Killer Fish (1979)

Several bargain-basement American stars appear in this rotten international production, which is part aquatic horror movie and part romantic heist thriller. The story alternates between two tonalities—incoherent and stupid—while the filmmakers waffle about what sort of movie Killer Fish should be. Sometimes, it’s a straight-up Jaws rip-off with bloody scenes of victims getting chewed to death by carnivorous sea creatures. Sometimes, it’s glossy late-’70s fluff about slender people with nice tans having sex with each other. And more often than not, Killer Fish is simply confusing. The picture starts out with an elaborate robbery sequence during which criminals Robert Lasky (Lee Majors) and Kate Neville (Karen Black), along with their accomplices, break into the office of a Brazilian power plant and steal a cache of emeralds. To distract security guards, Robert and Kate set off a huge explosion. Meanwhile, mystery man Paul Diller (James Franciscus) gambles in a tropical bar. Turns out Paul is the brains behind the robbery, and an inside man at the company that owns the plant. Paul, Robert, and Kate stash the emeralds in a lake, figuring that’s a safe hiding place while they wait for the inevitable investigation to cool down. Only Paul, without telling his pals, fills the lake with piranha so no one can grab the gems prematurely. As if the story wasn’t already crammed with enough random elements, enter fashion model Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway), who arrives in Brazil for a shoot and, naturally, falls in love with smoldering Robert. Never mind that Kate’s sorta hung up on Robert even though she’s Paul’s girlfriend. After several of Paul’s underlings die from piranha bites while trying to steal the gems, the surviving major characters end up on a boat together during a giant storm, which producer Alex Ponti (son of Carlo, stepson of Sophia Loren) and director Antonio Margheriti depict with cheesy miniature effects straight out of a Toho Productions monster mash. Awful disco music runs underneath all of this nonsense. An embarrassment for everyone involved, Killer Fish is almost completely without redeeming values, except perhaps for some attractive locations. Together with The Norseman (1978), Steel (1979), Agency (1980), and The Last Chase (1981), this movie also helped kill Majors’ post-Six Million Dollar Man movie career before it really began.

Killer Fish: LAME

Steel (1979)

          While it’s mildly enjoyable as a manly-man action movie, Steel is actually more amusing when viewed for its unintentional subtext—endeavoring for macho swagger led the filmmakers weirdly close to the realm of gay erotica. The story begins when contractor “Big” Lew Cassidy (George Kennedy) heads to work on a new high-rise he’s building in Texas, explaining that the sight of a tall building “still gives me a hard-on.” When Lew dies in a workplace accident, his pretty daughter Cass (Jennifer O’Neill) pledges to finish the building, thus saving her family’s company from bankruptcy. To do so, she needs a “ramrod”—no, really, that’s the phallic job title of the movie’s real leading character, Mike Catton, played by the Six Million Dollar Man himself, Lee Majors.

          Mike is a construction foreman who quit working at high altitudes after suddenly developing a fear of heights. Now working as a trucker (picture Majors behind the wheel of a big rig in a cowboy hat and a wife-beater), Mike accepts the job on the condition that he can supervise work from a completed floor instead of climbing onto beams. As Cass’ second-in-command, “Pignose” Morgan (Art Carney), says to Mike: “You’re here because this building will give you a chance to get it up again.” Scout’s honor, that’s the line!

          The first half of the movie comprises Mike building his team of world-class steel workers, Dirty Dozen-style. These roughnecks include such walking clichés as a horny Italian named Valentino (Terry Kiser); a jive-talking African-American named Lionel (Roger E. Mosley); a stoic Indian named Cherokee (Robert Tessier); and a taunting bruiser named Dancer (Richard Lynch). Meanwhile, Lew’s estranged brother, Eddie (Harris Yulin), conspires to derail the project because he wants to seize control of Lew’s company. As the movie progresses, Mike tries to overcome his fear of heights while coaching his fellow dudes through long days of hard work and hard drinking.

          Steel is such a he-man enterprise that even though Majors engages in close physical contact and soft talk with most of his male costars, he can barely muster furtive glances for his nominal love interest, O’Neill. All of this is pleasantly diverting, in a Saturday-matinee kind of way—director Steve Carver’s cartoony style didn’t peak until his 1983 Chuck Norris/David Carradine epic Lone Wolf McQuade, but he moves things along—so it doesn’t really matter that the script is ridiculous, or that Majors is ineffectual as a leading man. Plus, to Carver’s credit, the plentiful scenes taking place on girders high above city streets are enough to give any viewer vertigo. And as for those lingering shots of sweaty men working hard, their biceps glistening in the hot Texas sun . . .

