Stuart Cohen Movies

Jane Seymour makes a six-course meal of her starring role as a magazine editor in Obsessed With a Married Woman--indeed, her performance is the only tangible reason for sitting through this artistically bankrupt TV movie. The story contrives to have Seymour, happily married and the mother of a wise-lipped son, fall into the sack with her star reporter Tim Matheson. It seems that Jane has assigned Matheson to do a series of articles on mistresses. He does his homework so well that Jane takes him on as her own "male mistress." Obsessed with a Married Woman is not the title we'd choose for this time-waster; how about Annoyed with a Tiresome Premise? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this made-for-TV movie, a group of lonely, unattached people meet up in a local bar in search of love and friendship. ~ Iotis Erlewine, All Movie Guide

John Carpenter's The Thing is both a remake of Howard Hawks' 1951 film of the same name and a re-adaptation of the John W. Campbell Jr. story "Who Goes There?" on which it was based. Carpenter's film is more faithful to Campbell's story than Hawks' version and also substantially more reliant on special effects, provided in abundance by a team of over 40 technicians, including veteran creature-effects artists Rob Bottin and Stan Winston. The film opens enigmatically with a Siberian Husky running through the Antarctic tundra, chased by two men in a helicopter firing at it from above. Even after the dog finds shelter at an American research outpost, the men in the helicopter (Norwegians from an outpost nearby) land and keep shooting. One of the Norwegians drops a grenade and blows himself and the helicopter to pieces; the other is shot dead in the snow by Garry (Donald Moffat), the American outpost captain. American helicopter pilot MacReady (Kurt Russell, fresh from Carpenter's Escape From New York) and camp doctor Copper (Richard Dysart) fly off to find the Norwegian base and discover some pretty strange goings-on. The base is in ruins, and the only occupants are a man frozen to a chair (having cut his own throat) and the burned remains of what could be one man or several men. In a side room, Copper and MacReady find a coffin-like block of ice from which something has been recently cut. That night at the American base, the Husky changes into the Thing, and the Americans learn first-hand that the creature has the ability to mutate into anything it kills. For the rest of the film the men fight a losing (and very gory) battle against it, never knowing if one of their own dwindling number is the Thing in disguise. Though resurrected as a cult favorite, The Thing failed at the box office during its initial run, possibly because of its release just two weeks after Steven Spielberg's warmly received E.T.The Extra-Terrestrial. Along with Ridley Scott's futuristic Alien, The Thing helped stimulate a new wave of sci-fi horror films in which action and special effects wizardry were often seen as ends in themselves. ~ Anthony Reed, All Movie Guide

The character of tough, sarcastic, lollipop-sucking New York City police detective Theo Kojak was introduced in The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a 1973 TV movie based on the novel by Selwyn Raab, which in turn was inspired by the real-life Wylie-Hoffert murder case of 1963 that ultimately led to the Supreme Court's Miranda decision in 1966. Telly Savalas, a busy, baldheaded character actor who had only occasionally received above-the-title billing in his long career, became an international superstar in the role of Kojak, which he carried over into a long-running CBS cop show. Debuting October 24, 1973, Kojak was set in Manhattan (though not filmed there until its fourth season), where hard-boiled, thoroughly incorruptible Lt. Theo Kojak took his marching orders from his former partner and longtime friend, 13th precinct Captain Frank McNeill (Dan Frazer). Although Kojak had a habit of bending the rules to suit his needs, he was much valued by McNeill and the force because he invariably got results. Kojak's associates and assistants included plainclothes detective Lt. Bobby Crocker (Kevin Dobson), Detective Stavros (played by the star's brother George Savalas, who during the series' first two seasons billed himself as "Demosthenes"), and detectives Rizzo and Saperstein (Vince Conti, Mark Russell).

Extremely popular with both civilians and law enforcement personnel -- and a veritable cornucopia of such quotable lines as "Who loves ya, baby?" -- Kojak lasted five seasons and 118 hour-long episodes before it was canceled by CBS and ended its run on April 15, 1978. Seven years later, Telly Savalas revived the character for the TV movie Kojak: The Belarus File, which was followed two years later by another feature-length endeavor, Kojak: The Price of Justice. And from November 4, 1989, through June 30, 1990, five two-hour Kojak episodes -- in which the title character had been promoted to inspector -- were telecast as part of the crime-anthology series The ABC Mystery Movie. This time around, Telly Savalas' co-stars included Andre Braugher as Detective Winston Blake, Charles Cioffi as Chief George "Fitz" Morris, Kario Salem as Detective Paco Montana, and the star's daughter Candace Savalas as Kojak's secretary Pamela. Kojak was revived for a third weekly series run in 2005, with Ving Rhames starring in the title role created by the late Telly Savalas. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide