Cranky Lesbian

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Tag: '90s Films Page 2 of 6

Vows of Deception: Cheryl Ladd’s Trashy Femme Fatale

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On July 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Cheryl Ladd and Nick Mancuso in Vows of Deception.

Disappointingly, given its title and “inspired by actual events” origins, Vows of Deception isn’t a Lifetime dramatization of Renée Zellweger and Kenny Chesney’s marriage. But Vows, which aired on CBS in 1996, makes up for that shortcoming by giving Cheryl Ladd an enjoyably trashy role to sink her teeth into as Lucinda ‘Lucy Ann’ Michaels, a prodigiously pregnant recent parolee who moves cross-country to live with Terry (Nancy Cartwright), her more responsible sister.

“My past doesn’t determine my future,” she unconvincingly tells Matt Harding (Nick Mancuso), the detective who meets her at a bus stop with papers to sign. Apparently lacking any crimes to investigate, he offers her a ride and later enlists her help in pranking his best friend Clay (Mike Farrell), a prosperous lawyer, in a blind date setup. Instantly smitten, Clay surprises them both by continuing the date despite her baby bump. Earnest to a fault, he couldn’t be an easier mark for a dazzling criminal with a questionable tale of woe (she claims an abusive ex falsely accused her of child abuse).

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Behold the Magic and Wonder of Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story

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On July 11, 2023

In TV Movies

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.”

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Forgotten Sins: A Real-Life American Horror Story

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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.

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With Murder in Mind Squanders a Bewitching Talent

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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.

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

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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.

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Gramps: Andy Griffith Romps as a Homicidal Grandfather

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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.

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No One Would Tell: When Teen Romance Turns Deadly

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On May 22, 2023

In TV Movies

Candace Cameron and Fred Savage in No One Would Tell.

There’s a power in the casting of No One Would Tell (1996) that might be lost on younger viewers, but for children of the ’80s and ’90s, Kevin Arnold abusing D.J. Tanner was about as shocking as “Beaver” Cleaver giving Gidget a black eye. Based on the chilling true story of 14-year-old Amy Carnevale’s murder at the hands of her high school boyfriend, it stars Fred Savage as senior Bobby Tennison, a standout wrestler who can’t control his anger when girlfriend Stacy Collins (Candace Cameron) acknowledges the existence of anyone who isn’t him.

His rages — and her hidden bruises — multiply each time she laughs with pals, wears a miniskirt in public or exchanges pleasantries with male classmates. “Yeah, so he gets a little jealous, OK? Guys are like that,” she tells worried friend Nicki (Heather McComb). It’s a lesson she picked up at home, where mother Laura (Michelle Phillips) excuses the controlling behavior of boyfriend Rod (Paul Linke) despite Stacy’s concerns. After lashing out physically, Bobby turns into the domestic violence version of a Fisher-Price See ‘n Say.

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Betrayal of Trust: Judith Light Confronts a Predatory Doctor

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On April 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Judith Light with Betty Buckley in Betrayal of Trust.

If you previously thought I was nuts for calling Judith Light the Maria Falconetti of American TV movies, wait until you hear my theory that her late ’70s arc on One Life to Live as housewife-turned-hooker-turned-murderer Karen Wolek is the soap equivalent to Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Light’s legendary courtroom breakdown scenes as Wolek (seen here in a 1997 ABC retrospective hosted by Reba McEntire) contain some of the finest acting in the history of television and prepare us for her telefilm work to come, including 1994’s Betrayal of Trust.

Based on a true story, Betrayal recounts singer Barbara Nöel’s years of abuse at the hands of Jules Masserman, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst played by Judd Hirsch with a nearly perpetual scowl. Nöel (Light) sought treatment for complaints including performance anxiety and Masserman suggested the “Amytal interview,” in which he administered the highly addictive barbiturate sodium amytal. “Your subconscious will reveal itself to you in new and exciting ways,” he assures her. “You know, Barbara, sometimes this world can seem like a very frightening place. But now you’ll begin to relax. To feel safe and happy. And all the bad feelings of the past will begin to melt, melt away.”

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

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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.

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

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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.

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