Cop shows ruled the prime-time lineup in the late 1970s, and the Aaron Spelling-produced Murder Can Hurt You! poked fun at seven of them. Like a massive Mad magazine parody come to made-for-TV life, its sights were set on Ironside, Baretta, Starsky & Hutch, Kojak, McCloud, Police Woman and — oh, yeah, one more thing — Columbo.
The telepic boasts a cast that appears to have been drawn, lottery-style, from a complete series roster of The Love Boat (with which this movie shares director Roger Duchowny), because not only do we have Gavin MacLeod, but Victor Buono, Jimmie Walker, Tony Danza, Jamie Farr, John Byner, Buck Owens, Connie Stevens and Burt Young. These Los Angeles “defectives — I mean, detectives” (per the narrator, Get Smart star Don Adams) match their collective wits (which ain’t much) against the one-person crime wave known only as the Man in White (Mitch Kreindel, Modern Problems), so named because … hell, you figure it out. One by one, the cops are thwarted by such cartoon-ready devices as giant balloons, wet cement and magnetic beds.
The level of humor in this thing is every bit as low-aiming as you would expect from an ABC Wednesday-night movie. A recurring bit has flames shoot high every time Palumbo (Young, Paulie of the Rocky franchise) flicks his Bic to light a smoke. The climactic slapstick set piece atop — and hanging from — a ladder connecting two buildings is like the finale of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as if adapted by sixth graders.
What once was a laugh riot upon its broadcast premiere — hey, I was 9 — is largely an embarrassment now. One thing that hasn’t changed: how unbelievably sexy Connie Stevens is in this. Spoofing Angie Dickinson’s Sgt. Pepper Anderson, the bubble-voiced Grease 2 faculty member plays Sgt. Salty Sanderson by squeezing herself into one homina-homina-homina getup after another, from blue hot pants and, um, purple hot pants to a gold nightie. So what if the bra we glimpse as she plays Strip Go Fish is rather plain in its whiteness? It’s what I remembered most. —Rod Lott