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Tag: TV Movies Page 3 of 12

Kate Jackson Fools Around in The Silence of Adultery

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On September 23, 2023

In TV Movies

Kate Jackson and Robert Desiderio in The Silence of Adultery.

The loftiness — and supreme silliness — of The Silence of Adultery’s title drew me in because it was almost Bergmanesque. Doesn’t it conjure mental images of Erland Josephson or Max von Sydow meeting Harriet Andersson or Ingrid Thulin in a barn in rural Sweden for joyless assignations before an indifferent, possibly nonexistent God? And while we’re asking unserious questions, if your adultery is silent does that mean you’re doing it wrong?

This 1995 Lifetime movie isn’t prurient enough to provide an unequivocal answer, but there isn’t much heat between the married Rachel Lindsey (Kate Jackson) and Michael Harvott (Robert Desiderio), a recently separated father. They’re introduced when Michael brings his nonverbal son to the barn where Rachel offers equine therapy to autistic kids. Her qualifications are unclear — the script says she isn’t a doctor, despite IMDb calling her one — and don’t matter, anyway. Autism is merely a plot device to introduce the lovers.

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Connie Sellecca Cries and Commits Bigamy in She Led Two Lives

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On September 14, 2023

In TV Movies

Connie Sellecca and Perry King in She Led Two Lives.

We meet Rebecca Cross (Connie Sellecca), a 35-year-old flannel enthusiast with a flawless complexion and unfortunate bangs, when she’s hauled off to jail in handcuffs. Suspenseful music plays as she’s booked — what crime did the mild-mannered cancer researcher commit? For the answer, let us turn to one of Barbra Streisand’s greatest hits: Rebecca is “A Woman in Love.” And she’ll do anything to get Mike (A Martinez) into her world and hold him within, even if it means committing bigamy. It’s a right she defends over and over again.

Rebecca is already married to Jeffrey (Perry King of Inmates: A Love Story), a dashing surgeon. Weeks earlier, he slid a bracelet onto her wrist for their seventh wedding anniversary and proposed a toast: “To Rebecca. I didn’t think it was possible but I love you more today than the day we were married.” And then he is paged to the operating room, a familiar conclusion to their nights together. Her loneliness is accentuated by her father’s deathbed regret at not spending more time with loved ones, a fate he implores her to avoid.

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Twirl: A Baton-Twirling Competition Tests a Friendship

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On August 29, 2023

In TV Movies

Lisa Whelchel, Erin Moran, and Moran’s false lashes, in Twirl.

Pauline Kael’s review of Urban Cowboy memorably concludes with a question to its writers and director: “James Bridges, Aaron Latham, have you been riding a head-pounding machine?” From Twirl’s earliest moments and throughout its duration, you might wonder the same of its filmmakers — had they sustained baton-related head injuries? Did they ever recover?

Clearly they were influenced by Cowboy (released theatrically a year earlier, in 1980), a moderately campy and classist crowd-pleaser masquerading as something more serious. Baton-crazed besties Bonnie Lee Jordan (Erin Moran of Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi) and Jill Moore (Lisa Whelchel of The Facts of Life) never mount a mechanical bull, but they share a boundless passion for twirling, which consumes their identities.

In Twirl’s dizzying opening moments, the girls trade voice-overs expressing sentiments such as this: “You know what it means to twirl? It means not havin’ time for messin’ around with my friends, it means sayin’ no to dates on twirlin’ days. When I am out there twirlin’ my heart away, no explanation is necessary.” Viewers may beg to differ, of course, but Bonnie Lee continues: “It is worth it? The bruises, swollen fingers and even black eyes? Yes, it is all worth it. I am a Texas twirler.”

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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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Behold the Magic and Wonder of Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story

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On July 11, 2023

In TV Movies

Joan and Melissa Rivers in Tears and Laughter.

You can keep your Mildred Pierce and Mermaids, your Steel Magnolias and Terms of Endearment—Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story (1994) is the greatest mother-daughter movie of all-time. “But what about Mommie Dearest?” you might counter. “What about Volver, Imitation of Life, Freaky Friday or Postcards from the Edge?”

To which I can only reply that Tears and Laughter is a dramedy about producer Edgar Rosenberg’s suicide starring his actual widow, Joan Rivers, and their daughter Melissa, a non-actress whose performance is the made-for-TV equivalent of Sofia Coppola’s maligned turn in The Godfather Part III. If you love things that are terrible, it gets no better than this, a tearjerker that opens with liposuction jokes and excerpts from a typical Rivers routine: “I went to Las Vegas, I threw my hotel key up at Tom Jones. He took it and burglarized my room.”

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Teen Runaways Fall Prey to a Pimp in Little Ladies of the Night

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On July 6, 2023

In TV Movies

Linda Purl in Little Ladies of the Night.

Paul Schrader, the Taxi Driver scribe who later wrote and directed Hardcore, wasn’t the only 1970s auteur preoccupied with sexually exploited minors. “Jiggle TV” mega-producer Aaron Spelling threw his feathered fedora into the ring with Little Ladies of the Night in 1977, scoring a ratings blockbuster for ABC with a tonally confused production that regards teenage prostitution—and all the physical and sexual violence it entails—as a gig worse than the average fast food shift but better than Yves Montand’s trucking assignment in The Wages of Fear.

Its opening narration is our first clue that Little Ladies, scripted by Hal Sitowitz and directed by Marvin J. Chomsky (The Deliberate Stranger), is an unserious film about a serious topic. Calling the teen runaway crisis “a major social issue,” it warns parents of the dangers that await children on the street. “You don’t want to find your kids here,” we’re told, and of course that’s true. But we also knew by 1977 that life with one’s parents wasn’t necessarily safer than harsh alternatives. That idea is paid some lip service here, until Sitowitz and Chomsky pull a potent punch that arguably undermines the rest of the story.

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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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Lifetime’s Cyberstalker Serves More Laughs Than Scares

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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.

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Rob Lowe Makes Room for Daddy in Schoolboy Father

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On May 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Rob Lowe in Schoolboy Father.

Our first indication that 16-year-old Charles Elderberry (Rob Lowe) isn’t ready for parenthood comes early in Schoolboy Father (1980), an Afterschool Special about the dangers of reproductive illiteracy. As his judgmental mother (a solid Sharon Spelman) reads a birth announcement involving Daisy Dallenger (Dana Plato), a girl he met at summer camp, Charles begins counting on his fingers. Later, he asks a friend if pregnancy always takes nine months. It’s information he could’ve used before roasting more than marshmallows with Daisy, if you catch my nonsensical drift.

Because mothers and newborns weren’t booted from American hospitals within 24 hours in the early 1980s, Charles has time to consider his options. Inconvenienced by the $2 parking fee, he nevertheless visits daily, staring at his son through the nursery glass. Daisy, who harshly dumped him on the last day of camp, never said a word about her pregnancy, not even after being temporarily kicked out of her parents’ house. When Charles asks whether she used protection with him, she retorts “You were there, did you?” before ruefully observing “Not that it matters much now.”

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No One Would Tell: When Teen Romance Turns Deadly

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On May 22, 2023

In TV Movies

Candace Cameron and Fred Savage in No One Would Tell.

There’s a power in the casting of No One Would Tell (1996) that might be lost on younger viewers, but for children of the ’80s and ’90s, Kevin Arnold abusing D.J. Tanner was about as shocking as “Beaver” Cleaver giving Gidget a black eye. Based on the chilling true story of 14-year-old Amy Carnevale’s murder at the hands of her high school boyfriend, it stars Fred Savage as senior Bobby Tennison, a standout wrestler who can’t control his anger when girlfriend Stacy Collins (Candace Cameron) acknowledges the existence of anyone who isn’t him.

His rages — and her hidden bruises — multiply each time she laughs with pals, wears a miniskirt in public or exchanges pleasantries with male classmates. “Yeah, so he gets a little jealous, OK? Guys are like that,” she tells worried friend Nicki (Heather McComb). It’s a lesson she picked up at home, where mother Laura (Michelle Phillips) excuses the controlling behavior of boyfriend Rod (Paul Linke) despite Stacy’s concerns. After lashing out physically, Bobby turns into the domestic violence version of a Fisher-Price See ‘n Say.

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