Police parallèle

Falk, a veteran director on a number of TV series ranging from Get Smart! to The Colbys, first tried his hand at feature-length action filmmaking in 1974 with Death Squad. The box blazons "in the tradition of Magnum Force!" Tradition? Please.

Robert Forster (Alligator) plays a straight cop busted from a crooked force, re-recruited in secret to infiltrate a gang of vigilante police led by Claude Akins. (Does that seem a stretch to you, too?) Forster falls in love in record time with his ex-partner's daughter, played by Mamas and Papas alum Michelle Phillips, and complications ensue. Forster's a passable actor, but Eastwood he ain't. Phillips has gotten a lot better since 1974. And, well, Sheriff Lobo heading up a band of renegade officers is just plain too much. * 1/2

render a snarky judgment of 1974's The Death Squad by writing "The Cliché Squad" in the summary box. I was going to ridicule this cheapo TV movie as an inevitable rip-off of Magnum Force. I was going to point out the pablum-level plotting, the cardboard characterizations, the neon sign pointing at Melvyn Douglas as the Hal Holbrook character in Magnum Force.

In other words, I was going to dismiss The Death Squad as the typical junk put out by ABC for its "Movie of the Week" series way back when.

Then it dawned on me that I didn't know who all was involved in supporting the vigilante cops. I started thinking how this may have made a passable series (c'mon, every other episode of The Movie of the Week was a pilot or some sort of pitch to the network suits). I found myself feeling comfortable with Claude Akins, Ken Tobey, and Mark Goddard. I wanted to see more of a very young, very charming Michelle Phillips.

The Death Squad was junk, but the sort of junk you want to browse through at a garage sale.

And then there was Robert Forster, an actor with a reputation of doing journeyman work portraying the lead with an earnestness that I found admirable.

So, my prejudice against this sort of Spelling-Goldberg trash may have had legitimate roots (right, Starsky and Hutch?), but after The Death Squad was over, I found myself a smidgen sad. This was the stuff I grew up on in the 70s. The movie was just about as good as NBC's Police Story.

Not a complete waste of 70 minutes.

8 stars are for good to great. 7 good to great but with a noticeable flaw - rushed ending, plot hole.

THE DEATH SQUAD is a made-for-TV movie concerning the group of the title, who abduct and eliminate those whom they deem to have escaped justice. The squad is actually a cabal of rogue ex-cops / vigilantes.

Enter Robert Forster, as a cop sent undercover to infiltrate this group. Forster is very good in his conflicted role.

This theme had been explored a year prior in Clint Eastwood's MAGNUM FORCE, it would surface again in THE STAR CHAMBER with Michael Douglas, some nine years later. DEATH SQUAD's main strength lies in casting Forster, who brings this movie up several notches...

The low ratings for this made for TV film which cameos Melvyn Douglas are accurate. This film should be viewed by movie students to see how movies can either be improved or how the original outshines the copy.

You do not have to be a sophisticated movie lover to see the difference between DEATH SQUAD and MAGNUM FORCE. You should compare films like TO BE OR NOT TO BE with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard (1942) with the more slapstick production of Mel Brooks. Ernst Lubitsch in his direction supplied subtle nuances to make a sophisticated comedy, Mel Brooks i "Pie in the Face". This makes for a complex but comprehensive understanding of what is the difference between a good film and a film classic.

DEATH SQUAD was interesting for me, so that I could relate the comparison as stated above.