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Tag: Family Drama 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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Teen Runaways Fall Prey to a Pimp in Little Ladies of the Night

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On July 6, 2023

In TV Movies

Linda Purl in Little Ladies of the Night.

Paul Schrader, the Taxi Driver scribe who later wrote and directed Hardcore, wasn’t the only 1970s auteur preoccupied with sexually exploited minors. “Jiggle TV” mega-producer Aaron Spelling threw his feathered fedora into the ring with Little Ladies of the Night in 1977, scoring a ratings blockbuster for ABC with a tonally confused production that regards teenage prostitution—and all the physical and sexual violence it entails—as a gig worse than the average fast food shift but better than Yves Montand’s trucking assignment in The Wages of Fear.

Its opening narration is our first clue that Little Ladies, scripted by Hal Sitowitz and directed by Marvin J. Chomsky (The Deliberate Stranger), is an unserious film about a serious topic. Calling the teen runaway crisis “a major social issue,” it warns parents of the dangers that await children on the street. “You don’t want to find your kids here,” we’re told, and of course that’s true. But we also knew by 1977 that life with one’s parents wasn’t necessarily safer than harsh alternatives. That idea is paid some lip service here, until Sitowitz and Chomsky pull a potent punch that arguably undermines the rest of the story.

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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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Patrick Duffy is Our Preacher-Teacher in Danielle Steel’s Daddy

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On June 6, 2023

In TV Movies

Patrick Duffy and Lynda Carter in Daddy.

In Daddy, Danielle Steel’s treacly ode to the humble American paterfamilias, generations of Watson men suffer as nobly as Juanita Moore in Imitation of Life or Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas. At least that’s what Steel wants us to believe. But the socioeconomic differences are hard not to notice—the only Watson man who struggles to provide for a child on his own is 18-year-old Ben (Ben Affleck), stubbornly proving his honor in a short-term experiment before allowing his wealthy father to bankroll a custody battle.

Oliver (Patrick Duffy), Ben’s dad, is a Chicago advertising executive so happily married to Sarah (Kate Mulgrew, angry as usual) that glamorous TV star Charlotte Sampson’s plunging décolletage barely registers when they meet at work. Charlotte (Lynda Carter of Hotline) will feature in his latest perfume campaign, and she’s somehow drawn to Oliver, whose poofy salt-and-pepper hair helps him resemble a human Q-Tip from afar. “I have the life I’ve always wanted and I’m smart enough to know it,” he contentedly tells a colleague, but life has other plans.

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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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