Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson - The Treasures of Agra (1983)

Between 1979 and 1986 a series of Sherlock Holmes TV-movies were made for Soviet television. They were hugely popular in Russia (they triggered a real Holmes craze there) and well received internationally. Vasily Livanov starred as as Sherlock Holmes with Vitaly Solomin as Dr Watson.

The 1983 two-part fourth film, The Treasures of Agra (Sokrovishcha Agry), adapted both the 1890 novel The Sign of Four and the 1891 short story A Scandal in Bohemia (which is included as a flashback subplot).

Holmes has a new client, a rather sweet young woman, Miss Morstan. Her father had disappeared in India a decade earlier. Every year she receives, from an unknown source, a small package containing a very valuable pearl. Now she has received a letter promising information about her father if she agrees to a meeting.

It transpires that her father and a Major Sholto found a treasure hoard. There were perhaps others involved, and it seems there was double-crossing. And someone wants to make amends to Miss Morstan. She wants Holmes and Watson to accompany her to the meeting.

The meeting takes place, but a murder takes place as well.

The clues are puzzling, including an odd footprint.

Holmes will of course have to make use of his mastery of disguise.

There’s a man with a wooden leg, there are twin brothers, Inspector Lestrade turns up and arrests everybody in sight (everybody except the guilty parties) and there’s a very cool steam launch chase on the river.

There are revelations about the very murky events that took place years earlier, events which left a legacy of bitterness and guilt.

And Dr Watson is starting to become emotionally entangled with the charming and beautiful Miss Morstan.

In the second part we get the story of Holmes involvement with the glamorous sexy enigmatic Irene Adler and her apparent attempts to blackmail a minor European princeling. Many men have fallen for Irene Adler and Holmes is disturbed to discover that he is not immune to her considerable charms. Both Holmes and Watson display hidden romantic sides to their natures.

While Jeremy Brett’s twitchy neurotic performance in the British TV series is undeniably fascinating it is rather eccentric and many viewers will prefer Vasily Livanov’s more straightforward interpretation of the role. Vitaly Solomin as Dr Watson is a fine Dr Watson, not in the least foolish.

These Soviet TV-movies were clearly made by people with a great deal of respect for the source material, and also for the viewer.

When you look at the sets and costumes and the fine location shooting it’s obvious that real money was spent on this production. It’s very polished. It captures the feel of Conan Doyle’s stories and of Conan Doyle’s version of late Victorian London.

There is fog of course, but used to serve a purpose.  

The supporting cast is excellent. I loved Borislav Brondukov’s lively performance as Inspector Lestrade. This is a Lestrade who is not a fool, just ridiculously over-keen. He makes his arrests before thinking things through, but when he does think them through he is capable of admitting his mistakes.

Larisa Solovyova is a very glamorous Irene Adler. One can understand why Holmes becomes obsessed by her. 

Viktor Proskurin is very good as the rather jumpy Thaddeus Sholto.

The Russian DVD set includes all five movies with English subtitles.

Thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the first two TV films, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and The Hound of the Baskervilles. 

And I’ve reviewed Conan Doyle’s novel The Sign of Four.

Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982-83)

Tales of the Gold Monkey is a U.S. action/adventure TV series which ran for a single season from 1982 to 1983. It was created by Donald P. Bellisario who was also responsible for such cool 80s TV classics as Magnum, P,I. and Airwolf. The cancellation of the series was not due to poor ratings. The show was a huge hit. It was network politics that killed it.

Although you could certainly be forgiven for assuming that Tales of the Gold Monkey was clearly hoping to capitalise on the recent success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (it does belong to the same “rugged individualistic adventurer in exotic locales” genre) in fact Bellisario pitched the series to the network a year before Spielberg’s movie was released. His inspiration was the classic 1939 Howard Hawks movie Only Angels Have Wings.

The setting is the fictional South Pacific island Bora Gora, a French colonial possession.

Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) is an American airman with a small air cargo operation using a Grumman Goose amphibian (which happens to be my favourite aircraft of all time). He has an offsider named Corky (Jeff MacKay), a genius mechanic but with a chronically poor memory due to over-indulgence in alcoholic beverages. He also has a bad-tempered one-eyed dog named Jack.

Jake has a habit of trying to rescue damsels in distress but in the pilot episode his latest attempt, involving cute red-headed chanteuse Sarah Stickney White (Caitlin O’Heaney), gets him into all kinds of trouble. Sarah will become a regular character. There’s something very important about Sarah that Jake doesn’t know. She’s a spy.

Another regular character is Bon Chance Louie. He owns the Monkey Bar which is the island’s social hub and he’s the local representative of the French Government. He has the reputation of being lucky. He did after all survive the guillotine. In the pilot he is played by Ron Moody but Roddy McDowall takes over the role in the series.

Another regular is German missionary Willie Tenboom (John Calvin). We know from the start that he’s a German spy but he’s a sympathetic character and a nice guy. He is devoted to his parishioners who seem to be entirely attractive young women. One of them acts as his personal assistant. If she’s a good girl he gives her a blessing. She looks forward to that. There’s nothing a girl likes more than a good blessing. The Reverend believes that young women need to be blessed as often as possible.

And then there Princess Koji (Marta DuBois). She’s a Japanese princess involved in various ventures of dubious legality. She has a private samurai army. She’s a sexy bad girl, but not really evil.

Jake is also in trouble with Jack, having lost the dog’s false eye (which is a sapphire mounted in an opal) in a poker game.

There are monkey-men, venomous snakes and samurai warriors. And the island of Baku is an active volcano. A very active volcano.

There are spies everywhere on Bora Gora, from various nations. There are German, American and Japanese spies and possibly some freelancers. The German spies are in search of the legendary gold monkey of the island of Baku.

You have to remember that this is 1938. Japan was at peace with the U.S. and France. Germany was at peace with the U.S. and France. Princess Koji does not have the slightest dislike for the French or the Americans. She’s a businesswoman. Louis has no issues with her as long as she doesn’t break any French laws within French territory (which she never does). She’s oddly fond of Jake and would rather like to get him into bed. The Reverend Willie Tenboom is an agent of German military intelligence but he’s not Gestapo and he’s a seriously nice guy. Everyone likes him and he likes everyone. Sarah is an American agent but it’s peacetime so her job is just to gather information. All the recurring characters are in fact good guys. They all get along pretty well.

Episode Guide

In the first episode there are spies and double agents everywhere and a plot to build a super-bomb. In the second episode, Shanghaied, Corky is shanghaied by a disreputable sea captain who needs his ship repaired. The captain is involved in an illicit and very nasty trade.

In the third episode, Black Pearl, a flying buddy of Jake’s from the old days in China shows up. He’s a bit disreputable but mostly he’s just an irresponsible dreamer, forever chasing after imaginary treasures or lost cities. Now he’s hooked up with a Watusi tribe who live on a nearby island. It’s crazy. What is a Watusi tribe doing on a Pacific island? Jake’s buddy is sure it has something to do with King Solomon’s Mines.

In the fourth episode, Escape from Death Island, Jake and Corky fly a visitor to a French penal island and find themselves imprisoned.

In Trunk from the Past a trunk is sent to Sarah containing relics collected by her late archaeologist father. He devoted his life to finding the tomb of a certain Egyptian Pharaoh and came up with a crazy theory that the tomb was located on an island in the South Pacific.

In episode six another old flying buddy of Jake’s turns up. And Randall McGraw (Lance LeGault) is always trouble. His cargo plane has gone down and it was carrying something that simply must be retrieved.

In Honor Thy Brother a Japanese fighter pilot wants revenge, Corky gets a wife he doesn’t want and Jack gets his eye back. Next up Jake crash lands on an island within the Japanese Mandate and it’s inhabited by Amish. And a tiger. And a Japanese officer obsessed with cowboy movies. In the next episode something very bad has happened to Sarah on a mission to Manila. It has something to do with General Macarthur.

In the next episode a baseball star visiting the island lands himself in very big trouble involving a local girl. Trouble that could get him lynched. In the following episode Jake, Corky and Sarah crash land on an island inhabited by apes, and they find an ape-boy. In High Stakes Lady Jake is tempted by high stakes poker and a glamorous blonde and of course he falls for her. But the stakes are more than just money.

In Force of Habit Jake discovers that nuns can be pretty dangerous.

In Last Chance Louie it’s Louie who finds that the past cannot be escaped. A new guest arrives on the island and Louis immediately shoots him. It seems that Louis is embarked on a course of self-destruction but he refuses to explain his strange behaviour.

In the next-to-last episode the trouble starts with an eclipse and then a politico-religious cut leader decides that Sarah must be punished for offending the gods. And then things get explosive. Literally.

In the final episode Princess Koji hires Jake as his bodyguard. It’s a very dangerous occupation.

Final Thoughts

There’s plenty of cheesiness but it’s undoubtedly deliberate and it’s combined with a considerable amount of coolness which for me is an intoxicating mix. The cast is uniformly excellent.

For my money Tales of the Gold Monkey is the best action-adventure series of the 80s. There’s just enough humour and romance, the plots are delightfully implausible but fun, the entire cast is excellent and it looks like a very very expensive series (which it was) in which the money was well spent. Very highly recommended.

The DVD release is still in print and extras include a very good “making of” documentary.

Mike Hammer - Murder Me, Murder You (TV-movie, 1983)

Murder Me, Murder You is one of two Mike Hammer TV-movies which served as pilots for projected TV series. Murder Me, Murder You screened on CBS in April 1983 and the response was positive. The series went ahead and was quite successful, running from 1984 to 1987. Stacy Keach plays Hammer in both the TV-movies and the series.

This was a TV-movie so there was no way the budget was going to stretch to a period setting. This is New York in the early 80s but it has a grimy scuzzy slightly sleazy 70s vibe. There’s no 80s glamour. Mike Hammer fits right into this environment.

Mike Hammer looks like he’s dressing the same way he’s dressed for twenty years. He wears a hat, which definitely adds a slight retro hint. The women wear dresses that also have just a very slight retro feel. The women’s hairstyles are not too 80s. This is not really New York in 1983. This is Mickey Spillane’s New York. This is Mike Hammer’s New York. It has its own reality. The visual style works, with nods to classic film noir and 70s grittiness.

Hammer is pressured by the DA to offer protection to an important witness. Chris Jameson (Michelle Phillips) runs an all female courier agency that specialises in delivering very sensitive documents. One of their couriers has been killed. It may have some connection to a crooked aerospace company. A briefcase disappeared from the murder scene. A briefcase worth killing for.

Mike soon finds himself with a personal stake in the case (which is a standard feature in most of Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels). Chris is an old flame. And Mike discovers he has a family member he didn’t know about, one who is mixed up in this case in some mysterious way. Mike has some personal stuff from the past that he will have to deal with.

There has been a murder. It’s very likely that there have been two murders. And as the story progresses, three murders.

As usual Hammer has clashes with the police and the DA. He’s used to that, but someone is taking pot shots at him and that annoys him. Some people he liked are dead. Someone he likes very much could soon be dead. When things like that happen Mike starts playing hardball.

You couldn’t get too sleazy on network TV in 1983 but Murder Me, Murder You gives it the old college try. There’s an astounding quantity of cleavage on display. There’s no naked flesh but there is a nicely squalid atmosphere. A key suspect is involved in the adult movie business. And there’s a balance between life in the gutter and life for the rich, and the rich people in this story are the sleaziest of all.

There’s an effectively twisty screenplay by Bill Stratton and most importantly it feels like a Mike Hammer story. There’s a bizarre twist at the end which you might find bewildering if you haven’t read Spillane. But it is a real Spillane touch.

And Stacy Keach is a splendid Hammer, always ready to start throwing punches and shoot people.

And this is the real Velda. If you’ve read the books you know that Velda has a private investigator’s licence of her own and a gun licence and she has no qualms about shooting people if she has to. I think Tanya Roberts is pretty good in the role. Velda has to be beautiful and glamorous and Tanya Roberts fits the bill perfectly. It’s a pity she wasn’t available for the series.

I have a few qualms about the ending. I’m not sure it rings true emotionally. Obviously I can’t say any more without risking spoilers.

The two TV-movies Murder Me, Murder You and More than Murder are available in a two disc DVD set. Murder Me, Murder You gets a perfectly acceptable transfer. Sadly the TV series seems to be long out of print on DVD. Blu-Ray releases would certainly be welcome!

I enjoyed Murder Me, Murder You quite a bit. Highly recommended.

As much as I like Stacy Keach here I do think that Darren McGavin in the 1958-1960 Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer TV series was a slightly better Hammer. And, oddly enough, a slightly tougher Hammer.

Gunbuster (1988-89 OVA)

Gunbuster is a 1988-89 anime OVA. For those new to the world of anime an OVA (original video animation) was a bit like a mini-series but intended for the home video market rather than television broadcast. They were straight-to-video and later straight-to-DVD releases. It was an incredibly useful and flexible format and since they were not broadcast on TV they could deal more openly and easily with grown-up subject matter.

This is from the golden age of anime and like so many of the products of that age it turns out to be not at all what it first seemed to be.

Gunbuster is the story of Noriko Takaya, a high school girl whose dream it is to become a space pilot. Her dad was a space pilot. He was a hero, killed in action in the first great battle against the space monsters. Part of Noriko’s motivation is to honour the memory of her much-loved father. But Noriko doesn’t go to a normal high school. She attends a special high school for girls destined to become space pilots.

Noriko looks up to Kazumi Amano, a slightly older girl and the school’s star pupil. Noriko thinks of her as Big Sis.

The chief instructor is Koichiro Ohta, always referred to as Coach. He was one of the few survivors of the battle in which Noriko’s father was killed. This provides a link between Noriko and Ohta which will be important later.

When the space monsters attack again the girls are rushed into battle. Nobody thinks Noriko is ready. She’s just not a very promising space pilot but for some reason Coach Ohta insists that she will make it.

A series of epic space battles follow, in which we will find out if Noriko has the Right Stuff or not.

The whole “mecha” or giant robot thing is, let’s face it, kind of silly and goofy. But when you have giant robots that are also space fighters hurtling through space you’re reaching a whole new level of silliness. So you figure this will probably be just a fun kids’ space opera science fiction adventure series. And then suddenly it starts throwing science fiction Big Ideas at you. Like the concept of humanity as a bacteria.

And they have invented a whole new theory of physics for this OVA, a theory which supposedly superseded Einstein’s theories at the end of the 20th century. This new theory has an amusing steampunk touch since it posits the existence of the mysterious aether, a popular concept in 19th century physics. Space isn’t a vacuum. It is filled with the aether.

It’s also a series which actually takes account of the relativity effects on time. At the beginning of the the episode Noriko is still teenaged girl but her birth certificate says she is 27. Girls she went to high school with are married with kids. This sense of being displaced in time adds to Noroko’s sense of disconnectedness. She spends more time in space than her old friends so her friendships have to be rebuilt on a new basis. Those relatively effects will later become very very important, not as mere plot elements but for their immense emotional impacts.

Getting back to the goofiness which at first seems likely to be the predominant characteristic of this OVA we discover that, of course, the most suitable candidates for training as space combat pilots are hot babes. With big boobs. And the bottom half of their uniform consists of not much more than a thong. So we figure this will a sexy babes in space romp. Until we discover that the characters have a great deal of depth to them, that Noriko is a very complex young woman struggling with unresolved grief, a sense of emptiness and a sense of unworthiness. The death in combat of her father is not just a minor backstory element to explain why she’s a space pilot. It’s a tragedy that dominates her whole life and she will never become truly a grown woman until she learns to resolve this issue.

At first we think Coach Ohta will be a stereotypical tough drill sergeant type but he has lots of issues to deal with as well. Issues connected with that disastrous space battle in which Noriko’s father was killed. Perhaps he has a desire for revenge. Perhaps there is guilt. He may be searching for redemption. Why does he insist that Noriko is ready for combat when everyone (including Noriko) knows she’s a washout? This is a series that also deals very much with honour. This dominates Coach Ohta’s life. It’s not that he was in any way guilty of cowardice, but he survived that first battle when a warrior’s honour would have demanded that he die in battle.

And while we may have initially thought this was going to be an anime aimed at kids it soon becomes apparent that that is not the case. It’s not just the very adult concepts. There’s also the nudity, including quite a bit of frontal nudity. No, this is not aimed at the kiddies.

There are major themes of love and loss. Both Noriko and Kazumi find love, but each of them (in different ways) has to face the prospect of losing the man she loves.

This is old school animation without any CGI but I like old school anime.

There are three distinct parts to the story, with time gaps between each part but with the time gaps complicated by relativity effects.

Gunbuster does feature giant robots and scantily-clad (and sometimes unclad) babes but it’s an intelligent, subtle and complex science fiction story which deals with tricky concepts such as the nature of time and it’s a sensitive emotional drama.

Gunbuster is superb. Very highly recommended.

Gunbuster is available on a Blu-Ray release which thankfully offers the Japanese language soundtrack with subtitles as well the English dub. No power on this Earth could persuade me to watch anime in an English-dubbed version.

V (TV miniseries 1983)

V was a two-part 1983 American TV mini-series which gave birth to a franchise. It originally aired on the NBC network. I must confess that I had until now never seen the mini-series or any other parts of this franchise.

Flying saucers suddenly appear over major cities across the globe. But it’s OK. They’re friendly. We know they’re friendly because that’s what they told us.

They look just like regular humans except they always wear sunglasses. And they sound just a bit odd.

The aliens become known as Visitors. Everybody is excited to welcome them. No-one has the least suspicion that they might not be friendly. I have to say that I thought this was wildly implausible. Even with the media assuring everyone that the aliens are our friends nobody has any doubts?

It’s also odd that apparently the CIA, the FBI and the military take no interest in the arrival of the aliens. In fact the government plays no part whatsoever in this series.

The aliens then proceed to act in a way that would have made a five-year-old child suspicious but nobody does get suspicious.

Pretty soon, without anybody realising it, the aliens are in complete control. There are fifty gigantic mother ships and thousands of the Visitors. An invading army has been welcomed in.

TV journalist Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) develops some suspicions. He sneaks aboard one of the mother ships and discovers the truth about the alien Visitors. Meanwhile his ex-girlfriend has become the chief PR officers for the aliens.

Eventually a few people figure out that they’ll have to take a stand but their numbers are few and they’re disorganised.

While there are a few weaknesses to this mini-series there are some real strengths. The aliens do not take control by taking over the military. They take over the mass media instead. Once you control the mass media you control society.

Of course a critical difference between this series and an alien invasion series like The Invaders is that because of their weird voices the aliens in V cannot just blend in with humans. They cannot infiltrate human society. They must find another way to seize control and hijacking the media makes sense. And it does give this series a different flavour compared to other alien invasion series. The aliens have to operate in the open whilst using deception and manipulation.

And of course there are journalists who are only too happy to sell us out and help the invaders. There are also cops who are willing to sell out.

There’s a realistic dark and cynical edge. When the chips are down your co-workers, your friends, your family and your neighbours are all likely to betray you if the media tells them to. The basic human instinct for social conformity makes things easy for the alien invaders.

There’s a very effective atmosphere of paranoia and the paranoia levels rise inexorably.

There’s also a mind control angle which is handled skilfully. Giving the aliens unlimited mind-control powers would have made them too formidable. Their mind-control powers have limitations. It was essential that the aliens be seen as extremely difficult but perhaps not entirely impossible to defeat. 

I don’t want to any more about the ending other then the fact that it allowed for a follow-up series.

There are some pretty reasonable action scenes.

The mother ships are not miniatures but matte paintings (they had neither the time nor the money to build miniatures). When judging the special effects you have have to keep in mind (in this and in all science fiction TV series up to the 90s) that in 1983 people were going to be watching V on relatively small cathode ray TV sets. The deficiencies in the special effects would have been a lot less obvious than they are today when viewed on Blu-Ray. Some of the special effects are very iffy and have a cheap 80s arcade game look.

The budget was huge by 1980s television standards but the series was rushed into production so time was more of a problem than money.

Jane Badler as Diana makes a fine sexy villainess. The acting overall is quite adequate.

V is quite entertaining if you enjoy alien invasion stories (which I do) although I think the alien invasion idea was handled better in several other series both American (such as The Invaders) and British (such as Undermind). V is recommended.

V is available on Blu-Ray and DVD.

Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense

Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense was Hammer Films’ last desperate effort to save itself. Their final feature film was To the Devil…a Daughter in 1976. Due to unfortunate financial decisions, failed to make them any money. The British film industry was on its last legs and things were about to get worse, with home video about to arrive and drive the final nail in the coffin. Hammer’s decision to move away from movies into television was actually quite sound.

It’s a decision which should have worked. Hammer House of Horror, made in 1980, was well received and the ratings were healthy. The American network was initially keen on the idea of a second season. Sadly the deal fell through. Without the US network onboard the series was doomed.

Hammer House of Horror did demonstrate that Hammer could do TV horror extremely well. And by the late 70s it was becoming obvious that TV was more suited to Hammer’s style of horror. At the beginning of the 70s Hammer had realised that they needed to vary their formula, and that they needed to add more blood and more sex and more nudity. Their late 1960s efforts were starting to seem a bit tame and a bit stodgy. Hammer responded by making a series of extremely interesting early 70s horror films, with the extra blood, sex and nudity. But Hammer never seemed entirely comfortable with the idea of erotic horror. It just isn’t British. They preferred to leave that sort of thing to the Europeans who were very comfortable indeed with the concept. On TV however they could make the kind of horror that they were comfortable with, a bit bloody but not too much so and with just enough sexiness.

With Hammer House of Horror they hadn’t extricated themselves from their financial mess but the results of the series were still moderately encouraging. In 1984 they tried again, with Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.

This new series was a co-production with Fox’s TV arm in the US. That caused problems from the start. Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense was too rushed, and to please their American partners the series had to be squeaky clean, bland and inoffensive. If Hammer were uneasy about sex they were to find that American TV preferred to pretend that sex just didn’t exist.

The episodes have a 70-minute running time, presumably at the insistence of the American partners who intended the series to be screened as a mystery movie series. The running times are definitely too long in some cases. Some of the episodes are a bit slower than they should have been, with not quite enough plot to justify the movie-length running times. But it's only a problem with some episodes.

The Americans presumably also insisted on imported American stars. 

Episode Guide

The Sweet Scent of Death was directed by Peter Sasdy. It was written by Brian Clemens so it’s no surprise that it plays out exactly like an episode from his 1970s anthology series Thriller. If you’re a Thriller fan you’ll know what to expect. The plot twists are done reasonably well but some key aspects of the story are a bit too predictable.

Dean Stockwell (an actor I have never been able to warm to) plays an American diplomat in England. Shirley Knight plays his wife Ann. Someone seems to be out to get Ann, although it’s not clear just how serious the threat might be. The prologue suggests to us that there’s a connection to events in New York ten years earlier.

There’s an obvious suspect on whom the police focus their attention but the viewer will immediately realise that there are three or possibly even four alternative suspects.

Peter Sasdy directs the episode competently. It’s an OK episode but just a bit on the bland side.

A Distant Scream, written by Martin Worth and directed by John Hough, is more interesting. An elderly man is dying. He spent the lest few decades of his life locked up for the murder of his girlfriend years earlier. He has always proclaimed his innocence and has been obsessed with finding the real killer. Close to death, he is transported back in time (presumably by supernatural or paranormal means) and is able to witness the two days leading up to his girlfriend’s murder.

The old man is Michael (David Carradine). At the time of the murder Michael was a freelance photographer spending a holiday at a fishing village with his girlfriend Rosemary (Stephanie Beacham). She’s a married woman with whom he is having an affair.

Michael as an old man is not only able to witness the events leading up to the tragedy, he can interact with the people involved. Rosemary can see him. He can talk to her. At times others can see him and speak with him. Even his younger self sees him at one point.

This of course involves one of those famous time travel paradoxes. If he can interact with people in the past then he should logically be able to change the past. I was rather interested to see whether the scriptwriter (Martin Worth) was aware of the time travel paradox and if so how he was going to deal with it. Or whether he was simply going to ignore it.

The weak link in this episode is David Carradine. He just can’t act. There’s another problem - as a dying old man he looks younger healthier than he does as his younger self. Stephanie Beacham’s performance on the other hand is quite solid.

The Late Nancy Irving, written by David Fisher and directed by Peter Sasdy, concerns a lady golf champion. She has diabetes but it’s always been well controlled. She also has an incredibly rare blood type.

Then she wakes up in hospital. She is told that she crashed her car. She has only vague garbled memories of some kind of car accident. She is assured that her injuries are not all that severe. What worries her is that she feels rather confused. Her mind seems foggy. She is a bit disturbed by the bars on the windows of her private room but she is given a reasonably plausible explanation. The bars date from a time when the clinic treated mental patients who might try to throw themselves from windows. Of course she isn’t being locked in and she’s silly to think such a thing.

Gradually she becomes a little worried. Why hasn’t she heard from her fiancé? Why hasn’t she heard from anyone? Why does she feel so weak? And why are they giving her blood transfusions? And then she sees a story on the TV news and she starts to get the picture.

The main problem here is that while the basic idea is excellent there are not enough plot twists to sustain a 70-minute running time. The excessive length weakens the suspense. Cristina Raines in the lead rôle is also just a little bland. This is an OK episode that could have been a great episode.

Black Carrion was written by Don Houghton and directed by John Hough. Journalist Paul Taylor (Leigh Lawson) is hired to write an article about the Verne Brothers. They were (according to the story) a hugely successful pop duo who disappeared in 1963. Totally disappeared. No-one knows what happened to them. They were never heard from again. To Taylor it’s obvious that this is a promising story. Researcher/photographer Cora Berlaine (Season Hubley) has been assigned to assist him. Cora has a prodigious knowledge of 60s pop music.

Cora is troubled by memories. Disturbing but totally disjointed memories. Are they real memories? She thinks so but of course she can’t be sure.

The search for the Verne Brothers takes Paul and Cora to the village of Briar’s Frome. It was rumoured that the Verne Brothers were going to buy the palatial manor house there. The village is deserted. It’s a ghost town. But weird things are happening in Briar’s Frome, and Cora’s memories are getting more vivid.

The plot is all over the place and there’s some silliness but there are lots of great ideas (and even original ideas) in this episode. And lots of creepy atmosphere. I enjoyed this episode a great deal.

In Possession was written by Michael J. Bird and directed by Val Guest. Frank Daly (Christopher Cazenove) and his wife Sylvia (Carol Lynley) reach their hotel room only to find that it’s already occupied by a woman and an old lady. When they fetch the manager to sort things out the woman and the lady have vanished. Then Frank sees them again by the river, and again they vanish.

Frank and Sylvia start seeing various people in their flat. People who are not there. But they seem very real. Slowly it becomes obvious that in some way Frank and Sylvia are witnessing events that lead to a murder. Is this a shared dream? Or is it something that happened in the past?

Whether you consider this episode to be a haunted house story depends on how broadly you define that term. Whether this counts as a haunted house story doesn’t really matter. It’s a fascinatingly weird and disturbing tale with some real moments of terror and creepiness. An excellent episode.

And the Wall Came Tumbling Down was written by Dennis Spooner and John Peacock and directed by Paul Annett. An old deconsecrated church is being demolished by the Ministry of Defence. There’s a mysterious accident on the site, and we then get a flashback to events in 1949, events involving a coven of devil-worshippers. The devil-worshippers are betrayed by a young man. More than three centuries later another young man has a peculiar interest in this old church.

As you may have guessed the world of the 1980s is about to encounter evil from the 17th century. Maybe not wildly original but it plays out in a very satisfactory manner with plenty of gothic atmosphere and some real creepiness. Caroline Trent (Barbi Benton) works for the government but her real interest is in the occult. She isn’t sure what is going on with that old church but she knows that Dark Forces are at work. The site manager Peter Whiteway (Gareth Hunt) doesn’t believe her, at least not at first.

This one has an interesting cast. There’s Gareth Hunt (best-known for The New Avengers), the wonderful Peter Wyngarde from Department S and Jason King and there’s Barbi Benton, best known as a Playboy model. Hunt is very good, Wyngarde is sinister and charismatic and Barbi Benton is quite OK. It all builds to a satisfying conclusion. A very good episode.

Child's Play was written by Graham Wassell and directed by Val Guest. Mike and Ann Preston are a young couple with a daughter. They wake up in the middle of the night to discover something very odd and disturbing. They have been walled in. Their whole house has been walled in. And it’s getting rather hot. The telephone doesn’t work. The radio doesn’t work. The TV works, but every station has nothing but a station identification logo and it’s the same logo on every channel.

They haven’t noticed it yet but that logo has appeared on all sorts of items in the house. It’s getting hotter and they’re close to giving way to panic.

Mike comes up with various plans to break through the wall but it seems impossible. The two of them also come up with possible explanations. The actual explanation is one they hadn’t considered, and it’s pretty clever. There are some clues but I certainly didn’t guess the solution. This is a nicely scary creepy story, a bit like a good Twilight Zone episode. A very fine episode.

Paint Me a Murder was written by Jesse Lasky Jr and Pat Silver and directed by Alan Cooke. Painter Luke Lorenz finishes a painting then gets into a rowing boat and heads out to sea. He then smashes through the planking of the boat. His body is not found. Suicide is assumed.

He wasn’t a very successful painter when alive but now that he’s dead his paintings start to fetch huge prices. That’s good news for his widow Sandra (Michelle Phillips). And for art dealer Vincent Rhodes (David Robb).

The major early twist won’t come as much of a surprise but the twists do keep coming. I liked this episode.

Tennis Court was written by Andrew Sinclair and Michael Hastings and directed by Cyril Frankel. This is a haunted tennis court story. A middle-aged woman, Maggie (Hannah Gordon), inherits an old but moderately palatial country house. She has recently married Harry Dowd, a Member of Parliament. In the grounds of the house is an indoor tennis court. Slightly odd things happen on that tennis court. It has some connection to events many years earlier, during the war. A British bomber was shot down. One member of the crew survived. They other did not.

The local vicar, John Bray (Peter Graves), knows something about that wartime incident. At the time he was a Canadian volunteer in the R.A.F. and he was there.


Maggie is becoming increasingly terrified of whatever is in that tennis court.

Not one of my favourite episodes, but entertaining enough.

The Corvini Inheritance was written by David Fisher and directed by Gabrielle Beaumont. This one starts with a young woman, Eva Bailey, encountering a peeping tom. She is unharmed but rather scared. And it starts with a robbery at a fine art auction room.

Frank Lane (David McCallum) is in charge of security at the auction room. He also happens to live in the same building as Eva. Frank offers to help make Eva’s flat more secure. They have dinner together. Frank is divorced and a bit lonely but he’s a nice guy.

Frank has a big security job on. The Corvini inheritance, a fabulous collection of jewels amassed in Italy during the Renaissance by a family of professional assassins, is to be auctioned. It will be in the keeping of the auctioneers for several weeks. It’s an obvious target for professional thieves. The most valuable piece in the collection is a necklace with a grim history. It may be cursed.

There are two plot strands here. Someone seems to be stalking Eva, and there’s the possibility of an attempt to steal the Corvini jewels. I liked this one a lot. There’s some nice ambiguity here.

Czech Mate was written by Jeremy Burnham and directed by John Hough. This is a straightforward Cold War spy thriller but it’s nicely executed with plenty of cynicism and paranoia. Susan George plays an Englishwoman, Vicky Duncan, caught up in a web of deceit and betrayal behind the Iron Curtain. In this story there is no difference whatever between the good guys and the bad guys. People disappear and corpses turn up and Vicky discovers that she can’t trust anyone.

Susan George and Patrick Mower (as her ex-husband) give excellent performances and it’s always nice to see Peter Vaughan in anything. This episode is a bit out of place in this series but it’s entertaining.

Last Video and Testament was written by Roy Russell and Robert Quigley and directed by Peter Sasdy. Victor Frankham (David Langton) owns a vast electronic empire. He has a heart condition and he has a much younger wife, Selena (Deborah Raffin). A much younger wife who may be looking elsewhere for certain pleasures which her husband can no longer provide. Victor’s doctor has been encouraging him to have an operation. An operation which will restore his vitality in the bedroom, which may not be to Selena’s liking.

Victor has a surprise in store for Selena, in the form of a videotape.

This one has quite a clever central idea and it works very nicely.

Final Thoughts

This is an extremely good series, much much better than its reputation would lead you to believe. Highly recommended.

The German Pidax DVD boxed set includes all thirteen episodes, in English with removable German subtitles. The box cover suggests that it only includes eleven episodes but it definitely includes all thirteen. The transfers are perfectly acceptable.

Hannay (1988-89)

Hannay is a thirteen-episode (spread over two seasons) TV series featuring the hero of John Buchan’s classic thrillers, Richard Hannay. The series serves as a kind of prequel to The 39 Steps.

The episodes really have nothing to do with Buchan, apart from borrowing his hero. They’re all original stories. If you’re expecting the stories to be in the same class as Buchan’s novels you’ll be disappointed.

The stories are all over the place as far as tone is concerned. The best episodes are very lightweight and rely to an embarrassing degree on unlikely narrow escapes carried out by methods that are both silly and corny. These stories are much more like a cross between an Edwardian Boys’ Own Adventure Paper tale and an episode of Ripping Yarns. But they are fun in their own way. Other episodes are much more humourless and try to be serious. Many episodes are not spy tales at all but mysteries, some good while others are not so good.

The series does have one huge asset - Robert Powell as Hannay. He played Hannay in the 1970s movie version of The 39 Steps and he was by far the best thing about that film. In fact I’d go so far as to say that Robert Powell is the definitive screen Richard Hannay. Even better than Robert Donat in Hitchcock’s 1935 movie (which I rate as one of the ten best movies ever made).

At least he should be a huge asset. Unfortunately his performances are uncharacteristically restrained. A bit too restrained. If you’re going to put Robert Powell in an adventure series then you expect him to go totally over-the-top. You expect him to sparkle. But he doesn’t.

I can’t help thinking this series would have been much much better had it been made fifteen years earlier. For starters a younger more vigorous Robert Powell would have been a lot more fun. And it would have featured fewer ludicrously anachronistic social attitudes.

The biggest problem with this series is that not a single character behaves as you would expect people to behave in 1912. They’re all 1980s people wearing period costume. All the political, social and cultural attitudes are pure 1980s.

The characters we’re supposed to find sympathetic never express a single thought that is at variance with the orthodoxies of late 1980s social attitudes. This has the effect of making them seem self-satisfied and at the same time lacking in any actual personality. The characters we’re supposed to find unsympathetic come across as cardboard cut-out villains. Richard Hannay himself has no real personality whatsoever.

The TV series was shot entirely on videotape. Even the location shooting (of which there’s quite a bit) was shot on videotape. In spite of this looks it looks quite handsome. This is British TV at the tail end of its golden age so the costumes are terrific and it takes advantage of the abundance of superb character actors in Britain at that time.

Episode Guide

The first episode, The Fellowship of the Black Stone, opens with Hannay getting shot in South Africa. He is left for dead and is found clutching a black stone. His would-be assassin was notorious German spy Count von Schwabing (Gavin Richards). And a fine melodrama villain he turns out to be. He doesn’t actually twirl his moustache before carrying out dastardly deeds but you know that he’d like to.

On the ship carrying him back to Britain Hannay encounters the Earl of Haslemere (David Waller) and the earl’s daughter, the Lady Anne. Hannay is charmed by Lady Anne, to say the least.

Hannay had worked for the British Secret Service but had left their employ some years earlier. He finds himself caught up in a spy drama anyway, with the Germans hatching dastardly plots and poor Hannay getting himself repeatedly captured, tortured and threatened with certain death. Fortunately, although the German secret service is very efficient their agents have never been taught to tie a knot properly. Hannay keeps escaping by slipping out of his bonds.

The highlight of this episode is Charles Gray as a senior Scotland Yard man.

It’s all breathless stuff with a reasonable amount of action. A fine episode.

In A Point of Honour Hannay meets Lady Madrigal Fitzjames on a train. They get off at the wrong station and then arrive at the wrong country house. The staff assume they are the honeymooning couple whose arrival they were expecting. Hannay and Madrigal decide to have a bit of fun. They pretend they really are the honeymooners.

As it happens there’s an immensely valuable diamond necklace sitting in the safe. And things will soon get complicated and dangerous.

Historical anachronisms are always a problem in series such as this. I have to say that in this episode I just didn’t buy Lady Madrigal’s behaviour. The story takes place shortly before the First World War. We assume it’s around 1912. I don’t believe any well brought up lady at that time would have risked her reputation so recklessly. It would have been social suicide and would have wrecked any chance she might have of making an even halfway respectable marriage. Had she been one of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s then I might have found it plausible. But not in 1912.

It’s still an amusing, clever and entertaining story with a certain amount of charm.

In Voyage into Fear Hannay is accosted in an art gallery by a young girl who insists that there is a dangerous man who is trying to kidnap her. She insists that Hannay should pretend to be her father, to get her out of the gallery and back home safely. Hannay is inclined to think it’s all nonsense until he realises that the girl might be telling the truth.

Then things start to go badly wrong, Hannay and the girl are drugged and they wake up on board a ship, having absolutely no idea where they are. This is a really fun episode.

Death With Due Notice is a murder mystery story. Several men have received anonymous threatening letters, all in the form of quotations from Shakespeare. A routine episode that doesn’t really have the right flavour.

Act of Riot is one of the worst pieces of television I have ever seen in my life. A clumsy embarrassingly obvious script, stodgy direction, heavy-handed political messaging, atrocious acting, leaden pacing, a total lack of action, dull and humourless. Robert Powell is clearly bored and uninterested and I can’t say that I blame him.

The Hazard of the Die is better. At least it’s a spy story. The wife of a Cabinet Minister loses heavily at the casino at Monte Carlo and is trapped into espionage. The first problem is that there really aren’t enough plot twists. It’s a bit predictable. The second problem is a total lack of action. This is an adventure series. We’d like to get some adventure. It all falls just a bit flat.

So the first season of six episodes is a mixed bag. The first three are terrific fun. The next three are pretty dull.

The second season opens with Coup de Grace. Hannay gets involved with a woman and he’s charmed by her, and he meets charismatic hard-driving businessman and gambler Sir Marcus Leonard (Anthony Valentine). And Hannay gets caught in the middle. With Anthony Valentine as guest star you assume you’re going to be in for some fun and Valentine certainly delivers the goods. What’s strange is that Robert Powell allows himself to be totally overshadowed by Valentine. It’s a crime plot rather than an espionage or adventure tale but it’s a decent story.

The series gets right back on track with The Terrors of the Earth. Not only is it a spy story, it’s a totally outrageous spy tale. There’s actually some action and Hannay gets to be much more energetic and pro-active than usual. And Robert Powell’s performance has some zest. A very entertaining episode.

In Double Jeopardy a rich dying man entrusts Hannay with some diamonds. Hannay is to pass them on to a man named Desmond Leigh but only on certain conditions. This puts Hannay in a very awkward spot. Leigh has failed to meet those conditions but he has a young wife. Then the plot gets really convoluted with a murder and a kidnapping and Hannay under suspicion and all manner of conspiracies. The plot might be convoluted but it’s quite nicely constructed with some fine twists. A very good episode.

The Good Samaritan gets off to a promising start. Hannay is in central Europe, he’s on a train and he’s just met a beautiful mysterious woman. There’s a shady oilman of indeterminate nationality. And oh yeah, there’s a corpse. And a vanishing lady. It’s hard to go wrong with those ingredients. This is a terrific episode which movies along at break-neck pace.

In That Rough Music an old friend of Hannay’s dies and leaves his estate and fortune to his half-African daughter. A totally unconvincing story told in a very clumsy manner.

The Confidence Man is a major improvement. Hannay comes to the rescue of a music-hall proprietress menaced by an extortion racket. Hannay’s initial attempt to help ends in disaster. He realises he’s going to have to be much cleverer and he turns out to be a rather goof confidence trickster, all naturally in a good cause. A lightweight episode but it moves along briskly and it’s fun.

Say the Bells of Shoreditch involves a disappearing bridegroom. The young man works for his father who runs a shipping and insurance empire. There’s something strange going on in the company with all sorts of rumours flying around.

The jilted bride is Hannay’s goddaughter so he feels compelled to find the missing young man. Hannay discovers an ingenious and dangerous conspiracy.

Final Thoughts

Most of the episodes are quite entertaining but the series just doesn’t quite ring true. It’s very very uneven. The bad episodes are absolutely terrible but the good ones are very good. And the good episodes do outnumber the bad.

The biggest problem is that the series can’t decide if it wants to be fun or if it wants to be serious. Hannay is a slight disappointment but it’s still worth a look.

Network have released the complete series on DVD.

Knight Rider season 3 (1984-85)

Knight Rider returned for its third season in 1984. Knight Rider was one of the three great American action/adventure series of the early 80s, along with The A-Team and Airwolf. They were all thoroughly enjoyable and while the first season of Airwolf was the supreme achievement of the genre Knight Rider was still enormous fun.

The premise was pretty darned cool. An undercover cop is badly wounded but his life is saved by a mysterious tycoon. The cop gets a new identity and a new partner - an ultra-high tech car named K.I.T.T. (pretty much a mobile fortress) - and a new career as an unofficial crime-fighter. He works for a kind of vigilante justice outfit (but a respectable one) called the Foundation for Law and Government (FLAG), headed up by a suave if somewhat pompous Englishman named Devon Miles (Edward Mulhare).

The series had just the right mix of science fiction, fun, action, stunts, car chases, gadgets, humour, occasional seriousness and romance. Getting that mix right is quite an art and it’s something that the show’s creator, Glen A. Larson, was pretty good at.

David Hasselhoff may not be a great actor but he was perfect for this series. There’s one thing that has to be said for him - his performance is always enthusiastic. The car itself has its own personality and qualifies as the fourth regular cast member. It’s not easy to have chemistry with a machine but the chemistry between Michael and K.I.T.T. really does work.

For the third season some cosmetic changes were made to K.I.T.T.’s interior and the car gained even more formidable capabilities but the big news for fans was that Bonnie was back. Bonnie Barstow (played by Patricia McPherson) was the genius girl scientist/engineer who maintained K.I.T.T. and added various refinements to the car. She left after the first season to be replaced by April Curtis (Rebecca Holden). Rebecca Holden was an OK actress, April was pretty, she wasn’t an irritating character and I don’t think any Knight Rider fans actively disliked her but she wasn’t Bonnie. Bonnie just seemed to be an essential part of the team. So, wisely, the producers brought her back for the final two seasons.

K.I.T.T. is not just a super-car but a super-computer as well. The trick to making this series work was to ensure that K.I.T.T. could play a real rôle in each episode. It wasn’t enough to just throw in a car chase every time, there had to be something that needed doing that Michael could not possibly do without K.I.T.T. and could not possibly do with an ordinary car - something that required K.I.T.T.’s array of gadgetry and ability to do things that no conventional car could do. And ideally Michael had to get himself in a jam from which only K.I.T.T. could rescue him.

Of course this was the 80s so there had to be babes as well. Every case seems somehow to involve at least one glamorous young person of the female persuasion. The difficulty is that the whole concept of the show is that (apart from K.I.T.T.) Michael is a loner so you always know that any budding romance isn’t going to go anywhere. So any romances have to end one way or another before the closing titles but without making Michael appear to be a heel. This is something that the series managed to do pretty successfully.

A lot of K.I.T.T.’s super-abilities are in fact pretty much magic. They’re totally impossible and there’s no attempt to make them even the slightest bit plausible. K.I.T.T. can do just abut anything. This should be a weakness of the series but somehow it never seems to matter - Knight Rider, like The A-Team, has very much a comic-book feel.

Knight Rider has had several DVD releases. The Mill Creek complete series releases on DVD and Blu-Ray are extremely good value. The transfers on the DVD set (which is the one I own) are pretty good.

Episode Guide

Season three kicks off with the two-parter Knight of the Drones. Which starts promisingly - a prisoner (a killer named C.J. Jackson played by cult movie icon Jim Brown) breaks out of jail with the help of a cassette player that is really a robot, and a self-driving car. And there’s a glamorous female diabolical criminal mastermind named Margo Sheridan. She has plans for Jackson but neither Jackson nor the viewer has any idea what her plans actually are. Since Jackson killed Michael’s predecessor at FLAG the Foundation is taking a very keen interest in his recapture. A fine episode to kick off season three.

In The Ice Bandits diamonds belonging to the estate of an elderly lady and earmarked for the Foundation are stolen. Michael discovers that he is not the only one able to get a new face, and he also discovers that monks are not always what they seem to be. A fun episode.

Knights of the Fast Lane introduces Michael to the world of banzai racing - illegal street races for the super-rich, with super-cars. A young woman is a victim of a hit-run driver and she happens to be the daughter of a cop who was Michael’s partner when he was a rookie in the police force. And Michael used to know the daughter so this case is very much a personal matter for him and he thinks banzai racing is involved. So naturally we get lots of automotive action in this story. Plus football is involved, so K.I.T.T. has to learn to play football. And where there’s football there will be cheerleaders so we get lots of scantily-clad cheerleaders. Car racing, murder, football, babes. Is there anything else that the target audience for this series could possibly want? It works for me.

Halloween Knight I've talked about elsewhere.

In K.I.T.T. vs. K.A.R.R. Michael and K.I.T.T. come up against the K.I.T.T.’s original prototype, K.A.R.R. (Knight Automated Roving Robot). K.A.R.R. looks the same as K.I.T.T. and has much the same capabilities but unfortunately he also has a bad attitude. K.A.R.R. was found buried in the sand by a guy with a metal detector. He was foolish enough to dig up his find and K.A.R.R. thereupon offered to take him for a ride. It’s going to prove to be quite a ride. K.A.R.R. made his first appearance in season one and he wants revenge. The evil twin idea has been used countless times and using it for a super-car works pretty well in this case. It culminates in an epic machine vs machine showdown. Good stuff.

Michael and K.I.T.T. battle cattle-rustlers in The Rotten Apples. Rancher Rebecca Hammond isn’t really a rancher, she’s a child psychologist. And her ranch isn’t really a ranch, it’s a kind of halfway house for New York street kids. But if those cattle-rustlers can’t be stopped she’ll lose the ranch. K.I.T.T. has a disagreement with a horse and has to battle not one but two giant trucks. Michael has to ride a mechanical bucking bronco. The silliness level is off the scale in this episode but it’s good fun silliness. It’s like a western but somehow it works and it’s a lot of fun.

In Knight in Disgrace Michael is framed by a big-time New Orleans gangster named LaSalle. Michael is kicked out of the Foundation but LaSalle offers him a job - the job being to steal K.I.T.T.. Surely Michael is not going to go to work for a mobster? OK, so this one is a bit predictable but it’s OK.

In Dead of Knight Michael is on the trail of a criminal selling deadly chemicals to revolutionaries. An attempt to kill Michael ends with a girl dead by mistake, which gives him an added incentive to crack the case. There are deadly orchids and there’s a race against time with two lives at stake, including Michael’s. Not a bad episode, even with K.I.T.T.’s jokes.

The episode is called Lost Knight but it’s not Michael who is lost, it’s K.I.T.T. - he gets electrocuted and loses his memory. They were chasing some bad guys who’d stolen some new super high explosives. K.I.T.T. doesn’t know who he is any more but he befriends a boy. And the boy could be a key witness.

In Knight of the Chameleon Michael is up against a renegade arms dealer known as the Chameleon. He’s a man of a thousand faces, a master of disguise. The Chameleon has just escaped from custody and he has two objectives - to pull off a huge arms coup and to kill Michael Knight. Of course you know that at some stage he’s going to disguise himself as Michael. The gee-whizz jetpack is amusing and finally someone has found a real use for K.I.T.T.’s ejector seat mechanism. Good fun.

The garment trade is the scene for murder in Custom Made Killer. A series of murders in fact, all involving a deadly custom car. This episode is a good blend of action and glamour and it gives K.I.T.T. a worthy opponent in the form of the fairly scary killer car. Good stuff.

In Knight by a Nose Michael gets mixed up with a girl and a racehorse. Maxine’s beloved horse King Jack, a rising champion, has to be put down after a fall. Michael suspects that whatever happened it wasn’t as simple as that. A fairly innocuous episode in which K.I.T.T. develops a gambling habit.

Junk Yard Dog pits Michael against a ruthless toxic waste dumper but it’s K.I.T.T. who ends up in real trouble. He gets dumped in the toxic waste and it may be the end of the line for him. Even if he can be fixed, will he have lost his nerve? Can a car lose its nerve? Apparently so. This one could have been an embarrassing misfire but somehow it works. It works because David Hasselhoff makes it work - he really makes us believe that Michael believes that K.I.T.T. has emotions and since Michael believes it we believe it.

In Buy Out a company specialising in ultra high tech armoured limousines is about to make an important sale when their sales demonstration is spectacularly sabotaged. Michael has to find out what was behind the disaster. The employees were planning a buy out of the company so they stand to lose everything if the company goes under. Plenty of explosions, plenty of opportunities to show off K.I.T.T.’s capabilities and plenty of automotive mayhem. A good solid episode.

In Knightlines an employee at a high-tech corporation is accidentally killed while stealing company property, although maybe that wasn’t what he was doing and maybe it wasn’t an accident. It’s all about bugs and it’s a pretty good episode.

In The Nineteenth Hole the grand-daughter of one of Devon’s friends is organising a car race in a small town but someone is trying to stop the race. And they’re prepared to kill her to do it. The story also involves gangsters and golf, and it’s pretty entertaining.

Knight & Knerd is an obvious attempt to cash in on the unexpected success of Revenge of the Nerds. The Foundation gets a new recruit, a nerd named Elliott. The case involves the use of a new top-secret laser in a diamond robbery. It’s strictly played for broad comedy and you’ll either love it or hate it. I’m afraid I hated it. Rather cringe-inducing.

Ten Wheel Trouble deals with an attempt by a big trucking combine to put independent operators out of business, and with a trucker who may or may not have resorted to murder in order to stop them. Michael also has to deal with a precocious and feisty fifteen-year-old girl who’s as hot-headed as her big brother (the one accused or murder). It’s a pretty standard episode but there’s plenty of big rig action and K.I.T.T. takes on a truck loaded with ten tons of concrete.

An old friend of Bonnie’s is found dead in Knight in Retreat and since he was involved in top-secret work there’ll have to an investigation. Bonnie wants Michael to do the investigation even though she might not like what he finds out. There’s a glamorous lady criminal mastermind with lots of glamorous henchwomen. There’s a plot to steal a missile and a guidance system. It’s typical Knight Rider over-the-top nonsense and it’s fun.

In Knight Strike a cache of impounded weapons has been stolen from a police lock-up. The cache includes a couple of super high tech laser rifles. The case takes Michael to a survivalist convention were he gets to play with cool guns and a cute blonde. And there’s another babe who seems to want to play as well. It’s standard Knight Rider stuff but it’s executed with style and energy.

Knight Rider goes to the circus in Circus Knights. And there’s murder and mayhem. Michael decides to go undercover as a daredevil, complete with super car. I just love TV shows and movies with circus settings. K.I.T.T. gets to jump through the ring of fire, there’s a sexy tiger lady and there’s a great fiery action scene at the end. It’s good stuff.

Final Thoughts

The third season of Knight Rider is just as much fun as the first two seasons. Michael and K.I.T.T. remain a great team and there’s the right mix of action, humour and pretty girls. It’s great comfort TV. Highly recommended.

I've also reviewed season one and season two of Knight Rider.