Night of the Juggler: long-unavailable 1980 cult thriller getting a 4K release

Last Updated on March 4, 2025

For one reason or another, studio vaults are chockfull of movies that have become all but impossible to see nowadays – at least legitimately. We’ve written at length about movies that are surprisingly hard to find, but it’s rare that a mainstream movie exists that never made it to DVD – much less Blu-ray. Such is the case with Columbia’s Night of the Juggler, a well-regarded 1980 thriller starring James Brolin as an ex-NYC cop searching for his daughter, who’s been kidnapped by a psycho (played by future Angel star Cliff Gorman).

A cool, seedy-looking exploitation flick, Night of the Juggler only ever came out on a ratty-old VHS from Media (a low-budget company), with most existing prints of the movie being ripped from sporadic TV showings. Now, our friends at Blu-ray.com have revealed that Kino Lorber is giving the film not only a Blu-ray release but a 4K one to boot.

If you’re a fan of sleazy, late-seventies/early-eighties grindhouse cinema, Night of the Juggler is for you. It features James Brolin, just before he made The Amityville Horror, at his best as a tough-guy cop, with Gorman a memorably sleazy psycho. The movie was shot on location in NYC, and it offers an evocative look at the city back when it was a much scuzzier place. 

There’s no news yet on when exactly the disc will come out, but this is definitely a cool event for genre fans, with this a fun example of vintage “revenge-o-matic”, which is a term coined by Quentin Tarantino for the various Death Wish clones that came out in that era. It’s also a cool look at what might have been had Brolin, who returned to TV not long after the movie (to star in the long-running drama Hotel), had stuck with exploitation flicks. Maybe we would have become the next Charles Bronson? Fun fact: in 1982, Brolin came very close to being hired to play James Bond in Octopussy. Even though he was American (he adopted a mid-Atlantic accent for the role), EON was high on him, and would have given him the part had they not been up against a rival Bond movie (Never Say Never Again) starring Sean Connery. Check out his (really good) screen test here!