Charlie's Angels: Angels Under Cover

This review is sponsored by

BUY

General		Extras
Category	Television	Main Menu Introduction Featurette - Angels Forever (20:38) Filmographies - Cast and Crew
Rating
Year Released	1976
Running Time	96:34 minutes
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Phil Bondelli Richard Lang
Studio Distributor	Spelling-Goldberg Productions  Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment	Starring	Kate Jackson Farrah Fawcett-Majors Jaclyn Smith David Doyle
Case	Transparent Soft Brackley
RPI	$36.95	Music	Jack Elliott Allyn Ferguson

    This of course allows us to indulge in comparisons between the original three TV Angels in Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett-Majors and the film reborn Angels in Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. Just to be clear here, we are not talking comparisons about action abilities. The TV show was nothing more than pure sex appeal, with just enough of a hint of action to enable the feminist lobby see these ladies as strong, female characters doing heavy duty stuff. Yeah, right. I am quite sure that having Farrah Fawcett-Majors prancing around in tops designed to highlight breasts was all about strong female characters. The film version has never interested me and as far as I know it follows the same formula - hopefully with a bit more emphasis on the action bits.

    Angels Under Cover brings us two episodes from the first season of the television show. Why do we know that it is the first season? Because the aforementioned Farrah Fawcett-Majors left at the end of the first season and was replaced by Cheryl Ladd. The two episodes on offer are:

    To Kill An Angel - wherein Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith) is out with a hot date at a local amusement park when the young autistic boy manages to get a hold of a gun dropped by a fleeing hitman. Not realizing that it is a real gun, he points it and pulls the trigger - which is of serious consequence to Kelly as she is struck by the bullet. The young boy runs off but the chase is on from the rest of the Angels to locate him before the hitmen locate him. This high-powered action episode (not) sees the Angels doing some really typical fluff-weight investigation to not only locate the boy but his mother, and everything is cool - as it always was on Charlie's Angels.

    Night Of The Strangler - or more commonly remembered as the episode where Kelly models a white bikini (well, that is how I remembered it). A woman is strangled to death with a rag doll and the Angels have to go undercover in the modelling industry to unearth the (slightly improbable) answer as to who the murderer is. Unfortunately, despite the presence of Jill Monroe (Farrah Fawcett-Majors) and Sabrina Duncan (Kate Jackson) helping Kelly, another woman is murdered - the wife of the prime suspect of the first murder. When a third woman is almost murdered, the most incredible detective investigation comes up with the improbable answer to the almost triple murder.

    Well, I never did hold a high opinion of the stories used in Charlie's Angels, but in the light of twenty-five years of not having seen them, the stories are even worse then I recalled. Coupled with what could only be loosely described as acting, and action sequences that barely rate much above boring, it is staggering how bad the series actually seems twenty-five years later. However, the shows remain mildly entertaining for much the same reasons as it did twenty-five years ago: three attractive women parading around in 1970s style sexy clothing looking like three attractive women. It worked in 1976 and it works in 2001! Suffice it to say, I apologize for comments made in other reviews about the appalling quality of television in the last ten years - the appalling quality actually dates back at least twenty-five years. Did we really watch this stuff so avidly back in 1976?

    Charlie's Angels-Angels Under Cover is a seriously dated product from the wacky era known as the 1970s, complete with bell-bottoms and all. As a flashback to those heady days when nipples poking through tops were the height of titillation on American television, this is priceless. As mindless entertainment, there is plenty better around. Quite how or why this still rates an M rating is beyond me, but it is a mildly interesting look back at an era which perhaps we would all prefer not to recall!

Video

    To be fair, the transfer is no better and no worse than I was expecting for television material of this age. The transfer is basically of average sharpness throughout, not too bad but nothing approaching even television programming of much more recent vintage. Detail is reasonable enough, even allowing for the sparse sets, although the entire series seems to have been shot without a huge depth of field in the image. Shadow detail does not play much of a role here, and there are no real complaints at all. Clarity is not too bad but again is a distinct product of its time - or at least the age of the source material. Grain was pretty much a non-issue in broad terms. There did not seem to be any low level noise in the transfer.

    The colour on offer here is also reflective of the age of the source material. Not exactly blessed with deep saturated colours, there is also a slight variability in the colour so that occasionally there is a distinctly improved saturation of colours. The somewhat undersaturated colours are not really objectionable though. The look is reasonably natural and quite watchable. There is certainly no oversaturation noted in the transfer and colour bleed is also not an issue in the transfer.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer. There did not appear to be any significant film-to-video artefacts in the transfer. There is quite a feast of film artefacts in the transfer, and some are quite indicative of source material that has not exactly been well stored: mild mildew type marks are quite noticeable at the beginning of the first episode on the DVD. There are also quite a few scratches and other marks on the source material too. Overall though, the artefacts are not exactly unexpected.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The rather banal dialogue comes up well in the soundtrack and is easy to understand. There are no real indications of audio sync issues in the transfer.

    The musical score for the episodes comes from Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson, but it really is not that distinctive and is fairly representative of the sort of music-by-numbers approach used by most television shows.

    The packaging claims that the soundtrack is one channel mono effort, but it certainly does not sound like it is and PowerDVD indicates two channels. Whilst there is nothing spectacular on offer, at least it gives us something other than a straight centre channel strident sound. It is not much more than that though, but it is easy on the ears and is free from any distortions.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Featurette - Angels Forever (20:38)

Filmographies - Cast and Crew

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris (have a laugh, check out the bio)
27th May, 2001.