Doing Spooktober every year as I do is arguably a weird choice, given I do not in fact particularly care for horror. I’m a huge King devotee, to the extent that I have That Really Unpopular Opinion About The Shining. But beyond that, I don’t spend a lot of time exploring the genre. I’ve read the script to Halloween III, but I’ve never actually seen it. Much less the scads of other movies that appear to be of even lower quality that Tom Atkins has appeared in over the years. Though to be fair, it’s not as though those ‘90s Rockford Files movies are very good, either.
When I was a child, I actually knew him best from his episode of M*A*S*H, “The Tooth Shall Set You Free,” wherein he played an officer who was doing his level best to get as many black soldiers out of his unit as he could, either by arranging for them to go home or by sending them into danger. And let’s be clear, it’s not that great of a stretch to imagine Lieutenant Diel doing the same sort of thing. I don’t remember if we ever get explicit racism from him, though goodness knows it wouldn’t surprise me, but most of the officers on that show are awful in one way or another.
He has done an awful lot of horror, though. More than a dozen entries in the genre, including some that even I know are considered classics. I know Halloween III is divisive, but The Fog is pretty popular. He did a couple of movies with that John Carpenter guy, whose career was clearly one to keep your eye on. Oh, perhaps Maniac Cop—with Bruce Campbell and Robert Z’Dar, two of the biggest chins in the business—is not so highly regarded. And I’ll admit to immediate distrust of any movie which has a tagline for a plot summary on IMDb, especially if it also has two directors. But then there’s Creepshow?
Honestly he seems to have spent most of his career swinging back and forth between cop shows and horror movies. There are a few other stops along the way, such as the aforementioned M*A*S*H, an episode of Xena, and the movie Bob Roberts. But easily eighty percent of his career is either detective or horror adjacent. He’s also done the legitimate theatre in Pittsburgh, his hometown, a fair amount. It’s also worth noting that, when I say he did Creepshow, I mean both the movie and the recent TV show, because he’s still acting and he’s still doing horror.
He sums up his first movie—a detective picture starring Frank Sinatra—with “it’s not like we were doing Shakespeare.” I’d imagine he’d agree with that as a summary for a lot of his career. But even if it’s not Shakespeare, even Titus Andronicus, it is at least memorable. And he has worked with a phenomenal list of people. Even the stuff I’ve never heard of will often turn out to have at least one person of not beside him. If Bruiser is a lesser horror film, it’s a lesser George Romero-directed horror film with Peter Stormare, you know? And at least now I can connect Kevin Bacon and Robert Z’Dar, because that’s more my thing than either of the movies in question.