Kind of Watching It DVD's: Strike Force

Hey! I got a letter to preview the 1975 television movie. So what if I wrote the letter myself, Jason wants Jason to review this epic tele-film. Fantastic! The '70s were a great time for TV movies, they took it so seriously despite the often being monetarily constrained and edited for the non-movie going audience. This genre classic had an interesting premise. A cop, a Fed and a state trooper (good old Walter) all get together under the auspices of the Strike Force to fight crime. While the covers of this DVD features  Richard Gere as the star of this movie, he wasn't. The star was one Cliff Gorman. You remember Cliff, he was a short actor, did Broadway, movies but seemed to be one step away from the big time. Here he plays Joe "Joey" Gentry. In all honesty, Joey has to be one of the most Italian characters ever committed to film. The Fed was played by Donald Blakely, ha, kind of looked like Ramsey Lewis. And really, Ripley was a real snarky character, hilarious...


The big draw here according to the folks at Digiview is Richard Gere. Now, the name is familiar, but I really couldn't place him. What work has he done? Let's check IMDB to see if all is well. Anyway he played someone named Walter (really Walter), a young state policeman who had the geographical inside track of the movie's murder/crime. The movie didn't quite know what to do with Walter so they finally parked him in front of surveillance videos, well until he has to hit the road with the gang.

The final moments of this genre classic made me cry. It was such poetry and stuff fighting in that city dump. Oh the seagulls and boat-like automobiles! This was done in New York and did it ever look filthy. The conclusion of this was open-ended, like this possibly could have been a series. If the series was successful, there could have been Kenner action figures and Topps trading cards. "I'll trade you my Inspector Ripley for Big Jim..." Jason thinks about the possibilities and chokes back a sob...


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Part 2: This movie was filmed in 1974 and was really on point, not at all behind the times like a lot of crime movies were of the era.
<--------Look!! It seems that Strike Force has become a favorite for fly by night companies that specialize in public domain movies. It's a doggone shame. Here's yet another non-truthful cover about this movie and its contents. And that's One To Grow On!