Dan Priest Movies

John (Alan Olsen) is a Danish-born son who sets out to locate his father in this comedy thriller. While traveling to Los Angeles, John is caught in a small town in New Mexico and promptly has his money stolen. The main suspect is the waitress Lucy (Patricia Arquette), but she offers herself to him sexually. John soon is watched closely by the local sheriff (Richard Bright) and the suspicious hotel owner (Vincent Schiavelli). He joins a survivalist group run by Lucy's father, a local preacher who has more than fatherly love for his daughter. John and the father soon lock horns in an inevitable showdown. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

In the second half of Murder She Wrote's two-part Season Three opener, Jessica's long-missing brother in law Neil Fletcher (Jackie Cooper), who has been working under an alias with the Carmody Circus, has confessed to the murder of circus manager Hank Sutter. Jessica (Angela Lansbury) is convinced that Neil is innocent, and that he is covering up for somebody else--and this proves to be a reasonable conclusion when a second murder occurs, in which the victim is rival circus owner Harry Kingman (Joe Dorsey). Seriously hampering Jessica's investigation is the stone wall of resistance built up by the highly clannish circus folk--and by the curiously hostile local authorities. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Students at a college with obviously low graduation requirements spend their time and energy playing a game that involves mock assassinations with rubber-tipped darts fired from plastic guns. If you are shot, you are assassinated and out of the game and whoever remains alone at the end wins. When Gersh (Bruce Abbott), the odds-on favorite is about to do one of his opponents in, the hapless victim drops his dart gun, it misfires, and bonks a dart at Gersh - who is pushed over the edge, pulls out a real gun and kills his unfortunate opponent. Gersh drags the body to his room and stuffs it in his closet. Having killed once, the blood-thirsty student goes on a rampage, killing as many of these players as he can and stuffing them all in his closet. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

The 8-hour TV miniseries Blind Ambition was originally telecast May 20 through 23, 1979. This 105-minute feature-film version, prepared in 1982, seems a bit rushed at times, but overall does a credible and coherent job of storytelling. Based on John Dean's book Blind Ambition, with elements of Maureen Dean's Mo woven in by screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg, this is the saga of the Watergate affair, as experienced by Dean (Martin Sheen) and hia wife Maureen (Theresa Russell). As the Nixon administration goes down in flames, the Deans' marriage is sorely tested-as is Dean's success-at-any-price credo. Rip Torn plays Nixon like something out of a Greek Tragedy; some viewers accepted his interpretation, others found it jarringly inaccurate. Others in the cast of "usual suspects" include Michael Callan as Charles Colson, Lonny Chapman as L. Patrick Gray, William Daniels as G. Gordon Liddy, Fred Grandy as Donald Segretti, Christopher Guest as Jeb Magruder, Lawrence Pressman as H. R. Haldeman, William Windom as Richard Kleindienst, James Greene as E. Howard Hunt, Logan Ramsey as J. Edgar Hoover, and Al Checco as judge John Sirica. Also known as The John Dean Story, Blind Ambition earned two Emmy nominations. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A herd of chemically altered rattlesnakes become fearsome killers in this made-for-TV chiller. The tale is set in the Mojave Desert and centers upon Sam Parkinson, a noted zoologist, who has come to investigate a series of strange deaths that began with two dead children found near their parents' campsites. Sam is accompanied by Ann, a photographer who make an appalling discovery. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Black Like Me is the true story of white journalist John Howard Griffin, who "became" a Negro in the late 1950s. Feeling that the best way to understand what it was like to be black in a segregated south was to experience the feeling first-hand, Griffin (James Whitmore) undergoes extensive-and sometimes painful-skin pigmentation treatments. Though he tends to look more like Al Jolson or Eddie Cantor rather than African American, Whitmore does a creditable job playing a proud man forced into subservience by an unfeeling white society. Unfortunately, the film falls prey to stylistic affectations, notably an overabundance of confusing flashbacks. Though dating and occasionally patronizing, Black Like Me is still a worthwhile effort. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide