Damnation Alley
It was JMV. And George Peppard.
It was Damnation Alley.
“The town is infested with killer cockroaches!”
Jan Michael Vincent is much like Jan Michael Vincent, and he was in Damnation Alley in 1977.
(eta damn ninjas!)
Thanks. That’s been bugging (hah!) me for years.
I have two, a movie and a TV show.
First, the movie: My dad is really into Westerns. I remember waking up one night and crossing the hall to the bathroom for a drink of water. I glanced into the living room and saw another one of dad’s dumb westerns playing. But this one was different. It was (in my memory) gratuitously violent. Like Tarantino-type violence. The part of the movie I saw was a typical cavalry-attacking-an-indian-village scene. I stayed in the hallway long enough to watch three brief shots. The first was shot from ground level, and showed a small Indian girl of maybe six standing among the melee holding something to her chest and crying. A cavalry soldier on horseback gallops up behind her and decapitates her with his sword and the horse runs past her. The next scene shows a cavalry soldier raping a native woman while cutting off her breasts. I seem to remember a third shot of a soldier stabbing a pregnant woman in the abdomen. I quit watching after that.
This would have been at least 25 years ago. The movie had that 1960’s-1970’s “look” to it that today makes me think of spaghetti westerns. I have been reluctant to try to find the film because I’m not at all a fan of violent movies or westerns, but I am curious if my memory is accurate.
The TV show is more difficult to describe. I likely would have watched this in 1987, 1988, or 1989, and it was likely broadcast on either the Disney Channel or network TV—it was very much a kids show. I remember the characters were some sort of Martians or aliens. The most distinctive thing I remember is sometime during the show it would show the entire alien planet floating in space with the little Martian houses comically huge—imagine holding up a baseball and placing a Monopoly house (from the board game) on the ball. That’s kinda what it looked like. It had a crude animation style, perhaps claymation. I really don’t know even how to start searching for this one.
Soldier Blue
Hell… 25 years I’ve wondered if that movie really exists and it takes a Doper less than 10 minutes to find it. Good god I love this place.
Yes, I’m sure that’s it—or at least, it sounds like it is.
Almost everything is right except for the shot of the planet… I distinctly remember houses being visible. It may very well be the right show and I’m simply remembering a specific one-off episode. My memory of it is less than clear, although I seem to recall there being human-like creatures in it.
Closest match I could come up with was an episode of the 1975 t.v. series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, featuring a headless motorcycle rider avenging his death at the hands of the people who strung a cable across the road as a “prank”.
The first part sounds like an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker and the end something out of The Prisoner.
Yes, The Night Stalker had an episode about a headless motorcyclist, The Chopper, which aired in 1975.
Damn it.
There was a movie I watched as a kid, may have been a TV movie. I always picture it, but in a very fuzzy way. It felt like it was probably shot in the 50’s or 60’s, had the visual feel of a western but it wasn’t a western. Maybe kind of like Little House on the Prairie. It was a movie about a kid or kids who found treasure buried near their house somewhere. Makes me think of The Goonies, but it’s not that movie. It’s not much to go on, sorry.
Holes
Reminds me of a Night Gallery episode–“Big Surprise,” starring John Carradine–although it was only ten minutes long.
Could it have been a version of Tom Sawyer?
When were you a kid, exactly? About what year did you see it?
oohhhh… this might be something. I’ll look into it thanks! Good find!
“An eccentric farmer promises a big surprise to a group of boys- if they dig for it”
Not Holes, not Tom Sawyer. I was born in 1981 and I think I probably watched it in 1987ish?
I really think this is it! Watching it on Hulu right now. Thanks so much!
then again, maybe not…i swore they found actual treasure. though I could be mis-remembering.
^ I did a quick check–Wikipedia has a list of ABC Movie of the Week titles (I don’t think CBS did made-for-TV movies and NBC was Mystery Movie packages [McCloud, Hec Ramsey, Snoop Sisters]), so this is probably a good place to look if you think it was MFTV of that era. I recognized more than a few just by the title :o!
BTW, that Night Gallery epi scared the living crap out of me at age 11; saw it last year and all I could do was admire the style and photography and Carradine’s performance. 
I found it.
Black Samson
scene at time index 10:45
How 'bout that epic afro?
Somehow, this thread didn’t come up on my radar until it was just revived yesterday. Maybe one of you can help with this one:
I think it was a TV movie, some time in the 90s.
The plot was that this married businessman seemed to be having an affair with his hot secretary. He was constantly denying it and his wife was getting more and more paranoid, until she ended up committing suicide. The twist was that they really weren’t having an affair, the secretary was a lesbian, and the two of them were actually trying to drive the wife to suicide because the businessman wanted to be rid of her but not have the financial consequences of divorce. The final scene (that I remember, at least) has the businessman and secretary and some other woman who’s all over the secretary are in the back seat of a limo, the secretary says she’s going to take a vacation to the Greek island of Lesbos, they stop at an ATM for the businessman to withdraw money to pay off the secretary for her part in the plot, and the secretary shoots the businessman, saying that people will think he’s the victim of a random ATM mugging.