Invaders From Mars (1986)

Cannon blessed director Tobe Hooper (POLTERGEIST) with a decent $12 million budget to do right by this colorful remake of the 1953 science fiction film INVADERS FROM MARS. It was one of the studio’s biggest flops, opening in seventh place (one of the films ahead of it: POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE, which Hooper had nothing to do with) and contributing to Cannon’s eventual and inevitable downfall.

Certainly, Hooper and producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus had good intentions going in. A-list special effects artists John Dykstra (STAR WARS) and Stan Winston (THE TERMINATOR) were brought in to head departments. BLUE THUNDER’s Don Jakoby and ALIEN’s Dan O’Bannon (who also worked on BLUE THUNDER) wrote a screenplay that closely followed that of the original picture. Hooper’s TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE cameraman Daniel Pearl handled the director of photography duties. If only Hooper and company had been more diligent in casting.

By Cannon standards, $12 million was quite extravagant, though not quite enough to more than passably create the spaceships and aliens required by Jakoby and O’Bannon’s script. The film mainly suffers from a campy approach with arch performances by Karen Black (THE DAY OF THE LOCUST) and Louise Fletcher (BRAINSTORM) draining the suspense and terror from the premise. Granted, this approach plays fair with the ending, which copies that of the 1953 film, but it makes taking the film seriously a chore.

Likewise, the casting of Hunter Carson as the juvenile lead doesn’t work. The son of star Black and screenwriter L.M. Carson (PARIS, TEXAS), Carson is a subpar actor and unable to carry a film, as he must as one of the few “normal” characters. Nobody believes David (Carson) when he tells them a spaceship landed behind a hill in the backyard. Soon, his father (Timothy Bottoms), mother (Laraine Newman), teacher (Louise Fletcher as Dana Carvey), and even the local cops (one played by Jimmy Hunt, the kid from the original INVADERS FROM MARS) are acting logy and zombie-like.

The only person who believes David’s story is the school nurse, played by Carson’s mother. Granted, casting the eccentric cross-eyed Black as a normal human among a small town of weirdos is a crafty notion, but INVADERS FROM MARS is unable to make it work. Pacing is too leisurely during its first half, though the film becomes more interesting once things really get going with weird aliens and the military finally joining the picture. Sci-fi fans will enjoy the in-jokes, like Hooper’s LIFEFORCE playing on television and the school being named for William Cameron Menzies, the star of the original film.

James Karen (RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD) gives the film’s best performance as a cigar-chomping general who kicks some spaceman ass. INVADERS FROM MARS was the second in Hooper’s three-picture deal with Cannon. Though the creative success of LIFEFORCE, INVADERS, and TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 can be debated, none made money for Cannon, and Hooper’s career as a bankable filmmaker was basically over. His next film, SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION, came out four years later.

Invasion U.S.A. (1985)

Chuck Norris was already one of America’s biggest box office stars before this crazy, jingoistic action movie opened at number one. Courtesy of Cannon’s Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and featuring what may jokingly be called a screenplay co-written by Norris, INVASION U.S.A. is brainless fun with zero characterization, hardly any dialogue spoken by its star, and perhaps the worst female lead (in terms of performer and character) in the history of action movies.

Retired “Company” agent Matt Hunter (Norris) spends his life wrestling alligators and trading quips with grizzled Indian trader John Eagle (Dehl Berti) outside his shack in the Everglades. Reluctantly, he returns to active duty when hundreds of godless Commie terrorists, led by his old foe Rostov (Richard Lynch), invade the U.S.A. via Florida with a massive plan to blow up school buses, shoot up shopping malls, turn Americans against authority, and ruin Christmas.

For the most part, law enforcement is nowhere to be seen, except for a couple of government spooks (one played by Eddie Jones) and Hunter, whose condition for stopping Rostov is “I work alone.” So while hundreds of baddies roam the Sunshine State mowing down citizens, Hunter cruises aimlessly in his pickup truck with an amazing sixth sense for finding the killers, blasting them with his twin-holstered Uzis, and moving on to the next target. More often than coincidence would allow, he encounters an obnoxious female journalist, played horribly by Melissa Prophet (GOODFELLAS), who shows her gratitude at being rescued by Hunter by constantly calling him “Cowboy.”

Granted, the reporter is such an ill-conceived and superfluous character that Meryl Streep couldn’t have made her anything but an annoying appendage. But that’s the kind of perplexing mess INVASION U.S.A. is — an absurd series of setpieces in which Norris stumbles onto someone in danger and blows the bad guys away. There’s no detective work involved in which he is able to deduce where Rostov’s men will pop up next. No, he just drives around until he accidentally discovers the script’s next action scene.

Rostov’s plan, as far-fetched as it seems, would stand a better chance of succeeding if he’d just give it priority, but, noooo, he has to kill Chuck Norris first. You see, years before, Chuck had interrupted one of Rostov’s terrorist plots, and—gulp—kicked the Russian square in the face. One time. It must have been one heckuva kick, because Rostov still has nightmares about it, and refuses to fully commit himself to the invasion until Chuck is dead.

A lot of bullets fly in this movie, and director Joseph Zito (FRIDAY THE 13TH—THE FINAL CHAPTER), who previously worked with Norris on MISSING IN ACTION, at least keeps things moving quickly, tossing in a few smooth dolly shots and splashing enough blood on the screen to keep nondiscriminating audience members (like me) from getting bored. Working with a reported $10 million budget, Zito manages to get it all on the screen, photographing enough exploding houses, squibbed chests, and burning men to keep Cannon’s stunt crew plenty busy. INVASION U.S.A. may be stupid, crude, and confusing, but it certainly isn’t boring and is typical of the fun but empty-headed action movies Cannon was releasing in the 1980s.

Revenge Of The Ninja

REVENGE OF THE NINJA was a big step up for Cannon, as it was among the studio’s first films to receive a theatrical release from MGM. Cannon wanted a sequel to its smash hit ENTER THE NINJA, though REVENGE has nothing to do with it except actor Sho Kosugi is in both movies as different characters. Location filming in Salt Lake City gives REVENGE an offbeat look to match its offbeat script.

Kosugi, who played an evil ninja in ENTER, gets top billing this time as good ninja Cho Osaki, who leaves his native Tokyo for Los Angeles with his mother and his baby son Kane after the rest of his family is murdered in a ninja bloodbath. Six years later, Osaki has a successful business running a gallery of handcrafted dolls imported from the Orient. What he doesn’t know is that his business partner Braden (Arthur Roberts) is smuggling heroin inside the dolls and selling it to Italian mobster Caifano (an overacting Mario Gallo).

Braden’s plan goes awry after Kane (Kosugi’s real-life son Kane) accidentally breaks a doll, exposing the powder inside, and witnesses a murder. As if it weren’t already crazy enough, the screenplay by James Silke (AMERICAN NINJA) really goes off the rails when we learn Braden is also a ninja (!) and that he has the power to hypnotize sexy karate student Cathy (Ashley Ferrare) and get her to kidnap Kane.

REVENGE was the first action movie directed by Israeli-born Sam Firstenberg, and he immediately demonstrates a knack for staging exciting, bloody fight scenes. The massacre that opens the film gets the picture off to a rousing start, and the action-packed climax featuring Kosugi laying waste to an entire office building of henchmen is one of the best sequences in any Cannon movie. Kosugi and stunt coordinator Steve Lambert put together a succession of fun chases and fight scenes, which are glued together with a score credited to Michael W. Lewis and Robert J. Walsh that’s so infectious that Cannon used it in other movies.

Even little Kane Kosugi gets to knock some guys on their asses, though the sight of a little boy getting slapped around may surprise contemporary audiences. Firstenberg’s touch with actors is not as strong as his action chops — all the actors are either over- or under-emoting — but nobody’s watching a film called REVENGE OF THE NINJA to see Lee Strasberg exercises. Firstenberg, Silke, Kosugi, and editor Michael Duthie returned a year later in another unrelated “sequel,” NINJA III: THE DOMINATION, which added a supernatural spin to the chopsocky thrills.

Avenging Force

AVENGING FORCE is not just a terrific action movie, but it may also be the best exploitation movie Cannon ever produced. It was originally intended as a sequel to INVASION U.S.A., which starred Chuck Norris as a double-Uzied superman chasing terrorists around Atlanta. However, Norris didn’t like the script, and AVENGING FORCE was hastily retooled as a vehicle for Cannon’s new star, Michael Dudikoff, whose AMERICAN NINJA had grossed over $10 million the year before without ever getting into more than 672 theaters.

Directed by Sam Firstenberg, whose flair for staging exciting, violent action sequences has gone unheralded, even while similar low-budget filmmakers like William Witney and Isaac Florentine have found admirers in cult circles, AVENGING FORCE is a taut thriller that takes advantage of authentic New Orleans locations and a good script by actor James Booth (ZULU) that draws distinctive characters and carries a complex message, if not quite subtly. Better yet, it reunites Dudikoff with AMERICAN NINJA co-star Steve James, a charismatic actor and martial artist who elevated everything he appeared in, even as filmmakers refused to graduate him from sidekick roles before his untimely death from cancer at age 41.

But what really makes AVENGING FORCE stand out are its villains, which rank among the most vicious antagonists of any action film of the era. Not even children are immune to their evil, as these bad guys mercilessly gun down the offspring of one hero and sell the 12-year-old sister of the other into prostitution. Elliott Glastenbury (IT’S ALIVE’s John P. Ryan, convincingly crazy), the leader of the white supremacist group called the Pentangle, openly worships Hitler and declares open season on Larry Richards (James), a black man running for a United States Senate seat.

Dudikoff, who went on to make AMERICAN NINJA 2: THE CONFRONTATION with James, stars as Matt Hunter, the name of Norris’ character in INVASION U.S.A. Hunter is a former government operative who is now retired and rearing his little sister Sarah (Allison Gereighty) on a ranch after their parents were killed by a car bomb meant for him. While visiting New Orleans to see his old partner, Richards, Hunter runs afoul of the Pentangle, a secret and influential organization of survivalists who attack Richards and his family aboard their Mardi Gras float.

The Pentangle’s thing, aside from pledging to make America a lot whiter, is hunting men for sport, which we first see in the arresting main title sequence (directed by a second unit, rather than Firstenberg) of Glastenbury and his colleagues, dressed in outlandish costumes, stalking their prey through nasty, muddy, treacherous swampland.

Firstenberg eventually comes full circle with Dudikoff dodging baddies in the bayou with several terrific action scenes sandwiched in between, including a Mardi Gras shootout and rooftop chase, another chase through a shipyard, and a spectacular setpiece in a burning house that features some really dangerous-looking stuntwork coordinated by B.J. Davis.

James, always looking for an excuse to shed his shirt, is a nice balance for Dudikoff’s remote performance, though both are positively subdued compared to Ryan’s ripe ham-slicing and Booth’s ambiguous turn as Dudikoff’s former boss in the CIA (and weird mix of British and Cajun accents). One of Cannon’s more expensive exploitation movies (which is not to say the film is by any means expensive), AVENGING FORCE did not earn the same level of box office as AMERICAN NINJA did (not to mention INVASION U.S.A.), so the sequel hinted at in the end never happened. It did open with a healthy per-screen gross, but with only 500 screens to play on, AVENGING FORCE’s theatrical play was undeservedly fleeting.

He Who Digs A Grave

CANNON opened its third season on CBS with a special two-hour episode filmed on location in the small town of Grass Valley in northern California. Based on David Delman’s 1973 novel, “He Who Digs a Grave” allowed executive producer Quinn Martin (THE UNTOUCHABLES) and producer Adrian Samish (THE F.B.I.) to splurge on production values and guest actors, most notably David Janssen.

A major television star with stints on the hit series RICHARD DIAMOND, PRIVATE DETECTIVE and THE FUGITIVE and one season on Jack Webb’s flop O’HARA: UNITED STATES TREASURY, Janssen was well above doing episodic guest shots by 1973. He hadn’t worked in that capacity since a 1963 NAKED CITY, and would do only one more—an episode of the anthology POLICE STORY—before his 1980 death. So getting Janssen to appear as a special guest star in “He Who Digs a Grave” was a real coup for Martin, who had also been the executive producer of THE FUGITIVE.

Stephen Kandel, one of the era’s most creative television writers, adapted Delman’s book for the small screen and remained quite faithful to it, keeping most of the plot points and character names intact. Of course, the teleplay’s major divergence is the role of Los Angeles private detective Frank Cannon, who obviously didn’t exist in Delman’s version (his character was a Jewish Manhattan cop named Jacob Horowitz). William Conrad, whose deep baritone and portly frame revealed his past as a leading man in radio dramas, became a surprise TV star as the urbane and intelligent Cannon, who is fondly remembered by mystery fans for his skills behind the wheel of his Lincoln Continental, as well as in the kitchen.

Janssen plays Ian Kirk, an alcoholic writer who is arrested and charged with the murder of his wealthy young wife (Cathy Lee Crosby) and her even younger lover. Tossed into the slammer of a small town (Mercer, California) that mistrusts strangers and resents him for marrying into Irene’s well-regarded family, Kirk calls upon his old Army buddy Frank Cannon for help.

Kirk claims his wife left a suicide note at their house, but it isn’t found. Cannon, whom the townspeople also regard as a big-city instigator, is received hostilely at nearly every step of his investigation, right down to the mischievous brothers who own Mercer’s lone hotel (played by the historic Holbrooke Hotel). Like other small towns in mystery stories, Mercer has a lot of ugly secrets, and the town doesn’t want Cannon snooping around, especially to help Ian Kirk dodge a murder rap.

Richard Donner, who would soon graduate to big-budget features like THE OMEN and SUPERMAN, was the perfect choice to helm this episode. Taking advantage of Martin and Samish’s souped-up production values (it’s likely this season opener had a larger-than-usual budget) and the rich tapestry of characters and subplots developed in Kandel’s script, Donner moves the plot along at just the right pace. The action scenes, including a horse stampede and an interesting shootout in a picturesque river bed, flow well. The extra time accorded a two-parter allows the story to breathe a little in scenes that don’t advance the plot, but provide color and characterization (such as Cannon’s sparring with the hotel owners out to make the stranger’s stay as unpleasant as possible).

Janssen spends most of the show locked in a cell and projects the proper ambivalence. Barry Sullivan as the self-righteous sheriff, Tim O’Connor as Irene’s attorney, and Murray Hamilton as an impotent crack shot provide most of Cannon’s opposition, but the detective finds an important ally in town mayor Anne Baxter. Lee Purcell, Royal Dano, R.G. Armstrong, Robert Hogan, Lenore Kasdorf, Dabbs Greer, and Bill Quinn lend support.

In Delman's book, Baxter's character was the sheriff, not the mayor, and Sullivan's sheriff was her deputy. Kandel's biggest contribution was the addition of action scenes and an illegal cockfighting arena run by Armstrong. A year later, Kandel wrote a similar two-part HARRY O that took Janssen’s Harry Orwell to a small California town to investigate a friend’s murder.

Twin Trouble

After many years as a radio actor and narrator (he played Marshal Matt Dillon on the GUNSMOKE radio series), occasional TV guest star, prolific television producer and director, and heavy in westerns and adventure films (a terrific exception is his turn as a good-guy sheriff opposite Anthony Quinn in THE WAY BACK), William Conrad became an unlikely leading man when he took the role of private eye Frank Cannon in 1971.

At age 51, Conrad dominated CBS' CANNON, both physically (he was under six feet tall and weighed around 300 pounds) and by force of his powerful screen presence (as the series' only regular cast member, he was in almost every scene). For 121 episodes, Cannon chased, shot, and bullied kidnappers, crooks, and killers across the CBS landscape, and Conrad handled the physical aspects of the role with surprising aplomb.

CANNON's five-season run inspired three tie-in paperbacks, the first of which, MURDER BY GEMINI, was published by Lancer in 1971. I'm guessing author Richard Gallagher had never seen the series, which premiered in the fall of that year. Not only is Cannon out of character at times, but Gallagher also saddles him with a young sidekick, which Cannon never had on the series (most likely against CBS' desires).

At least Gallagher gets the assistant out of the way early and gets to the plot, which draws Cannon away from Los Angeles to bucolic Custer County, Wyoming. A young woman, Veronica Gleason, watches her older husband Robert, a conservationist, gunned down in the desert by a poacher with a rifle. Being a small county where everybody knows everybody else, it wouldn't seem much of a problem for Veronica to identify the killer. Except for the fact that he's one of two identical twins: James or John Cape.

Nobody in Custer, even the locals who have known the Cape brothers all their lives, have ever had any luck differentiating the two, which puts crusty sheriff Cyrus Bateman in a real bind. If neither Cape admits to being the killer, there's no way to try one of them without a heavy dose of reasonable doubt attaching itself to the trial. And that's when ace detective Frank Cannon is summoned.

As a 160-page mystery, MURDER BY GEMINI has a clever premise, but Gallagher isn't sure what to do with it. The novel is padded by conversations between Cannon and Bateman that have little to do with the case at hand, but don't offer much in terms of characterization either. Really, the novel has little to say about Cannon and what makes him tick. Perhaps Gallagher believed fans of the TV show already knew everything they needed to.

The book is missing the intellectualism and the culinary expertise of Conrad's Cannon, but adds a couple of decent chases in their stead. MURDER BY GEMINI isn't heady reading, but there are worse ways to kill three hours on the couch.