Russ McCubbin Movies

To keep Hunter (Fred Dryer) alive long enough to testify against mob boss Max Crane (Wolf Muster), Captain Devane (Charles Hallahan) orders the detective to go on a fishing trip at a remote sporting lodge. Almost immediately upon arrival, Hunter meets and falls in love with a girl named Nicki (Lydia Cornell). Meanwhile back in LA, McCall (Stepfanie Kramer) gets word that a paid assassin has been dispatched to "off" Hunter--and just guess whom that assassin turns out to be! ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Stewart Granger plays a Joseph Mengele type in the grim Hell Hunters. Hiding out in jungles of South America, Granger plans to poison the population of Los Angeles as revenge for the toppling of the Third Reich. Nazi hunters Maud Adams and George Lazenby race against time to foil the old Nazi's scheme. They find themselves with an unexpected ally in the form of Candice Daly, whose mother died in a concentration camp at Granger's hands. If nothing else, Hell Hunters clues us in on what George Lazenby has been doing since On Her Majesty's Secret Service. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this fourth installment of the Dirty Harry series, Harry has been banished temporarily from San Francisco because his superiors are uncomfortable about his feud with a local crime boss. He goes to an oceanside small town for a little rest and recuperation but finds the town has been traumatized by a series of brutal murders. Harry meets and falls in love with Jennifer Spencer (Sandra Locke), a young artist. Jennifer and her sister were brutally raped a few years previously by a group of men, leaving her sister catatonic and Jennifer filled with a rage that is expressed in her disturbing artworks. Harry investigates the killings and the rapes, and one by one he dispatches Jennifer's rapists, one of whom is the son of the local police chief (which explains why the police have done little investigating). Finally, Harry finds out that Jennifer also dispenses her own brand of justice because she cannot rely on the criminal justice system. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi

"Who are you?" the dwarf Mordecai (Billy Curtis) asks Clint Eastwood's Stranger at the end of Eastwood's 1973 western High Plains Drifter. "You know," he replies, before vanishing into the desert heat waves near California's Mono Lake. Adapting the amorally enigmatic and violent Man With No Name persona from his films with Sergio Leone, Eastwood's second film as director begins as his drifter emerges from that heat haze and rides into the odd lakefront settlement of Lago. Lago's residents are not particularly friendly, but once the Stranger shows his skills as a gunfighter, they beg him to defend them against a group of outlaws (led by Eastwood regular Geoffrey Lewis) who have a score to settle with the town. He agrees to train them in self-defense, but Mordecai and innkeeper's wife Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) soon suspect that the Stranger has another, more personal agenda. By the time the Stranger makes the corrupt community paint their town red and re-name it "Hell," it is clear that he is not just another gunslinger. With its fragmented flashbacks and bizarre, austere locations, High Plains Drifter's stylistic eccentricity lends an air of unsettling eeriness to its revenge story, adding an uncanny slant to Eastwood's antiheroic westerner. Seminal western hero John Wayne was so offended by Eastwood's harshly revisionist view of a frontier town that he wrote to Eastwood, objecting that this was not what the spirit of the West was all about. Eastwood's audience, however, was not so put off, and an exhibitors' poll named Eastwood a top box-office draw for 1973. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Investigating a missing-child report, officers Pete Malloy (Martin Milner) and Jim Reed (Kent McCord) expose an illegal adopting ring. In another incident, the two cops probe a report of stolen narcotics on a college campus, following the trail of clues to a star football player. And this being Adam-12, the episode is capped by a high-speed car chase. Featured in the cast are two former child stars, Jackie Coogan and James Lydon. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This extra-violent Civil War melodrama was also released as Cain's Way and The Blood Seekers. Scott Brady plays a homesteader whose biracial family is butchered by Confederate renegades. Teaming up with bounty hunter-cum-preacher John Carradine, Brady goes after the men responsible. After dispatching most of the killers in particularly gruesome fashion, Brady sets his sights on the renegade leader, Robert Dix. Why is it that the hero never kills the leader at the outset, but always knocks off the flunkeys first? Evidently aiming at surrealism, director Kent Osborne juxtaposes Brady's campaign of slaughter is intercut with scenes of a modern-day motorcycle gang going on a real-life rampage. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Once again, Jason McCord (Chuck Connors) has a fateful brush with history when he save legendary journalist Horace Greeley (Burgess Meredith) from an assassination attempt. Impressed by Jason's courage, Greeley hires him as his "social secretary" (translation: bodyguard). Now it is up to Jason to find out who wants to kill the eminent newspaperman--and why. (Incidentally, if you're thinking that Horace Greeley will at some point in the story say something like "Go west, Young Man", chances are that you're right...and never mind that Greeley never actually uttered those words). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi