In the early 1930s, Hollywood tapped Olympic gold medalists Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe to play Tarzan. Half a century later, when high-concept action became big box office, studios wanting to shepherd the next Stallone or Schwarzenegger again looked to the middle of the medal podium; within 13 months of one another, moviegoers could see Kurt Thomas in Gymkata, Bart Conner in Rad and Mitch Gaylord in American Anthem.

Had those flicks clicked, who knows? We might have Michael Phelps defending God’s pool as Aquaman or Simone Biles crushing it as Katniss in The Hunger Games franchise. Although I have no evidence, I’d like to think Gaylord’s sophomore slump, American Rickshaw, served as the final nail in this miscasting coffin.

Gaylord’s Scott is a struggling full-time college student who works as a part-time rickshaw driver in Florida. One night, slinky redheaded stripper Joanna (one-and-doner Victoria Prouty) offers intercourse as a tip, which he accepts … until he realizes their shower romp is being videotaped by a thumbless perv (Gregg Todd Davis, Nightmare Beach) who happens to be the son of televangelist Rev. Mortom (Donald Pleasence, The Great Escape). The young Mortom is killed by a towering hulk (Daniel Greene, Hands of Steel) who frames Scott as the culprit, then sets out to kill him, too. Scott need only not get murdered, but clear his name and find that sex tape!

Conspiracy, secrets, homicide, a femme fatale, unlabeled VHS cassettes, AIDS needles — all pretty standard stuff for a thriller of that era, but Sergio Martino is no standard director. Known more for his stellar work in the giallo (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, et al.), he introduces one weird, wild supernatural element to keep things from being too generic: an immortal Asian witch (Michi Kobi, 12 to the Moon) who helps protect Scott by teleporting a cobra and turning Rev. Mortom into a satanic warthog on live TV — but not at the same time, mind you, because that would be stupid. At least the script offers an ironclad reason for the witch’s kindness: because Scott helped her onto his rickshaw on a rainy afternoon.

Seeing as how American Rickshaw (aka American Tiger) contains nary a pommel horse, the logic in hiring Gaylord is negligible. Then just shy of 30, he looks like a preening preteen, yet is a real wet blanket on screen. His line readings are so wooden, he could have found them near the contractor’s entrance at Home Depot. He can’t convincingly act an sexual encounter in the shower, which he’s certainly had in real life; by contrast, as the antagonist, Greene sells the hell out of a magic key burning straight through his hand like Alien acid, as if he’s lived it a hundred times before, just as Pleasence commits to uncontrollable oinking — ever the professional, no matter how embarrassing. And this one is that, to all involved, to our eternal enjoyment. —Rod Lott

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Psychotherapy has existed for centuries … and yet so has its stigma. Perhaps it’s because films like The Couch, where the emphasis is on the suffix — something bound to happen when you hire Psycho scribe Robert Bloch as your screenwriter.

In the first scene, a young man named Charles Campbell (The Incredible Shrinking Man himself, Grant Williams) calls the police to report a murder — one that’s about to happen, as the clock strikes 7 p.m. Sure enough, he’s absolutely correct, because at the top o’ the hour, Charles inserts an ice pick through the back of a random person on the street. More homicides follow, all with the “1900 hours” gimmick.

But, hey, other than that, Charles is a normal dude! He lives in a dingy boardinghouse, works as a lowly stock clerk in a paper factory and regularly attends therapy with Dr. Janz (Onslow Stevens, Them!), whose secretary (Shirley Knight, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure) he romances. This culminates in ol’ Chuck stealing scrubs and running loose in a hospital, prepared to perform surgery on somebody to keep all his killer secrets from being exposed.

If director Owen Crump (an Oscar-nominated documentarian who dreamed up the story with that S.O.B. Blake Edwards) intended for Charles to be sympathetic, he failed. Pouty and inclined to perspiration, Charles is no Norman Bates, even if his backstory is equally unsavory. Williams’ choice to overplay the histrionics further alienate him from audience goodwill, raising those scenes — and flashbacks to Charles’ childhood — to a level of camp to which the remainder of The Couch is ill-prepared to scale. All of that leads to one good question: Why couldn’t William Castle have made this instead? —Rod Lott

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“Ruggero, old friend! Listen, the Americans are all so crazy over these Airport pictures. First there was one, then there was two, and now they do four! It is called The Concorde, then ‘dot dot dot,’ then Airport ’79. Dramatic, no?

“Well, listen, we want to do what the Americans do right away, so you, my friend, Ruggero, will direct. We like the sound of this Concorde, so we will call ours Concorde Affaire ’79! Sexy, no?

“Here is what I think, Ruggero: We start with the Concorde crashing into the Atlantic Ocean. Then we introduce our hero. So the audience knows he is the hero, we will give him a hero’s name. Something biblical, perhaps, like Moses. This Moses character will be a journalist covering the crash. He will work for Ladies Day magaz– no, I don’t know why a women’s magazine would print such an article, but we can figure that out later.

“Anyway, where was I, Ruggero? Ah, yes: the crash. The plane will sink to the floor of the ocean so we can do some underwater things with the scubas. The Americans seemed to like that in the Airport ’77 with the Jack Lemmon. We need someone stronger, a man’s man, someone the women watching would want to kiss with the passion of a thousand suns, like Charlton Heston in Airport 1975. A-ha! He would be playing Moses again, yes?

“Well, too bad, Ruggero. I cannot afford his American salary. But this I will tell you: I believe James Franciscus would work for our picture. After all, he was good enough for starring in the talking-monkey movie after Charlton, so he is good enough for our film! To go back to the Airport 1975, though, I think I would like to have a real sexy American pin-up like the Lee Grant or Brenda Vacarro. Perhaps you get me Mimsy Farmer? Also, my friend, we need an old movie star who used to be big, big, big, but now will work for cheap, like the Joseph Cotten– oh, you say you can get Joseph Cotten? Grande!

“Now, Ruggero, last thing, my friend is we need to make Concorde Affair very, very boring. I trust you can do that, no?” —Rod Lott

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For a made-for-TV movie, Superdome sure is rife with vice: Sex! Drugs! Violence! Dick Butkus!

And all that takes place within the five days the fictional Cougars have come to New Orleans to play the Super Bowl, meaning team manager Mike Shelley (David Janssen, Mayday at 40,000 Feet!) has a lot on his hands, including a comely reporter (Donna Mills, Hanging by a Thread) who’s not above sex with seniors to extract quotes — or, for that matter, a plate of fried catfish.

Thrown into the suds of Superdome are a marriage on the brink, a potentially exiting star quarterback (Tom Selleck, Runaway), an illegal gambling plot with mob muscle and, above all, murder! Someone is shooting team staff members to death, with poisoned ginger ale and electrocution by whirlpool also on tap for attempts. Curiously, there is next to no football.

In charge of this whole mess is director Jerry Jameson, fresh from Airport ’77 and likely hired for his ability to corral an all-star cast; here, that includes such screen sirens as Edie Adams, Vonetta McGee, Jane Wyman and Bubba Smith.

For all Jameson’s skill at actor control, he is unable to wring any suspense from the stew. Had the script stuck to the killer angle and run with it, he might have something, like the then-2-year-old stadium-sniper thriller Two-Minute Warning. Instead, just as we’re shown a pair of black gloves pulling the trigger, Superdome pivots to a storyline of dramatically lower stakes, like Ken Howard’s aching knee. Fumble! —Rod Lott

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After writing an article about a sheep birthing a human baby, Populous magazine reporter Jill Weatherby (Jodi Russell, Blind Dating) and her shoulder pads thirst for “a shot at some real news.” She finds it in sleepy Edmond, Missouri — a town that’s “fictious,” per the misspelled credits — where the elderly, married owners of a mini-mart have been murdered by a trio of traveling hoodlums. While one of the the bad guys (Kenny McCabe, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2) remains at large, rogue cop Cliff Madlock (Larry Williams, 2001’s Heartbreakers) fatally shot the others at the scene.

What Jill doesn’t know initially is that one of Madlock’s kills was a straight-up execution — Miranda rights, schmiranda rights. Edmond boasts a crime rate 40% lower than the U.S. average, yet almost never convicts a criminal. She learns why after witnessing Madlock break into a drug dealer’s house — warrant, schmarrant — and force-feeds spoonfuls of cocaine to the dealer as if it were Cheerios.

Maybe it’s the experience of watching Lethal Justice through a 21st-century lens, but it’s not clear whether Madlock is supposed to be its hero or villain — until the ending, when Weatherby watches Madlock blow away the elusive criminal (“Damn! There goes my exclusive!”) and decides to let the good ol’ boy in blue keep shooting first and asking questions later never. Hey, it was a very different time.

It was also a time when anything could churn profits on VHS, no matter how homegrown. Lethal Justice represents the second and thus far final film from writer/director/producer/editor Christopher Reynolds. As with his debut, the Johnny-come-lately slasher Offerings, it was shot in the Oklahoma City area (including the actual city of Edmond) using its fair share of overemoting locals and exaggerated extras, but also with Russell believably exhibiting that journalist’s pluck, just as Williams does with hotheaded authority; however, they fail to click in the chemistry department. All one can really ask of such cinematic pursuits is an effortless watchability, which Lethal Justice provides, no matter how hard its secondhand-synthesizer score — appropriately referred to by the closed captioning as “sleuth music” — works against it. —Rod Lott

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