Steel: FUNKY

The Six Million Dollar Man (1973)

          Surprisingly, the first onscreen appearance of beloved ’70s superhero Steve Austin has more than a hint of darkness. Adapted from Martin Caidin’s novel Cyborg, this TV movie begins with former astronaut Austin (Lee Majors) working as a test pilot. After the experimental plane he’s flying crashes, government operative Oliver Spencer (Darren McGavin) approves the $6 million procedure of replacing Austin’s damaged body parts with lifelike, super-powered bionics. The procedure is executed by Dr. Rudy Wells (Martin Balsam), the bleeding-heart yin to Spencer’s coldly calculating yang. When Austin wakes from surgery and discovers what transpired, he’s enraged at being turned into a freak. Nonetheless, Austin agrees to conduct a covert mission in the Middle East, the purported goal of which is rescuing an American hostage—but in fact, Spencer engineered the mission as a test. He allows Austin to get captured, then waits to see if the “Six Million Dollar Man” can escape without assistance. Suffice to say he does, but that success merely triggers an oh-so-’70s bummer ending: Spencer orders Austin into an artificially induced coma, keeping him on ice until some future mission.

          The Six Million Dollar Man is highly watchable but quite gloomy, and thus a world away from the escapist vibe of the resulting series. After the first Steve Austin movie scored in the ratings on March 7, 1973, a pair of follow-up telefilms were broadcast in the fall of the same year, taking the character in a totally different direction: Wine, Women, and War and The Solid Gold Kidnapping awkwardly shove Austin into James Bond-style adventures. Featuring comic-book plots and a goofy theme song performed by Dusty Springfield, both movies are enjoyable but far too derivative. Once the weekly Six Million Dollar Man series launched in January 1974, Majors’ aw-shucks stoicism and the spectacle of bionic-assisted heroism took center stage, with Austin reworked as a devoted government servant thankful for a second chance at life. Although the first episode introduced the series’ iconic opening sequence (“We can rebuild him,” and so on), the show didn’t reach cruising altitude until later seasons, thanks to recurring tropes like Austin’s mechanized love interest, the Bionic Woman, and a robotic version of Bigfoot (first played by wrestler Andre the Giant). In the context of what followed, the original 1973 pilot movie offers not just the foundation for a fun franchise, but also a window into a more serious version of The Six Million Dollar Man that might have been.

The Six Million Dollar Man: FUNKY

Avalanche Express (1978)

A turgid Cold War thriller featuring a sloppy script and underwhelming special effects, Avalanche Express also suffers because of two unexpected tragedies. The film’s director, action-movie veteran Mark Robson, died partway through production and was replaced with an uncredited Monte Hellman. More glaringly, leading man Robert Shaw died before post-production began, so when the filmmakers decided to re-record the dialogue in his first scene, they ended up hiring actor Robert Rietty to dub Shaw’s entire performance; as a result, not a syllable of Shaw’s distinctive English lilt is heard during the movie. Ultimately, however, these are the least of the movie’s problems, because Avalanche Express grinds through a simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped narrative marked by tedious lulls between action sequences. The basic premise is simple enough. When a high-powered Russian general named Marenkov (Shaw) defects to the West, U.S. agents led by Major Wargrave (Lee Marvin) transport Marenkov by train as a means of luring the assassins they know Soviet spymaster Bunin (Maximilian Schell) will send to kill Marenkov. The idea is to flush out long-buried operatives with the bait of a defector whose secrets can unravel important Soviet projects. Unfortunately, the filmmakers smother this workable premise with pointless subplots about double agents, a Middle Eastern terrorist group, a mysterious Russian counterintelligence project, and Wargrave’s on-again/off-again relationship with a fellow spy (Linda Evans). That all of this gets crammed into 88 minutes gives a sense of how superficially each story point gets addressed; the word for every scene in this movie is “perfunctory.” Even the presence of former football great Joe Namath (as Wargrave’s sidekick) and a cheesy avalanche sequence created by Star Wars special-effects guy John Dykstra aren’t enough to overcome the movie’s glaring flaws. Avalanche Express isn’t unwatchable, because there’s just enough action and star power to generate fleeting interest, but it’s a poor epitaph for Robson and Shaw. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Avalanche Express: LAME

The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970)

          The last movie directed by the great William Wyler, The Liberation of L.B. Jones is one of several nervy race-relations pictures made in the wake of In the Heat of the Night (1967). Like that Oscar-winning film, L.B. Jones is s a thriller exploring the dangers of a black man seeking justice in the South, only this time the protagonist is not a cop or even a lawyer, but rather an undertaker. In a small Tennessee community, L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne) is the most affluent black citizen, which generates grudging respect from well-to-do whites and seething resentment among poor whites. When Jones discovers that his years-younger wife, Emma (Lola Falana), is sleeping with a white cop, simple-minded redneck Willie Joe (Anthony Zerbe), Jones’ attempt to amicably dissolve his marriage unexpectedly triggers a fusillade of horrific violence.

          Based on a novel by Jesse Hill Ford, who co-wrote the script, the picture’s tricky plot weaves together nearly a dozen major characters, each of whom reflects a facet of racism or its impact. The formidable Lee J. Cobb plays Oman Hedgepath, the white lawyer Jones hires to handle the divorce; Hedgepath tries to resolve the matter outside of court by working angles with Willie Joe and the town’s do-nothing mayor (Dub Taylor), but he only makes matters worse. Lee Majors, of all people, plays Oman’s idealistic nephew, a clean-cut voice of reason whose words are drowned out by pervasive prejudice. And in the picture’s linchpin role, a very young Yaphet Kotto plays Sonny Boy, an angry young black man who has returned to his hometown after a long absence because he wants revenge against the racist white who beat him as a child. Barbara Hershey pops up in a tiny role as Majors’ wife, and dancer Fayard Nicholas, of the famed Nicholas Brothers, appears as well, in his only dramatic performance.

          Amazingly, The Liberation of L.B. Jones doesn’t feel overstuffed, although some actors are left gasping for screen time; the clockwork script allocates time wisely, sketching characters just well enough for viewers to understand why people choose their paths. Wyler orchestrates the various elements so that when things get ugly, horrible events explode like the stages of carefully coordinated fireworks display. Not everything that happens in the picture is credible, and the material portraying Emma as a capricious nymphomaniac is stereotypical, but The Liberation of L.B. Jones is filled with memorable nuances. It’s also filled with memorable acting, because the film’s cast offers a spectrum of performance styles. Browne is elegant and nuanced; Cobb is fiery and intense; Zerbe is wonderfully squirrely and perverse; and Kotto bounces between sweet and menacing, effectively portraying the wounded boy within the dangerous man. As for Falana, she’s so sexy that it’s easy to see why the men in her life are driven to distraction. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

The Liberation of L.B. Jones: GROOVY

The Norseman (1978)

So shamelessly absurd that it’s almost amiable, this medieval adventure stars Lee Majors as the chief of a Viking war party that sets ashore in 11th-century America to rescue their lost buddies from the clutches of dastardly Native Americans, with the help of a weather-controlling wizard and an Indian woman who inexplicably turns on her people. Suffice to say that Majors, a strapping Michigander with the acting range of a Pet Rock, doesn’t exactly disappear into his role as “Thorval the Bold”; from his flat Midwestern line readings to his perfectly groomed ’70s-stud mustache, he’s preposterous. It doesn’t help that his Viking costume includes a black superhero mask for no discernible reason, and that he spends much of the movie running in slow motion, which makes the film seem like a dream sequence from one of his Six Million Dollar Man episodes. Jack Elam, another performer who’s about as American as they come, plays the wizard, scowling from under the black cloak that hides his unconvincing hunchback prosthetic. The picture starts out well enough with a fusillade of action and semi-coherent plotting, then devolves into a series of needlessly protracted fights and chase scenes; even the spectacle of watching Majors spout silly dialogue wears thin. (Sample line: “Our shores are laden with the remains of intruders whose ambitions were far greater than their fighting skills.”) Running the show is writer-producer-director Charles B. Pierce, a prolific hack who spared every expense making robustly bad movies like The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976). Pierce shot The Norseman in Florida—which everybody knows is exactly where Native Americans and Vikings would most likely tussle—and he didn’t break the bank acquiring the picture’s one impressive prop, because a closing credit thanks the city of Newburn, NC, “for furnishing the Viking boat.”

The Norseman: LAME