ROBERT CONRAD DOUBLE FEATURE (1977 / 1975)

I know the name Robert Conrad but realised i'd never seen anything with him in, so when i got sent this review of an upcoming double bill of his films, i decided to do a bit of research, turns out he was the original James T. West in the show Wild Wild West. anyway this review comes courtesy of stateside reviewer Shawn Francis, and these films sound like great fun, especially Sudden Death. Check out Shawn's reviews after the jump...

Until I heard of this double feature, I have to admit, I had no idea Robert Conrad had been in any movies. I’m familiar with him through his THE WILD, WILD WEST television series that ran from 1965-1969. The series came to end the year I was born, and I saw it in re-runs growing up. My main impetus for wanting to review these two movies, especially SUDDEN DEATH, was to see what Conrad is like in a violent, R-rated action flick, and I admit it was really weird watching Jim West swear and kill people

SUDDEN DEATH revolves around a sinister cadre of businessmen down in the Philippines trying to make their personal empire bigger by knocking off another of their kind through a violent raid on his home. His wife and kids are killed—yes, they show the kids get shot and die in slow motion—but he manages to give the death the middle finger and come away only wounded.

Enter Conrad who plays seasoned war dog, Duke Smith, whom survivor, Neilson, goes to for help on finding out who did this to him. Smith refuses to help, knowing the kind of danger he would be putting himself, his daughter and his girlfriend in, if he did. But things change days later when Neilson is hit again, but this time he doesn’t walk away, being blown up in his car. His daughter manages to change his mind, getting him interested in wanting to put things right, and put down the people who killed this man and his family. He then enlists the aid of another experienced war dog, Wyatt, and together they kick a lot of ass and kill a lot of people in the process.

Exploitation actor, John Ashley (The BLOOD ISLAND movies) plays one of the bad guys, a CIA operative, who, despite one scene, never takes off his sunglasses, even when he’s trying to put Smith’s skull in the crosshairs of his rifle’s scope. Thayer David (DARK SHADOWS, JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH) also shows up briefly as one of the businessmen, and Don Stroud (THE AMITYVILLE HORROR) appears as Smith’s main nemesis, an assassin who’s been gunning for him for some time.

Listening to Conrad utter ‘motherfucker,’ and watch him bloodily kill Stroud with a pair of ice tongs in their semi-martial arts finale was a shock to my system. He’s Jim West, he shouldn’t be doing this kind of shit.

Conrad’s second movie, LIVE A LITTLE, STEAL A LOT (aka MURPH THE SURF) is tamer, as Conrad plays experienced, real-life crook, Allan Kuhn. This time around, Stroud, plays his neophyte partner in crime, Jack Murphy, and the film bounces back and forth in time as they break into the American Museum Of Natural History in New York to steal a shitload of precious gems, and their life as jewel thieves in a posh, tropical resort that eventually leads up to the crime of their careers, not to mention the one heist that finally gets them busted.

I found the first half of the flick, the flashbacks to Conrad’s life masquerading as a beach boy while he ripped off the rich, to be more interesting than the latter half of the film. There’s no “real” violence, some scant swearing, and only one death, a suicide, which took me by surprise. Donna Mills (CURSE OF THE BLACK WIDOW) shows up as Stroud’s main squeeze and Burt Young (BLOOD BEACH) makes an appearance near the end of the flick.

The transfer (1.85:1, anamorphic) gave me some problems on my old player, a 2006 Sony DVD Changer. There was some serious, and distracting, frame jumping that had me thinking these two flicks were poorly sourced from PAL transfers, which I have no idea if they were, or not. During the interim, my player broke and I replaced it with a Toshiba region free player, and the frame jumping was almost non-existent. I say, almost, because you can still see the jumping when the camera pans and people movie, but with the new player it wasn’t as distracting. Mondo Digital gave me some advice on how to rectify it, and I’ll pass it on to all of you, in case you find it too distacting: ". . . your player should have a setup option to either turn progressive on or off or to change the frame rate between 23 and 29fps; try switching those back and forth. If you're trying to upscale it to 1080p on an HD set, don't - run it at regular 480 or 1080i, and it should look better."

MURPH THE SURF was a bit too dark for my tastes, specifically in some of the in-door scenes in the latter half of the film. The 2.0 Digital audio could have been more impressive, too. Technically, these two films could use a good remastering, but if it were a choice of the lesser of the two evils, the other “evil” being a VHS tape or a bootleg, I’d go with this DVD here.  

SUDDEN DEATH (1977)

LIVE A LITTLE STEAL A LOT (1975)