Robert Solo Movies

In this campy, nostalgic comedy based on a popular TV series from the early '60s, the two bungling cops Toody and Muldoon are assigned to guard a key witness who is planning to testify against a crime lord. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers is the third screen version of Jack Finney's cold war science fiction novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Marty Malone (Gabrielle Anwar) is moving with her father, stepmother, and stepbrother to a military base where her father will investigate possible environmental and ecological problems. Before they get to town, Marty is warned in a gas station restroom by a crazed looking military man that, "They get you when you sleep!" Marty adjusts to life on the base by flirting with a young officer and making friends with the rebellious daughter of the base commander. These friends help her when a plot by aliens to turn all humans into unemotional, unfeeling "pod people" shifts into high gear. As her family and friends are attacked, Marty doesn't know who to trust. Previous versions of his story were directed by Don Siegel (1956) and Phillip Kaufman (1978). ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide

Colors stars Robert Duvall and Sean Penn as partners on the LAPD's gang crime division. Duvall had hoped to spend more time with his family, but he's pulled back into active service because of a step-up in gang activity. He makes no secret of his contempt for his novice partner Penn, but eventually comes to rely on the younger man as a valuable street contact. The central crisis is the battle for supremacy between the "Crips" and the "Bloods", with every effort to call a truce stymied by the gang members themselves and by undue police intervention. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Ex-football player Carl Weathers stars in this violent action film as Detroit policeman Jericho Jackson. The dedicated but brutal cop is plunged into nefarious doings concerning a crooked industrialist (Craig T. Nelson) and his drug-addicted girlfriend (pop-singer Vanity), breaking many people's bones before solving the case. Sharon Stone stands out in a cast of genre veterans including Nicholas Worth, Sonny Landham, and Robert Davi. Heavy on the sex and violence, this film harkens back to the glory days of 1970s blaxploitation, but is a bit too mean-spirited to be as much fun. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

Larry Cohen wrote the screenplay to this updating of Mickey Spillane's notorious 1947 novel. Cohen was originally engaged to direct the film as well but was pulled from the director's chair after a week's worth of shooting because he had already run up the budget by $100,000; he was replaced by television director Richard T. Heffron. In this 1982 I, the Jury, Mike Hammer (Armand Assante) is a Vietnam veteran who wears hip duds and drives around in a bronze Trans Am in much the same way as Robert Mitchum's Philip Marlowe was refurbished for Michael Winner's re-make of The Big Sleep. After a cheesy rip-off of a James Bond-style credit sequence, the story kicks in. One-armed detective Jack Williams (Frederick Downs) is murdered. Jack was Hammer's best friend, and Hammer decides that he will become a one-man vigilante squad and seek vengeance on the person responsible for his death. He enlists the aid of his vivacious secretary Velda (Laurene Landon) and is also helped and hindered by police-chief Pat Chambers (Paul Sorvino). Hammer latches on to the killer's trail, then the film veers in a radically different direction from the book, introducing government conspiracies and mind-control techniques by the CIA and the Mafia. Also introduced is Hammer's love interest Charlotte Bennett (Barbara Carrera), an administrator of a kinky sex clinic (depicted as a psychiatrist in the original novel). ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

This remake of the 1956 horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers moves the action from small-town USA to 1970s San Francisco and replaces at least part of the original's psychological horror with special effects. Spores rain forth, unseen, from outer space, and soon strange flowers begin popping up all over the city. After bringing one of these hybrid specimens home with her one night, biologist Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) notices that her live-in boyfriend, Geoffrey (Art Hindle), doesn't seem like himself; he's cold and distant and somehow just not quite there. When she turns to her friend Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland), a colleague at the Department of Public Health, he convinces her to see his friend Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a pop psychologist who argues that the problem is all in Elizabeth's head. Soon, though, Matthew and Elizabeth begin to notice that people all over the city are changing subtly and inexplicably. When their friend Jack Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum) and his wife Nancy (Veronica Cartwright) find a lifeless, half-formed doppelganger covered with plant fibers in the mud baths they own and operate, the group of friends finally begins to understand that a sinister transformation is sweeping their city. Kevin McCarthy and Don Siegel, respectively the star and director of the original film, have small roles in the new version, as does an unbilled Robert Duvall. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Scrooge was designed as a follow-up to 1968's Oliver!, the Oscar-winning musicalization of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. The umpteenth musical version of Dickens' 1843 novelette A Christmas Carol, Scrooge features several sprightly Leslie Bricusse songs, including the bona fide hit "Thank You Very Much." Buried under mounds of latex, Albert Finney is Ebenezer Scrooge. The Three Ghosts who turn the miserly Scrooge's life around on Christmas Eve are portrayed by Edith Evans (Past), Kenneth More (Present) and Paddy Stone (Yet to Come). Sir Alec Guinness also appears as a fussy, slightly effeminate Marley's Ghost. Intriguingly, Finney performs his many songs live, without post-production dubbing. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide