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Category: TV Movies Page 8 of 13

Dial ‘M’ for Murder: The Angie Dickinson Remake

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On October 24, 2022

In TV Movies

Angie Dickinson with Ron Moody in Dial ‘M’ for Murder.

Onscreen adultery rarely looked more glamorous than when it was being committed by Angie Dickinson, who followed her turn as one of the more significant straying spouses in the history of cinema—in Brian De Palma’s 1980 classic, Dressed to Kill—with a TV remake of another notable tale of extramarital betrayal, Dial ‘M’ for Murder. In an intriguing departure from other adaptations of Frederick Knott’s stage play, Dickinson was 50 years old when she tackled the role of Margot Wendice—twice as old as Grace Kelly, who played Margot in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder (1954).

That Dickinson’s Margot and Christopher Plummer’s Tony Wendice are an age-appropriate pairing subtly reconfigures their power dynamic. Grace Kelly’s youthfulness, contrasted with the Ray Milland’s cool, mature composure as a retired tennis player, enhanced her character’s vulnerability. In Andrew Davis’ A Perfect Murder, a 1998 remake, Gwyneth Paltrow would’ve been more believable as the daughter, not wife, of an embattled Michael Douglas. Dickinson, who held her own in westerns, exploitation flicks, police fare, and opposite the Rat Pack, was no ingénue by 1981, raising the domestic stakes.

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Kate Jackson Makes the Grade in Satan’s School for Girls

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On October 21, 2022

In TV Movies

Kate Jackson leads a campus recruitment effort in Satan’s School for Girls.

Nearly 50 years after its television debut, Satan’s School for Girls (1973) owes much of its timelessness to Kate Jackson’s devious smile. But it’s strikingly modern in other ways as well, containing portents of the #MeToo movement and alluding to the continued (and comically one-sided) political debate about the merits of a liberal arts education.

We join the action as Martha (Terry Lumley), paranoid in the manner of an Afterschool Special character lost in a bad trip, races to her sister Elizabeth’s place. There she encounters an offscreen menace and is soon found hanging from the rafters. Elizabeth (Pamela Franklin) knows it wasn’t a suicide, despite police labeling Martha “a melancholy girl,” and enrolls at Martha’s alma mater, the Salem Academy for Women, to conduct an undercover investigation.

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Kate Jackson Does Time in Inmates: A Love Story

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On October 10, 2022

In TV Movies

Killer Bees were nothing compared to hard time.

Kate Jackson’s incarcerated again in Inmates: A Love Story (1981), and while it’s frustrating that her love interest is Perry King and not Meg Foster, we must learn to accept it and move on with our lives. (Gluttons for punishment will recall that Foster was King’s lesbian love interest in 1978’s seven-layer dip of offensiveness, A Different Story, in which he also played gay, but that’s a rant for another day.) If you can manage your disappointment, even as Jackson wears flannel and performs garbage duty, you’ll be rewarded with a bizarre, mostly enjoyable telefilm with a rare early ’80s lesbian subplot.

Jackson’s Jane Mount (no comment on the butch surname) is doing “a nickel to a dime,” as she puts it, at the Greenleaf State Co-Correctional Institution, an experimental coed facility. The men and women bunk in separate areas but fraternize in the cafeteria, prison yard and other shared spaces. Sexual contact is a verboten but couples pair off anyway, which is how Jane’s closest friend, young Grace (an affecting Fay Hauser), becomes pregnant. When Grace spots the baby’s father canoodling with another inmate, Jane tells her to leave and approaches the cad with her cafeteria tray — and a trademark mischievous Jackson smile that signals he’s about to receive a helluva comeuppance.

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The Deliberate Stranger: Before There Was Netflix…

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On October 5, 2022

In TV Movies

Mark Harmon in The Deliberate Stranger (1986).

Netflix, the streaming giant once poised to join or overtake HBO as a premiere destination for prestige programming, now happily wallows in lurid filth—and, sadly, I don’t mean that in the best spirit of the phrase. Whether it’s the new Marilyn Monroe film (which I’m avoiding for reasons better articulated by Michael Campochiaro of The Starfire Lounge), or an endless parade of deeply exploitative true crime ‘documentaries’ that aren’t worthy of the name, I regularly receive promo emails from Netflix touting irredeemable content.

Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, one of its most recent ghoulish offerings, is produced by Ryan Murphy, a titan of tabloid tragedy who has never met a murder he wasn’t happy to exploit for profit. Even as real-life families of victims called the series re-traumatizing, it was quickly watched in its entirety by more than 56 million households. I’ve heard more than one viewer justify their decision by insisting they’re merely interested in abnormal psychology, which is absurd. No one is bingeing a 10-part series about a cannibal weeks before Halloween for academic reasons.

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I Think I’m Having a Baby: A Teen’s Pregnant Pause

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On October 3, 2022

In TV Movies

Jennifer Jason Leigh, dressed in a red shirt, waves.
Jennifer Jason Leigh waves goodbye to her childhood in I Think I’m Having a Baby.

As strange a title as it is — it’s preferable to possess a degree of certainty about whether you’re expecting — I Think I’m Having a Baby is also perfectly in keeping with the utter cluelessness of this 1981 Afternoon Playhouse special’s 15-year-old protagonist. Laurie McIntire (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a child with the hair and makeup of a divorced and disillusioned single mother of two, has entered that hideous phase of adolescence where she’s constitutionally incapable of doing anything but mooning over an unimpressive boy.

Star athlete Peter (Shawn Stevens) dates her older cousin Phoebe (Helen Hunt), whose preppy sweater draped over the shoulders tells you all there is to know about her. Peter isn’t particularly bright (Phoebe does his schoolwork) and teases Laurie on the rare occasion he notices her at all. But when her best friend Marsha (Bobbi Block, now known as Samantha Paris) and little sister Carrie (Tracey Gold, years away from the torments of Lady Killer and Midwest Obsession) mock his ape-like walk across the football field, Laurie gets defensive. “He’s not really like that,” she insists.

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The Cat Creature Pussyfoots Around Lesbianism

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On September 21, 2022

In TV Movies

Gale Sondergaard has designs on Renne Jarrett in The Cat Creature.

Where to begin with all of the metaphorical lesbian double-entendre that director Curtis Harrington cheekily supplies in The Cat Creature (1973)? And how to explain that some of it was purely unintentional, as the openly gay Harrington had no way of knowing then that Meredith Baxter was not quite the woman that networks — and viewers — imagined her to be. (And then there’s the smaller matter of her hunky love interest, David Hedison, whose lookalike daughter Alexandra became one of Hollywood’s most visible A-list lesbians in a time when there were few.)

This pulpy tale, adapted by Psycho author Robert Bloch from his own material, is thin on story and long on atmosphere. It begins with appraiser Frank Lucas (Kent Smith) recording a voice memo for the attorney that hired him to inventory a wealthy and secretive dead man’s estate. “This place gives me the shivers,” he says of the darkened mansion before descending into its cellar, which contains a priceless collection of ancient artifacts. Prying open a sarcophagus, he finds a mummy wearing a striking gold amulet with emerald eyes.

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Tricks of the Trade: Laverne & Squirrelly

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On September 7, 2022

In TV Movies

Markie Post and Cindy Williams stare nervously at criminals who aren't pictured.
Markie Post and Cindy Williams in Tricks of the Trade.

“They don’t teach Prostitution 101 at Vassar,” prim Beverly Hills housewife Cathy (Cindy Williams) huffs to streetwise hooker Marla (Markie Post) in Tricks of the Trade, a saucy 1988 telefilm. This very dated buddy comedy serves as her crash course. When stockbroker Donald (John Ritter), Cathy’s husband, is gunned down at Marla’s seedy apartment by a mystery assailant, the women are plunged into zany criminal intrigue — a milieu more comfortable to the lady of the evening than the staid suburban spouse.

They first spot each other at the police station, where there’s an obligatory scene of Marla snapping “Are you gonna charge me with something? Because if you’re not gonna charge me with something, I’m outta here.” But it’s not until Cathy’s therapist encourages her to get in touch with her anger that she finally knocks on the other woman’s door, interrupting a date with a kinky john to ask how long Donald was a client. “What is this, female bonding?” Marla asks, admitting it was a years-long arrangement.

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Fear Stalk: Even the Title is Stupid

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On August 29, 2022

In TV Movies

Lynne Thigpen teaches Jill Clayburgh to shoot in Fear Stalk.

Fear Stalk (1989), an irredeemably awful telefilm as generic and stupid as its title, follows Alexandra ‘Ally’ Maynard (Jill Clayburgh), a soap opera producer known as “the blood and gore queen of daytime,” as she’s stalked by… a purse thief?! The gimmick here, explained by security expert and former Beverly Hills detective Barbara (Lynne Thigpen, in the film’s best performance), is that the contents of women’s purses make us uniquely vulnerable to bad actors. To demonstrate, she has volunteers empty their bags, which contain ID cards, checkbooks and insurance information.

“What does the average man carry with him?” she asks. “A wallet, driver’s license, a few credit cards. Men travel lighter than women. In essence they live more defensively. Not stuff. See, we love stuff. It makes us feel secure to carry everything with us. Then our purse is stolen. Then all that security, all that power, is in someone else’s hands.” These days, of course, the most sensitive details of our lives are often stored in the cloud. But Barb’s argument isn’t unduly persuasive even to those of us who remember the clunky, bottomless purses our mothers carried pre-smartphones.

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Laughter is Contagious in Someone I Touched

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On August 23, 2022

In TV Movies

Cloris Leachman and James Olson have trust issues in Someone I Touched.

The 1970s were a complicated time for telefilm husbands, whether it was Robert Reed making obscene phone calls and assaulting his wife in The Secret Night Caller, or Patty Duke’s dipshit spouse justifying his serial infidelity in Before and After by telling her “You see, when you were fat, I felt betrayed.” And so you may feel a familiar sense of dread from the opening moments of Someone I Touched (1975), largely due to its opening ballad.

That treacly theme, warbled by Leachman herself, appears to lay it all out, allowing us to mentally prepare for the inevitable moment when a woman accepts at least partial blame for her husband’s transgressions. Here is but a sampling of its lyrical treasures, which begin normally enough: “Someone I touched/You’re someone I touched/And right away, I knew/I was in love with you.” Things get slightly weirder as we enter “Forget the others I touched/Those others I touched” territory, which includes a cold, abrupt reminder: “Yes, everything dies.”

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Before and After: Patty Duke’s Diet Mania

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On August 8, 2022

In TV Movies

“I am so f*cking sick of salad.”

If you’ve ever longed to watch Patty Duke eat depressing amounts of cottage cheese and engage in comic pratfalls while exercising, rejoice! (Hey, it’s preferable to the child abuse in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.) Before and After, a 1979 telefilm about a woman who had the audacity to gain 20 pounds, delivers all that and more. First, you’ll want to prepare yourself mentally—I found it helpful to take a deep breath and contemplate how much worse it might’ve been if not written and directed by women.

Once you’ve done that (and perhaps hidden any sharp objects that normally rest nearby), grab a cake pop, as I did, and gather ’round the TV. If you’re open to the experience, you might laugh as Duke pays homage to Rocky by training in gray sweats and punching dead chickens. You may cry as her mother sabotages her progress and her smarmy husband calls her fat. And you’ll definitely check your pulse to make sure you haven’t died when special guest star Betty White heaps scorn and humiliation on underperforming weight-loss group participants.

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