James Keach Movies

This silly horror film stars Dean Jagger in a zoned-out performance as a mad scientist whose experiments in halting the aging process have reduced the residents of Smalltown, U.S.A. to shambling zombies. Since his serum requires massive amounts of extracted human pituitary fluid, Jagger is ever on the lookout for more unwilling donors -- i.e. nearly everyone unlucky enough to pass through town. This film is apparently assembled from pieces of two different projects, including an uncompleted film from the mid-'70s, and spiced up with some gratuitous nudity courtesy of former Playboy playmate Lynda Wiesmeier. As expected, the combination doesn't really work -- the editors have made a commendable attempt at maintaining some form of continuity, but the end result seems hardly worth the effort. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

In Armed and Dangerous, John Candy plays a cop who has been kicked off the force on a trumped up charge. Eugene Levy costars as a disbarred lawyer. The two outcasts take low-paying jobs as security officers at a company controlled by mob boss Robert Loggia. In their own stumblebum fashion, Candy and Levy uncover a smuggling operation masterminded by Loggia. Meg Ryan also shows up in an early leading role. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Blonde-haired, blue-eyed women's libber Molly McGrath (Goldie Hawn) quits her teaching job at a comfortable middle-class school to take a new position as varsity football coach at a predominantly black inner-city school. Culture and gender clashes abound; she must win over the hard-boiled youths, convince them to practice hard and show up for class, and convince them they can win football games. Her job begins to take a toll on her family, however, when her ex-husband (James Keach) attempts to take away her daughter, claiming she is neglecting her responsibilities as a mother. Wildcats marked the fourth sports film directed by Michael Ritchie. ~ Jeremy Beday, All Movie Guide

In an "urban cowboy" story, a father decides to take a stand against neighborhood gangsters even at risk to his life. After Louis Thibadeau (Charles Durning) witnesses a gangland-style execution he agrees to help the police nail and jail the murderers, knowing full well the gangsters will not idly sit back and allow him to testify. When a female lawyer friend (Pam Grier) runs across one of the hoodlums in a court case, she warns Louis that he doesn't stand a chance of collecting social security at the moment. Louis sends his children away for the duration and digs out his supply of weapons from his days as a Marine, waiting at home for the assault to come. Following more or less the same build-up as Straw Dogs, this is a milder version of the same theme. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Unmarried disc jockey Jamie Lee Curtis happens across a packet of love letters, written by her late mother. As she peruses these missives, she learns that her mother had carried on a lengthy extramarital affair. At firt appalled by mom's "double life," Curtis is slowly brought around to another way of thinking. Soon she has embarked on her own romance with an older man, the very married James Keach. Well cast and sensitively directed, Love Letters is a purposely "small" films that deserves a larger audience. The film was also released as My Love Letters and Passion Play. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this thriller three troubled couples attend a two day marital retreat in hopes of saving their marriages. Unbeknownst to them, their psychiatrist is a psycho slasher. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The hook in Walter Hill's mythic retelling of the James-Younger outlaw legend is in the casting; the James, Younger, Miller, and Ford Brothers are played by a string of acting brothers, the Keachs, the Carradines, the Quaids and the Guests. The film begins as outlaws are robbing a bank. After the robbery, Ed Miller (Dennis Quaid) finds himself kicked out of the gang for needlessly killing a man during the robbery. Jesse James (James Keach) hands over Ed's share of the money and tells him to leave, a feeling held mutually by Ed's brother Clell (Randy Quaid). After the killing the gang decides to split up for awhile. The James boys return to their wives and farms, while Cole Younger (David Carradine) travels to Texas with his prostitute girlfriend Belle Starr (Pamela Reed). After the brief respite, the gang reunites to rob a well-stocked bank in Northfield, Minnesota. The robbery turns out disastrously, with most of the gang either wounded or dying. The James boys are the only ones not seriously hurt, and they leave the rest of the gang behind, escaping while they can. After the James boys leave, the remnants of the gang are captured. But trailing the Jameses is a relentless posse. Frank and Jesse manage to keep one step ahead until the Ford brothers (Christopher Guest and Nicholas Guest) make a deal with the Pinkerton detectives trailing the outlaws. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

This film showed up on TV as Forbidden Paradise, but you can't fool us. It's really The Hurricane, producer Dino De Laurentiis' ill-advised remake of the 1938 Sam Goldwyn production of the same name. The story of the casual cruelties imposed by the white ruling class on the natives of the isle of Manakoora had the advantage of timeliness in 1938; forty-one years later, the story plays like a Gilligan's Island amateur production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Playing the old Jon Hall role of the native lad whose rambunctiousness incurs the wrath of the provincial governor, the uniquely ungifted Daton Kane makes Hall look like Sir John Gielgud. Even the expensive hurricane finale (which ate up most of the film's $22 million budget) isn't one-tenth as exciting as the corresponding sequence in the earlier film. The saddest aspect of the 1979 The Hurricane is that it was directed by Jan Troell, who showed flashes of brilliance in his earlier The Emigrants and Zandy's Bride; perhaps significantly, Troell hightailed it back to Sweden after wrapping up his obligation to Dino De Laurentiis. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

After football player Joe Ramsey (Lee Paul) dies of a brain aneuryism, Quincy (Jack Klugman) performs an autopsy and finds that the man was suffering from a drug-resistent strain of gonnorhea. In his efforts to trace the source of the disease, Quincy orders a round-up of the city's prostitutes--and when one of the hookers turns up murdered, it seems that the feisty medical examiner has stumbled onto a widespread conspiracy and coverup. This episode can be regarded as a seminal example of the "AIDS dramas" which proliferated on television during the next two decades (though of course AIDS had not yet been identified as an international epidemic). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Old man Ewing (Jason Robards) owns a ranch right next to the ranch of Ella (Jane Fonda). This is a source of two problems: Ewing wants to gobble up most of the land around the two ranches and also wants Ella's ranch; secondly, when Ella was too young to know better, she went to bed with the man, which, many years later, she considers to have been a grievous error on her part. A third problem arises when oil companies begin pressuring both of them to allow drilling on their land, and Ewing won't allow it -- on his or anyone else's land. Before long, war-veteran Frank (James Caan) enters Ella's life and helps her fight to save her land and her sanity, with added assistance from Dodger (Richard Farnsworth), an old local who knows the score. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

In this suspenseful drama, an angry husband hatches an ingenious plot to get his avaricious wife and the pesky detective she has hired out of his life. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Part of the "American Short Story" collection, this is an adaptation of a story by Stephen Crane. In this film, a traveller takes refuge in a hotel. However, he becomes concerned his life is in danger from others who are staying at the same hotel. The concept of fate is introduced as a guiding element of the story. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide