WINTER KILL: Andy Taylor VS A Serial Killer

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Andy Griffith

Well not exactly.

WINTER KILL, from 1974, was a pilot with Andy Griffith playing Sam McNeil, police chief of the small resort town of Eagle Pass. it’s the same character he’s honed to perfection over the years, laid back, but a steel core that carries him through the trying times. This was one of several pilots he did that didn’t sell(the next year he did Adams of Eagle Lake; don;t know why the name change) during the period.

The film is full of stock characters: the eager beaver deputy, fresh out of the army and, despite admonitions, continually “yes sirs” Griffith, the town manager more concerned about the bottom line with the tourist season about to be upon them, the old mechanic/would be novelist that likes to quote from the book he’s been writing for years, the rich woman that has no real concern for the first victim(didn’t like her lifestyle), the waitress/girl friend he’s too busy to spend much time with, the town council screaming for action and threatening to fire him.

Despite all that, I liked this one. What can I say? Maybe because Griffith is a North Carolina boy like myself and grew up about forty miles from where I live(a small aside: my step-father grew up in Mt. Airy as well and, the same age, knew the future actor. Knew him, but wasn’t friends). And we can’t discount his little show about Mayberry either. So I liked it.

Our serial killer leaves messages at each killing. Spray paints THE FIRST, THE SECOND, and so forth. He kills his victims with a twelve gauge shotgun. Before each killing with get the killer, heavily bundled in a bulky snow jacket and wearing a knit ski mask so that we can’t even tell the sex, reading from a pink diary with flashback sequences to illustrate the writings.

The first is a middle aged woman. Her husband is out of town and missing. The hotel in L.A. where he’d made reservations says he didn’t show up. Griffith notices a missing gun in the home’s long gun case. When the husband shows up, he changed his mind and just stopped at a motel before coming home. The missing gun, a twelve gauge, is at the bottom of the lake because he was frustrated at missing birds three times. Right!

Investigations lead him to a local ski instructor(a very young Nick Nolte) who’d had an affair with the dead woman. he swears it was over and he was friends with the husband(very forgiving man). A young woman had stayed with the dead woman about a year before, after her mother had died, before disappearing and Griffith discovered she’d been pregnant.

The second victim is Nolte’s ski instructor. Griffith learns HE was the father of the pregnant girl. Checking the girl out, he finds Father Unknown on her birth certificate. The third victim is the town’s preacher and records show he had an appointment with the young girl shortly before she fell off the map.

Let’s see, where are we. Victim one had the young girl stay with her and had an affair with victim two, victim two gets young girl pregnant, young girl visits victim three. Obviously he needs to find the young girl. His first clue comes when the gitl friend(Sheree North) mentions she gave her a lift when she was going to L.A., only to have her change her mind and get out at a motel on the way. At the motel, Griffith finds she committed suicide in one of the rooms and was buried near by, visited regularly by a man who put up a nice stone and leaves flowers.

Griffith zeroes in on a suspect, they never make it clear how, and happens to be with him when a fourth murder occurs, the rich woman mentioned earlier. The murderer is found, her husband, having crashed through the ice in the lake and drowned.

Suddenly the town is in a celebratory mood. Case solved. Well not exactly. Griffith is bothered. The Fourth message is, this time, a mixture of upper and lower case letters, unlike the other three murders. The shot size is different. When he finds proof of who the real murderer is and realizes his girl friend is next, he rushes out there.

In the final confrontation, Andy Griffith fires a gun(I don’t ever remember him firing one in the line of duty in Mayberry) and actually kills the murderer!

This one might have been a good series, but being a small town, the body count would have eventually been a bit unbelievable(hey, Cabot Cove turned out to be a dangerous small town to live in).

It was fun though.

Firecreek

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Henry Fonda, Inger Stevens, James Stewart, western

James Stewart is Johnny Cobb and Henry Fonda Bob Larkin in this 1968 western. Cobb is a farmer and part-time Sheriff of Firecreek and Larkin is the leader of a band of guns for hire that stop over in the town. Larkin’s band is made up of actors Gary Lockwood, Morgan Woodward, James Best, and Jack Elam. The townspeople include Dean Jagger, Inger Stevens, and Ed Begley is a circuit preacher.

Stewart’s wife is expecting their third child, the time is now, and he’s sent a midwife out to see to her while he and his two sons stay in town. The midwife doesn’t like males underfoot at this time.

There are several subplots driving the film. Larkin is wounded and being cared for by Inger Stevens, an attraction growing between them. The midwife’s daughter, a pretty young blond has caught Lockwood’s eye and she’s just naive enough not to known the trouble that will cause. There is a Native American woman living in town, with a blond headed child, and there’s a connection with Stewart’s character. In a conversation, they argue about telling the town the truth, as he wanted to do when he first brought her to town, and she prevented it. James Best wants her.

Though drunk and disorderly and continually upsetting the townspeople, Stewart, despite going unarmed, seems to command some sort of respect and manages to keep the gunmen in line. He tries to stay out of their business, hoping they will move on.

Arthur is a mentally challenged young man who wandered into town a few years before and works in the livery. He is Stewart’s “deputy,” a job he takes very seriously. When he finds James Best trying to rape the Native American woman, he jumps in and gets a beating for his troubles. As Best turns to continue his assault on the woman, Arthur grabs his gun and, unfamiliar with weapons, accidentally shoots him in the back, killing him.

Stewart arrests him for his own good and still stands by while the gang throws an impromptu wake for their slain comrade, driving the townspeople out in the middle of the night to attend. A little later, a neighbor comes racing into town to tell him something is wrong with his wife. Stewart rushes off to see to her.

Crisis averted, he returns the next morning to find a deserted street and when he gets to the livery, he discovers Arthur hanging from a rafter. Enraged, he stands screaming at the town for not stopping it, only to hear behind him, “They didn’t have any choice.” Fonda and his three men were still in town, getting ready to leave. He swears to follow them, hound them, until he can find a more legal law officer and charge them with murder, only to get a bullet in his leg for his trouble.

When he goes for a weapon and gets Dean Jagger trying to talk him out of it, Stewart realizes he’s just as bad as the townspeople. If he hadn’t wanted to stay out of their business during their drunken mischief, Arthur likely would still be alive.

The showdown that follows between Stewart and the gang is well staged as he has to deal with the individual members. He’s neither a gunman or a fighter, just an ordinary man.

I’d never seen this one before. Or even heard of it. It was pretty good.

Today’s Humor: Get Ready To Learn A lesson….

THE FOUR CATS

Four men were bragging about how smart their cats were.

The first man was an engineer, the second an accountant, the third a chemist, and the fourth a government employee.

To show off, the engineer called his cat. “T-Square, do your stuff!” T-Square pranced over to the desk, drew out pen and paper, and promptly drew a square, a circle, and a triangle. Everyone agreed that was pretty smart.

But the accountant said his cat could better. He called his animal over and said, “Spreadsheet, do your stuff!” Spreadsheet went out to the kitchen and returned with a dozen cookies, dividing them into four equal piles of three. Everyone said that was pretty smart.

But the chemist bragged his cat could do better. “Measure, do your stuff!” Measure got up, walked to the fridge, got out a quart of milk, a glass from the cupboard, and returned to pour exactly eight ounces of milk without spilling a drop. That was pretty good, they all agreed.

Then the three men turned to the government employee and asked, “What can your cat do?”

The government employee called his cat and said, “CoffeeBreak, do your stuff!” CoffeeBreak jumped to his feet…

Ate the cookies…
drank the milk…
shit on the paper…
screwed the other three cats…
claimed he injured his back while doing so…
filed a grievance report for unsafe working conditions…
put in for worker’s compensation…
and went home for the rest of the day on sick leave…

and THAT’s why, my friend, everyone wants to work for the government!

Hunt Beyond The Frozen Fire

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Christa Faust, Gabriel Hunt

HUNT BEYOND THE FROZEN FIRE is the fourth book in the Gabriel Hunt series, this one by Christa Faust, and it continues the adventures of our favorite hero. Gabriel Hunt heads to Antarctica in this one, one of the few places on Earth he’s never been.

Gabriel’s brother, Michael, think’s it’s a fool’s mission, but the beautiful daughter of the missing Dr. Lawrence Silver, Velda, convinces the Hunt Foundation to help her. He’d gone missing while on the ice of the Antarctica continent researching global warming, no trace of him had been found, and everyone was positive that, at seventy-five, he was long dead. His daughter remained unconvinced.

All she has to back her beliefs is a garbled radio recording of her father speaking of a fissure, sudden warmth, and his final words, “I see…trees.” Clearly impossible on a continent covered with ice and temperatures at the best of times rarely even getting near the freezing mark.

Intrigued, Gabriel recruits a team to accompany them. Rue Aparecido was a tiny woman that could repair and handle anything that flew, sailed, submerged. She was also an ex-lover of Gabriel’s. and Maximillian Ventrose, Jr., Millie to friends, was six foot seven, three hundred pounds of solid muscle, a roughneck when needed to be, but also having the power to calm the most heated with words.

They discover a hidden valley deep under the ice, stocked with a number of “extinct” animals and a civilization of savage people, not to mention a threat to the world stretching back to World War II. Ms Faust even throws in a twist toward the end I wasn’t expecting, I guess that’s why they’re called twists, and there’s plenty of action from beginning to end.

Two more books are scheduled and I hope the series continues well beyond that. I’ve grown to like Mr. Hunt and his adventures.

Riverworld: A Review

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Philip Jose Farmer, Riverworld, Science Fiction, SYFY

I was frankly surprised when I watched the SyFy Channel’s(hate that name) latest attempt at meaningful science fiction. Their usual fare is cheesy looking monster movies, professional wrestling, reality shows that look to goofy for me to have ever watched, and not much else. A good idea originally, one one of my best friends and I(probably not the only ones) suggested should be done in the early days of cable. But as the cable channel changed hands several times, they seemed to go increasingly for the lowest common denominator, pandering to junk even worse than the commercial channels. Bereft of ideas, it was a channel that commanded less and less of my time as the years went by, a not uncommon thought, I would imagine, by readers and lovers of good science fiction.

Sorry for the mild rant.

RIVERWORLD wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. Not nearly as good as it could have been either. They picked up the basic idea from the novels, a few plot threads, distorted some others, and produced a movie long on action and effects, short on anything coherent. Matt Ellman and Jessie are new characters dropped in, I guess to give the audience a pair of young lovers, with characters from the novels: Samuel Clemens, Sir Richard Burton, Francisco Pizarro.

The motivation of the beings behind it all seem different. Two opposing factions, the Salvationists and the Second Chancers, have pitted their champions against each other, Ellman for the Second Chancers and Burton, the ostensible villain of the piece here, as opposed to the novels, for the Salvationists, with Jessie’s love, of all things, between the pair.

Instead of all of history’s humanity being resurrected at the same time, they seem to be held in limbo and released at the whim of these beings(blue people, rejects from Avatar I suppose). It’s never quite clear. Matt and Jessie were killed at the same time by a suicide bomber in a night club, yet she’s revealed to have wandered the Riverworld for months longer than Matt. Matt’s partner, who died six years after Matt, has been around for four years. Whenever our stalwart hero dies and is reborn, years seem to go by before his resurrection.

The movie looked good, but has a meandering plot that includes a nuclear powered steam boat, a same powered zeppelin, grail bands that the people use to open machines for their food(different from the books), robot horses, and lots of sword fights and battles.

Ultimately, I think the powers that be were unsatisfied with what the end result. They showed both parts in one night(it was obviously designed for a two night showing in that a natural break after two hours, with a summing up segue of the previous part and new credits for the second two hours), likely just to get something for the time and money invested. They filled up the time between acts with promos for dumb movies, wrestling, and their other series. The commercials were more enjoyable.

The best thing I can say about it was that it was better than their first effort seven years back. Still didn’t make it though. I give it a weak C-. They even threw in some modern cultural references(9-11, Homer Simpson).

In following some of the comments at different sites, people who had read the books objected to the “re-imagining” and those who didn’t read found it interesting. About what I expected. But almost no one found it “good,” which perhaps shows more taste in the targeted viewing audience than I granted them.

The Toyman – Robert S. Napier

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Robert S. Napier, The Toyman

Jack Lorentz is the Toyman, a dealer in all sorts of baby boomer collectibles, a former investigative journalist, and here a reluctant investigator. He is a creation of Robert Napier, otherwise known here on the internet as Cap’n Bob. Both live and operate in Tacoma, Washington.

I’ve had the first one for a while now and haven’t read it(ducks while running for cover), so with delivery of RIDES AGAIN, I decided it was time.

LOVE, DEATH, AND THE TOYMAN

Jack Lorentz is visited one day by someone he hasn’t seen in fifteen years, Mandy Howard, his ex-fiance who walked out on him while he was looking at a house. She’s married to a rich man now who’s planning a run for congress and wants someone to investigate a partial skeleton found six months before on family property. While not wanting a whitewash, he wants a perfunctory investigation that won’t allow any potential opponents to use it against him. Declining at first, he’s coerced into taking the job with a bit of legal blackmail.

The Howard family all live together in one big mansion and what a set of characters: two siblings, Dorothy and Howard Chapman, she of split personality, one a refined woman, the other a nymphomaniac, he a slovenly bully, their mother concerned with the purity of the family lines. Mandy’s husband and his brother, competitors all their lives, Mandy herself a study in contradictions.

Lorentz’s investigation turns up dirty linen, as one would figure, but not exactly like one might expect. Murder attempts and beatings follow before he finds the answers he’s hunting in a slam bang finale.

THE TOYMAN RIDES AGAIN

This one takes up shortly after the first. Lorentz’s office is being cleaned up and repainted from the finale of the first book. He decides to take another job to get out while that’s being done.

He’s hired to join a group of reenactors for their annual recreation of Custer’s Last Stand to guard the man playing the role of Custer, Charles Swanson, who has been receiving death threats. He goes in undercover as a reporter that was along with the Seventh Cavalry on that fateful day.

When they are attacked by a band of Native Americans on-motorcycles?- a melee breaks out. Swanson/Custer ends up murdered, a big knife poking out of his chest, a knife known to belong to Native American leader. Though arrested, Lorentz soon comes to believe he’s not the actual murderer and works with a beautiful young woman, Abigail She Stands In Light, to learn the truth. Throw in a couple of more murders, the FBI tailing Lorentz, and a budding relationship with Abigail, it all works to make Lorentz’s job more complicated. Though he hadn’t really wanted the job, he feels bad Swanson was killed and he puts his skills from his reporter days to piece together what really happened.

I quite liked these two mysteries, written in a smoothly flowing style. I look forward to the next one in the series.

FFB: The Case of The Chinese Boxes – Marele Day

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Forgotten Books, Marele Day

THE CASE OF THE CHINESE BOXES was the second novel to feature Australian P.I. Claudia Valentine who works out of the city of Sydney. She lives above a bar and has a failed marriage with a couple of kids that live with their father. It was published by Allen & Unwin in 1990. The third book in the series, THE LAST TANGO OF DELORES DELGADO, won the PWA Shamus for best paperback original.

The bank job, dubbed The Great Chinese Takeaway by the press, happened over the new year’s weekend amidst a long celebration, you know fireworks and such, perfect cover for the heist. They spent forty-eight hours looting safe deposit boxes, unable to get at the cash, setting off alarms when they tried to blast the door. All sorts of rumors were about about the contents, everything from jewelry to cash, gold, securities, and heroin. Various estimates of the haul ranged from ten million to a hundred million. Not a lot of people disclosed the contents of their boxes and the thieves had never been caught.

Enter Claudia Valentine.

The Chen family hires her to recover a family heirloom, an antique key made of gold with six intricate teeth and an ornate fire-breathing dragon on the crown. She was to find it and offer a considerable sum for the return. No questions asked. When asked why they thought she could succeed, the answer was, “You are a woman. You are invisible.” She was given a thousand dollar check as a retainer.

Recover a family heirloom. It seemed simple enough, even if finding the thieves might not be that easy. The police weren’t having any luck. As usual with these types of stories, things get complicated and dangerous. Throw in the Chinese Triads, ancient treasure, a woman looking through cheap backstreets and oriental temples, and you get a fine tale here.

This is my first Claudia Valentine novel(I’m tracking down the other three), but I have been reading the Wyatt novels(an Australian Parker) by Garry Disher and these stories give me a glimpse of a society much different than that of which I’m familiar, even though they are English speaking people. It’s the same with England. We all speak the same language, well mostly, but we each have our own customs, slang, foods, an outlook on life. I like catching these glimpses.

Planet Earth

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Gene Roddenberry, Planet Earth, Science Fiction

PLANET EARTH was Gene Roddenberry’s second pilot based on concepts used in the Genesis II project. John Saxon took the role of Dylan Hunt in this one and Ted Cassidy returned as Isiah, the “savage” that was a member of PAX. The only other holdover was Majel Barrett Roddenberry in a minor role as one of PAX’s ruling council.

This one jumps right into the action as the PAX team led by Dylan is accompanying Pater Kimbridge back from a survey when they are attacked by agroup of militaristic mutant humans known as the Kreeg. Though they escape through the underground tubes that connect all the continents, Kimbridge is severely wounded and needs immediate surgery to survive. PAX’s best surgeon is two weeks away in Europe and the next best shot disappeared on a mission a year before.

Dylan’s Pax team, consisting of Isiah, Harper-Smythe, and Baylock, an ESPer, is sent looking for him into an area known to be controlled by an Amazon society known as The Confederacy of Ruth where the males are nothing more than farm animals and breeding stock, controlled by a drug placed in their gruel that induces fear and blind obedience.

Farm animals because they are more easily trained, care for themselves, and raise their own food. They are bought and sold, fought over, like one would any animal. As a sign of the times this pilot was produced, Dylan refers to it as women’s lib gone mad.

Dylan splits the team and goes in with Harper-Smythe as her captive. Immediately, he is claimed by Marg(Diana Muldaur), one of the women leaders and the only one who knows the formula for the control drug. H-S has to fight her to reclaim her “property” and win the respect of the other women who didn’t like outside ideas polluting their society.

They find the doctor they are looking for and learn that he’s not under the drug, having recognized it even in his former polluted state and weaned himself. The last year has been spent piling up the antidote with the intention of slipping it into the gruel distributed from Marg’s lands each day.

It becomes Dylan’s job to distract Marg, who has an interest in him(shades of Jim “Tomcat” Kirk), while they slip the antidote into the gruel and escape to save Kimbridge. And lucky they do as the Kreeg are coming to attack and gain the drug.

All ends well. Or at least as twentieth century man wants things to end anyway.

PLANET EARTH didn’t sell as a series either. A third attempt was made using some of the concepts, without Gene Roddenberry, and It’s one I never saw. As far as I know, it’s never been made available on DVD as have the first two efforts.

What I have learned of this one, STRANGE NEW WORLD, is that the Earth was destroyed by a swarm of giant meteors and PAX had changed the orbit of their space station just in time so that it was sent into a new orbit around the sun that returned it to Earth’s vicinity one hundred-eighty years later, awakening the three astronauts from suspended animation. They were to return to Earth and free the hundreds of PAX members from their suspended animation in underground bunkers. If that one had gone to series, presumably they would have set out to explore and rebuild Earth.

John Saxon seemed to be the only holdover, playing a man named Captain Anthony Vico this time around.

And if all this seems familiar, some years later, elements from all three were used for the series, Andromeda, “created” by Gene Roddenberry in 2000, nine years after his death. Kevin Sorbo was Dylan Hunt, captain of a sentient starship that had been caught on the event horizon of a black hole, keeping him in suspended animation for three hundred years. When rescued, Hunt is horrified to learn that the Systems Commonwealth has collapsed while he slept and sets out with the crew of the salvage ship that pulled him and his starship out to restore peace and harmony throughout the systems. And we know how well that worked out.

Genesis II

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Gene Roddenberry, Genesis II, Science Fiction

GENESIS II was the first of three pilots for a new science fiction series, the first two produced and written by Gene Roddenberry, which aired in 1973. It was one of his attempts to replicate his success of Star Trek. It starred Alex Cord as Dylan Hunt and Mariette Hartley as Lyra-a, a mutant.

The film opens in that far flung future of 1979(?) in which NASA is getting ready to perform an experiment designed to help astronauts on long journeys through space. Dylan Hunt was in charge of the suspended animation project and decided he would be the first human subject. The process had been refined down to aging one day for every ten years suspension. The first test was to last only a few days.

The NASA base was built into Carlsbad Caverns and unknown to everyone was a major fault in the rock strata. When the earthquake hit, much of the caverns collapsed, burying the section where the test was being performed.

Next we see an odd looking group finding the chamber and figuring how to open it. Dylan learns then what has happened and that the year is 2133. Lyra-a is his nurse during his recovery from the long suspension. She is a Tyranian, a mutant born with two hearts and two navels(an in-joke as during Star Trek, network censors were forever banning costumes that revealed female navels). I remember at the time that the two navels was a bit of a sensation.

PAX is the name of the people that have found him. As she ministers to his needs, Lyra-a tells Dylan that they are descendants of the soldiers and their families and have used the name to cover their looting of the world. He’s shown caves filled with some of the great works of art, paintings, statues, and such in the history of the world.

In this future world, much of man’s knowledge had been lost. A nuclear war had occurred and the survivors, in fury, had begun a slaughter of scientists and technicians for nearly destroying the world. So much was gone. Travel is through a system of underground shuttles that looked like bullets traveling through rifle barrels that had been completed before the war and connected all the continents.

Lyra-a helps him escape and they go on horseback to her home, the city of Tyrania, telling him they were peace lovers opposed to the depredations of PAX. Once there, while being shown around, he gets a far different picture. “Helpers,” a euphemism for slaves, are everywhere, doing all the work while the few Tyranians control the population with a device that uses sonics to stimulate the pain or pleasure centers of the brain. There are eight pain settings. They want Dylan to repair their nuclear generator which seems to be failing after one hundred-fifty-three years.

Dylan slips out one night to look around and realizes some of the truth, that he’d been lied to every step of the way. He’s grabbed by a PAX team, with Ted Cassidy as a man named Isiah, who explain they were sent in to foment a slave rebellion and get him out. They do and that was to set up the series.

The idea had been for Dylan Hunt to lead team-21 on missions around the world through the train tunnel system, encountering different societies that had developed in isolation during the recovery years following the war. A number of plots were developed for episodes that included one with a squad from the past coming out of suspension to attack PAX, computers left on a Jupiter moon in 1992 that had evolved intelligence and threatened Earth, a society dominated by women with men as pets and breeding stock(used in the second pilot), the London of the future, and a priesthood in one city that used electricity to awe and control the population.

The pilot didn’t sell, not enough action, and a second pilot was ordered. John Saxon took over the role of Dylan Hunt. I’ll do a post on that one tomorrow. If some of this sounds familiar, all will be explained.

These Are Kind Of Odd

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Daveyboyz

These are the first two of seventeen short videos parodying different forms of music, movies, and television by someone called the Daveyboyz. These guys certainly have a weird sense of humor. I like them.