Cranky Lesbian

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Tag: Occult

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

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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)

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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