Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Tag: Kate Jackson Page 1 of 2

Black Death: Kate Jackson Fights the Plague

By

On March 1, 2024

In TV Movies

Kate Jackson and Jeffrey Nordling in a scene from Black Death.

Imagine if Charlie dispatched his Angels to defeat pneumonic plague: Jill would’ve made out with it to create a diversion while Sabrina and Kelly broke into a locked medicine cabinet under cover of night to retrieve a cache of critical antibiotics like streptomycin. Then they’d sneak up on the plague, there might be a karate-chop or two and a couple of hokey one-liners after force-feeding it medication, and we’d cut to Charlie chuckling “Good work, Angels! That Yersinia pestis never saw you coming.”

Kate Jackson has a tougher time protecting the populace in Black Death (1992, also known as Quiet Killer), assisted not by comely crossing guards but an underfunded New York City Department of Health. As Dr. Nora Hart, the agency’s chief epidemiologist, her gal Friday is Dr. Jake Prescott (Jeffrey Nordling), a fresh-off-the-bus Indiana transplant whose corn-fed naïveté makes no sense in the context of his occupation: epidemiologists tend to be pretty well-versed in the gritty realities of urban living.

Read More

Kate Jackson Fools Around in The Silence of Adultery

By

On September 23, 2023

In TV Movies

Kate Jackson and Robert Desiderio in The Silence of Adultery.

The loftiness — and supreme silliness — of The Silence of Adultery’s title drew me in because it was almost Bergmanesque. Doesn’t it conjure mental images of Erland Josephson or Max von Sydow meeting Harriet Andersson or Ingrid Thulin in a barn in rural Sweden for joyless assignations before an indifferent, possibly nonexistent God? And while we’re asking unserious questions, if your adultery is silent does that mean you’re doing it wrong?

This 1995 Lifetime movie isn’t prurient enough to provide an unequivocal answer, but there isn’t much heat between the married Rachel Lindsey (Kate Jackson) and Michael Harvott (Robert Desiderio), a recently separated father. They’re introduced when Michael brings his nonverbal son to the barn where Rachel offers equine therapy to autistic kids. Her qualifications are unclear — the script says she isn’t a doctor, despite IMDb calling her one — and don’t matter, anyway. Autism is merely a plot device to introduce the lovers.

Read More

Death at Love House: An Odd ’70s Mix of Old Hollywood and the Occult

By

On April 24, 2023

In TV Movies

Kate Jackson and Robert Wagner in Death at Love House.

For a few fun years in the 1970s, Kate Jackson was the queen of the humdinger ending. From Killer Bees to Death Cruise and Satan’s School for Girls, she delivered morbid laughs with a winsome smile. Unlike those offerings, director E.W. Swackhamer’s Death at Love House (1976) isn’t particularly humorous—at least not intentionally—but its overwrought ending might remind you of the flaming baby scene from Susan Slade, which puts it in a league of its own.

Jackson’s Donna Gregory is the newly pregnant wife and writing partner of Joel Gregory, Jr. (Robert Wagner). Together they’re probing the history of Joel Sr., the father Junior barely knew, and his turbulent Hollywood romance with the late Lorna Love (Marianna Hill), a legendary bombshell actress. If the actors aren’t entirely convincing as Didion and Dunne knockoffs, modern audiences would have to uncomfortably concede that Wagner (who also plays Joel Sr.) is right at home in a story about the sordid circumstances surrounding the premature death of a beloved actress.

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

All Aboard a Star-Studded ’70s Death Cruise

By

On October 31, 2022

In TV Movies

The cast of Death Cruise.

Depending on how you look at Death Cruise, a 1974 made-for-TV movie produced by Aaron Spelling, it’s either about the horrors of matrimony or the nightmare of traveling with one’s spouse. Either way, it’s one of the more unexpectedly delightful entries in Kate Jackson’s oeuvre, with wardrobe changes galore and the revelation of an unexpected, and somewhat butch, talent—she plays a crack skeet-shooter.

A year removed from her devilishly amusing performance in Satan’s School for Girls, Jackson stars as Mary Frances Radney, the luminous bride of Jimmy (Edward Albert), a boyish attorney. They’re on a second honeymoon, having won an all-expense-paid Caribbean cruise vacation. They’re assigned to dinner table 24 with two other couples, also winners: staid suburbanites David and Elizabeth Mason (Tom Bosley and Celeste Holm) and the quarrelsome Carters, Jerry and Sylvia (Richard Long and Polly Bergen).

Read More

Kate Jackson Makes the Grade in Satan’s School for Girls

By

On October 21, 2022

In TV Movies

Kate Jackson leads a campus recruitment effort in Satan’s School for Girls.

Nearly 50 years after its television debut, Satan’s School for Girls (1973) owes much of its timelessness to Kate Jackson’s devious smile. But it’s strikingly modern in other ways as well, containing portents of the #MeToo movement and alluding to the continued (and comically one-sided) political debate about the merits of a liberal arts education.

We join the action as Martha (Terry Lumley), paranoid in the manner of an Afterschool Special character lost in a bad trip, races to her sister Elizabeth’s place. There she encounters an offscreen menace and is soon found hanging from the rafters. Elizabeth (Pamela Franklin) knows it wasn’t a suicide, despite police labeling Martha “a melancholy girl,” and enrolls at Martha’s alma mater, the Salem Academy for Women, to conduct an undercover investigation.

Read More

Kate Jackson Does Time in Inmates: A Love Story

By

On October 10, 2022

In TV Movies

Killer Bees were nothing compared to hard time.

Kate Jackson’s incarcerated again in Inmates: A Love Story (1981), and while it’s frustrating that her love interest is Perry King and not Meg Foster, we must learn to accept it and move on with our lives. (Gluttons for punishment will recall that Foster was King’s lesbian love interest in 1978’s seven-layer dip of offensiveness, A Different Story, in which he also played gay, but that’s a rant for another day.) If you can manage your disappointment, even as Jackson wears flannel and performs garbage duty, you’ll be rewarded with a bizarre, mostly enjoyable telefilm with a rare early ’80s lesbian subplot.

Jackson’s Jane Mount (no comment on the butch surname) is doing “a nickel to a dime,” as she puts it, at the Greenleaf State Co-Correctional Institution, an experimental coed facility. The men and women bunk in separate areas but fraternize in the cafeteria, prison yard and other shared spaces. Sexual contact is a verboten but couples pair off anyway, which is how Jane’s closest friend, young Grace (an affecting Fay Hauser), becomes pregnant. When Grace spots the baby’s father canoodling with another inmate, Jane tells her to leave and approaches the cad with her cafeteria tray — and a trademark mischievous Jackson smile that signals he’s about to receive a helluva comeuppance.

Read More

Quick Programming Note for Kate Jackson Fans

By

On October 7, 2022

In Housekeeping

Kate Jackson, affectionately known here as Charlie’s Butchest Angel, celebrates a birthday later this month. If time permits I plan to look back on a few of her telefilms. First up will be Inmates: A Love Story (from 1981, the same year as Thin Ice), in which she again finds herself behind bars, this time in a co-ed institution with Shirley Jones as the prison superintendent.

Will sparks fly when the impossibly handsome Perry King shows up in a three-piece suit as a white collar criminal? Why is Tony Curtis loitering near the men’s showers dressed like a cross between a pimp, a cat burglar and the Gorton’s fisherman (by way of Johnny Cash)? We’ll attempt to answer all these questions and more next week, but I wanted to put this here now as a promise. Because, through a convoluted and predictably gay series of events, a few Jackson fans check in here almost every weekend looking for new Kate content.

Finally, an update on last week’s post about my anniversary. My wife and I don’t normally exchange gifts but since this was a milestone year I gave her a painting of the place where we got engaged. She gave me a Tom of Finland book that some of you will surely appreciate. Now the question becomes whether to leave it on the coffee table when her super-religious parents visit next week.

UPDATE: Here’s the Inmates: A Love Story review.

Charlie’s Angels: Unshackling “Angels in Chains”

By

On July 20, 2022

In Charlie's Angels

Alas, Helen Stewart ain’t in charge here.

“Angels in Chains” isn’t just the most iconic episode of Charlie’s Angels, it’s a Matryoshka doll of sexploitation. And this time the perv-in-chief isn’t even that scoundrel, serial sexual harasser Charlie. It’s us. Nearly 50 years after it first aired—and even if you don’t consider yourself particularly lascivious—you’ll spend the first 11 minutes holding your breath, waiting for the Angels to finally land behind bars.

The case is straightforward enough: Christine Hunter (Lauren Tewis) hires Charlie to infiltrate Pine Parish Prison Farm, where her sister Elizabeth (Terry Green) disappeared. The Parish has a reputation as a place where comely young women are baselessly arrested, only to never be seen or heard from again. But without evidence of wrongdoing, the governor won’t devote resources to searching for Elizabeth.

This early part of the episode lacks Charlie’s usual ribald comments, leaving us to ponder why Sabrina’s dressed as a clownish lesbian pimp. (Kelly’s in enormous wedge heels, the type Tom Cruise might’ve worn to the Maverick premiere.) “I’ve already arranged for you three to go to prison,” Charlie cheerfully announces. Jill seems less bothered by the assignment than the others.

Read More

Killer Bees (1974): Gloria Swanson is Big, It’s the Killer Bees That Got Small

By

On July 14, 2022

In TV Movies

Gloria Swanson’s the queen in Killer Bees.

The killer bee genre is a crowded one, with films like The Swarm (1978, starring Michael Caine in his “Sure, whatever, pay me in cash” phase); 1995’s Deadly Invasion: The Killer Bee Nightmare; and, perhaps most famously, My Girl (1991). I could go on and on. What makes this killer bee telefilm, creatively titled Killer Bees, so special, is its cast. Forget Kate Jackson and Lillian Gish, a memorable pairing in Thin Ice (1981). Here we have Kate Jackson and Gloria Swanson.

It opens with a pushy salesman pulling up to a filling station. The attendant (John Getz of Blood Simple) warns him not to trespass onto the neighboring Van Bohlen Winery property, but he does so anyway, and is summarily killed by bees. Forgive me, I’m being flippant. Technically, a swarm follows him into his car (it would’ve been funny if they had voice boxes like Richard Romanus in Night Terror), resulting in a crash and an enormous explosion. “I told him. I told the darn fool,” the gas station attendant mutters. Must happen all the time.

Read More

Page 1 of 2

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén