisy CGI blah blah. When is Spielberg going to make another Indiana Jones movie?

INTO THE BLUE--I saw this movie when it was called THE DEEP. Vapid teenagers go diving for buried treasure and fight insipid bad guys. Paul Walker is in it, which likely means it will suck. Jessica Alba wears lots of bikinis in it. Jessica is the new Denise Richards, probably the worst actress on Hollywood's A-list. But she looks great in a bikini. This movie looks bad.

THE HONEYMOONERS--I saw this when it was called, um, THE HONEYMOONERS. I don't know who the audience is for this. The urban crowd, I suppose. It doesn't seem raucous enough to attract that audience, and since nobody under 40 gives a rat's ass about Jackie Gleason, there isn't even a built-in brand recognition. There aren't any funny gags in the trailer either.

LAND OF THE DEAD--The teaser is still running. I don't know what's keeping Universal from promoting this thing better. 28 DAYS LATER was a smash. The DAWN OF THE DEAD remake was a smash. This George Romero sequel will likely be better than both of those movies. Zombies are hot now, so why doesn't Universal pull its head out of its ass? I may see this when it comes out, but I'll more than likely wait for the unrated DVD. Who wants to see R-rated Romero zombies?

WEDDING CRASHERS--Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn team up for the 49th time. This actually looks funny, and Christopher Walken should be a good foil for the stars.

DARK WATER--This trailer is ridiculous. It's Jennifer Connelly skulking around her apartment, investigating dripping water, puddles of water, water spots on the ceiling. Ooooo...pools of water are sooooo scary! Whoever edited this trailer is a major yutz.

On another subject, I read where the conservative publication HUMAN EVENTS listed the ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th & 20th Century. I find it odd that people with 17th-century attitudes are criticizing books from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Back to movies, since I've been rewatching some of Ivan Reitman's oeuvre, I saw DAVE tonight. It's a very charming little picture about a regular guy (Kevin Kline) who is recruited by the sinister Chief of Staff (Frank Langella) to substitute for the President of the United States after POTUS suffers a debilitating stroke. One of my favorite scenes is the one where Charles Grodin, as Kline's accountant, is summoned by Dave to the White House late at night to balance the budget. Overnight, Dave manages to find an extra $650 million to be used to build homeless shelters. It's a funny scene and a sweet one, but also sort of depressing in that I suspect this really could be done if we had a government that was interested in doing something beyond feeding their own self-interest. Kline has a monologue in which he pledges that the lives of the people should come before his own and that he should be willing to give up everything in order to improve their lives. Obviously, this is not something you would ever hear the current administration say, and I suspect that Langella's portrayal of a selfish, conniving, corrupt senior White House staffer is a more accurate portrayal than Kline's do-gooder. Much to our detriment, of course.