Anthony James Movies

Soap opera queen Susan Lucci stars as an orphan adopted by a mobster family who grows up to be a star attorney, but still dreams of getting revenge on the killers who murdered her parents. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

Rick Hunter (Fred Dryer) is convinced that Otto Minski (Anthony James), a man he arrested several years before, is responsible for blowing up the angel statue on the grave of a woman whom Rick has once planned to marry. Trouble is, Minski is a past master at slipping through the fingers of the law and cooking up convenient alibis. Now Hunter must literally race against the clock to prevent the demented Minski from planting time bombs all over town! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Sisters Cathy and Maryann Rogers (Claudia Christian, Suzanne Barnes) are the owners of a bottling plant which turns out an all-natural beverage called Hi-Bright soda. Evil beer magnate Jason Webb (Louis Giambalvo) uses strongarm tactics to pressure the sisters into converting their plant into a brewery, part of a larger scheme involving crooked banker-realtor Barrington (Jack Hogan). Figuring that the world doesn't need any more alcoholics, the A-Team comes to the rescue of the sisters, posing as the representatives of a phony ad agency in order to expose the villains' machinations. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Divided into four separate independent films originally made as a television pilot, Nightmares begins with "Terror in Topanga," a story about a young woman who goes out one night to buy a pack of cigarettes, knowing full well that the infamous "canyon killer" is on the loose -- and sure enough, a subtly menacing store clerk (Anthony James) begins to loom large in the woman's journey. The second story, "Bishop of Battle" is a sequence with animation that details the saga of a video games champion who comes up against a supernatural opponent. The next vignette, "The Benediction" is about a priest who gives up on his faith and takes off down the highway, only to be confronted with a demonic minivan and good reasons for remaining a believer. The last story, "Night of the Rat" has the rodent that ate Manhattan looming large over the home of a young couple, but never fear, the husband is blasé enough to handle anything, or so he thinks. As might be expected, the low-budget production and facetious scripting of a few of these sequences work against the intended scary effect of the stories. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

When a woman being treated for an ulcer by Dr. Barri Stoddard (Frances Lee McCain), a practitioner of holistic medicine, suddenly dies, an outraged Quincy (Jack Klugman) prepares to expose and denounce Stoddard as a quack. He changes his mind when he meets Barri and falls in love with her, though he is still skeptical of the woman's "all-natural" medical methods. Ultimately, Quincy ends up crusading to keep Dr. Stoddard's clinic open despite mounting public pressure to close her down--and this requires him to expose the person who was actually responsible for the ulcer patient's death. This is the final episode of Quincy, M.E.'s fourth season. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Several inconvent truths about "equal consideration under the law" come to surface as Stone (Karl Malden) and Keller (Michael Douglas) investigate two separate murders. One of the victims was a wealthy and well-connected white foreign businessman; the other was an impoverished black police informant. Judyann Elder delivers a stunning performance as the black victim's embittered wife, who challenges the cops to pay as much attention to her husband's death as to the executive's murder. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

When Jimmy Price (Jim Brown) wins an upset victory for sheriff, he becomes the first black man ever to hold the job (or any elective office) in anyone's memory in his rural southern county. He also sets off an ominous rumblings as the entire county seems split apart by his presence -- Mayor Parks (Fredric March) offers him the support of his office, but many whites aren't prepared to accept a black man as sheriff, while most of the whites that can accept him aren't saying so too loudly; a lot of older black residents, remembering decades of Jim Crow laws that only lately disappeared, are more confused than encouraged by Price's victory, while younger, more radical black citizens like George Harvey (Bernie Casey) have little use for Price's straight-arrow personality; they expect him to show them favoritism, and when he doesn't, they suspect him of being an nothing but a white man in black skin. Even Price's own wife (Janet MacLachlan) wonders if the cost of his being sheriff is too high. He finds himself alone, walking a tightrope between all of the forces pulling at him, and then the whole situation threatens to explode when he arrests the good-for-nothing son (Bob Random) of a wealthy man from the next county, who has killed a child while driving drunk. Soon the local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan is planning a meeting, and a lynch mob seems to be gathering across the county line to break the prisoner loose and take care of the sheriff. Price finally gets some unexpected help from his embittered predecessor, John Little (George Kennedy) -- Little would like nothing more than to sulk over losing his longtime job, but with his wife's coaxing he realizes that he can't let Price fail without the risk of destroying everything he worked for years to build. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Oscar winner Strother Martin is cast as Joad Bruder, the father of jailed stagecoach robber Randy Bruder (Anthony Colti). Aware that Joad is holding the Ponderosa money that was stolen by Randy, Joe and Hoss hatch another of their hare-brained schemes to retrieve the loot. Heading to Pineville, the Cartwright boy pose as two members of Randy's gang-a ruse that threatens to burn and crash when the wife of one of the gang members shows up unexpectedly. Originally shown on December 13, 1970, "The Impostors" was written by Robert Vincent Wright. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Prescription: Murder, a 1967 TV movie, represents the first appearance of Peter Falk as the rumpled but crafty detective Columbo. Gene Barry plays a distinguished doctor whose happiness is thwarted by his drunken wife (Nina Foch). Barry is in love with a pretty actress (Katherine Justice), and to smooth the path of his romance he murders his wife and arranges the evidence to pin the blame elsewhere. Enter Columbo, who seems to be slow on the uptake but who in fact is suspicious of the doctor's story. Snooping, prodding, puttering, and forever stopping at the doorway with the inevitable "just one more question," Columbo gets to the truth by playing a psychological trick on Barry, with the grudging cooperation of Barry's mistress. Written by Richard Levinson and William Link, Prescription Murder began life as a Broadway play in the late 1950s, starring Thomas Mitchell in the Columbo part (with a different character name), Joseph Cotten as the devious doctor, Agnes Moorehead as the victim and Patricia Medina (Mrs. Cotten) as the mistress. It would be adapted into a one-hour special on NBC in 1961 (with Bert Freed as the disheveled detective) before finally hitting weekly-series paydirt with Peter Falk in the lead. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

A movie based on a true story, this is the story of a man who was exiled as a thief from his village but later returns for revenge. He plans to buy the entire district up as part of a water reservoir project but an old woman and her stepson stand in his way. Revenge, murder, desperation and love all intertwine in this moving account. This was Richard Burton's first screen role, having been a stage actor prior to his stint in the Royal Air Force as a navigator during WWII. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide

Sam Grimm (Perry Lang) and his brother Max (Christopher Atkins) stand to inherit the mortuary academy that bears their family name in this black comedy. The two brothers must first graduate, and their progress is monitored by school manager Dr. Paul Truscott (Paul Bartell) and the academy's top lecturer Mary Purcell (Mary Woronov). Truscott is blackmailed when he falls in love with a corpse (Cheryl Starbuck), a beautiful cheerleader who choked to death on popcorn. Dickson (Tracey Walter) is the mechanical wizard whose animatronic expertise brings a dead heavy-metal band back to life for one last encore performance. Co-starring Wolfman Jack and Cesar Romero. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide

Shot in South Africa, this direct-to-video installment of the werewolf series continues that franchise's tradition of generating sequels light-years distant from the quality of Joe Dante's witty and frightening original. The fourth chapter even attempts to rewrite the original film's premise, which admittedly took grand liberties with the novel by Gary Brandner. The revamped tale involves successful author Marie (Romy Windsor), who visits the scenic woodland town of Drago to find respite from constant nightmare visions involving werewolves and a mysterious nun. Needless to say, her stay in the village does nothing to dispel the visions, which increase in frequency and seem to suggest strange portents of evil events to come... and a warning to get out of town before the next full moon. Director John Hough has yet to surpass his horror masterpiece The Legend of Hell House, and this deadly dull exercise is hardly a step in the right direction. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide