Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Tag: '90s Films Page 3 of 6

Criminal Behavior: Farrah Fawcett Solves Crimes, Minus Charlie

By

On April 7, 2023

In TV Movies

Farrah Fawcett in Criminal Behavior.

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.

Read More

Park Overall Calculates The Price of a Broken Heart

By

On April 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Park Overall in The Price of a Broken Heart.

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.

Read More

Paula Abdul is Touched by Evil in Her TV Movie Debut

By

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.

Read More

Murder is Genetic (and Campy) in Tainted Blood

By

On March 26, 2023

In TV Movies

Raquel Welch butches it up in Tainted Blood.

In Arsenic and Old Lace, Cary Grant’s character famously quips “You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.” Tainted Blood, a 1993 made-for-TV thriller starring the tiniest bits of Raquel Welch and Joan Van Ark’s original faces, takes that premise and stigmatizes it within an inch of its life—it would make you cry uncle, if you weren’t afraid that he, too, would show up and go on a killing spree.

Welch, inexpressive as ever in a series of drably colored power suits, plays Elizabeth Hayes, a bestselling author of books about “the breakdown of the American family” and “prostitute spies in Washington, D.C.” We meet her as she crashes a funeral in Oklahoma, where high school athlete Brian O’Connor (John Thomson) shot his parents and then himself in a crime that left their small town reeling. Her instincts for tabloid journalism are rewarded when Brian’s grieving aunt (Molly McClure) reveals her adopted nephew was born in a psychiatric hospital.

Read More

Because Mommy Works: The Nightmare of Having a Self-Sufficient Mother

By

On January 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Anne Archer is a persecuted parent in Because Mommy Works.

From Stella Dallas to Kramer vs. Kramer, there’s no tearjerker quite like the separation of parent and child, and Because Mommy Works (1994) is no exception. An NBC production that found a second home on Lifetime, it could more accurately be called Because Daddy’s a Dipsh*t. And while its plot and resolution are likely to astonish or even amuse younger or more sheltered viewers who don’t take it seriously, the ’90s were indeed still a time when mothers, unlike fathers, were legally penalized for working or attaining higher education.

Anne Archer plays Abby Forman, a cardiac care nurse and mother to six-year-old Willie (Casey Wurzbach of Gramps). Her ex-husband, Ted (John Heard, a specialist of sorts in detestable characters), has spent nearly half of Willie’s life largely absent from it, doing whatever he pleases, but believes he has fulfilled his fatherly obligations by never missing a child support payment. Now remarried to homemaker Claire (Ashley Crow, who makes the most of a small but complex role), he reappears to again hassle Abby for having the temerity to think that she, like him or any other working father, can effectively parent while also holding a job.

Read More

Kelly McGillis Will Punch a Tornado in the Face in Storm Chasers

By

On January 23, 2023

In TV Movies

Kelly McGillis (with Wolf Larson) keeps her eyes on the sky in Storm Chasers.

Kelly McGillis, like Rodney Dangerfield, don’t get no respect. And while I’ve previously been part of the problem, having poked a little fun at her coming out many moons ago, I can say in all seriousness that she is criminally underrated as an actress. Sure, she’s been adequately celebrated for taking everyone’s breath away in Top Gun (1986), but beauty alone is little more than a genetic fluke. Any number of actresses could’ve roared off on a motorcycle with Tom Cruise and audiences would’ve responded favorably (though few would’ve brought the kind of energy to the role that made you think, “Huh, so Maverick’s a bottom”).

Witness (1985) is rightfully remembered as one of the great thrillers of the 1980s. But it’s also one of the best cinematic love stories of the last 40 years, and much of that is due to an incandescent performance by McGillis as Rachel, the Amish widow whose son witnesses a murder that Harrison Ford’s big city detective is determined to solve at great personal cost. Rachel’s goodness, curiosity and capacity for surprise light her from within. You hold your breath when McGillis is onscreen, whether Rachel is bathing, unashamed, with Ford’s detective in view, or illicitly (but innocently) dancing with him in a barn. Her presence is never short of mesmerizing.

Read More

A Soapy Sister Act in Dick Van Dyke’s Daughters of Privilege

By

On January 20, 2023

In TV Movies

Dick Van Dyke stares into the ruins of his past in Daughters of Privilege.

Soapy, swampy and occasionally sultry, Daughters of Privilege (1991) is above all else fairly silly, even though its star, Dick Van Dyke, doesn’t trip over any ottomans—or, for the Golden Girls aficionados among us, practice law while wearing a clown suit. As Buddy Keys, a hard-headed businessman whose empire includes construction, real estate and newspaper publishing, there are secrets in his eyes and wisdom in his mustache, little of it shared with either us or his plentiful daughters.

From his first marriage to Trina (Marj Dusay), a treacherous social climber, he is father (or “Daddy,” as they call him) to crusading physician Mary Hope (Daphne Ashbrook) and rebellious Diana (Kate Vernon). He shares young newspaperwoman Felicia (Angela Alvarado) with an unseen second wife from whom he’s estranged. “A kid who doesn’t depress me!” he proudly calls Felicia. When she pronounces his newspaper boring, he is invigorated even as he chides her: “Why don’t you just speak your mind? Why don’t you show up here after 25 years of court-enforced visitation and tell me how to run my business?” And then he makes her an associate publisher.

Read More

The Cold Heart of a Killer: Kate Jackson’s Icy Thriller

By

On December 20, 2022

In TV Movies

Kate Jackson in The Cold Heart of a Killer.

Whether she’s skeet-shooting, serving time, pledging her allegiance to Satan, getting swarmed by bees or shacking up with a teenage student, Kate Jackson always looks effortlessly cool. And as an Iditarod hopeful in The Cold Heart of a Killer (1996), she’s practically frozen. While her Charlie’s Angels costars sang Christmas carols and helped save Santa and his elves from certain death, as we’ve explored in recent weeks, Jackson never made a holiday telefilm. But her springtime race across the snowy, windswept Alaskan wild will make you shiver, and it’s not just the subzero temperatures that are deadly—there’s also a killer on the loose.

Jessie Arnold (Jackson, also executive producing) is a former sled-dog musher whose competitive career ended five years earlier, when she narrowly escaped death in a savage storm. Since then she’s become one of the state’s premier dog breeders, developing a new breed of Huskies for racing purposes. Her pack is poised to make its Iditarod debut with her newly sober brother, Robbie Pierce (Philip Granger). When he’s lured to his death by a shadowy figure, Jessie has no choice but to enter the race, competing not only as a tribute to Robbie but because she’ll lose both her kennel operation and custody of son Matthew (Kevin Zegers) if she doesn’t bring home the $50,000 grand prize.

Read More

Dolly Parton Decks the Halls in Unlikely Angel

By

On November 28, 2022

In TV Movies

Dolly Parton and Roddy McDowall plot her salvation in Unlikely Angel.

Even if you aren’t the type of Dolly Parton fan who finds A Smoky Mountain Christmas’s lesbian subtext to be as bountiful as the beloved entertainer’s talent—or other assets—you are likely to derive some amusement from Roddy McDowall (who last we saw in Flood!) sternly lecturing her about resisting “affection for the opposite sex,” as he puts it, in Unlikely Angel. That he does so as a slightly bitchy Saint Peter makes it all the better.

The two meet at the pearly gates after Parton’s bar singer, Ruby Diamond (“everybody says I’m a gem!”), dies in a car crash. Peter notes with some concern that Ruby was, overall, less than virtuous. Consulting his book, he elaborates: “All your life, you have done exactly as you wanted, gone where you wanted, said what you wanted. You have never thought of anyone else but yourself.” She doesn’t dispute this, nor is she shocked to learn that Uncle Clem hasn’t joined her mother and the rest of their family in heaven.

Peter offers her a chance to redeem herself by healing a grief-stricken family in the week leading up to Christmas. Ben Bartilson (Brian Kerwin, who I’ve loved since Torch Song Trilogy) has drifted apart from his children after the tragic death of his wife, devoting all of his energy to work. Young Sarah (played by future sex cult leader Allison Mack) and Matthew (Eli Marienthal) spend a lot of time alone, when they aren’t scaring off a string of nannies. Ruby’s deposited on their doorstep with little more than a suitcase, a guitar and an aw-shucks smile.

Read More

Thanksgiving Day: Mary Tyler Moore and Tony Curtis Serve a Turkey

By

On November 22, 2022

In TV Movies

Mary Tyler Moore spanks Jonathon Brandmeier in Thanksgiving Day.

Readers, I’m going to ask you to sit down before we continue any discussion of Thanksgiving Day (1990), because I’m about to say something that might upset anyone with lingering nightmares about Just Between Friends (1986). It’s as difficult to break this news as it is to receive it: Mary Tyler Moore wears a pink spandex leotard in this one, too. Not only that, we’re subjected to lingering shots of her scantily-clad tap dancing skills in lieu of excessive aerobics instruction. Scream and cry and hug Judd Hirsch about it, and then we’ll move on.

Even without those godforsaken leotards, you have to approach Thanksgiving Day with realistic expectations. NBC billed it as “the most unusual holiday movie ever” for a reason—it’s a big ol’ frozen turkey. Performed in the screwball style of Rue McClanahan’s Children of the Bride (1990), but without its pathos or crooked charm, we are left with little more than Moore’s exhibitionism and repeated gags about serving roast beef on Thanksgiving. Oh, and there’s a lesbian. Except, American television being what it was in the early ’90s, Moore’s daughter isn’t really a lesbian. She ends up with… Sonny Bono.

Read More

Page 3 of 6

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén