Fantasy Island (1977)

          If only because his company also made The Love Boat, the campy dramatic series Fantasy Island cannot be deemed the worst television show for which producer Aaron Spelling was responsible. That faint praise being offered, the massive success of the show—which ran for 152 episodes from 1977 to 1984—underscores that much of Spelling’s career was spent manufacturing the audiovisual equivalent of junk food. From week to week, Fantasy Island served up C-list actors in ridiculous scenarios against the backdrop of a semi-supernatural vacation destination. Sentimentality, superficiality, and sexuality powered the show, together with the odd coupling of series stars Ricardo Montalban, as godlike host Mr. Rourke, and Hervé Villechaize, as Mr. Rourke’s diminutive assistant, Tattoo. Throughout its run, Fantasy Island presented escapism about escapism. That’s why it’s amusing to revisit the TV movie that served as the series’ pilot episode, because the first installment of Fantasy Island is quite dark.

          Naturally, the picture begins with Tattoo climbing to the bell tower of the main building on Fantasy Island and yelling in his French-accented English, “Ze plane! Ze plane!” Once the seaplane to which Tattoo referred lands at the main dock, Rourke gives introductory voiceover to explain the wishes of new guests to Tattoo (and the audience). In the pilot, businessman Eunice Baines (Eleanor Parker) fakes her own funeral to determine which of her associates she can trust; World War II veteran Arnold Greenwood (Bill Bixby) revisits wartime France so he can see a lost love once again; and big-game hunter Paul Henley (Hugh O’Brian) asks to be hunted, ostensibly to test his virility. The Eunice storyline generates only bland soap opera, but the Arnold and Paul storylines are grim. It turns out that Arnold suffers from PTSD because he killed his wartime lover in a jealous rage, and that Paul is suicidal. As for Rourke, he’s like a capricious deity manipulating people’s lives for amusement. After casually describing his guests as being “so mortal” (implying that he’s the opposite), Rourke later proclaims: “There are no rules on Fantasy Island except as I make them!” In addition to magically re-creating Arnold’s horrific murder scenario, Rourke hires a shapely hooker named Michelle (Victoria Principal) to sleep with Paul, and then he handcuffs Michelle to Paul so she’ll share his fate. At one point, Rourke callously dismisses a husband’s rage at being cuckolded: “Your wife was used many times by many men.” Ouch.

          Fantasy Island has all the hallmarks of a typical Spelling production, such as shallow storytelling and tacky production values (in most of the scenes, Burbank subs for the tropics), but the nastiness of the piece is striking. Things got more family-friendly once Fantasy Island went to series—notwithstanding the strange episodes in which Rourke duels with Satan, played by Roddy McDowall--so it’s possible to watch the pilot as a glimpse at an alternate version of the series that could have been. In fact, something akin to that alternate version materialized when Fantasy Island was briefly revived, with Malcolm McDowell as Mr. Rourke, in 1998. Produced by feature-film guy Barry Sonnenfeld, the ‘90s Fantasy Island went for paranormal black comedy and fizzled after just 13 episodes.

Fantasy Island: FUNKY

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

          By far the funniest and most polished of the various doofus-humor anthology films that hit theaters after Saturday Night Live’s success transformed so-called “college humor” into mainstream entertainment, The Kentucky Fried Movie was a game-changer for its director, John Landis, and its writers, the zany team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. After this picture made a splash, Landis went on to helm the blockbuster Animal House (1978), while the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team perfected their style of comic insanity with Airplane! (1980). Yet while both of those pictures feature traditional start-to-finish narratives, The Kentucky Fried Movie operates in the Saturday Night Live mode by presenting more than 20 different sketches, some of which are less than a minute long, and one of which runs more than 30 minutes. Some bits are funnier than others, of course, but everything in The Kentucky Fried Movie is executed with the utmost professionalism; Landis’ sleek camerawork and meticulous pacing has the effect of corralling the movie’s slapdash gags into a coherent format.

          Obviously, none of this should give the impression that The Kentucky Fried Movie represents an exercise in good taste. Quite to the contrary, the movie is gleefully crude, especially in the realm of sex jokes, of which there are many. For instance, one sketch that I’m ashamed to say kept me chuckling for years after I first saw the picture (and still makes me laugh now) is the outrageously vulgar two-minute trailer for a nonexistent sexploitation movie called Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, which hits every note of Roger Corman-style hucksterism perfectly. There are other fake trailers, as well as ersatz news broadcasts, faux commercials, and straight-up comedy bits that feel like stand-alone short films. Sometimes, characters from one sequence pop up in an unrelated sequence, so everything feels like it’s happening in the same milieu.

          The centerpiece of The Kentucky Fried Movie is A Fistful of Yen, a slick spoof of the iconic Bruce Lee flick Enter the Dragon  (1973). A Fistful of Yen contains some of The Kentucky Fried Movie’s silliest gags—think of this extended vignette as a dry run for the genre send-ups Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker made in the ’80s, and you’ve got the right idea. (Sample gag: The bad guy has a disloyal underling beheaded, then shouts, “Now take him to be tortured!”) During this sequence, comic actor Evan Kim gives a simultaneously charming and ridiculous performance as the Bruce Lee-styled lead character, delivering all of his lines with an absurdly racist accent; the wide-eyed shamelessness of his acting is winning, and he does a credible job of mimicking Lee’s fierce athleticism.

          A few familiar names pop up in cameos during The Kentucky Fried Movie, including Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, and Donald Sutherland, but utility players appearing in multiple roles—including David Zucker—carry most of the load. As with most examples of “college humor,” The Kentucky Fried Movie isn’t for everyone, because it’s a guy movie through and through. In other words, it’s so dumb and leering you may feel embarrassed laughing at some of the jokes. However, when seen in the right frame of mind, The Kentucky Fried Movie provides 83 minutes of jubilantly juvenile jocularity.

The Kentucky Fried Movie: GROOVY

The Magician (1973)

          In between his longer-running series The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and The Incredible Hulk, beloved TV star Bill Bixby spent one season playing an illusionist who dabbles as a philanthropic detective, using his unique skills to help innocent people out of tricky situations. Although the series didn’t last very long, it engendered a loyal fan base because of its comic-book style, and, indeed, the series’ feature-length pilot plays out like a superhero story. While performing his magic show one night in a big-city hotel ballroom, Anthony Dorian (Bixby) notices a distraught woman in the audience. Then, when a mystery man staggers to her table and dies, Tony offers assistance. It turns out the woman, Nora Cougan (Kim Hunter), is upset because she can’t confirm whether her daughter died in a recent plane accident. Jazzed by the chance to solve a mystery, Tony stashes Nora at the home of his super-rich friend Max Pomeroy (Keene Curtis), and then embarks on a search for clues. Although penned by no less a figure than Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Psycho (1960), the pilot’s narrative gets murky pretty quickly, so after a while it’s hard to remember exactly what Tony’s looking for and/or why violent people seem so determined to stand in his way. (There’s a bomb, a conspiracy, a kidnapped girl, and so forth.)
          This being a TV pilot, the storyline is less important than establishing a vibe. Bixby portrays the lead character as a suave type who’s always ready with a slick magic trick or a smooth line, so his performance is appealing; furthermore, Bixby mimics sleight of hand with polished flair since he was a lifelong amateur illusionist. However, even though the movie’s requisite gimmicks are fun (Tony lives aboard a customized jet and drives a bitchin’ white Porsche), the supporting characters are woefully underdeveloped. Still, director Marvin Chomsky, who helmed numerous episodes of the comic-book-styled ’60s adventure show The Wild Wild West, keeps things brisk, and the cast features reliable players including Elizabeth Ashley and Barry Sullivan. Completing the package, the pilot movie introduces the series’ jazzy credits sequence, which blends animated transitions with live-action clips. This is slight stuff, but it’s easy to see why NBC thought fans would tune in for more week after week. (FYI, the lead character’s surname was changed from “Dorian” to “Blake” once the series got going.)

The Magician: FUNKY

The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) & The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979)

          Standard Disney live-action fare about cute youngsters getting into mischief, The Apple Dumpling Gang features skillful support from grown-up players Bill Bixby, Tim Conway, Don Knotts, Harry Morgan, and Slim Pickens. The Old West story concerns three young orphans whose varmint uncle dumps them into the care of an irresponsible gambler (Bill Bixby), who in turn tries to dump the kids onto someone else until the moppets discover gold in a mine belonging to their family. When assorted disreputable types try to rip off the gold, seeing the children endangered causes Bixby to grow a conscience. Television icons Conway and Knotts are the main attraction, working as a comedy duo for the first time, and they’re comfortably amusing even though their slapstick antics as a pair of inept outlaws are contrived and silly (typical bit: trying to steal a ladder from a firehouse and slamming the ladder into everything in sight). Earnest, old-fashioned, and beyond predictable, The Apple Dumpling Gang moves along at a pleasant clip, despite cloying music and rickety process shots, so the movie is innocuous entertainment for very young viewers; grown-ups should be able to swallow everything except perhaps the requisite warm fuzzies at the end and the cutesy theme song.
          Bixby and the kids were jettisoned for the sequel, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, in which Conway and Knotts try to go straight but end up running afoul of the army, a crazed sheriff, and a criminal gang, causing destructive mayhem along the way. The sequel’s storyline is a patchwork of Western clichés—the climax is a train robbery—so neither Conway’s deadpan delivery nor Knotts’ bug-eyed crankiness is enough to liven up the proceedings. And the less said about the scene they play in drag, the better. Harry Morgan returns in a different role than he played in the first movie, while Tim Matheson, Jack Elam, and Kenneth Mars add color to the cast. The overstuffed plot and the depiction of the “heroes” as complete morons makes the sequel far less palatable than its predecessor, but as a small mercy for those who take the plunge, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again runs its forgettable course in a mere 88 minutes.

The Apple Dumpling Gang: FUNKY

The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again: LAME

The Amazing Spider-Man (1977) & The Incredible Hulk (1977) & Dr. Strange (1978) & Captain America (1979) & Captain America 2: Death Too Soon (1979)

          Years before Marvel Comics became a Hollywood powerhouse, the venerable publisher licensed its characters for a string of low-budget TV productions, beginning with hokey “limited animation” cartoons in the ’60s and continuing with several live-action TV movies in the ’70s. First came The Amazing Spider-Man, starring Nicholas Hammond (the oldest Von Trapp boy from the classic 1965 movie The Sound of Music) as Peter Parker, a graduate student with twin interests in photography and science. As in the comics, he gains arachnid abilities after getting bitten by a radioactive spider. Various pointless changes from the source material are less glaring than the excruciating background music and the bargain-basement FX that accompany numbingly dull “action” scenes. The main gimmick involves superimposing shots of Spidey crawling onto images of buildings, even though neither the lighting nor the movements match. Scenes of Hammond and/or his stuntman on real sets are no better, because the action choreography is lifeless and the bright colors of the costume look awful in realistic settings.
          In terms of acting, Hammond is so dorky and polite that he seems like a department-store clothing mannequin come to life. Character actors including Thayer David and David White give stock performances, while appealing leading lady Lisa Eilbacher barely gets any screen time. The actual story involves Spidey battling a criminal who uses mind-control on unsuspecting victims, so there's a faint whiff of satire related to ’70s cults, though the filmmakers lack the will or the wit to maximize that element. This tepid take on Spidey also has a certain camp factor, but unlike, say, the ’60s Batman series with Adam West, The Amazing Spider-Man contains only humor of the unintentional variety. A mercifully short-lived series followed the broadcast of this pilot movie, but it's hard to find anyone who feels genuine nostalgia for Hammond’s enervated wall-crawling.
          Far more impressive was The Incredible Hulk, for which writer-producer Kenneth Johnson turned the story of scientist Bruce Banner (renamed “David” Banner for the series) into the saga of a tormented fugitive. In the initial telefilm, Banner (Bill Bixby) obsessively researches why adrenaline gives some people extraordinary strength in times of crisis, because his wife died when he couldn’t extract her from a burning car after an accident. Lighting onto a possibility, Banner recklessly exposes himself to an overdose of gamma radiation, causing him to transform into a big green dude (bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno) whenever he gets stressed. Johnson plays the material straight, and Bixby’s sincerity grounds the goofy premise, so when the storyline turns tragic, it’s possible to buy into the melancholy emotions of the piece, especially with Joe Hammel’s plaintive piano theme “The Lonely Man” reverberating on the soundtrack. 
          Also elevating The Incredible Hulk is the work of costar Susan Sullivan, who plays Banner’s colleague and love interest; she and Bixby generate viable chemistry that suggests as much mutual respect as it does latent passion. Notwithstanding the kicky first transformation scene, which involves lightning and rain plus a great use of camera angles and sound effects to jack up the suspense, the classic moment in The Incredible Hulk involves Banner warning a relentless tabloid reporter (Jack Colvin) to keep his distance: “Don’t make me angry, Mr. McGee. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” Five seasons of anguished hulking ensued, as did three reunion movies, so the Bixby/Ferrigno franchise reigned as the only truly successful live-action Marvel adaptation until the late ’90s.
          A year after Hulk and Spidey hit the airwaves, Marvel’s resident mystic appeared in Dr. Strange, a bizarre telefilm notable for eerie synthesizer scoring by Paul Chihara. The plot of Dr. Strange is so thin that the best sequences are the extended dialogue-free montages set to Chihara’s otherworldly grooves. (Some of the huge, fluid cues that Chihara provides anticipate the creepy “blaster beam” effect that Jerry Goldsmith used so powerfully in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture.) While no match for the mind-bending images that artists including Frank Brunner, Steve Ditko, and Gene Colan created for vintage Dr. Strange comics, at least the aimless montages in the Dr. Strange telefilm come across like trippy music videos. Far out, man!
          Forgettable leading man Peter Hooten plays Stephen Strange, a medical doctor recruited to participate in an interdimensional war against ancient sorceress Morgan le Fay (Jessica Walter, rocking spectacular cleavage). A murky storyline, choppy editing, and unfinished-looking FX give the movie a fever-dream vibe. That’s why Dr. Strange is recommended exclusively for those who savor cinematic weirdness. Not only does this failed pilot have the disjointed feel of a midnight movie, but it also features an unintentionally hilarious line. At one point, an aging mystic (John Mills) dispatches his manservant to collect the title character by issuing the command: “Find Stephen Strange!” In this context, you will find Stephen to be quite strange indeed.
          Marvel’s last (and least) attempt at launching a ’70s live-action series was Captain America, an excitement-free modernization of the World War II-era superhero. Musclebound actor Reb Brown blankly plays Steve Rogers, who through convoluted circumstances becomes a superman fighting crime while he cruises around in a tricked-out van that contains his equally tricked-out motorcycle. Toward the climax of the movie, Brown finally dons an awful-looking costume, his motorcycle helmet ridiculously adorned with painted-on facsimiles of the decorative wings from Cap’s comic-book cowl. (That atrocious ensemble gets replaced in the final scenes by a second version that’s closer in design to the comic-book original.) Rather than a series, Captain America was followed by one additional TV movie, Captain America II: Death Too Soon. Despite that title, death couldn’t come soon enough for this misbegotten take on the beloved character. Suffice to say that the highlights of Captain America II are Christopher Lee's florid bad-guy acting and the debut of Cap’s latest silly gadget, a hang-glider.

The Amazing Spider-Man: LAME

The Incredible Hulk: GROOVY

Dr. Strange: FREAKY

Captain America: SQUARE
Captain America II: Death Too Soon: SQUARE