Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

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Obsessed: Shannen Doherty’s Fatal Attraction

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On January 1, 2024

In TV Movies

Shannen Doherty channels Isabelle Adjani in Obsessed.

The early ’90s were a cinematic golden age of gorgeous obsessives scheming seaside in trash, glorious trash, and while Obsessed (1992), Shannen Doherty’s entry in that sweepstakes, was made for ABC, it has the lurid spirit of a Cinemax special. Your hopes will soar from its opening scenes, when her Lorie Brindel, a marine surveyor in her early-to-mid twenties, is dispatched to appraise a yacht for insurance purposes and arrives in her finest miniskirt, appallingly baby-voiced and flirtatious with a silver-haired client, Ed Bledsoe (William Devane).

“I’ve seen a lot of boats but not many this old, in this kind of shape, Mr. Bledsoe,” she coos, impressed by the majesty of his vessel. You’re forgiven for anticipating the strains of “bom-chicka-wawa” on the soundtrack, and that’s before she admiringly runs her hand along his yacht’s woodwork as he grins like a Cheshire cat. They show some propriety by arranging a dinner date, and their first tryst — a very ’90s ordeal with excessive closeups of limbs entangled in white sheets (and Lorie reverently kissing Ed’s saggy chest) — is scored with the same saxophone music that accompanied all sex in TV movies during the Clinton administration.

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Donna Mills Searches for a Missing Plot in The Lady Forgets

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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.

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Vows of Deception: Cheryl Ladd’s Trashy Femme Fatale

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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).

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Criminal Behavior: Farrah Fawcett Solves Crimes, Minus Charlie

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On April 7, 2023

In TV Movies

Farrah Fawcett in Criminal Behavior.

Charlie’s Angels disbanded long before 1992, but that year found two of the Townsend Agency’s finest still solving murders in TV movies: Jaclyn Smith in In the Arms of a Killer, a police procedural that wanted to be more hardboiled than it was, and Farrah Fawcett in Criminal Behavior. The superior performance and film belong to Fawcett, whose breezy mystery is as edgy as it is convoluted.

In a rueful opening voiceover, her Jessie Lee Stubbs divulges “I was nine years old when I began to hope criminal behavior didn’t run in the family genes.” (Raquel Welch later tackled the same subject in a rather more salacious manner in Tainted Blood.) Born to a stickup artist father and madam mother, and raised alongside a drug-dealing brother, Jessie works as a public defender, a position that nurtures her bone-deep distrust of the police.

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Paula Abdul is Touched by Evil in Her TV Movie Debut

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On April 4, 2023

In TV Movies

Paula Abdul gets mixed up with a cold-hearted snake in Touched by Evil.

If there are words that could accurately convey the fathomless stupidity of Touched by Evil, Paula Abdul’s 1997 telefilm debut, they are lost to me as I ponder what might be the dumbest film I’ve ever seen—and I am someone who has, through an unusual series of events, endured Moment by Moment more than once. My problems are less with Abdul, whose cheetah print poster hung above my bed in the early ’90s (alongside a gallery of New Kids on the Block posters), than with Phil Penningroth’s screenplay, which trivializes rape and treats not only viewers, but the characters themselves, as nincompoops.

Abdul’s Ellen Collier, newly divorced from MC Skat Kat, is attempting to forge a new life and career as a single woman when she’s attacked in her condo by the prolific Northside Rapist, who subsequently torments her with harassing phone calls. One of the few pieces of information she is given about her assailant is that he evades detection by always driving a different vehicle. You might assume this fact would give her pause when car detailer Jerry (Adrian Pasdar, oozing sleaze), keeps running into her and trying to make her acquaintance. But Ellen, though hyper-alert in other areas of her life, doesn’t find it strange at all. Even more unbelievably, her friends (Susan Ruttan and Tracy Nelson) begin pressuring her to date him shortly after the assault.

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The Bedroom Window: Isabelle Huppert and… Steve Guttenberg?!

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On March 28, 2023

In '80s Movies

Isabelle Huppert and Steve Guttenberg in The Bedroom Window.

The Bedroom Window’s central mystery is not the identity of its killer, who stalks the streets of Baltimore raping and murdering young women he spots in bars. Nor is it how Steve Guttenberg’s Terry Lambert, the slick protégé of a construction executive, will clear his name after becoming hopelessly ensnared in the resulting investigation. It is, instead, how Guttenberg gets Isabelle Huppert’s Sylvia Wentworth, his boss’s wife, to come home with him. To that question, I maintain, writer-director Curtis Hanson provides no reasonable answer.

Was she enchanted after seeing him roller-skate his way through the Village People classic Can’t Stop the Music in his tightest pants and shorts? (Guttenberg doesn’t strut his stuff on wheels here, but ditches his clothes more than once.) Did the greatest screen actress of her generation secretly adore Police Academy? In the end, it doesn’t matter: The Bedroom Window is made more interesting by its unusual casting. And, just as importantly, it holds a special place in my heart for its repeated use of Robert Palmer’s “Hyperactive.”

My unabashed fondness of this dated ’80s song in a dated ’80s movie is sentimental in nature. “Hyperactive” reminds me of all the great loves of my life, from the one who danced wildly in her pajamas each week to the Mad Men theme to the one who “puts her makeup on at 6 am,” then “goes to work, gets home and puts it on again.” Window’s resident whirling dervish is Terry himself, an affable schemer eager to climb not only the corporate ladder but an icy Sylvia, whose philandering is more a byproduct of boredom than passion.

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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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Cheryl Ladd’s Oddball Dancing with Danger

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On June 30, 2022

In TV Movies

Saving the last dance for Cheryl Ladd is a dangerous proposition.

How or why Dancing with Danger was made is a mystery lost to time, but the answer might be found in its love scene. Before we get to that, let’s reacquaint ourselves with this 1994 USA Network telefilm. Cheryl Ladd stars as taxi dancer Mary Dannon, whose various disguises (all-black ensembles, berets, large sunglasses) counterproductively raise her profile.

Mary is already as conspicuous as any Guess Who? character in the opening scene, when she witnesses a street slaying in Atlantic City. She then moves cross-country to the Pacific Northwest, where trouble follows. She lands a job at the Star Brite, punching a time card before and after each dance. Her profession, popular in the ’20s and ’30s, was moribund by the ’50s and ’60s. Virtually no taxi dancers existed in the US by the ’90s, but this isn’t a movie concerned with realism.

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My Mother’s Secret Life … as an Escort

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On May 6, 2022

In TV Movies

Loni Anderson (un)dresses for success in My Mother’s Secret Life.

The big daughter-seeks-birth-mom TV event that everyone remembers from 1984 is, of course, the miniseries Lace. History has unfairly forgotten My Mother’s Secret Life, and I’ll be pleased if I can get even one person to revisit it. It’s an engaging (and unintentionally funny) telefilm that is perhaps best described as “Loni Anderson’s Charlene moment.” I encourage everyone to get in the mood right now by listening to the song of which I speak.

Now that we’ve taken the hand of a preacher man and made love in the sun, I think we can continue. My Mother’s Secret Life opens with Anderson’s Ellen Blake draped in about 30 lbs of designer clothes and furs. It’s all soon to be removed with artful precision in a demanding john’s penthouse suite. “I’m the buyer here,” he tells her aggressively. “I want to know what I’m buying. You do come at a premium rate.”

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Angie Dickinson Wields a Badge (Again) in Prime Target

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On April 4, 2022

In TV Movies

Angie Dickinson shoots to kill in Prime Target.

Eleven years after Angie Dickinson last nabbed a perp as Sgt. Pepper Anderson on Police Woman, she was back in the hunt in Prime Target (1989). This made-for-TV movie reunites her with Police Woman creator Robert L. Collins, who writes and directs. As veteran NYPD Sgt. Kelly Mulcahaney, she’s both predator and prey while investigating crooked cops who’ve been murdering women on the force, and Dickinson seems uncharacteristically peeved.

“So, why am I heading this task force?” she asks after being handed the assignment by Commissioner Peter Armetage (David Soul, who looks amusingly louche behind his giant desk). “Because you’re one of the highest-ranking female homicide detectives we’ve got,” he answers. “Because you’re on the women’s committee. Because I requested you, personally.” They have a history, of course, and that’s where the hardboiled dialogue begins:

Kelly: You know what they’re gonna say about this. About us. Again.

Peter: Kelly, Kelly, Kelly. My friend.

Kelly: Not anymore, I’m not.

Peter: How’s Judge What’s-His-Name?

Kelly: How’s your wife?

Peter: God, you’re tough. Why are you so tough, huh?

PRime target (1989)

On her way out she tells him, “Oh, and by the way, happy birthday, Peter. I’d have brought you a present except” — she shrugs — “what do you give someone who’s had everybody?” We trust that Kelly’s formidable, but Dickinson appears bored in another of her tough-broad-in-a-man’s-world roles. She dutifully pauses after each barb lands, her mind possibly wandering to that night’s dinner plans.

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