“Just call me and say ‘The carpet’s been cleaned,'” Celeste Cooper (Joanna Kerns) tells a hit man at the beginning of Mother Knows Best, after ordering the execution of her son-in-law. “I want whoever does this to be extremely careful,” she warns. “As careful as I am.”
Celeste, a socialite who is perfectly coiffed and manicured even while shopping for cheese, is indeed quite careful. So meticulous is this tireless fundraiser for charitable causes (recently honored as Handicapped Children’s Woman of the Year) that she times false accusations of assault against that same beleaguered son-in-law to coincide with her latest eye-lift.
Alas, Jessica Walter doesn’t attend Motherboy in this one.
“Comin’ atcha at the top of the hour, we’ve got your traffic update… and a little murder.”
As a non-Catholic, I’m not sure how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys it would take to atone for such an absolute dog as Original Sins (1995), but I reckon it’s a lot. On the Tori Spelling scale of TV movie terribleness, it’s better than Mind Over Murder (so is gallbladder surgery) but not quite as convincing as Death of a Cheerleader, if that’s any help at all. Despite a sexyFather Ralph de Bricassart twist that might’ve titillated my grandmother in the ’90s, this one’s a massive yawner.
Jennie Garth will not be ignored in An Unfinished Affair.
Here we go again with Tim Matheson and adultery. Having learned nothing from all the rampant infidelity that claimed no fewer than three lives in The Woman Who Sinned, his Alex Connor in An Unfinished Affair (1996) didn’t just mess around on any wife, he cheated on a woman dying of cancer. His biggest mistake is also his greatest joy: she miraculously, as he calls it, recovered.
“I know I need to put on some more weight, but at least I didn’t lose my hair,” Cynthia (Leigh Taylor-Young) sheepishly tells him during one of their scenes of domestic idyll. He couldn’t be happier to have his wife back and has even decided to give up a teaching side gig to rededicate himself to marriage. Pleased, Cynthia admits, “I know it’s selfish but I want you all to myself.”
Tim Matheson is keeping some painful secrets from Leigh Taylor-Young in An Unfinished Affair.
Does it make a ton of sense why he chose to scratch the teaching itch during the time he was most convinced his wife’s death was imminent? Of course not. But this is an exceptionally lazy screenplay (credited to Rama Laurie Stanger, later of Lifetime’s House of Versace, and Dan Witt) in need of a way to introduce the other woman, Sheila Hart (Jennie Garth), a graphic designer who took his class.
Jack Wagner has dangerous abandonment issues in Lady Killer.
We might as well get this out of the way here: I consider Judith Light the Maria Falconetti of American made-for-TV movies. She is without peer. No matter the limitations (or excesses) of the material or her costars, her performances tend to be tiny marvels of subtlety, sympathy and generosity. Lady Killer (1995) is only the second of her films I’ve reviewed here, after A Strange Affair (1996), and it’s easily one of my least favorite of hers, but no matter how silly it might sound to the uninitiated, she genuinely elevates the medium.
Here she stars as Janice Mitchell, a homemaker who spends more time in the company of her therapist than with her workaholic husband Ross (Ben Masters) and co-ed daughter Sharon (Tracey Gold). Ross is usually overseas and with Sharon away at school, Janice is lonely and directionless. For fun she takes architectural tours, which is how she meets Guy Elliman (Jack Wagner), a self-described sometime architect whose voluminous hair suggests the balance of his time is spent deep conditioning.
Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott in Mind Over Murder.
What is there to say about a movie as bad as Mind Over Murder (2005), a Lifetime offering starring Tori Spelling as an Assistant District Attorney in temporary possession of psychic powers? Everything about it is unusually tacky, even by basic cable standards, from its garish pink and green color scheme to its nightmarish faux comic sex scenes and lifeless acting.
Its distinct terribleness makes you long for previous Spelling affairs like Death of a Cheerleader and Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? — and, speaking of affairs, Murder mostly lives on as a trivia answer. It was on the set of this film that Spelling’s tabloid-ready liaison with costar Dean McDermott began.
A children’s treasury of Spelling’s regrettable wardrobe.
The plot, to the extent that one exists, involves Holly Winters (Spelling), an ADA in Cincinnati whose head-scratchingly casual wardrobe is a series of increasingly hideous pink and green shirts and cardigans that match her equally awful accessories (as well as the wardrobe and, in one instance, even the beverage of her boss, Julian Hasty, played by Tyler Benskin). My wife walked past the TV at one point and mused “She looks like she shopped at GAP Kids.”
Joan Collins and Joanna Pacula wig out in Sweet Deception
Whoever greenlit Sweet Deception (1998) knew it was unmitigated crap. That’s how we ended up with not one but two very special guest stars: Kate Jackson (wearing the type of gaudy press-on nails favored by Linda Richman) and Joan Collins (styling wigs and giving manicures from a wheelchair). We’ll get to those two later. First we need to talk about Jack Scalia’s Southern accent, the least convincing thing in a movie full of ’em.
Joanna Pacula stars as Risa, the second Mrs. Gallagher. Her husband is Fin (Peter LaCroix), a wealthy serial philanderer we meet as he stashes millions of dollars in cash in an offshore safe deposit box. He isn’t long for this world, which is just as well because little about Fin and Risa’s pairing, or casting, makes sense. Equally nonsensically, Scalia plays Brett Newcomb, Fin’s slick Southern law partner in a San Francisco firm. He calls Risa “darlin'” about 87 times in the course of 90 minutes, sometimes while wearing a bow tie, as if lost on his way to a dinner theater production of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Kate Jackson plays her embittered ex role a bit broadly.
The first Mrs. Gallagher, Kit (Kate Jackson), is also in the picture, making a scene at a soiree attended by her ex and casually greeting his new wife with an insult: “Hello, Risa. Beautiful dress. It’s a shame they didn’t have it in your size.” Jackson has very few lines altogether but might as well be in a Honeysuckle Ham catalogue with her exaggerated facial expressions and swigs of champagne that have absolutely nothing in common with the rest of Sweet Deception.
Philip Casnoff is one of many pawns in Susan Lucci’s game.
All My Children legend Susan Lucci’s long and not-so-illustrious career in TV movies (dating back to 1984’s Invitation to Hell, which we’ll get to eventually) was running on fumes by the Miracle at Christmas: Ebbie’s Story era of the mid-’90s. Its last gasp (to date — you know how soap actors love to reanimate the dead) came in 1998 with Blood on Her Hands, the perfunctory tale of a seductive schemer who leaves a trail of ruined men in her wake.
Unlike her character in 1991’s The Woman Who Sinned, Lucci’s Isabelle Collins is not a reluctant adulteress. She embraces the role with gusto, expertly fanning her cuckolded husband’s suspicions and taunting him with thinly veiled banter she knows will provoke a reaction. Stewart (John O’Hurley), an ill-tempered venture capitalist whose hobbies include golf and domestic violence, is happy to comply. A typical nasty exchange goes like this:
Hold onto your pom-poms because strange worlds are colliding in this one. We’ve got Tori Spelling, who we just watched in Mother, May I Sleep with Danger? We have Valerie Harper, who we’ve seen in Night Terror and Strange Voices. And we’ve got ’em in Death of a Cheerleader, a 1994 TV movie that could best be described as Mean Girls meets The Craft meets Election meets The Positively True Adventuresof the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. Excited yet? Alas, I suggest tempering your enthusiasm.
Without further ado, Kellie Martin (who knows her way around a TV movie herself) is Angela Delvecchio, a bright and seemingly normal kid who is a little too captivated by her high school’s pep rally. Its inspirational theme: Be the Best. “I’m going to be,” Angela vows to her BFF Jill (Margaret Langrick, bedecked in the type of unfortunate headwear favored by Mayim Bialik and Jenna von Oÿ’s Blossom characters). “I am going to edit the yearbook, and I’m going to be a cheerleader.” And she’s gonna get all As in murder!
As Felix Unger taught us lo those many years ago, when you assume you make an ass out of you and me. Reader, here I confess that I made an ass out of us all with this one. After watching Susan Lucci in The Woman Who Sinned, I noticed In Her Defense, another title with a similar plot (adultery, murder, legal jeopardy). It starred Marlee Matlin and Michael Dudikoff, who played the schmuck with whom Lucci sinned, and I thought maybe the films would make a decent double feature.
How wrong I was! By the time I realized this was not a campy TV movie of the week but dreary Canadian direct-to-cable-or-video dreck, I’d invested enough time in watching it that I didn’t want to scrap the whole thing. Gird your loins if you plan to continue reading, because this was brutally bad. Its saving grace was a half-baked lesbian twist that, despite feeling somewhat random, was less than surprising to anyone who has seen Basic Instinct.
Susan Lucci and Tim Matheson are on the outside of their marriage looking in.
First thing’s first: The Woman Who Sinned, a 1991 TV movie that bravely asks the question, Is it okay to cheat if you’re married to Tim Matheson?, is no Miracle at Christmas: Ebbie’s Story (1995). Few films are. If you’re here for Taran Noah Smith’s Tiny Tim singing a Christmas carol while Susan Lucci’s a raging asshole to everyone, you’re out of luck. If you’re here for endless scenes of Lucci crying and a few seconds of Matheson fresh from a swim, you’re in the right place.
What we have here, mostly, is adultery. Adultery as far as the eye can see. And, to keep things lively, the occasional murder. Lucci is Victoria Robeson, a gallery owner whose best friend, author Jane (Lenore Kasdorf), is an outspoken proponent of extramarital affairs. When Victoria is uncharacteristically tempted to have one of her own, Jane is full of encouragement. And when that tryst with Evan Ganns (Michael Dudikoff, In Her Defense) ends poorly, Jane winds up dead—and Victoria’s wrongfully accused of the crime.
