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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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Lies Before Kisses: Jaclyn Smith’s Tawdry Neo-Noir

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On January 12, 2024

In TV Movies

Jaclyn Smith schemes and seduces in Lies Before Kisses.

When we think of femme fatales, we don’t usually imagine scheming seductresses in mom jeans and cutesy vests. But Jaclyn Smith (In the Arms of a Killer, The Night They Saved Christmas) remains true to her early ’90s Kmart aesthetic in Lies Before Kisses (1991), even as she rushes from one clandestine meeting to the next, leaving a trail of besotted men — and planted evidence — in her wake.

The duality of her Elaine ‘Lainey’ Sanders, wife of publishing magnate Grant (Ben Gazzara), is exposed at their daughter’s birthday party. After a catering snafu leaves them cakeless, she graciously insists “Don’t worry. If we have to, we’ll put some candles on the pâté.” Her mood darkens moments later, once she overhears Grant on the phone with a mystery woman. Rather than confront her husband, she calls the catering company to unleash hell. Lainey is used to getting her way.

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Dial ‘M’ for Murder: The Angie Dickinson Remake

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On October 24, 2022

In TV Movies

Angie Dickinson with Ron Moody in Dial ‘M’ for Murder.

Onscreen adultery rarely looked more glamorous than when it was being committed by Angie Dickinson, who followed her turn as one of the more significant straying spouses in the history of cinema—in Brian De Palma’s 1980 classic, Dressed to Kill—with a TV remake of another notable tale of extramarital betrayal, Dial ‘M’ for Murder. In an intriguing departure from other adaptations of Frederick Knott’s stage play, Dickinson was 50 years old when she tackled the role of Margot Wendice—twice as old as Grace Kelly, who played Margot in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial ‘M’ for Murder (1954).

That Dickinson’s Margot and Christopher Plummer’s Tony Wendice are an age-appropriate pairing subtly reconfigures their power dynamic. Grace Kelly’s youthfulness, contrasted with the Ray Milland’s cool, mature composure as a retired tennis player, enhanced her character’s vulnerability. In Andrew Davis’ A Perfect Murder, a 1998 remake, Gwyneth Paltrow would’ve been more believable as the daughter, not wife, of an embattled Michael Douglas. Dickinson, who held her own in westerns, exploitation flicks, police fare, and opposite the Rat Pack, was no ingénue by 1981, raising the domestic stakes.

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I Think I’m Having a Baby: A Teen’s Pregnant Pause

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On October 3, 2022

In TV Movies

Jennifer Jason Leigh, dressed in a red shirt, waves.
Jennifer Jason Leigh waves goodbye to her childhood in I Think I’m Having a Baby.

As strange a title as it is — it’s preferable to possess a degree of certainty about whether you’re expecting — I Think I’m Having a Baby is also perfectly in keeping with the utter cluelessness of this 1981 Afternoon Playhouse special’s 15-year-old protagonist. Laurie McIntire (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a child with the hair and makeup of a divorced and disillusioned single mother of two, has entered that hideous phase of adolescence where she’s constitutionally incapable of doing anything but mooning over an unimpressive boy.

Star athlete Peter (Shawn Stevens) dates her older cousin Phoebe (Helen Hunt), whose preppy sweater draped over the shoulders tells you all there is to know about her. Peter isn’t particularly bright (Phoebe does his schoolwork) and teases Laurie on the rare occasion he notices her at all. But when her best friend Marsha (Bobbi Block, now known as Samantha Paris) and little sister Carrie (Tracey Gold, years away from the torments of Lady Killer and Midwest Obsession) mock his ape-like walk across the football field, Laurie gets defensive. “He’s not really like that,” she insists.

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Poison Ivy: Cheap Lesbian Thrills in (Mostly) Straight Packaging

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On August 5, 2022

In '90s Films

Drew Barrymore is a teenage femme fatale in Poison Ivy.

If you were a young lesbian in the mid-’90s and your parents had cable, you were most likely aware of Poison Ivy. It was the perfect tawdry late-night fare, with a little something for everyone. Your more lascivious straight guys were there, of course, for the lurid sexual content featuring a jailbait antagonist. For everyone else, you had Drew Barrymore’s delightfully perverse machinations and Cheryl Ladd as an emphysema patient dying an unusually glamorous death.

Lesbian overtones (and lip locks) shared by Barrymore and Sara Gilbert were an added bonus for gay adolescents like myself. It wasn’t as titillating as the Aerosmith video with Alicia Silverstone and Liv Tyler (back then, few things were), or romantic like Fried Green Tomatoes. But its legend was burnished by two simple things: Gilbert, we already sensed, was one of us. And Barrymore was widely rumored to be bisexual. In that prehistoric pre-“Puppy Episode” era, you had to take what you could get.

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Celebrating A Smoky Mountain (Lesbian) Christmas

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On July 25, 2022

In TV Movies

Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain wig is a precious gift to viewers.

“A film that defies both description and sobriety, you either understand its brilliance or you don’t—it’s the El Topo of made-for-TV movies.” That’s how I described A Smoky Mountain Christmas when Bo Hopkins died earlier this year. But I left out another, more controversial opinion: It’s also a psychosexual lesbian Christmas drama for the whole family.

The peanut butter to Kenny Rogers’ Six Pack jelly, this Henry Winkler-directed 1986 made-for-TV musical holiday fantasy begins with Parton’s voice-over narration. “Once upon a time, and not too long ago, a princess lived in a beautiful castle, built upon a grassy green hill. People thought she had everything. They envied her talent, her fame and fortune—and her special relationship with longtime gal pal Judy Ogle. And they said her spirit could light up the darkest corners of any heart.”

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Goddess of Love: I’d Like to Buy a Plot

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On July 18, 2022

In TV Movies

Vanna White’s hair was later dyed and worn by Billy Ray Cyrus.

Only a decade rooted in such material excess as the ’80s, and fueled by as much cocaine, could have given us something like Goddess of Love. How this gem escaped my attention over the years is anyone’s guess. But when Lisa, a commenter here, mentioned it, all it took was one look at the trailer and I knew I had to watch it. Now, having done so, I encourage all true fans of garbage to do the same.

This 1988 NBC telefilm opens with a title card reading “Mt. Olympus… Ages Ago.” A chagrined Zeus (John Rhys-Davies) attempts to discipline his daughter, Aphrodite (Vanna White), as wife Hera (Betsy ‘Mrs. Voorhees’ Palmer) looks on. It’s a familiar situation, you can tell, for all three of them. Before he can list her offenses, Aphrodite interrupts to chide her father for not using her preferred name, Venus.

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Courtney Thorne-Smith is a Murderous Dairy Princess in Midwest Obsession

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On July 11, 2022

In TV Movies

We’re not watching outtakes from Drop Dead Gorgeous. This is all Midwest Obsession.

Try as the actors might, the only authentic performances in Midwest Obsession (1995) are those of its farm animals. That is the fault of the screenplay primarily, but I also blame the director, the producers, and possibly even society. (Were viewers not the ones demanding an endless supply of grisly movies-of-the-week during this era?) It must have been demoralizing heading to the set each day, trying to will a story this grim into existence.

We begin with a murder in a parking lot. The editing is abrupt and unsatisfying, leaving you less frightened than confused. The lighting doesn’t help; several scenes are too dark to fully keep track of what’s happening. It’s a problem that intensifies as the story unfolds. When our murderess loses control of herself, as happens now and then, the distorted shots and frenetic cuts are more suggestive of a Soundgarden music video than a movie. (The film’s fashions also aged poorly, which some of you might enjoy. If you’re in that camp, check out Gabrielle Carteris in Seduced and Betrayed, also from ’95.)

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Elizabeth Montgomery’s Sins of the Mother

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On May 4, 2022

In TV Movies

Elizabeth Montgomery raises a toast to an appalling lack of boundaries in Sins of the Mother.

If ever a film review deserved the headline “Bebitched,” it is Elizabeth Montgomery’s Sins of the Mother (1991). Adapted from Jack Olsen’s true crime novel Son: A Psychopath and His Victims, Sins does for motherhood what Montgomery’s The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) did for daughters.

Wooing her son one minute, tearing him to shreds the next, her Ruth Coe has the colorful vocabulary of Moira Rose; the histrionic tendencies of Rose and Lucille Bluth; and enough sinister Cluster B features to fuel an HBO limited series. On a cinematic scale of mother-son immorality, ranging from Psycho to Savage Grace to Ma Mère, Ruth’s relationship with son Kevin (Dale Midkiff of Back to You and Me) is mercifully mild. They are, in some ways, a more respectable version of con artists Lilly and Roy from The Grifters.

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Valerie Bertinelli is a Tempted Nun in Shattered Vows

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On January 28, 2022

In TV Movies

Valerie Bertinelli and David Morse in Shattered Vows.

Valerie Bertinelli’s Shattered Vows, a 1984 TV movie about a young nun romantically drawn to a priest, feels three hours long. Its run time is actually only around 90 minutes, much of it devoted to Bertinelli’s Mary Milligan and David Morse’s Father Tim looking disturbed and conflicted.

“When I was 16 years old, I had a calling to serve God I thought would last the rest of my life,” Mary tells us via voice-over. At other times it’s mentioned she knew her calling by 14. When her family tearfully hands her over to Sister Agnes (Caroline McWilliams), who is also Mary’s aunt, her mother says “She’s in your hands now.” Agnes corrects her: “She’s in God’s hands.” Soon enough, she’d rather be in Father Tim’s.

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