When Mark Hamill retired Luke Skywalker in 1983, his career did not die. However, he also curated a very intentional body of work to distance himself from his iconic character. As opposed to bawdy TV actors like Adam West or William Shatner, whose careers became largely about touting their stardom in their respective niches, Hamill demanded to be taken seriously. This meant his successes were largely outside, and remain largely outside of, live-action film.

However, he did make several films throughout the late eighties into the early nineties, and I’d venture that none of them are great. However, there are elements to all that are enjoyable, even if many are TV movies or films made for home video release. Several of these films- Body Bags, Slipstream, Night of the Eagles, and Midnight Ride– are available to stream right now on Tubi for free, if you happen to have a penchant for any genres herein. That said, I can recommend none in good conscious.

This list is not to ignore his late-career successes. Hamill re-defined the animated character of the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, all the while he was making these films. He also pre-dated many of these roles with Broadway productions, many of them very successful. Mark Hamill had largely a very vibrant and successful career as an actor with a great deal of talent. Many of the following roles, the good, the bad, or the ugly, still reflect this talent regardless of overall quality.

The Good

The highlights of this watch are still not without their own eccentricities. One of the better films is a Leonard Hill TV movie called Earth Angel. Earth Angel is a formula that draws the very popular guardian angel plots of the time, probably motivated by the resurgence of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Earth Angel follows a popular-girl prom queen played by Cathy Podewell of Dallas fame as a ghost, where she trots along her own quest to find who she needs to help. Podewell is doing what Scott Bakula did every week on Quantum Leap, but as an actual agent of heaven.

The story is full of fun elements. Podewell starts on a red herring course, following a high schooler name Cindy, played by a dead-lookalike of Winona Ryder, as she gets berated in purgatory by her old high school principal when she gets off track — again, in Quantum Leap this character was Albert (Dean Stockwell). The prologue to this entire story is an awkward miniature story all of its own. Long before deepfake technology attempted to make older actors young, this film simply places middle-aged actors in high school. One of these actors is Hamill himself.

The movie hits its stride far past the extended prologue, but the early scenes are where Mark Hamill gets to shine, and he has terrific chemistry with Podewell. In the end, her journey to heaven is tied to him, and his way to a happily ever after. On that pathway, there are several very convincing scenes of Hamill playing the saxophone in a jazz club, which I suspect are not actually him. Mark Hamill plays the nerd with tremendous gravitas, and this may be the best attenuation of his Skywalker-style of character without entirely attempting to remake the character from scratch.

The second is John Carpenter’s TV assemblage, Body Bags, a collection of three short films with Carpenter playing as a ghoulish emcee that tells the tales of various dead bodies in a morgue. Carpenter is the master of low budget, so the TV movie is a thriving art form, and there are several phenomenal cameos. Mark Hamill appears in the final short, Eye, which is the only film in the collection not directed by Carpenter. Eye isn’t tremendously complicated. Hamill, a ballplayer, gets an experimental surgery after a car accident that gorged out his eye. His new eye he receives makes him see strange visions. What happens next is hardly worth spoiling if you have even the slightest interest in these genre stories. Its predicable, but its execution has a disarming charm and, of course, the story isn’t meant to be bewilderingly subversive. It’s a great performance for Hamill, who gets to go completely unhinged in a way that no other film in this list necessitated.

The Bad

It’s not fair to call any of these singularly derivative. The late eighties epitomized schlock. Anything that promised more financial turnaround was xeroxed as many times as possible by anyone looking for a quick buck. The Last Starfighter or Joe Dante’s Navigators being an inspiration for Lazerhawk is a perfect example of this. The lead-in for Lazerhawk is one of the best- a UFO is kidnapping people for some unknown reason, and the only explanation lies in the dreams of a group of teenagers and a comic book made by someone named M.K. Ultra.

While the actual story promises an interesting conceit, the second half is plot-light and relies heavily on contrivance to bring the characters from one place to another, making even a low-budget ripoff like this a passable entry at best. Hamill’s side plot, though thin, is plenty interesting. The tragedy is that it barely begins before it abruptly ends. He’s killed off shortly after his entry into the main plot, and his replacement is some badly-written comic relief. It’s a great pitch, but the teenagers aren’t very charming and the payoff lacks any kind of pathos, which you’ll find a remnant of even in the most obscure Roger Corman movie.

Corman appears as one of Hamill’s employers well after he’d established himself as a go-to voiceover artist. Shortly after the 1988 film Watchers, Corman took the premise and turned it into three sequels. It’s hard to know whether Dean Koontz or the first adaptation took its premise a bit more seriously, but Corman had distilled the idea into its core elements, making it fun but ultimately ludicrous.

The final entry was called Watchers Reborn, acting as both a sequel and a reboot. The monster looks like a cheap Halloween costume, and the premise distills down to “Bigfoot Vs. Lassie.” The dog is the hero of this story, and in the original the dog’s owner was a young teen boy. In this, it’s a hardened cop, played by none other than Mark Hamill. His journey is heartwarming, and the script isn’t half bad, alongside a surprisingly smart ending. Still, Watchers Reborn is beyond the pale of anything resembling serious entertainment.

The Guyver from 1991 uses Hamill as almost exactly the same character, but completely forgoes any attempt at serious entertainment. It pre-empts a style that would make producer Haim Saban millions of dollars with Power Rangers just a few years later. Hopefully, this gives you a sense of what The Guyver strives to be. The character is from an anime series, but The Guyver postures itself as an early superhero attempt, though well before any serious filmmaker cracked the code for making successful superhero movies. Instead, they lean into the camp factor. As an example — by the end battle, the only villain who escapes, presumably to be featured in the sequel, is gangster-rapper hybrid monster M.C. Striker played by Jimmie Walker. The Guyver is chock full of silly one liners, blubbering lackies, and an all-you-can-eat kung-fu buffet. While absolutely the most fun to watch, and filled with beautiful character design elevating it beyond another rubber-suit monster fest, The Guyver is ludicrous. It features comic book storytelling in its early years, and this era is far better represented by Sam Rami’s Darkman from the same year, which at the very least learned something from the Tim Burton Batman films.

The ugly

Most of the entries here have had relatively low budgets. Often low budget movies are charming in their own way. Great actors are not always discovered, and live on in small budget features. The look of a monster can be hidden by waiting to show it in the light, as was done in earlier entry Watchers Reborn (though it would have been dramatically improved if they had not shown the monster at all). Rarely is something totally unsalvageable. However, low budget movies, at their worst, are just like many large budget movies at their worst. If something fundamentally fails in the execution of a film, it can mean an excruciating watch.

Night of the Eagles, like Lazerhawk, is better in its first half than its last. But while Lazerhawk had some budget to work with, allowing for the underwritten space battle to at least simulate an epic conclusion, Night of the Eagles is a micro-budget romance and lives by the dramatic turns it makes. It also hurts all the more to see Christopher Lee, one of the most tremendous on-screen presences of all time, do little more than sit there and motion through the badly paced and confusing second-half.

The first half sketches out its characters well enough, although the film is a pale shadow of the David Lean style of modern cinematic melodrama. By the second half, Night of the Eagles is careless with its storytelling, writing off Mark Hamill, who plays a German sympathizer, by a quick and pathetic death. The early section promises at least a pale look into the psyche of the Nazis, but makes no use of the setup and the fallout is far greater than in any other entry. If you wish to analyze the psyche of a fascist soldier, you can’t phone-in every element of the ending scenes.

Slipstream is a shoe-in for this list, in that it’s by far the most messy, and easily the most ambitious. Slipstream could have, if done right, given Mad Max a run for its money, or acted as the American equivalent of Stalker. This is obviously not the case. The post-apocalyptic world is rendered nearly incoherent in a series of settings that never full gel in any meaningful way. Bob Peck and Bill Paxton are the film’s true heroes, but they’re overshadowed in reputation by Mark Hamill with his dyed blonde hair acting as the bounty hunter, Tasker, chasing Peck’s character, Byron.

There are so many ideas here: Byron is an android who learns to love. Paxton’s character, Matt Owens, begins much like Tasker, cold and detached, but learns to find solace in Byron’s companionship. The story sets up idea after idea but tees nothing off. No conflict the film poses is any real threat. Tasker captures Owens and Byron in the second half, but they easily make a run for it. They are captured inside a castle in the second half, but once again trot off without overcoming much of any obstacle, and no major plot progressions seem connected to one another.

What makes Slipstream’s legacy all the more confounding is that it could have been the next Star Wars, but was rendered a mess the likes of which makes Waterworld look good. Produced by Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz off of The Dark Crystal, it seems as if Kurtz legacy was a poison pill. Not all of his films were as bad as this, certainly not the aforementioned, but all of them were as middling at best, and total duds at worst. He was an artistic force behind The Thief and the Cobbler, one of the worst production schedules ever, having gone on for twenty-eight years, and the dark terrifying Oz sequel produced by Disney, Return to Oz. Needless to say, alongside Kurtz, Mark Hamill having made a few ridiculous films is hardly worth scoffing at. Even in a dud like Slipstream, Hamill never lets your eyes leave the screen, and the film mainly suffers when he’s absent. That said, he’s cartoonishly murdered in the final scene.

Hamill’s modern legacy has gathered much retribution for these missteps. Maybe this is because more than half of these entries include Hamill dying just as he did in Slipstream, ensuring that he could disappear from these franchises as if he had never existed. Hard to argue it wasn’t for the best.