Houseley Stevenson, Jr. Movies

In this rather blatant "all-white" derivation of the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor starrer Stir Crazy, Christopher Lemmon and Charles Rocket are cast as pair of dimwitted innocents who suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the law. While promoting a zany get-rich-quick scheme, uptight suburbanite Eugene Griswold (Lemmon) and his eccentric inventor pal Stanley Flynn (Rocket) are hijacked by a pair of equally stupid jewel thieves. Wrongly accused and convicted of the heist, Eugene and Stanley get swept up in a prison break, spending the balance of the film on the lam and in disguise. Filmed in 1982 as the pilot for a unsold TV series, The Outlaws didn't see the light of day until ABC had to fill an unplugged 90-minute scheduling hole on July 9, 1984. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In The Man With Bogart's Face, an affectionate send-up of the Bogart detective films of the 1940s, Robert Sacchi plays a man who idolizes Humphrey Bogart so much he has his features altered to look exactly like his idol. He then opens up a detective agency under the name Sam Marlowe (an amalgam of the names of Bogart's characters from The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep). Sam hires the Duchess (Misty Rowe) as his secretary ("She looked like Marilyn Monroe and made about as much sense as Gracie Allen") and "Sam Marlowe, Private Eye" is in business. Sam gets a meager response until a shooting puts his picture in the paper and business starts to flourish. Particularly attracted to Marlowe's services are a collection of characters -- Gena (Michelle Phillips), an attractive Gene Tierney type; Commodore Anastas (Victor Buono), a Greek shipping tycoon and Sidney Greenstreet lookalike; and the mysterious Mr. Zebra (Herbert Lom doing a Peter Lorre imitation). They are all trying to find the famous Eyes of Alexander -- a priceless set of stones from a statue of Alexander the Great. Also on hand are old Hollywood pros George Raft, Yvonne DeCarlo and Mike Mazurki. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

This made-for-TV actioner was designed as the pilot for a series based on the popular Walking Tall films of the 1970s. This time out, a young Brian Dennehy is cast as the stick-wielding, scrupulously honest Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser (played in the films by Joe Don Baker and Bo Svenson), with Forrest Tucker repeating his role from Walking Tall: The Final Chapter as Pusser's father. After chasing down a speeding car, Pusser is disgusted to find that its teenaged occupants (two of them dead, two blinded for life) are stoned out of their minds on bad bootleg hooch. Bypassing due process and other such legal niceties, Pusser goes on a one-man rampage of destruction in order to square accounts with the evil disco owner-cum-moonshiner responsible for the tragedy. Making things difficult is the fact that one of the villains of the piece is also one of Buford's oldest pals. A Real American Hero made its CBS debut on December 9, 1978. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Rated R for violence, this is another of the promises broken to us by the movie industry. When they promise that we won't have to see something again, why can't they make it happen? Although this, like the Jason movies (Friday the 13th ad nauseam), is followed by a made for TV movie and a series, they really have to be prequels to this "final chapter," as dictated by the fiery conclusion of the movie. The story of a sheriff who just isn't going to take it anymore, it is based on a true story but, as with all Hollywood fare, made larger than life. ~ Tana Hobart, Rovi

H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds had been on the Paramount Pictures docket since the silent era, when it was optioned as a potential Cecil B. DeMille production. When Paramount finally got around to a filming the Wells novel, the property was firmly in the hands of special-effects maestro George Pal. Like Orson Welles's infamous 1938 radio adaptation, the film eschews Wells's original Victorian England setting for a contemporary American locale, in this case Southern California. A meteorlike object crash-lands near the small town of Linda Rosa. Among the crowd of curious onlookers is Pacific Tech scientist Gene Barry, who strikes up a friendship with Ann Robinson, the niece of local minister Lewis Martin. Because the meteor is too hot to approach at present, Barry decides to wait a few days to investigate, leaving three townsmen to guard the strange, glowing object. Left alone, the three men decide to approach the meterorite, and are evaporated for their trouble. It turns out that this is no meteorite, but an invading spaceship from the planet Mars. The hideous-looking Martians utilize huge, mushroomlike flying ships, equipped with heat rays, to pursue the helpless earthlings. When the military is called in, the Martians demonstrate their ruthlessness by "zapping" Ann's minister uncle, who'd hoped to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the standoff. As Barry and Ann seek shelter, the Martians go on a destructive rampage. Nothing-not even an atom-bomb blast-can halt the Martian death machines. The film's climax occurs in a besieged Los Angeles, where Barry fights through a crowd of refugees and looters so that he may be reunited with Ann in Earth's last moments of existence. In the end, the Martians are defeated not by science or the military, but by bacteria germs-or, to quote H.G. Wells, "the humblest things that God in his wisdom has put upon the earth." Forty years' worth of progressively improving special effects have not dimmed the brilliance of George Pal's War of the Worlds. Even on television, Pal's Oscar-winning camera trickery is awesome to behold. So indelible an impression has this film made on modern-day sci-fi mavens that, when a 1988 TV version of War of the Worlds was put together, it was conceived as a direct sequel to the 1953 film, rather than a derivation of the Wells novel or the Welles radio production. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The city of the title is Los Alamos, where nuclear physicist Gene Barry lives and works. Terrorists kidnap Barry's son and demand that the physicist turn over the H-bomb formula. It's cat-and-mouse for a while, but when the FBI gets on the case, the criminals haven't got a chance. Outdated almost before its release, The Atomic City is still effective on a purely melodramatic level. There's a particularly tense climax played out along the mountain mesas surrounding Los Alamos. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi