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Kate Jackson and Robert Wagner in *Death at Love House*.

For a few fun years in the 1970s, Kate Jackson was the queen of the humdinger ending. From Killer Bees to Death Cruise and Satan’s School for Girls, she delivered morbid laughs with a winsome smile. Unlike those offerings, director E.W. Swackhamer’s Death at Love House (1976) isn’t particularly humorous—at least not intentionally—but its overwrought ending might remind you of the flaming baby scene from Susan Slade, which puts it in a league of its own.

Jackson’s Donna Gregory is the newly pregnant wife and writing partner of Joel Gregory, Jr. (Robert Wagner). Together they’re probing the history of Joel Sr., the father Junior barely knew, and his turbulent Hollywood romance with the late Lorna Love (Marianna Hill), a legendary bombshell actress. If the actors aren’t entirely convincing as Didion and Dunne knockoffs, modern audiences would have to uncomfortably concede that Wagner (who also plays Joel Sr.) is right at home in a story about the sordid circumstances surrounding the premature death of a beloved actress.

Betrayed: A Story of Three Women Finds Meredith Baxter in a Murder-Free Infidelity Saga

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 21, 2023

In TV Movies

Swoosie Kurtz and Meredith Baxter won’t be smiling for long.

A little bit of lesbianism would’ve gone a long way in Betrayed: A Story of Three Women (1995), its heartache perhaps averted if only Swoosie Kurtz and Meredith Baxter had found love with each other, and not unreliable men, back in college. Our cad here, the dashing Rob (John Terry, whose other woman was a man in Change of Heart), belongs to Amanda Nelson (Baxter), who is best friends with Joan Bixler (Kurtz). And if you think the widowed Joan is upset when daughter Dana (Clare Carey of Coach) drops out of law school, just wait until she catches her in a compromising position with Rob.

“You’re referring to yourself and Rob as ‘we’? You two are a ‘we’ now? Oh, I think you had better rethink that little pronoun,” she rants to her daughter, who took afternoon naps in the Nelsons’ marital bed as a tyke. “‘We’ is in your imagination. ‘We’ is not even a possibility.” Before leaving in disgust, she hands her an old family photo, showing an adult Rob beside Dana, then a child. “It’s almost incest,” Amanda says of the affair, a sentiment neither viewers nor Joan disagree with, but it wouldn’t be a betrayal without blow-ups and breakdowns and even a good face-slapping (administered by Amanda to Joan in a grocery store parking lot) along the way.

Thrilling Answers to All Your Dystonia Questions

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 20, 2023

In Brainpan, Oh No!

Last month I pledged to answer questions about the strange turn my lengthy medical mystery took after I was sent to a neurologist. Here it is, in Q&A form. To spice things up, you can pretend the late James Lipton, host of Inside the Actor’s Studio, conducted the interview. And, as always, more telefilm reviews are coming soon, including special appearances by our patron saints, Kate Jackson and Judith Light.

How are the Botox and levodopa going?

The first round of Botox is already wearing off, which is normal earlier on, as the doctor experiments with dosages and injection sites. The levodopa has been great for my dexterity, slowness and rigidity, which confirms the neurologist is on the right track. Now the question is whether I have dopamine-responsive dystonia or young-onset Parkinson’s. In June I’ll learn whether I have to undergo more tests or if the doctor has already made a decision.

House of Versace, Starring Cristal Connors

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 18, 2023

In TV Movies

“I’m doin’ some of the finest cocaine in the world, darlin’. You want some?”

The genius of Lifetime’s House of Versace (2013) is most evident in its casting: Gina Gershon, Cristal Connors herself, stars as Donatella Versace (or is that Versayce?). It’s a choice that instantly conjures memories of Showgirls, setting the mood for glorious camp to follow. Gershon more than delivers the goods as a grieving sister who is 80% cocaine and 20% synthetic hair, rasping lines like “A hooker wouldn’t even wear this shoe!” and “Giving up my heels was harder than giving up cocaine” as naturally as Carmen Maura interprets Almodóvar.

In the movie’s first act, Donatella and brother Gianni (Enrico Colantoni, of the unfortunately titled fashion sitcom Just Shoot Me) frequently squabble like children, to the irritation of their more placid brother Santo (Colm Feore). “You both exhaust me,” he tells Gianni after the pair stage another spectacular workplace meltdown. When they inevitably kiss and make up, he complains “You two deserve each other.” Gianni is a doting brother and uncle (you’ve not heard “principessa!” so many times in one film since Life is Beautiful), but he’s not above telling his sister “I’m the sun and you’re the moon and your job is to reflect my glow.” Nor is she above hurling homophobic insults at him.

For the Love of Nancy: Tracey Gold’s Anorexia Movie

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 16, 2023

In TV Movies

Tracey Gold in a scene from *For the Love of Nancy*.

A hazard of the message movie is that disparate audiences can take very different lessons from it. My wife was already anorexic by the time she arrived in middle school, where one of her teachers played For the Love of Nancy on videocassette during free periods, presumably in an attempt to reach at-risk students. She recalled this recently after spotting the DVD on my desk. “Did you learn anything from it or were you hostile to its message?” I asked, suspecting I already knew the answer. A sheepish smile tugged at her lips after a moment’s reflection: “I learned you can hide food in walls,” she replied with a laugh.

That is most assuredly not the wisdom screenwriters Nigel and Carol Evan McKeand sought to impart with Nancy, about a family’s struggle to save its daughter from an eating disorder. But what they hoped to accomplish wasn’t entirely clear to me, either. We never get close enough to 18-year-old Nancy Walsh (Tracey Gold) to understand who she was prior to her illness, and even once she’s in the throes of it, we watch the terrible proceedings from a curious emotional remove. Then there’s the brazenness of Gold’s casting itself. She was still early in her own recovery from anorexia in 1994, which raises uncomfortable questions viewers must answer for themselves about responsibility and sensationalism.

Goldie and Liza Together: You’ll Laugh, You’ll Cry, You’ll Be Confused

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 13, 2023

In TV Specials

Goldie wears Bob Mackie, Liza Halston, in *Goldie and Liza Together*.

Of all the great television mysteries of 1980, the most popular was undoubtedly “Who shot J.R.?” But the most enduring might be “Goldie and Liza Together: Why?” Was there a great public clamoring for this pairing? Did Minnelli and cherished collaborator Fred Ebb, who’d triumphed with the landmark TV concert film Liza with a “Z” eight years earlier, have tax bills to settle? No matter the impetus, here they were, in an hour-long special presentation on CBS directed by Don Mischer and sponsored by Sentry, “a family of insurance companies to meet all your insurance needs!”

Nominated for four Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Variety or Music Program (which it lost to Baryshnikov on Broadway), its shaky premise is that the stars are old friends finally fulfilling their dream of working together. With Liza supplying the lung power and Goldie the sobriety, we slog through a disjointed first half that includes, most memorably, Hawn performing “Y.M.C.A.” while surrounded by male dancers, a cutesy precursor to the more seductive (and entertaining) “Physical” video Olivia Newton-John released the next year. The number concludes with Hawn joining the boys in the shower, which causes them to flee in a gay panic.

Ricki Lake’s Babycakes: Stalkers Come in All Sizes

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 10, 2023

In TV Movies

“Love doesn’t come in sizes,” we’re assured by Babycakes, which simultaneously teaches us that stalkers do. Ricki Lake could’ve been a size two and her plucky Babycakes protagonist, lovelorn mortician Grace, would’ve still been an XXXL stalker. Requesting a month off work to dedicate herself to the pursuit of a stranger with whom she’s romantically obsessed, Grace goes so far as to don a disguise and infiltrate his boss’s office simply to learn his name.

He is Rob (Craig Sheffer), a motorman for the MTA; she knows this because she watches him at work, much as she watches him everywhere else. Whether he’s ice skating in public or lounging at home with his brittle, mismatched fiancée (Cynthia Dale), Grace is lurking nearby—even with binoculars, from a perch across the street—sighing at his every move, captivated by his mere existence. When men behave like this in made-for-TV movies, we know we’re careening toward a denouement in which our heroine unsteadily raises a gun in self-defense. In Babycakes, all that is raised of Rob goes unseen due to network standards and practices.

Criminal Behavior: Farrah Fawcett Solves Crimes, Minus Charlie

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 7, 2023

In TV Movies

Charlie’s Angels disbanded long before 1992, but that year found two of the Townsend Agency’s finest still solving murders in TV movies: Jaclyn Smith in In the Arms of a Killer, a police procedural that wanted to be more hardboiled than it was, and Farrah Fawcett in Criminal Behavior. The superior performance and film belong to Fawcett, whose breezy mystery is as edgy as it is convoluted.

In a rueful opening voiceover, her Jessie Lee Stubbs divulges “I was nine years old when I began to hope criminal behavior didn’t run in the family genes.” (Raquel Welch later tackled the same subject in a rather more salacious manner in Tainted Blood.) Born to a stickup artist father and madam mother, and raised alongside a drug-dealing brother, Jessie works as a public defender, a position that nurtures her bone-deep distrust of the police.

Park Overall Calculates The Price of a Broken Heart

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Like Park Overall in The Price of a Broken Heart (1999), I would be stunned if my husband cheated—mostly because I don’t have one. But if you were to traffic in heterosexist stereotypes, as Lifetime movies do, my wife is essentially an old-school husband. Society views her as the more dominant and valuable partner because of her career; I’m the one who does her laundry.

How would I react if she ran off with her secretary? Well, I’d be surprised, mostly because she lacks the requisite immaturity, free time and organizational skills for such pursuits. (“Can you pls wash my lacy black bra and book a hotel room for my affair tomorrow? Thx,” she might text me before an assignation.) One thing I’m confident I wouldn’t do is sue her mistress, the course of action Overall’s Dot Hutelmyer charts in The Price of a Broken Heart, a sort of tawdry primetime domestic spin on The Price is Right.

Paula Abdul is Touched by Evil in Her TV Movie Debut

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 4, 2023

In TV Movies

Paula Abdul gets mixed up with a cold-hearted snake in *Touched by Evil*.

If there are words that could accurately convey the fathomless stupidity of Touched by Evil, Paula Abdul’s 1997 telefilm debut, they are lost to me as I ponder what might be the dumbest film I’ve ever seen—and I am someone who has, through an unusual series of events, endured Moment by Moment more than once. My problems are less with Abdul, whose cheetah print poster hung above my bed in the early ’90s (alongside a gallery of New Kids on the Block posters), than with Phil Penningroth’s screenplay, which trivializes rape and treats not only viewers, but the characters themselves, as nincompoops.

Abdul’s Ellen Collier, newly divorced from MC Skat Kat, is attempting to forge a new life and career as a single woman when she’s attacked in her condo by the prolific Northside Rapist, who subsequently torments her with harassing phone calls. One of the few pieces of information she is given about her assailant is that he evades detection by always driving a different vehicle. You might assume this fact would give her pause when car detailer Jerry (Adrian Pasdar, oozing sleaze), keeps running into her and trying to make her acquaintance. But Ellen, though hyper-alert in other areas of her life, doesn’t find it strange at all. Even more unbelievably, her friends (Susan Ruttan and Tracy Nelson) begin pressuring her to date him shortly after the assault.