Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Author: Cranky Lesbian Page 2 of 54

Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.

With a Vengeance: Melissa Gilbert’s Memorable Amnesia Thriller

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On January 31, 2024

In TV Movies

Melissa Gilbert and Matthew Lawrence in With a Vengeance.

If there’s a sensitive ’80s sitcom dad you never expected would chase Little House on the Prairie’s Half-Pint through the woods with a bloody knife and murder in his eyes, it’s probably Steven Keaton of Family Ties. (Give Jason Seaver a little coke or booze and who knows what he’s capable of doing.) That element of surprise lends a subversive jolt to the opening scenes of With a Vengeance, a 1992 TV movie also known as Undesirable, when Frank Tanner (Michael Gross) frenziedly slashes a Washington mother and her children to death and sets off after Melissa Gilbert, the only witness to the crime.

Six years later, she’s living in California as Jenna King, a nanny who breaks down when her newest employer, Mike Barcetti (Jack Scalia, Sweet Deception), questions her phony background. She admits to living under an assumed name and tearfully confesses “I don’t know where I went to high school. I don’t know if I went to high school. I don’t know where my family is. I don’t know if I have a family. The truth is, I don’t even know who I am.” Luckily for her, he’s not just a ruggedly handsome single father but a tenacious DOJ attorney determined to help cure her amnesia and uncover her true identity.

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Stillwatch: Lynda Carter and Angie Dickinson Collide

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On January 26, 2024

In TV Movies

Lynda Carter in Stillwatch.

Lynda Carter’s shoulder pads are so impressively broad at times in Stillwatch (1987) that she resembles David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. You might optimistically wonder if the cushioning is tactical, meant to provide protection during that most sacred of ’80s primetime rituals: a catfight. But Patricia Traymore, her TV journalist, is too refined for that. Her inevitable showdown with scheming Senator Abigail Winslow (Angie Dickinson) results in a single slap.

A profiler of celebrities and politicians, Patricia’s been lured to Washington, D.C. by veteran newsman Luther Pelham (Stuart Whitman) to interview Winslow, who’s in the running to replace an ailing vice president. “I’ve always felt that the public’s right to know ends where my private life begins,” Abigail uncooperatively maintains, even though she’s a public servant whose career was built on the premature death of her congressman husband. Naturally, there are skeletons in her closet — and a few in Patricia’s, as well.

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Lies Before Kisses: Jaclyn Smith’s Tawdry Neo-Noir

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On January 12, 2024

In TV Movies

Jaclyn Smith schemes and seduces in Lies Before Kisses.

When we think of femme fatales, we don’t usually imagine scheming seductresses in mom jeans and cutesy vests. But Jaclyn Smith (In the Arms of a Killer, The Night They Saved Christmas) remains true to her early ’90s Kmart aesthetic in Lies Before Kisses (1991), even as she rushes from one clandestine meeting to the next, leaving a trail of besotted men — and planted evidence — in her wake.

The duality of her Elaine ‘Lainey’ Sanders, wife of publishing magnate Grant (Ben Gazzara), is exposed at their daughter’s birthday party. After a catering snafu leaves them cakeless, she graciously insists “Don’t worry. If we have to, we’ll put some candles on the pâté.” Her mood darkens moments later, once she overhears Grant on the phone with a mystery woman. Rather than confront her husband, she calls the catering company to unleash hell. Lainey is used to getting her way.

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Obsessed: Shannen Doherty’s Fatal Attraction

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On January 1, 2024

In TV Movies

Shannen Doherty channels Isabelle Adjani in Obsessed.

The early ’90s were a cinematic golden age of gorgeous obsessives scheming seaside in trash, glorious trash, and while Obsessed (1992), Shannen Doherty’s entry in that sweepstakes, was made for ABC, it has the lurid spirit of a Cinemax special. Your hopes will soar from its opening scenes, when her Lorie Brindel, a marine surveyor in her early-to-mid twenties, is dispatched to appraise a yacht for insurance purposes and arrives in her finest miniskirt, appallingly baby-voiced and flirtatious with a silver-haired client, Ed Bledsoe (William Devane).

“I’ve seen a lot of boats but not many this old, in this kind of shape, Mr. Bledsoe,” she coos, impressed by the majesty of his vessel. You’re forgiven for anticipating the strains of “bom-chicka-wawa” on the soundtrack, and that’s before she admiringly runs her hand along his yacht’s woodwork as he grins like a Cheshire cat. They show some propriety by arranging a dinner date, and their first tryst — a very ’90s ordeal with excessive closeups of limbs entangled in white sheets (and Lorie reverently kissing Ed’s saggy chest) — is scored with the same saxophone music that accompanied all sex in TV movies during the Clinton administration.

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Deadly Whispers: Tony Danza’s Odd Turn as a Murderous Father

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On December 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Tony Danza and Pamela Reed in Deadly Whispers.

Imagine Tony Danza in a frilly dress and sun hat, clutching a parasol and drawling “Fiddle-dee-dee! Ashley Wilkes told me he likes to see a girl with a healthy appetite!” and you’ll have some idea of the absurdity of his casting in Deadly Whispers (1995). The extent to which he mangles an exaggerated Southern accent is hard to overstate; when he says “Yo missin’ The Waltons” (rather than “You’re missing”) only 10 minutes into the movie, you might laugh harder than you ever did at Who’s the Boss?

Unfortunately for Danza, Deadly Whispers isn’t supposed to be funny. In this thinly veiled dramatization of the 1987 murder of Kathy Bonney, he plays Virginia salvage yard owner Tom Acton, the last person to see his troubled teenage daughter Kathy (Heather Tom) alive before she disappears. A high school dropout who answers the phones at Tom’s business — he doesn’t need the help but refuses to let her out of his sight — she defiantly teases her hair and bares her midriff in pursuit of a married coworker.

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The Seduction of Gina: Valerie Bertinelli Gambles

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On December 19, 2023

In TV Movies

Valerie Bertinelli accessorizes in The Seduction of Gina.

From California Split to Croupier and Uncut Gems, women are often afterthoughts in movies about gambling. Jeanne Moreau’s compulsive gambler in Bay of Angels (1963) is a notable exception, a deadbeat mom whose desperation is evident in her haunted eyes and peroxide-blonde hair. “The first time I walked into a casino, I felt like I was in church,” she recalls in that film, a romanticization not quite echoed by Valerie Bertinelli’s Gina Breslin* in The Seduction of Gina (1984).

Gina’s gambling is less about spiritual communion than emotional immaturity and marital ennui: “I feel like I’m single, except I can’t date,” she moans to best friend Mary (Dinah Manoff) as they loll around the college campus where she studies art. It’s a problem of her own making — husband David (Fredric Lehne), a young physician, warned against tagging along for his intern year, worried she’d be lonely and isolated. She insisted on cohabitating anyway but struggles during his overnight shifts, resorting first to restless late-night baking and then baccarat to keep busy.

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An Afterschool Special Asks, What If I’m Gay?

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On December 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Richard Joseph Paul and Evan Handler in What If I’m Gay?

There comes a moment in What If I’m Gay?, a 1987 CBS Schoolbreak Special, when our teen jock protagonist — the one with gay pornography stashed in his bedroom, its walls adorned with posters of muscled male physiques as if he were Josh Hawley — questions how people know they’re gay. “How can anyone be sure?” he asks Allen (Evan Handler of Sex and the City), a dweeby heterosexual friend who is not yet romantically interested in girls.

For some of us, all it takes is renting the right Gina Gershon film at the age of 14 for those puzzle pieces to fall into place. Others tread more winding paths, like the curious Todd (Richard Joseph Paul) himself, a soccer team captain whose girlfriend has recently started to wonder, after a year of dating, why they never spend time alone. Surely he has some idea, between his choice of reading material and previous (offscreen) sexual encounters with a friend, but acknowledging it’s a struggle.

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A Magical Christmas Village: Marlo Thomas Practices Witchcraft

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On December 1, 2023

In TV Movies

Marlo Thomas and Alison Sweeney in A Magical Christmas Facelift Village.

There’s a mother-daughter horror movie tucked within A Magical Christmas Village (2022), cloaked by spruce and tinsel. But until Hallmark develops a line of greeting cards and snow globes commemorating intergenerational trauma, it must remain suppressed. In its absence we’re left with another holiday romance between a hardworking single parent and a peripatetic professional, one that again culminates, as is often the case, in a public display of affection cheered by townspeople that seem to voyeuristically assemble specifically for that purpose. (That Brian De Palma hasn’t directed a Hallmark film is one of the great tragedies of his career.)

The players here are Summer Ashby (Alison Sweeney), a small-town architect, and civil engineer Ryan Scott (Luke Macfarlane of A Shoe Addict’s Christmas), whose job takes him around the country. She’s remodeling a city-owned building when he arrives in search of storage space for toy drive donations. It’s an odd request (who wants stuffed animals covered in sawdust?) until you realize her general contractor’s duties primarily consist of moving Christmas trees and adjusting speakers that play seasonal music. Their awkward introduction gives way to instant attraction and the usual ritualized Hallmark bonding over shared values.

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A Mother’s Justice: Meredith Baxter Goes Charles Bronson

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On November 26, 2023

In TV Movies

Meredith Baxter and G.W. Bailey in A Mother’s Justice.

There are worse tales of maternal vigilantism than Meredith Baxter’s A Mother’s Justice: John Schlesinger’s notorious Eye for an Eye, starring Sally Field, springs immediately to mind. But don’t take that as an endorsement of Baxter’s film, which premiered on NBC in 1991 and found a second home on Lifetime. It’s still quite bad, just not as grotesque as Field’s revenge fantasy. The closest it comes is a misguided scene at an Italian restaurant that brings new meaning to the slogan “When you’re here, you’re family.”

Justice, directed by Noel Nosseck (No One Would Tell), opens suspensefully, with a predator prowling the streets. His abduction of Debbie (Carrie Hamilton), a 23-year-old aspiring nurse, is more graphic than her subsequent rape, which she immediately reports to police. Det. Bogardus (Blu Mankuma) assures her it wasn’t her fault and awkwardly tells her “I know I’m the same color as the man who attacked you, but I just want you to know, we get ’em in all colors. Like I said, don’t worry. If he goes on, we’ll get him.”

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Faye Dunaway Crashes A Family Thanksgiving

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On November 19, 2023

In TV Movies

Faye Dunaway stuffs a turkey with dermal fillers in Hallmark’s A Family Thanksgiving.

There are those who will watch A Family Thanksgiving (2010) for the reassuring comforts of its adherence to Hallmark formula: nothing says the holidays quite like an ambitious, career-driven woman realizing the error of her ways in a festive family setting. A second, smaller group of us merely want to hear Faye Dunaway cry “Tina, bring me the carving knife!”, an opportunity that screenwriter Emily Baer senselessly squandered.

Minor consolation can be found in Dunaway’s Stevie Nicks meets Mother Goose wardrobe and ill-fitting wig, which might’ve been salvaged from a drag bar’s dumpster after a What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? revue. A Family Thanksgiving is also saucier than the average Hallmark offering, featuring both scatological humor and — heavens to Betsy! — sex. It’s not often you see the heroine tear off her love interest’s clothes in one of these movies, but don’t get too excited: it’s made less unseemly by a time-travel loophole that places the action within the bonds of holy matrimony.

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