Patty Duke and son Sean Astin costar in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom
TV movie titans collide in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom (1981), an Afterschool Special starring Patty Duke and Nancy McKeon. It begins in the typical style of such films, with McKeon’s Nancy Parks comically flying over the handlebars of her bicycle. Sprawled on the ground, she’s introduced to brothers Mike and Brian Reynolds (Lance Guest and Sean Astin). In the rare meet cute that intersects with child abuse, Nancy and Mike learn they’re new neighbors and will attend the same high school.
While the teenagers make eyes at each other, Barbara Reynolds (Patty Duke) angrily drags the younger Brian inside. The camera rests on the home’s exterior as she yells at him. We feel unsettled, a condition that extends to Nancy’s conversation with BFF Judy (Deena Freeman) about prom wear. “I blew my clothes allowance this month on a fantastic sweater,” Nancy admits. “So what do I wear to the prom?” She envisions unaffordable designer jeans.
It’s cloudy with a chance of racism in Storm Warning.
A genre-blending mess of a film that takes frosty relations between in-laws to extremes, Storm Warning is also notable for its unusual denouement, in which Ginger Rogers is lashed (seven times!) with a whip. Alas, that is only the beginning of her suffering — her pregnant sister still has to die in her arms. We could debate whether Warning is more film noir or melodrama, but the question I kept returning to was whether its final 20 minutes might qualify as a primitive iteration of torture porn.
There are endless ways to confront the pedestrian stressors and ennui many of us face as we hurtle toward middle age. Sports cars and extramarital affairs are usually the self-treatments of choice for forty-something family men in TV movies (rarer breeds make dirty phone calls), but Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction entices us with a hit of something different. In this 1983 offering that plays like an Afterschool Special for quadragenarians, Dennis Weaver escapes his professional and familial pressures by sniffin’ the devil’s dandruff.
Barbara Mandrell struggles to save a small town from mine fires (and itself) in Burning Rage.
The most depressing thing about Burning Rage, Barbara Mandrell’s dramatic debut, is how contemporary it feels. In this 1984 telefilm, stubborn Americans would rather jeopardize their own safety, and that of their families, than listen to government scientists. There’s even a scene in which menacing goons try to prevent a scientist from conducting important research. They slink off when told, “Now if you have any problems with that you best take it up with the federal government!” These days, such an invitation might elicit a very different response.
Mommie Dearest not included, I just couldn’t resist using that photo.
Day #7: The final film in our Mother’s Day marathon is The Truth About Jane(2000), a Lifetime ditty about the inability of mother Janice (Stockard Channing) to accept the lesbianism of her teenage daughter Jane (Ellen Muth). Costarring James Naughton and RuPaul, The Truth About Jane contains many scenes set at a dining room table. Each and every time, without fail, I thought of late comedian Bob Smith’s Thanksgiving joke (“Please pass the gravy to a homosexual”) and laughed.
Day #6: Motherhood was often at the center of Rue McClanahan’s TV movies, whether she was in a starring or supporting role. We still have a few of those titles left to tackle, but today’s retrospective is of her most frustrating portrayal of motherhood: Baby of the Bride. The middle entry in her early ’90s Margret Hix series finds her unexpectedly pregnant at 53, and boy is her husband a rat about it.
Day #5: For today’s new review we’re looking back on My Mother’s Secret Life, a tawdry 1984 telefilm starring Amanda Wyss as a teenager in search of her birth mom following the death of her father. It brings her to the doorstep of a glamorous San Francisco call girl played by Loni Anderson. This was my greatest surprise of the week. It’s thoroughly ridiculous and that’s why it works in spite of itself.
Day #4:Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? is the mother of all TV movie questions, and today we’ll look back at that film, which was reviewed here last year. This one should be extra special to gay viewers not just because of the title and Tori Spelling (or costar Ivan Sergei, of The Opposite of Sex), but because the titular mother was played by the marvelous Lisa Banes. Banes, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident last year, was survived by her wife.
Day #3: We have a new review today, of Sins of the Mother. In this nasty little 1991 adaptation of a true crime book, Elizabeth Montgomery plays a manipulative mother unaware of her son’s violent secret life—and the role her abuse has played in it. Montgomery was one of the earliest (and busiest) queens of the TV movie, and later this year I’ll write about more of her work.
Day #2: Today we’re revisiting Mother Knows Best. We first watched this 1997 black comedy in January and were surprised by its hilarity. Joanna Kerns plays against type as the mother-in-law from hell, a socialite who consults a hitman when her daughter (Christine Elise) mortifies her by marrying a blue collar man (Grant Show).
Day #1: It’s May 2nd and our first post, a look at the 1981 Afterschool Special Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom, is live!
Mark your calendars! Unless my dog eats my computer, we’ll kick off a one-week celebration of Mother’s Day on May 2nd. Every day through the 8th we’ll feature a TV movie about motherhood, blending all-new content with some reposts of other mom-centric reviews.
It’s a rehearsal for a more ambitious project I might undertake later this year, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s definitely not kid-tested or mother-approved, but you can get in the mood ahead of time by listening to Lucille Bluth sing “Rose’s Turn.”
Beginning on the 2nd, I’ll “sticky” this post and update it daily with the appropriate link, and of course you can also subscribe to the site below (or track updates via RSS) if you’re a masochist.
Susan Lucci is a diminutive mafioso in Lady Mobster.
Susan Lucci’s Laurel Castle doesn’t come right out and quote Michael Corleone in Lady Mobster, but her behavior toward the heads of other crime families echoes something Michael told his consigliere: “I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Tom. Just my enemies. That’s all.”
In this pulpy 1988 TV movie, Laurel has enemies from way back. A hitman killed her parents when she was a teenager, and slashed her face before fleeing from the police. (Her wound heals nicely, sparing her the fate of Judith Anderson’s Lady Scarface.) Her father was targeted for trying to take mafioso Victor Castle (Joseph Wiseman) legit, a crusade Laurel resumes as a young attorney.
Kenny Rogers has a pint-sized pit crew in Six Pack.
The ’80s were a cinematically magical time, when tenderhearted country music superstars couldn’t stop adopting ragtag groups of orphans. Dolly Parton did so to memorably trippy effect in A Smoky Mountain Christmas (1986), but her “Islands in the Stream” duet partner Kenny Rogers beat her to the punch four years earlier, in Six Pack.
Eyes twinkling with mischief, majestic beard shining proudly, Rogers stars as washed-up racer Brewster Baker. Sabotaged and sold out to sponsors by his former head mechanic, Terk (Terry Kiser), Brewster’s career is circling the drain. He’s stranded in the john of a dilapidated gas station in Texas when thieves make off with his race car’s new engine, which he can’t afford to replace.
Dame Judith Anderson’s had enough of everyone’s crap in Lady Scarface.
Judith Anderson’s reputation as a titan of the stage didn’t always translate to her film work, as Lady Scarface demonstrates. Released a year after her Oscar-nominated turn as Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Scarface, an RKO production, was B-list all the way. Screenwriters Arnaud d’Usseau and Richard Collins struggled to fill its 66-minute runtime, but it has a few sweet moments, and best of all, Anderson’s given the bulk of its hardboiled dialogue.
Her Slade, the ruthless head of a crime gang, distinguishes herself early, during a heist at the Chicago Securities Building. “You gonna leave this guy here to yap to the police?” one of her associates asks about the hostage forking over the safe’s combination. “When we leave here, his yappin’ days are over!” she replies. True to her word, he’s shot. During their escape, a disguised Slade is literally run into by Lt. Bill Mason (Dennis O’Keefe), who takes a moment to apologize — after all, she is a lady.
Judith Anderson’s a gun-wielding crime boss in Lady Scarface.
I hadn’t planned on posting anything here until Monday, when we’ll tackle Judith Anderson’s Lady Scarface, but the mailwoman just dropped something off that changed all that. Behold, French Silk (and read on for its gonzo back cover and a special YouTube treat).
As Delta Burke’s Maternal Instincts, a USA Network howler that premiered in 1996, reminds us, some women would die to be mothers—and others would kill for the same privilege. Her Tracy Patterson, an infertile former realtor whose biological clock could explode at any moment, technically belongs to both categories.
Dr. Eve Warden (Beth Broderick), a fertility specialist, cautions Tracy and her husband, Stan (Tom Mason), to be realistic. “Even if all goes well, there’s only a small percentage of success.” Tracy’s sure she’ll be part of that exclusive, odds-defying club, and has already purchased an antique cradle and selected a name for her daughter. Stan, who spoils his wife but can’t give her the one thing she wants the most, isn’t as sure.
