Cranky Lesbian

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Tag: '80s Thrillers

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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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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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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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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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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Rent-a-Cop: Burt and Liza’s Forgotten Masterpiece

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On March 12, 2022

In Burt Reynolds

Burt and Liza are under attack by critics, and a crazed killer, in Rent-a-Cop.

The ’80s were a rough decade for Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli, with 1988 proving something of a nadir for them both. Not only was Rent-a-Cop a critical and commercial flop, Reynolds had a second bomb with Switching Channels less than two months later. Minnelli’s year was arguably more disastrous, resulting in a Worst Actress Razzie win for her work in Cop and Arthur 2: On the Rocks. All of this makes Rent-a-Cop sound somewhat better, and worse, than it actually is.

Before we get into the plot, let’s take a moment to remember a bit of ’80s movie trivia. Just weeks before Rent-a-Cop was given its ignominious January theatrical release, Nuts received a prestige December debut. Barbra Streisand played a hooker on trial for murder in that Martin Ritt film, an unsatisfying mess that nevertheless garnered a few Golden Globe nominations. I would argue that in the battle of prostitution movies starring non-competitive EGOT honorees, Minnelli made the more enjoyable picture.

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