THE STAR CHAMBER (1983)

Netflix is probably recommending this movie to a whole bunch of people right now, what with its theme of 'avenging the miscarriages of justice.'  The examples of the law failing to right wrongs provided here are much more outlandish than merely a mother murdering a child.  A man who enjoys murdering old ladies for their welfare checks is released scot-free because the detectives improperly searched his trash for the gun, and a pair of child murdering pornographers are let go because the unpaid parking tickets that led to their initial arrest were actually paid off so they never should have been pulled over in the first place.  Judge Michael Douglas is fed up with all the criminals being set free to commit more crime so he joins a shadowy cabal of judges led by Hal Holbrook who hire hitmen to take out the thugs that the court system is just powerless to stop.  Guess we know how they feel about the death penalty.

Those two examples above were actually based on rulings in California around the time the film was made that were later overturned by the Supreme Court.  Nowadays, cops can search your trash if you put it at the curb and as long as they pull you over in good faith it doesn't matter if it turns out later they shouldn't have.  I don't know why Michael Douglas is holding a gun on the cover for this since he never holds a gun in the film; on closer inspection, this hand is poorly photoshopped.  The movie never stoops to the level of having the judges run around with guns shooting at each other.  Its particular brand of schlocky pseudo-exploitation thrills come mostly from talking.  That might sound terrible, but this movie is stocked to the point of bursting with the finest breed of character actors who know how to elevate the material.

Larry Hankin, probably best known as the crazy neighbor on the early seasons of Friends, is one of the cops searching for a gun in the trash.  One of the two cops who pull over the creeps under false pretense is played by Charles Hallahan, an actor I know best from The Thing and whose biography on IMDB has possible the greatest first sentence ever: "Beefy, Philadelphia-born Charles Hallahan was often cast as cops, both good and bad, mainly because the map of Ireland was written all over his face."  The other cop is played by David Proval, today best know as Richie Aprile on The Sopranos, who has the difficult task of playing a cop so nervous he gets gutted on the witness stand by a public defender.

Not enough?  Yaphet Kotto, James Bond Villain and early Alien victim, appears as a dogged detective.  Jack Kehoe, the bookkeeper from The Untouchables, plays a slimy public defender.  DeWayne Jessie, Otis Day of Otis Day and the Knights from Animal House, plays a supposedly excellent car thief who sweats bathtubs during an amateurish, failed job.  The two child-murdering pornographers, who later turn out to be just harmless PCP cookers, are played by Don Calfa, the mortician from Return of the Living Dead, and Joe Regalbuto who co-starred as Frank on Murphy Brown for years.

Holy shit, there's just a few more.  These are just the assholes I recognized right away.  James Sikking, who plays some Starfleet asshat in Star Trek: Search for Spock, turns up as a victim's father who does a shitty job avenging him when the justice system fails to; if you're going to attempt a vigilante shooting in a courtroom, don't shout 'Goddamn you!' so loud that everybody turns to look at you before you've even started shooting.  And Bud Bundy himself David Faustino shows up as Michael Douglas's son.  All these actors, except Faustino whose scenes are too brief, really make the most of the sometimes ridiculous story they're in.  When one of the creeps is released and exclaims "God Bless Fucking America" right there in the courtroom, your heart will warm a little.

Even the director Peter Hyams is like the character actor of directors.  He made Capricorn One, the movie about a faked mars mission, he also made Outland, which is High Noon in space with Sean Connery.  Then he made 2010 which struggles to get out of the shadow of 2001 and almost succeeds by being a completely different type of movie.  Holy balls, he also made The Presidio where Sean Connery beats up guys with just his thumbs and Stay Tuned, one of those TV is the Devil movies that wasn't half bad.  Plus he made Timecop, Sudden Death, The Relic, End of Days, The Musketeer, A Sound of Thunder and many others I left out.  You can't pin this Hyams fella down, that's for damn sure.

So good acting and good directing make up for the TV movie storyline.  Hal Holbrook spends his whole first scene stealing the movie by only talking about Chinese food.  Old lawyers or judges talking about Chinese food always seems to steal the show (see John Mahoney in Primal Fear).  Hal Holbrook would probably play this same part if the movie were made today.  None of the other judges in his fun murder club even have names that I remember hearing except for the one that commits suicide in the beginning and is replaced by Michael Douglas.  Nobody really seems to care about the Judge who killed himself.  I guess they all know that he had to do it or else Michael Douglas wouldn't end up in their special little group and then we wouldn't have a movie.

Some parts of this movie don't ring true.  A poor nervous policeman is harassed on the witness stand by a public defender.  Aren't policeman tough, not to mention smart, sons-of-bitches that practice courtroom testimony?  Aren't public defenders notoriously overworked and prone to short cuts and mistakes?  And nobody in this movie ever seems to make the argument, even halfheartedly, that the same rules that protect the scumbags also protect the wrongly accused.  One of the later examples of a 'technicality' that lets a murderer go free is a stenographer using his own secret code language before his sudden death which leaves the case without a complete transcript.  You can call me some sort of bleeding heart, but if you lose the entire record of a case other than the guilty verdict, I think you've fucked up enough that you have to let the guy go.  Just let that be more incentive to never fuck up that bad again.

These movies about the flaws of the legal system almost always seem to focus on the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the judges, the cops, or anybody in the entire world except the juries.  Why not juries?  They make the ultimate decision.  In real life, people were pissed at the juries in the Casey Anthony or OJ Simpson cases; they were mad at plenty of other people too, but in the movies it always seems assumed that if you could just get the case to the jury, of course they would vote to convict.  The reason is probably that audiences don't want to see a movie about government employees hunting down and killing jurors, no matter what verdict they hand in.