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Tag: '80s Films Page 1 of 4

Firefighter: Nancy McKeon Turns a Hose on Sexism

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On April 6, 2024

In TV Movies

Nancy McKeon keeps her eye on the ball in Firefighter.

Somewhere in the annals of TV movie history, there’s probably a biopic with less dramatic frisson than Firefighter — maybe an early ’90s TNT original called Not Without My Dry Cleaning, starring Delta Burke as a desperate tourist who enlists the help of the American Embassy to liberate her captive chiffon blouses after misplacing the receipt. But I’m hard-pressed to think of one that takes as compelling a story as Cindy Fralick’s bid to become L.A. County’s first female firefighter and reduces it to yuk-yuk suspense over whether its heroine will ever learn to cook.

Nancy McKeon (Strange Voices), who plays Fralick, appeared in Afterschool Specials grittier than this (Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom and Schoolboy Father), but it’s easy to imagine that in 1986, only three years after its subject made history, a realistic depiction of the harassment faced by women in male-dominated fields was verboten. Instead, Mod Squad director Robert Michael Lewis and screenwriter Kathryn Montgomery (herself the co-author of two CBS Schoolbreak Specials) gave viewers and fire department spokespeople alike exactly they wanted: a kumbaya tale in which even the worst-behaved men aren’t that bad, and are handily outnumbered anyway by those who root for her success.

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Valentine Magic on Love Island Offers ’70s TV Nostalgia Galore

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On February 14, 2024

In TV Movies

Adrienne Barbeau and Janis Paige in Valentine Magic on Love Island.

Cheesier than a 32 oz. Velveeta loaf, Valentine Magic on Love Island (1980) was a trifle intended to entertain not only parents but the children they’d conceived while rolling around on shag carpets to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. Combining the worst of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island — director Earl Bellamy (Flood!) was a veteran of both — it opens with grating tropical theme music even more hilariously horrible than Cloris Leachman’s Someone I Touched ballad.

As we’re introduced to a slew of characters bound for the mysterious island — one wins a paid trip, another is written a Love Island prescription by his doctor, and so on — we’re reminded of 1974’s Death Cruise. In that ABC Movie of the Week, featuring luminaries such as Tom Bosley, Kate Jackson and Celeste Holm, tourists were picked off by an assassin aboard a massive cruise ship. Much to our disappointment, no one is murdered on Love Island.

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Passions: Lindsay Wagner and Joanne Woodward Brawl at a Funeral

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On February 7, 2024

In TV Movies

Joanne Woodward rumbles with Lindsay Wagner in Passions.

There’s a quiet dignity to the way Joanne Woodward instigates a catfight with Lindsay Wagner at her straying husband’s funeral in Passions (1984). Catherine Kennerly, her patrician homemaker, doesn’t want to engage in fisticuffs, but what else is she to do when Wagner’s Nina Simon, the other woman, has the temerity to attend his church service and dab her eyes in front of God and everyone? Confronting Nina in private, a seething Catherine exclaims “You are filth!” — and still her rival persists, asserting her right to be there.

“I think you’d better leave before you make a fool of yourself,” the younger woman coolly replies. Having silently choked on her anger throughout the priest’s eulogy (“He was that rare individual who really cared about his fellow men, and acted upon his feelings”), Catherine is thrilled to have a living target for her rage. Then Nina drops a bombshell: she was with Richard (Richard Crenna) for eight years, and they have a six-year-old son together. The widow launches herself at the stylish marital interloper almost automatically, propelled as much by grief as fury.

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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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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 feel lonely and isolated. She insisted on cohabitation anyway but struggles during his overnight shifts, resorting first to restless late-night baking and then baccarat to keep busy.

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Donna Mills Searches for a Missing Plot in The Lady Forgets

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On November 14, 2023

In TV Movies

Donna Mills has more hair than memories in The Lady Forgets.

Amnesia is contagious in The Lady Forgets (1989), afflicting not only its puzzled heroine, an art teacher mixed up in a murder she can’t remember, but screenwriter Durrell Royce Crays (Schoolboy Father), who seems to have misplaced its plot and improvised by scribbling bits of dialogue in spray cheese.

If you don’t feel like a neurologist within its first 10 minutes, when Rebecca Simms (Donna Mills) sustains one of her many head injuries and recovers previously lost memories while simultaneously losing newer ones, give it a little time. Eventually you’ll have wondered “Did he just have a stroke?” about several important characters, before finally questioning your own cognitive abilities as you struggle to make sense of anything you just saw — particularly Greg Evigan’s hair, the vivacious mullet of My Two Dads having been cruelly replaced by an ailing squirrel.

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Right of Way: Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart’s Suicide Pact

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On October 30, 2023

In TV Movies

Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart cuddle and fantasize about death in Right of Way.

If I told you that Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart costarred in an HBO movie about an elderly couple in a suicide pact, you’d probably think I was yanking your chain — and that’s without mentioning that Stewart’s character nibbles on cat food* or that Davis makes tuna casserole, something she certainly never did as Charlotte Vale, Judith Traherne or Margo Channing. It happens in the long-forgotten Right of Way (1983), which was produced in the network’s pre-Michael Patrick King era. In laymen’s terms, that means our octogenarian protagonists keep their clothes on and don’t break up with their daughter via Post-it note.

Instead, Miniature ‘Mini’ Dwyer (Davis, and there’s a long story behind that diminutive) and husband Teddy (Stewart) summon daughter Ruda (Melinda Dillon) to their Los Angeles home, which she finds unkempt and overrun with stray cats. Mini explains their lack of concern: “You see, we’re not worried about the house, the lawn these days, or the cats’ bowls or the weeds. We aren’t worried about any of it. We know we haven’t been attending to these things. We’re not blind and we haven’t forgotten. In fact, it’s just the opposite. We have chosen not to.” Indeed, they’ve been busy with weightier matters, like plotting their deaths.

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The Day the Loving Stopped: Rhoda, McCloud and a Very ’70s Divorce

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On October 13, 2023

In TV Movies

Valerie Harper and Dennis Weaver in The Day the Loving Stopped.

As if Rhoda Morgenstern’s divorce from Joe Gerard wasn’t emotionally bruising enough, here Valerie Harper (Goodbye, Supermom) goes again, putting us through the wringer in The Day the Loving Stopped (1981). This telefilm about a 1970s split with ’80s repercussions isn’t as giddily melodramatic as its title suggests, but coed Judy Danner (Dominique Dunne, Valentine Magic on Love Island) sure cries a lot, a trait shared with mother Norma (Harper). Younger sister Debbie (Ally Sheedy) gets so fed up with all the waterworks that she eventually snaps “Just knock it off!” — it was either that or break into “No More Tears (Enough is Enough).”

The family has gathered for Judy’s wedding to Danny Reynolds (James Canning), a persistent classmate who is resolutely untroubled by his betrothed’s ambivalence about marriage and hostility toward her estranged father, Aaron (Dennis Weaver of Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction). Alone together, the sweethearts can’t put groceries in the trunk without pausing to kiss. Alone with her thoughts, or with Debbie, Judy’s a waterlogged mess who isn’t sure she believes in love. “I’ve never seen it last. I don’t know if it does. Don’t you understand?” she asks, increasingly hysterical. We do, but she clarifies: “I don’t want to do to my kids what they did to us.”

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Twirl: A Baton-Twirling Competition Tests a Friendship

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On August 29, 2023

In TV Movies

Lisa Whelchel, Erin Moran, and Moran’s false lashes, in Twirl.

Pauline Kael’s review of Urban Cowboy memorably concludes with a question to its writers and director: “James Bridges, Aaron Latham, have you been riding a head-pounding machine?” From Twirl’s earliest moments and throughout its duration, you might wonder the same of its filmmakers — had they sustained baton-related head injuries? Did they ever recover?

Clearly they were influenced by Cowboy (released theatrically a year earlier, in 1980), a moderately campy and classist crowd-pleaser masquerading as something more serious. Baton-crazed besties Bonnie Lee Jordan (Erin Moran of Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi) and Jill Moore (Lisa Whelchel of The Facts of Life) never mount a mechanical bull, but they share a boundless passion for twirling, which consumes their identities.

In Twirl’s dizzying opening moments, the girls trade voice-overs expressing sentiments such as this: “You know what it means to twirl? It means not havin’ time for messin’ around with my friends, it means sayin’ no to dates on twirlin’ days. When I am out there twirlin’ my heart away, no explanation is necessary.” Viewers may beg to differ, of course, but Bonnie Lee continues: “It is worth it? The bruises, swollen fingers and even black eyes? Yes, it is all worth it. I am a Texas twirler.”

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

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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)

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