Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Tag: Murder Most Foul Page 1 of 5

With a Vengeance: Melissa Gilbert’s Memorable Amnesia Thriller

By

On January 31, 2024

In TV Movies

Melissa Gilbert and Matthew Lawrence in With a Vengeance.

If there’s a sensitive ’80s sitcom dad you never expected would chase Little House on the Prairie’s Half-Pint through the woods with a bloody knife and murder in his eyes, it’s probably Steven Keaton of Family Ties. (Give Jason Seaver a little coke or booze and who knows what he’s capable of doing.) That element of surprise lends a subversive jolt to the opening scenes of With a Vengeance, a 1992 TV movie also known as Undesirable, when Frank Tanner (Michael Gross) frenziedly slashes a Washington mother and her children to death and sets off after Melissa Gilbert, the only witness to the crime.

Six years later, she’s living in California as Jenna King, a nanny who breaks down when her newest employer, Mike Barcetti (Jack Scalia, Sweet Deception), questions her phony background. She admits to living under an assumed name and tearfully confesses “I don’t know where I went to high school. I don’t know if I went to high school. I don’t know where my family is. I don’t know if I have a family. The truth is, I don’t even know who I am.” Luckily for her, he’s not just a ruggedly handsome single father but a tenacious DOJ attorney determined to help cure her amnesia and uncover her true identity.

Read More

Stillwatch: Lynda Carter and Angie Dickinson Collide

By

On January 26, 2024

In TV Movies

Lynda Carter in Stillwatch.

Lynda Carter’s shoulder pads are so impressively broad at times in Stillwatch (1987) that she resembles David Byrne in Stop Making Sense. You might optimistically wonder if the cushioning is tactical, meant to provide protection during that most sacred of ’80s primetime rituals: a catfight. But Patricia Traymore, her TV journalist, is too refined for that. Her inevitable showdown with scheming Senator Abigail Winslow (Angie Dickinson) results in a single slap.

A profiler of celebrities and politicians, Patricia’s been lured to Washington, D.C. by veteran newsman Luther Pelham (Stuart Whitman) to interview Winslow, who’s in the running to replace an ailing vice president. “I’ve always felt that the public’s right to know ends where my private life begins,” Abigail uncooperatively maintains, even though she’s a public servant whose career was built on the premature death of her congressman husband. Naturally, there are skeletons in her closet — and a few in Patricia’s, as well.

Read More

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

By

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.

Read More

Deadly Whispers: Tony Danza’s Odd Turn as a Murderous Father

By

On December 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Tony Danza and Pamela Reed in Deadly Whispers.

Imagine Tony Danza in a frilly dress and sun hat, clutching a parasol and drawling “Fiddle-dee-dee! Ashley Wilkes told me he likes to see a girl with a healthy appetite!” and you’ll have some idea of the absurdity of his casting in Deadly Whispers (1995). The extent to which he mangles an exaggerated Southern accent is hard to overstate; when he says “Yo missin’ The Waltons” (rather than “You’re missing”) only 10 minutes into the movie, you might laugh harder than you ever did at Who’s the Boss?

Unfortunately for Danza, Deadly Whispers isn’t supposed to be funny. In this thinly veiled dramatization of the 1987 murder of Kathy Bonney, he plays Virginia salvage yard owner Tom Acton, the last person to see his troubled teenage daughter Kathy (Heather Tom) alive before she disappears. A high school dropout who answers the phones at Tom’s business — he doesn’t need the help but refuses to let her out of his sight — she defiantly teases her hair and bares her midriff in pursuit of a married coworker.

Read More

Donna Mills Searches for a Missing Plot in The Lady Forgets

By

On November 14, 2023

In TV Movies

Donna Mills has more hair than memories in The Lady Forgets.

Amnesia is contagious in The Lady Forgets (1989), afflicting not only its puzzled heroine, an art teacher mixed up in a murder she can’t remember, but screenwriter Durrell Royce Crays (Schoolboy Father), who seems to have misplaced its plot and improvised by scribbling bits of dialogue in spray cheese.

If you don’t feel like a neurologist within its first 10 minutes, when Rebecca Simms (Donna Mills) sustains one of her many head injuries and recovers previously lost memories while simultaneously losing newer ones, give it a little time. Eventually you’ll have wondered “Did he just have a stroke?” about several important characters, before finally questioning your own cognitive abilities as you struggle to make sense of anything you just saw — particularly Greg Evigan’s hair, the vivacious mullet of My Two Dads having been cruelly replaced by an ailing squirrel.

Read More

Stalked by My Doctor: The Return Improves on the Original

By

On October 26, 2023

In TV Movies

Eric Roberts and Claire Blackwelder in Stalked by My Doctor: The Return.

When last we saw Dr. Albert Beck (Eric Roberts), the world’s second-most dangerous cardiothoracic surgeon, he was starting a new life as an international fugitive following a kidnapped patient’s daring escape from captivity. Stalked by My Doctor: The Return (2016) finds him in Acapulco, and one can only assume that Lifetime couldn’t afford to license the Four Tops’ “Loco in Acapulco,” which would’ve been the perfect soundtrack to a sequel that zestfully embraces the abject terribleness of its slightly more serious predecessor.

Its villain, now posing as a pediatrician named Victor Slauson, practices his own form of self-acceptance by ignoring the advice — and pharmaceuticals — offered by his psychiatrist, Dr. Clark (Tiffany Adams). Their online appointments convey Beck’s commitment to indulging his madness, as when he confidently tells the doctor of his plan to stalk 18-year-old Amy Watkins (Claire Blackwelder), who he recently saved from drowning. “I’m thinking I can date the mother, which would help me get closer to the daughter,” he muses. “The mom likes me, I can tell. But don’t worry, she won’t be bothering us for long.”

Read More

Vows of Deception: Cheryl Ladd’s Trashy Femme Fatale

By

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).

Read More

The Demon Murder Case: Guest-Starring Harvey Fierstein as Satan

By

On July 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Andy Griffith and Beverlee McKinsey scour their Demon Murder Case contracts for an escape clause.

When we look back on our childhoods, who among us can’t fondly recall being possessed by murderous demons? Reading IMDb’s plot summary of The Demon Murder Case, a 1983 telefilm, I felt stirrings of nostalgia and decided to track down this horror flick that was sure to play like a home movie. Sadly, the synopsis — “A young boy is taken over by demons who force him to commit murder” — is deceptive. The worst that Demon’s bedeviled pipsqueak Brian Frazier (Charlie Fields) does is anger a sputtering bishop (Burning Rage’s Eddie Albert, sounding more like a revivalist grifter) by blowing raspberries at God.

There is a murder, committed by an adult late in the film, that comes out of nowhere. Its circumstances, in keeping with the rest of The Demon Murder Case, are nonsensical. The screenplay, credited to William Kelley (soon an Oscar winner for Witness), isn’t just inchoate, it is genuinely imbecilic. If you wish to understand the particulars of how a malevolent spirit called the Beast came to reside within Brian, or how it hopscotches into the body of another character, you’re out of luck. This courthouse exchange between Brian’s sister and a reporter typifies the quality of the writing:

Joan: What did you do, then, to get rid of the devil in [Murderer]?

Nancy:  Well, we haven’t done anything for [Murderer] as of yet. But he still definitely needs a full exorcism.

THE DEMON MURDER CASE (1983)

Read More

With Murder in Mind Squanders a Bewitching Talent

By

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.

Read More

Lifetime’s Cyberstalker Serves More Laughs Than Scares

By

On June 16, 2023

In TV Movies

Mischa Barton in Cyberstalker.

“Everybody’s got a stalker,” Alexis Rose asserts in the expanded lyrics of a “A Little Bit Alexis,” and given my own misadventures in being trailed online, I can’t entirely disagree. In Lifetime’s amusing Cyberstalker (2012), it’s Mischa Barton’s Aiden Ashley who captures the depraved attentions of an obsessive, but the Internet’s merely a gimmick. He tracks the teenager offline as well, eventually breaking into her house and murdering her parents, though the editing was such that I’m uncertain of his methods.

It’s the first of several strangely bloodless acts of violence he’ll commit in the course of the movie, with weapons including a motorcycle, a hacked traffic light and a taser. Why he does any of it, I haven’t the foggiest. How he came to fixate on Aiden, I couldn’t tell you. The screenplay, credited to Kraig X. Wenman, seems to have been composed by an online story generator that randomly inserts words like “IP address,” “algorithm,” “hard drive” and “server” into dialogue that almost never advances the plot.

Read More

Page 1 of 5

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén