Cranky Lesbian

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Tag: Lesbians!

Christmas at the Ranch: Cowgirl, Take Her Away

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On November 25, 2022

In Streaming Movies

Laur Allen and Amanda Righetti in Christmas at the Ranch.

There has never been a believable cowboy in a made-for-TV Christmas romcom. Wearing clothing that’s curiously clean and unwrinkled at the end of the day, their faces caked in makeup, these down-home characters with chiseled jaws model looks that were cheaply assembled in the aisles of Kohl’s. Christmas at the Ranch, a lesbian take on Hallmark and Lifetime’s seasonal offerings, strikes a blow for equality by treating Amanda Righetti’s rancher, Kate, no differently.

The rebellious daughter of wealthy Kentucky horse breeders, Kate has toiled for several years at Hollis Hills, a farm on the verge of bankruptcy after Meemaw Hollis (Lindsay Wagner) refinanced it under usurious terms to pay the medical expenses of her now-deceased husband. Meemaw and grandson Charles (Archie Kao) make such a big to-do about Kate repairing a fencepost on her own—a task less arduous than assembling a baby gate or IKEA shelving—that it’s easy to see why the farm is insolvent. Everyone’s too busy bringing each other warm beverages and exaggeratedly tipping their hats to actually work.

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

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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.

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Kate Jackson Does Time in Inmates: A Love Story

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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.

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The Cat Creature Pussyfoots Around Lesbianism

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On September 21, 2022

In TV Movies

Gale Sondergaard has designs on Renne Jarrett in The Cat Creature.

Where to begin with all of the metaphorical lesbian double-entendre that director Curtis Harrington cheekily supplies in The Cat Creature (1973)? And how to explain that some of it was purely unintentional, as the openly gay Harrington had no way of knowing then that Meredith Baxter was not quite the woman that networks — and viewers — imagined her to be. (And then there’s the smaller matter of her hunky love interest, David Hedison, whose lookalike daughter Alexandra became one of Hollywood’s most visible A-list lesbians in a time when there were few.)

This pulpy tale, adapted by Psycho author Robert Bloch from his own material, is thin on story and long on atmosphere. It begins with appraiser Frank Lucas (Kent Smith) recording a voice memo for the attorney that hired him to inventory a wealthy and secretive dead man’s estate. “This place gives me the shivers,” he says of the darkened mansion before descending into its cellar, which contains a priceless collection of ancient artifacts. Prying open a sarcophagus, he finds a mummy wearing a striking gold amulet with emerald eyes.

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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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Bernadette Peters’ Lesbian Turn in Bobbie’s Girl

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On February 1, 2022

In TV Movies

Bobbie's Girl screen cap of Bernadette Peters crying
Rachel Ward and Bernadette Peters contend with cancer in Bobbie’s Girl.

Having Bernadette Peters as your whimsical lesbian aunt sounds great on paper, but Bobbie’s Girl might make you rethink that. Here her whimsy is such that it can’t be contained even as she tells her 10-year-old nephew his parents are dead. Addressing Alan (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) in the headmaster’s office of his boarding school, her Bailey Lewis somberly informs him “There’s been an accident.”

That’s as far as screenwriter Samuel Bernstein lets her get before she launches into one of her scatterbrained digressions. “That sounds funny, like some old mystery drama,” she babbles without awareness as a child, his life now changed forever, stares at her. They’ve never met before and her impulse is to play his parents’ death for yuks. Then she lets him drive her home since she’s a disaster behind the wheel.

Alan (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) adjusts to his new reality in Bobbie’s Girl.

Home is the Two Sisters bar in Ireland, owned by Bailey and her longtime partner Bobbie Langham (Rachel Ward). Bobbie is Alan’s biological aunt, who by her own admission never met him or gave his existence any thought. As Alan takes in the merry karaoke scene at the bar, Bailey broaches the subject of Bobbie’s brother and is again inexplicably tone-deaf.

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