Dirk Benedict

The low-budget, sci-fi telemovie Earthstorm opens with an interstellar catastrophe. A massive asteroid slams into the moon, dramatically altering the Earth's ocean tides and triggering sweeping storms. At closer glance, however, scientists learn that the moon's structure is now entirely unstable and that large chunks of it will soon fly off and hit the Earth, damaging all life on that planet. With no other answer in sight, scientists solicit the help of a demolitions man (Stephen Baldwin), who promises to devise a workable solution. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Boys will be boys, and that's not always a good thing, as this dark drama with comic overtones reveals. Matt (Keith Carradine) and Harley (David Keith) were best friends in high school, but since then their lives have followed a very different course. Matt drifts from job to job, swilling beer and making trouble wherever he lands, while Harley is a building designer with a nice home and an attractive wife, Fox (Janet Gunn), who wants to have a baby, though Harley isn't so certain he wants to be a parent. One day, Matt walks off his job at an Alaskan oilfield and heads to California, appearing on Harley's doorstep; Harley has neither the heart nor the desire to turn Matt away, and soon Matt is giving Harley a new taste of the bachelor lifestyle as they head out drinking, carousing, and chasing women from dusk till dawn. But Fox soon becomes wary of the way Matt is bringing out the less wholesome side of Harley's personality, while Harley notices Matt's behavior is advancing past good-natured rowdiness into something more sinister. Matt's fondness for fast sex with prostitutes and his sudden friendship with a gangster (Jan Triska) leads Matt down a dangerous road that proves to have disastrous consequences for the two friends. Cahoots was the first feature film for writer and director Dirk Benedict, who is best known for his career as a television actor, having starred in the TV series Battlestar Galactica and The A-Team. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Widower Jake Barnes (Dirk Benedict) moves with his daughter and son to a fishing village in Alaska, and earns his keep as a bush pilot by ferrying supplies to remote locations throughout the state. While the daughter loves her new home, the son cannot stand it, and is impatiently waiting until he is grown up enough to move away. However, they join forces to look for their father when they learn that he has gone down in an airplane accident. The official search party is called off and Jake is assumed dead, but the children will have none of it, and go off on their own into the Alaskan wilderness. Along the way, they thwart a big-game poacher (Charlton Heston) and his sidekick, and learn about survival in the wilderness. A highlight of the film is its fine footage of wild Alaska. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Jessica (Angela Lansbury) arrives at the headquarters of a prominent ice cream manufacturing firm in order to collect a promised donation for her literacy foundation. It soon develops that the company has created a brand-new flavor--but not for public consumption. How else to explain the mysterious death of one of the company's top executives...a death quickly followed by another one that is equally mysterious? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Set in New England but actually filmed in Africa for some strange reason, this derivative demon-possession opus is one of the less-inspired releases from Roger Corman's direct-to-video outfit New Horizons. The story involves an occult soiree at the palatial home of a phony-baloney psychic, where an arcane recitation summons the feral demon Asmodeus, who appears under the pretense of answering some pressing questions about the afterlife. Instead, the nefarious visitor decides to commit a serious social blunder by possessing one guest after another, setting them at each other's throats until nearly everyone is dead -- not even the family dog is spared from demonic possession. By the time the police arrive, the sole survivor (Dirk Benedict), who is also the only genuine psychic in the bunch, is blamed for the murders. Essentially a tired Exorcist knockoff (the kind which even the Italians had given up on making a decade before), this shabby, poorly-written mess also borrows the standard '80s slasher-movie convention of requiring its characters to behave like absolute morons in order to propel the plot. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

Something stinks in tiny Norman, Texas and New York detective Kelly, who has come to attend the funeral of his brother-in-law, is determined to find out what it is. Much of the problem stems from the control a San Antonio gangster has over the town's lawmen. This actioner chronicles Kelly's crusade to clean up the dirty little town. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The 100th episode of Murder She Wrote gets under way when a derelict is found dead in a New York alley. At first glance, it appears that the dead man succumbed to alcoholism, but the other clues--including several conspicuously missing items--don't add up. Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) teams with ulcerated NYPD lieutenant Hanratty (Barney Martin) to make sense of the case, leading both sleuths to a group of disreputable doctors. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Harry Similac (Dirk Benedict) is a music promoter who must scramble to stay out of debt in this slapstick comedy. He hits upon the idea of becoming a wrestling promoter and steals Rick Roberts (Roddy Piper) from his former manager Captain Lou Milano (Lou Albano). He books his rock band Kick at the match and creates a new phenomena that combines wrestling with rock n' roll. Charles Nelson Reilly, Billy Barty, and John Astin provide memorable comedy relief. Cameo appearances by wrestlers Ric Flair, Afa & Sika, Sheik Adnan Al Kaissy, Freddie Blassie, and Bruno Sammartino add further realism to this feature that recalls the rock-and-wrestling spectaculars of the early 1980s. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Former Battlestar Gallactica leading man Dirk Benedict turns baddie in the British/Canadian Mark of the Devil. After committing a murder, Benedict is confident that he'll escape detection. That's when he discovers that his body has been marked by a tattoo, which begins to spread all over his evil epidermis. Jenny Seagrove, George Sewell and John Paul costar. Made for British television, Mark of the Devil premiered in America over the USA Cable Network on March 6, 1985. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Soldiers-of-fortune Hannibal Smith (George Peppard), B.A. (Mr. T), Howling Mad Murdock (Dwight Schultz) and Face (Dirk Benedict) continue to fight crime and perform various and sundry acts of derring-do while simultaneously trying to clear themselves of criminal charges as The A-Team launches its third season. With the Team's erstwhile female assistant Amy Allen having left for parts unknown, Amy's function as "Girl Friday" is taken over by Tawnia Baker (Marla Heasley). Also, season three will be the last for semi-regular William Lucking in the role of the Team's ruthless pursuer, Col. Lynch; thereafter, our heroes will be keeping one step ahead of another colonel, Roderick Decker (Lance Le Gault), on a near-exclusive basis. The season opens with the tantalizingly titled "Bullets and Bikinis," in which the A-Team takes over a beachfront hotel in order to foil a mobster. In subsequent adventures, the team heads to the Amazon in hopes of rescuing Tawnia's archeologist fiancé; B.A. agrees to help the Army doctor who once saved his life in the doctor's efforts to rescue the residents of a tropical island from a band of brigands; a group of A-Team impostors wreak havoc at a Wild West show forcing the real team to blow its cover and nearly fall into the waiting hands of Col. Lynch; a damsel in distress (Markie Post) proves to be a real pain in the posterior for her rescuer, Face; the heroes go toe-to-toe with evil industrialists who plan to dump toxic waste in an endangered environment; and in the final episode of the season, the A-Team and Decker's minions have a showdown at a lakeside resort. ~ All Movie Guide

Unfairly imprisoned for committing a bank robbery during the waning days of the Vietnam War (no one could prove they were just following orders), the members of the A-Team, a unit of highly specialized undercover operatives, manages to escape from prison and set about to clear their names by working as soldiers-of-fortune throughout the world. This is the premise established by the two-hour pilot episode of The A-Team and carried out during the series' first season. Led by cigar-chomping, disguise-happy Hannibal Smith (George Peppard), the team includes B.A. (Mr. T), a musclebound black weapons expert; ace pilot "Howling Mad" Murdock (Dwight Schultz), who has to be busted out of a mental institution for each assignment; and all-around wheeler dealer "Faceman" Peck, played in the opening episode by Tim Dunigan and thereafter by Dirk Benedict. Also along for the ride is plucky girl reporter Amy Allen (Melinda Culea), one of the few "outsiders" who believes in the team's innocence. Relentlessly pursuing the A-Team in hopes of either locking them up permanently or seeing them all hang is a certain Col. Lynch (William Lucking).

In the two-hour opening episode, Amy Allen sets out to prove that the shadowy A-Team really exists and becomes involved in the team's plan to rescue one of her fellow reporters from kidnappers in Mexico. The season's remaining hour-long episodes find the team being hunted down "Most Dangerous Game" style by a loony cult leader, saving B.A.'s girlfriend from the clutches of a corrupt prison warden who stages illegal to-the-death gladiatorial battles, matching wits with a rogue SWAT team that commits murders on the side, going head-to-head with a small-town biker gang, taking on the Mob in Las Vegas on behalf of two coeds who are worried about the safety of their professor, championing the cause of New York shopkeepers who are being terrorized by a protection racket, crash-landing in the mountains where they try to save an innocent man from being lynched, protecting a group of farmers from a land-greed rancher, saving a young girl from a forced marriage, attempting to free passengers of a hijacked airliner despite Murdock's temporary blindness, and shielding a small town from a band of crazed murderers. And in an ironic twist, the very government that is determined to clap the A-Team behind bars must solicit the team's aid in order to rescue a general and his daughter who are being held by terrorists in the heart of Borneo. ~ All Movie Guide

In this soapy drama based on Judith Krantz's novel,, a rather ordinary woman inherits a conglomerate and finds herself embroiled in the glittery but often sleazy world of big business. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide