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Tag: '80s Films Page 2 of 4

Rob Lowe Makes Room for Daddy in Schoolboy Father

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On May 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Rob Lowe in Schoolboy Father.

Our first indication that 16-year-old Charles Elderberry (Rob Lowe) isn’t ready for parenthood comes early in Schoolboy Father (1980), an Afterschool Special about the dangers of reproductive illiteracy. As his judgmental mother (a solid Sharon Spelman) reads a birth announcement involving Daisy Dallenger (Dana Plato), a girl he met at summer camp, Charles begins counting on his fingers. Later, he asks a friend if pregnancy always takes nine months. It’s information he could’ve used before roasting more than marshmallows with Daisy, if you catch my nonsensical drift.

Because mothers and newborns weren’t booted from American hospitals within 24 hours in the early 1980s, Charles has time to consider his options. Inconvenienced by the $2 parking fee, he nevertheless visits daily, staring at his son through the nursery glass. Daisy, who harshly dumped him on the last day of camp, never said a word about her pregnancy, not even after being temporarily kicked out of her parents’ house. When Charles asks whether she used protection with him, she retorts “You were there, did you?” before ruefully observing “Not that it matters much now.”

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Lace: Motherhood’s a B*tch

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On May 12, 2023

In TV Movies

“Is that any way to talk to your mothers?”

Let’s say it now, in unison, to get it out of the way: “Incidentally, which one of you b*tches is my mother?” That notorious question, from 1984’s Lace, is Phoebe Cates’s most enduring contribution to cinema that doesn’t involve a red bikini. And it cuts jaggedly to the neon-pink heart of this ABC miniseries, a soapy, sprawling maternity mystery that plays like the most scandalous Facts of Life episode never made.

Adapted by Elliott Baker from Shirley Conran’s saucy novel, Lace is first set in 1960 and tells the story of three friends and roommates at a Swiss boarding school: the pouty French Maxine Pascal (Arielle Dombasle); sardonic Brit Jennifer ‘Pagan’ Trelawney (Brooke Adams); and adventurous American Judy Hale (Bess Armstrong), who entertains her friends with passages from a bodice ripper she scribbles between classes that features a heroine called Lucinda Lace. It’s a name the pals use interchangeably when one of them finds herself pregnant on the eve of graduation, and the trio form an unusual pact of secrecy to protect her at any cost.

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

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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.

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Ricki Lake’s Babycakes: Stalkers Come in All Sizes

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On April 10, 2023

In TV Movies

Ricki Lake in a scene from Babycakes.

“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.

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The Bedroom Window: Isabelle Huppert and… Steve Guttenberg?!

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On March 28, 2023

In '80s Movies

Isabelle Huppert and Steve Guttenberg in The Bedroom Window.

The Bedroom Window’s central mystery is not the identity of its killer, who stalks the streets of Baltimore raping and murdering young women he spots in bars. Nor is it how Steve Guttenberg’s Terry Lambert, the slick protégé of a construction executive, will clear his name after becoming hopelessly ensnared in the resulting investigation. It is, instead, how Guttenberg gets Isabelle Huppert’s Sylvia Wentworth, his boss’s wife, to come home with him. To that question, I maintain, writer-director Curtis Hanson provides no reasonable answer.

Was she enchanted after seeing him roller-skate his way through the Village People classic Can’t Stop the Music in his tightest pants and shorts? (Guttenberg doesn’t strut his stuff on wheels here, but ditches his clothes more than once.) Did the greatest screen actress of her generation secretly adore Police Academy? In the end, it doesn’t matter: The Bedroom Window is made more interesting by its unusual casting. And, just as importantly, it holds a special place in my heart for its repeated use of Robert Palmer’s “Hyperactive.”

My unabashed fondness of this dated ’80s song in a dated ’80s movie is sentimental in nature. “Hyperactive” reminds me of all the great loves of my life, from the one who danced wildly in her pajamas each week to the Mad Men theme to the one who “puts her makeup on at 6 am,” then “goes to work, gets home and puts it on again.” Window’s resident whirling dervish is Terry himself, an affable schemer eager to climb not only the corporate ladder but an icy Sylvia, whose philandering is more a byproduct of boredom than passion.

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Kenny Rogers Has a Midlife Crisis in Wild Horses

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On February 10, 2023

In TV Movies

Kenny Rogers says “Take this job and shove it” in Wild Horses.

No nobler a beard graced the small screen throughout the 1980s than that of Kenny Rogers, who stuck with made-for-TV movies (and wood-fired rotisserie chicken) after the box office underperformance of Six Pack, his feature film debut. Lost in the shadow of his popular Gambler series, you will find 1985’s Wild Horses sandwiched between the creatively titled The Gambler: The Adventure Continues and The Gambler: The Legend Continues.

If you’ve ever asked yourself what might’ve happened if The Night They Saved Christmas was produced by Menahem Golan and set in the Wild West with Rogers (or his equine counterpart, a majestic stallion) as Santa Claus, the answer is Wild Horses. Seemingly crafted for an audience of seven-year-old boys, with a little something tossed in for any maternal figures in their lives who might have flung underwear onstage at Wayne Newton concerts of yore, this finds Rogers staring down the barrel of a blue collar midlife crisis, wistful for his glory days as a champion rodeo cowboy.

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Blind Witness: Victoria Principal’s Audrey Hepburn Retread

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On January 25, 2023

In TV Movies

Victoria Principal in Blind Witness.

Just in case its plot—and gamine leading lady—weren’t tip-offs enough that Blind Witness (1989) was a made-for-TV retread of Audrey Hepburn’s Wait Until Dark, a quick glance at its credits reveals a common cowriter, Robert Carrington. Working here with Edmond Stevens from a story by Tom Sullivan, he crafts a familiar cat-and-mouse thriller about a blind woman targeted by a sadistic murderer. What distinguishes Witness from similar disabled-woman-in-peril fare, like Sorry, Wrong Number or The Spiral Staircase, is the resourcefulness of its heroine, Maggie Kemlich (Victoria Principal), and the intensity of her pursuer, Remy (Tim Choate), a hardened criminal.

Visually impaired since childhood, Maggie has built a successful business and enjoys an adventurous marriage with the sighted Gordon (Stephen Macht of Fear Stalk). When he is killed in a home invasion, investigating Lt. Schapper (Matt Clark, scowling as only he could) discounts a bruised and shaken Maggie’s reliability as a witness on the basis of her blindness. Asked how she can be certain only two suspects were present, she confidently rises from her chair, crosses the room and introduces herself to his silent partner, Det. Tuthill (a guarded Paul Le Mat, the useless father in The Night They Saved Christmas). “It’s not a parlor trick,” she admonishes a surprised Schapper, whose smug certitude persists.

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Sorry, Wrong Number Gets the Loni Anderson Treatment

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On January 17, 2023

In TV Movies

Loni Anderson could use some Anacin for her neuralgia and neuritis in Sorry, Wrong Number.

Was Barbara Stanwyck’s death in January of 1990 perhaps hastened by the premiere of Loni Anderson’s made-for-television remake of Sorry, Wrong Number in October of 1989? The coroner’s report contains nothing to support that irresponsible theory, but it’s difficult not to wonder how Stanwyck, arguably the greatest American film actress in the history of the medium, felt about this silly project, one of many ’80s TV remakes of classic films. What must she have made of Anderson’s performance in particular, beginning with the stilted delivery that’s reminiscent of Brenda Dickson welcoming you to her home? (The video will inevitably be scrubbed from YouTube, but the legend lives on in print.)

Dressed alternately as a stewardess and a Sea Org member, her strikingly unnatural wig brilliantly capturing the sunlight in flashbacks, Anderson—who we last enjoyed as a robotic and impeccably attired escort in My Mother’s Secret Life—plays Madeleine Coltrane, middle-aged heiress to the country’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical empire. Screenwriter Ann Louise Bardach and director Tony Wharmby don’t probe too deeply, but we understand that her tycoon father Jim (Hal Holbrook) has kept her in an overprotective bubble. However, her guilelessness is so pronounced that during the interminable scenes that Madeleine spends hanging on the telephone, my thoughts turned to how she’d react if Beverly Sutphin called.

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Pam Dawber Squints Through Naked Eyes

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On January 14, 2023

In TV Movies

Pam Dawber is an unlikely voyeur in Through Naked Eyes.

From the earliest Brian De Palma films of the decade through the release of Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape at its end, the ’80s were a time when viewers—many newly equipped with camcorders of their own—began to embrace voyeurism. It was hardly a new cinematic subject, but the kids who’d once giddily delighted in the perverse thrills of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) were now grown and making their own movies—or at least subscribing to cable TV with the expectation of exposure to similarly titillating content.

For every serious film about voyeurism and surveillance—Blow-up, The Conformist, The Conversation, Blow Out and The Lives of Others, to name a few—there are five more prurient duds like Sliver, many indeed made for cable. Through Naked Eyes (1983), starring Pam Dawber of Mork & Mindy and David Soul of Starsky & Hutch, was produced for ABC, so you can temper your tawdrier expectations: it goes about as far as bare shoulders. A quasi-erotic thriller that’s notably short on eroticism, Eyes holds your attention mostly because of Soul’s intriguingly oddball performance. It also mixes things up a little by making Dawber the more dedicated peeper.

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Stoned: Scott Baio’s Reefer Madness

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On January 6, 2023

In TV Movies

“It’s just me. It’s just me and my ganja.“

There are life lessons that only Afterschool Specials and the school of hard knocks can teach us, and the wisdom imparted by Scott Baio’s Stoned (1980) is simple. If you smoke the devil’s lettuce, like Baio’s wiry, acne-scarred Jack Melon—known to some as Melonhead—you might nearly kill someone.

Jack, a lonely, awkward high schooler with an absent mother and gruff father, plays second fiddle at home to brother Mike (Vincent Bufano), a college-bound star swimmer who appears to be his only friend. When stoner classmates Alan (Steve Monarque) and Teddy (Jack Finch) offer him weed from their usual bathroom stall, he declines. “A goon like him? Pot would definitely do him good,” they derisively declare.

One of Stoned’s finer qualities is that Jack isn’t given a sob story. (Another is Baio’s knack for physical comedy.) His lack of social prowess isn’t a commentary on his character, it’s a natural byproduct of his age. He’s a quiet, puberty-stricken geek with an odd gait who experiences boredom so crushing that he walks down the street kicking a can. When a blowup with Mike leaves him vulnerable to Alan and Teddy’s invitations to smoke, he’s less interested in pot than companionship.

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