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Joan and Melissa Rivers in *Tears and Laughter*.

You can keep your Mildred Pierce and Mermaids, your Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment—Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (1994) is the greatest mother-daughter movie of all-time. “But what about Mommie Dearest?” you might counter. “What about Volver, Imitation of Life, Freaky Friday or Postcards from the Edge?”

To which I can only reply that Tears and Laughter is a dramedy about producer Edgar Rosenberg’s suicide starring his actual widow, Joan Rivers, and their daughter Melissa, a non-actress whose performance is the made-for-TV equivalent of Sofia Coppola’s maligned turn in The Godfather Part III. If you love things that are terrible, it gets no better than this, a tearjerker that opens with liposuction jokes and excerpts from a typical Rivers routine: “I went to Las Vegas, I threw my hotel key up at Tom Jones. He took it and burglarized my room.”

Teen Runaways Fall Prey to a Pimp in Little Ladies of the Night

By Cranky Lesbian

On July 6, 2023

In TV Movies

Linda Purl in *Little Ladies of the Night*.

Paul Schrader, the Taxi Driver scribe who later wrote and directed Hardcore, wasn’t the only 1970s auteur preoccupied with sexually exploited minors. “Jiggle TV” mega-producer Aaron Spelling threw his feathered fedora into the ring with Little Ladies of the Night in 1977, scoring a ratings blockbuster for ABC with a tonally confused production that regards teenage prostitution—and all the physical and sexual violence it entails—as a gig worse than the average fast food shift but better than Yves Montand’s trucking assignment in The Wages of Fear.

Its opening narration is our first clue that Little Ladies, scripted by Hal Sitowitz and directed by Marvin J. Chomsky (The Deliberate Stranger), is an unserious film about a serious topic. Calling the teen runaway crisis “a major social issue,” it warns parents of the dangers that await children on the street. “You don’t want to find your kids here,” we’re told, and of course that’s true. But we also knew by 1977 that life with one’s parents wasn’t necessarily safer than harsh alternatives. That idea is paid some lip service here, until Sitowitz and Chomsky pull a potent punch that arguably undermines the rest of the story.

The Demon Murder Case: Guest-Starring Harvey Fierstein as Satan

By Cranky Lesbian

On July 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Andy Griffith and Beverlee McKinsey scour their *Demon Murder Case* contracts for an escape clause.

When we look back on our childhoods, who among us can’t fondly recall being possessed by murderous demons? Reading IMDb’s plot summary of The Demon Murder Case, a 1983 telefilm, I felt stirrings of nostalgia and decided to track down this horror flick that was sure to play like a home movie. Sadly, the synopsis — “A young boy is taken over by demons who force him to commit murder” — is deceptive. The worst that Demon’s bedeviled pipsqueak Brian Frazier (Charlie Fields) does is anger a sputtering bishop (Burning Rage’s Eddie Albert, sounding more like a revivalist grifter) by blowing raspberries at God.

There is a murder, committed by an adult late in the film, that comes out of nowhere. Its circumstances, in keeping with the rest of The Demon Murder Case, are nonsensical. The screenplay, credited to William Kelley (soon an Oscar winner for Witness), isn’t just inchoate, it is genuinely imbecilic. If you wish to understand the particulars of how a malevolent spirit called the Beast came to reside within Brian, or how it hopscotches into the body of another character, you’re out of luck. This courthouse exchange between Brian’s sister and a reporter typifies the quality of the writing:

Joan: What did you do, then, to get rid of the devil in [Murderer]?

Nancy: Well, we haven’t done anything for [Murderer] as of yet. But he still definitely needs a full exorcism.
THE DEMON MURDER CASE (1983)

Wimbledon 2023: The ‘Stop Asking Me if Świątek’s a Lesbian’ Edition

By Cranky Lesbian

On July 3, 2023

In Tennis

It happens every Slam, and during Masters tournaments, too — there’s an uptick in traffic to my half-assed tennis posts as Googlers descend, having searched some combination of “Świątek + lesbian” that points them here, hopeful detectives chasing dead ends. I regret to inform every last one of you that you’ve been duped. Because this site has the word ‘lesbian’ in its name, and because I often mention Świątek, my favorite active WTA player now that Serena Williams has retired, you’re nudged in this direction.

But I don’t publicly traffic in gossip about whether tennis pros are gay — I save that for message boards and private emails with friends, like a gentlewoman. And I know nothing of Świątek’s personal life anyway, though I’d suggest that as the world #1, with tens of millions of dollars in endorsement deals hanging in the balance, she has little incentive to swing open the closet door in the prime of her career if she’s hanging out in there. (You know she’d be up to something geeky in the closet, like reading with a flashlight.) An openly gay #1 isn’t unprecedented — Amelie Mauresmo did it — but it’s rare in any sport.*

Forgotten Sins: A Real-Life American Horror Story

By Cranky Lesbian

On June 30, 2023

In TV Movies

Bess Armstrong and John Shea in *Forgotten Sins*.

Of the many horror stories to emerge from the recovered memory, satanic ritual abuse and multiple personality disorder crazes that swept the United States in the 1980s and early ’90s, you will find few more bizarre than that of the Ingram family of Olympia, Washington. Forgotten Sins (1996), a telefilm adaptation of Remembering Satan, journalist Lawrence Wright’s chronicle of that convoluted case*, attempts to condense their troubling tale into 90 minutes and largely succeeds, no small task for subject matter this complex and disturbing.

John Shea stars as Matthew Bradshaw, an upstanding sheriff and fanatical Christian—Paul Ingram, his real-life counterpart, spoke in tongues at church—who feels an inexplicable emotional estrangement from his daughters. “Why can’t I be affectionate with them? I want to be,” he tells wife Bobbie (Bess Armstrong, worlds away from the glamour of Lace), who runs an in-home daycare center. She earnestly suggests he discuss it with their pastor, Reverend Newton (Gary Grubbs), whose smarmy paternalism leaves traces of oil on the screen.

With Murder in Mind Squanders a Bewitching Talent

By Cranky Lesbian

On June 19, 2023

In TV Movies

Elizabeth Montgomery in *With Murder in Mind*.

From The Legend of Lizzie Borden and A Case of Rape in the 1970s to Sins of the Mother and Black Widow Murders in the ’90s, Elizabeth Montgomery was the queen of the based-on-a-true-story TV movie. Sadly, though her bearing was regal as ever in 1992’s With Murder in Mind (also known as With Savage Intent), the film around her is every bit as soggy as her rain-drenched surroundings in The Victim.

Murder’s structural problems begin and end with its screenplay, credited to Daniel Freudenberger (A Strange Affair). In the 90 minutes we spend with Gayle Wolfer, a successful realtor in Western New York who survives a heinous shooting, we learn virtually nothing about her other than she’s a new grandma and, we’re repeatedly told, an inspiration. If the idea was that our affection for Montgomery would transfer seamlessly to her brusque character, Freudenberger and director Michael Tuchner (Summer of My German Soldier) were mistaken.

Lifetime’s Cyberstalker Serves More Laughs Than Scares

By Cranky Lesbian

On June 16, 2023

In TV Movies

“Everybody’s got a stalker,” Alexis Rose asserts in the expanded lyrics of a “A Little Bit Alexis,” and given my own misadventures in being trailed online, I can’t entirely disagree. In Lifetime’s amusing Cyberstalker (2012), it’s Mischa Barton’s Aiden Ashley who captures the depraved attentions of an obsessive, but the Internet’s merely a gimmick. He tracks the teenager offline as well, eventually breaking into her house and murdering her parents, though the editing was such that I’m uncertain of his methods.

It’s the first of several strangely bloodless acts of violence he’ll commit in the course of the movie, with weapons including a motorcycle, a hacked traffic light and a taser. Why he does any of it, I haven’t the foggiest. How he came to fixate on Aiden, I couldn’t tell you. The screenplay, credited to Kraig X. Wenman, seems to have been composed by an online story generator that randomly inserts words like “IP address,” “algorithm,” “hard drive” and “server” into dialogue that almost never advances the plot.

The Price She Paid: Loni Anderson’s Bitter Custody Fight

By Cranky Lesbian

On June 15, 2023

In TV Movies

Loni Anderson prepares to perform “Batdance” while dressed as Prince.

If there’s anything more enjoyable than a terrible wig in a TV movie, it’s a terrible wig atop the head of beloved superstar Loni Anderson, who brought us both my favorite mother-daughter prostitution film, My Mother’s Secret Life, and my favorite unnecessary remake of a Barbara Stanwyck classic in Sorry, Wrong Number. In The Price She Paid, a 1992 CBS telefilm that found a second home on Lifetime, she wears a shaggier, peroxided version of Patrick Duffy’s Daddy ‘do that blinds you as it draws you in, as if to ensure your attention doesn’t wander.

Anderson fans can be forgiven for wondering whether The Price She Paid is a biopic about her many financial disputes with Burt Reynolds, whom she was soon to bitterly divorce. The answer, sadly, is no. It’s about the emotionally bruising and politically charged custody fight her Lacey Stewart, single mother to 12-year-old R.T. (Coleby Lombardo), is plunged into when the boy’s father, her rapist, is paroled. And I’m serious when I say that Anderson, typically faulted here for her vacant stares and robotic delivery, acquits herself nicely when the screenplay serves up something meaty.

Gramps: Andy Griffith Romps as a Homicidal Grandfather

By Cranky Lesbian

On June 13, 2023

In TV Movies

Andy Griffith strikes a match in *Gramps*.

“Sometimes things happen between grownups that’s hard for kids to understand,” Gramps’s Jack MacGruder (Andy Griffith) gently counsels his grandson Matthew (Casey Wurzbach), whose parents are fighting again. (Wurzbach was last seen enduring yet another domestic ordeal in Because Mommy Works.) He might as well be addressing viewers who are similarly confused about the plot of this made-for-TV movie, which premiered on NBC in 1995 and also aired under the title Relative Fear.

Jack, a retired musician who claims to have worked with the likes of Hank Williams and Elvis, enjoys a rapprochement with his long-estranged son Clarke (John Ritter), a successful lawyer, following a death in the family. Eager to win Matthew’s affections, he plies the boy with ice cream and candy bars, tosses him a football and teaches him how to climb a tree. He kindly refrains from instructing him in arson, a skill we already know he’s mastered from Gramps’s opening scene.

The Joker Card: Parkinson’s at 40

By Cranky Lesbian

On June 7, 2023

In Brainpan

Let’s cut to the chase for this one, without our usual banter. This week the neurologist confirmed that my recently diagnosed dystonia is a symptom of what we hope is young-onset Parkinson’s disease. We hope because there are less attractive options, including multiple system atrophy and progressive supranuclear palsy. All are clinical diagnoses, not things she can order an easy test for, and they share many symptoms. If it’s MSA or PSP, it will become more apparent in time. For now, we’re calling it early Parkinson’s, since the other options usually afflict older patients. You can read more about YOPD here.

My wife, Crankenstein, accompanied me to the appointment because she knew what was coming and wanted to talk with my movement disorder specialist (MDS). She shared observations about my muscle rigidity and bradykinesia, reduced arm swing, diminished sense of smell and increasingly inexpressive face, which the doctor also noticed. We cataloged the positive changes that I experienced after treatment with Botox and levodopa. I mostly sat there and looked pretty when I wasn’t failing the usual movement exam.