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Tag: TV Movies Page 5 of 12

Murder is Genetic (and Campy) in Tainted Blood

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On March 26, 2023

In TV Movies

Raquel Welch butches it up in Tainted Blood.

In Arsenic and Old Lace, Cary Grant’s character famously quips “You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.” Tainted Blood, a 1993 made-for-TV thriller starring the tiniest bits of Raquel Welch and Joan Van Ark’s original faces, takes that premise and stigmatizes it within an inch of its life—it would make you cry uncle, if you weren’t afraid that he, too, would show up and go on a killing spree.

Welch, inexpressive as ever in a series of drably colored power suits, plays Elizabeth Hayes, a bestselling author of books about “the breakdown of the American family” and “prostitute spies in Washington, D.C.” We meet her as she crashes a funeral in Oklahoma, where high school athlete Brian O’Connor (John Thomson) shot his parents and then himself in a crime that left their small town reeling. Her instincts for tabloid journalism are rewarded when Brian’s grieving aunt (Molly McClure) reveals her adopted nephew was born in a psychiatric hospital.

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Kenny Rogers Has a Midlife Crisis in Wild Horses

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On February 10, 2023

In TV Movies

Kenny Rogers says “Take this job and shove it” in Wild Horses.

No nobler a beard graced the small screen throughout the 1980s than that of Kenny Rogers, who stuck with made-for-TV movies (and wood-fired rotisserie chicken) after the box office underperformance of Six Pack, his feature film debut. Lost in the shadow of his popular Gambler series, you will find 1985’s Wild Horses sandwiched between the creatively titled The Gambler: The Adventure Continues and The Gambler: The Legend Continues.

If you’ve ever asked yourself what might’ve happened if The Night They Saved Christmas was produced by Menahem Golan and set in the Wild West with Rogers (or his equine counterpart, a majestic stallion) as Santa Claus, the answer is Wild Horses. Seemingly crafted for an audience of seven-year-old boys, with a little something tossed in for any maternal figures in their lives who might have flung underwear onstage at Wayne Newton concerts of yore, this finds Rogers staring down the barrel of a blue collar midlife crisis, wistful for his glory days as a champion rodeo cowboy.

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Because Mommy Works: The Nightmare of Having a Self-Sufficient Mother

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On January 27, 2023

In TV Movies

Anne Archer is a persecuted parent in Because Mommy Works.

From Stella Dallas to Kramer vs. Kramer, there’s no tearjerker quite like the separation of parent and child, and Because Mommy Works (1994) is no exception. An NBC production that found a second home on Lifetime, it could more accurately be called Because Daddy’s a Dipsh*t. And while its plot and resolution are likely to astonish or even amuse younger or more sheltered viewers who don’t take it seriously, the ’90s were indeed still a time when mothers, unlike fathers, were legally penalized for working or attaining higher education.

Anne Archer plays Abby Forman, a cardiac care nurse and mother to six-year-old Willie (Casey Wurzbach of Gramps). Her ex-husband, Ted (John Heard, a specialist of sorts in detestable characters), has spent nearly half of Willie’s life largely absent from it, doing whatever he pleases, but believes he has fulfilled his fatherly obligations by never missing a child support payment. Now remarried to homemaker Claire (Ashley Crow, who makes the most of a small but complex role), he reappears to again hassle Abby for having the temerity to think that she, like him or any other working father, can effectively parent while also holding a job.

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Blind Witness: Victoria Principal’s Audrey Hepburn Retread

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On January 25, 2023

In TV Movies

Victoria Principal in Blind Witness.

Just in case its plot—and gamine leading lady—weren’t tip-offs enough that Blind Witness (1989) was a made-for-TV retread of Audrey Hepburn’s Wait Until Dark, a quick glance at its credits reveals a common cowriter, Robert Carrington. Working here with Edmond Stevens from a story by Tom Sullivan, he crafts a familiar cat-and-mouse thriller about a blind woman targeted by a sadistic murderer. What distinguishes Witness from similar disabled-woman-in-peril fare, like Sorry, Wrong Number or The Spiral Staircase, is the resourcefulness of its heroine, Maggie Kemlich (Victoria Principal), and the intensity of her pursuer, Remy (Tim Choate), a hardened criminal.

Visually impaired since childhood, Maggie has built a successful business and enjoys an adventurous marriage with the sighted Gordon (Stephen Macht of Fear Stalk). When he is killed in a home invasion, investigating Lt. Schapper (Matt Clark, scowling as only he could) discounts a bruised and shaken Maggie’s reliability as a witness on the basis of her blindness. Asked how she can be certain only two suspects were present, she confidently rises from her chair, crosses the room and introduces herself to his silent partner, Det. Tuthill (a guarded Paul Le Mat, the useless father in The Night They Saved Christmas). “It’s not a parlor trick,” she admonishes a surprised Schapper, whose smug certitude persists.

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Kelly McGillis Will Punch a Tornado in the Face in Storm Chasers

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On January 23, 2023

In TV Movies

Kelly McGillis (with Wolf Larson) keeps her eyes on the sky in Storm Chasers.

Kelly McGillis, like Rodney Dangerfield, don’t get no respect. And while I’ve previously been part of the problem, having poked a little fun at her coming out many moons ago, I can say in all seriousness that she is criminally underrated as an actress. Sure, she’s been adequately celebrated for taking everyone’s breath away in Top Gun (1986), but beauty alone is little more than a genetic fluke. Any number of actresses could’ve roared off on a motorcycle with Tom Cruise and audiences would’ve responded favorably (though few would’ve brought the kind of energy to the role that made you think, “Huh, so Maverick’s a bottom”).

Witness (1985) is rightfully remembered as one of the great thrillers of the 1980s. But it’s also one of the best cinematic love stories of the last 40 years, and much of that is due to an incandescent performance by McGillis as Rachel, the Amish widow whose son witnesses a murder that Harrison Ford’s big city detective is determined to solve at great personal cost. Rachel’s goodness, curiosity and capacity for surprise light her from within. You hold your breath when McGillis is onscreen, whether Rachel is bathing, unashamed, with Ford’s detective in view, or illicitly (but innocently) dancing with him in a barn. Her presence is never short of mesmerizing.

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A Soapy Sister Act in Dick Van Dyke’s Daughters of Privilege

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On January 20, 2023

In TV Movies

Dick Van Dyke stares into the ruins of his past in Daughters of Privilege.

Soapy, swampy and occasionally sultry, Daughters of Privilege (1991) is above all else fairly silly, even though its star, Dick Van Dyke, doesn’t trip over any ottomans—or, for the Golden Girls aficionados among us, practice law while wearing a clown suit. As Buddy Keys, a hard-headed businessman whose empire includes construction, real estate and newspaper publishing, there are secrets in his eyes and wisdom in his mustache, little of it shared with either us or his plentiful daughters.

From his first marriage to Trina (Marj Dusay), a treacherous social climber, he is father (or “Daddy,” as they call him) to crusading physician Mary Hope (Daphne Ashbrook) and rebellious Diana (Kate Vernon). He shares young newspaperwoman Felicia (Angela Alvarado) with an unseen second wife from whom he’s estranged. “A kid who doesn’t depress me!” he proudly calls Felicia. When she pronounces his newspaper boring, he is invigorated even as he chides her: “Why don’t you just speak your mind? Why don’t you show up here after 25 years of court-enforced visitation and tell me how to run my business?” And then he makes her an associate publisher.

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Sorry, Wrong Number Gets the Loni Anderson Treatment

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On January 17, 2023

In TV Movies

Loni Anderson could use some Anacin for her neuralgia and neuritis in Sorry, Wrong Number.

Was Barbara Stanwyck’s death in January of 1990 perhaps hastened by the premiere of Loni Anderson’s made-for-television remake of Sorry, Wrong Number in October of 1989? The coroner’s report contains nothing to support that irresponsible theory, but it’s difficult not to wonder how Stanwyck, arguably the greatest American film actress in the history of the medium, felt about this silly project, one of many ’80s TV remakes of classic films. What must she have made of Anderson’s performance in particular, beginning with the stilted delivery that’s reminiscent of Brenda Dickson welcoming you to her home? (The video will inevitably be scrubbed from YouTube, but the legend lives on in print.)

Dressed alternately as a stewardess and a Sea Org member, her strikingly unnatural wig brilliantly capturing the sunlight in flashbacks, Anderson—who we last enjoyed as a robotic and impeccably attired escort in My Mother’s Secret Life—plays Madeleine Coltrane, middle-aged heiress to the country’s fourth-largest pharmaceutical empire. Screenwriter Ann Louise Bardach and director Tony Wharmby don’t probe too deeply, but we understand that her tycoon father Jim (Hal Holbrook) has kept her in an overprotective bubble. However, her guilelessness is so pronounced that during the interminable scenes that Madeleine spends hanging on the telephone, my thoughts turned to how she’d react if Beverly Sutphin called.

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Pam Dawber Squints Through Naked Eyes

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On January 14, 2023

In TV Movies

Pam Dawber is an unlikely voyeur in Through Naked Eyes.

From the earliest Brian De Palma films of the decade through the release of Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape at its end, the ’80s were a time when viewers—many newly equipped with camcorders of their own—began to embrace voyeurism. It was hardly a new cinematic subject, but the kids who’d once giddily delighted in the perverse thrills of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) were now grown and making their own movies—or at least subscribing to cable TV with the expectation of exposure to similarly titillating content.

For every serious film about voyeurism and surveillance—Blow-up, The Conformist, The Conversation, Blow Out and The Lives of Others, to name a few—there are five more prurient duds like Sliver, many indeed made for cable. Through Naked Eyes (1983), starring Pam Dawber of Mork & Mindy and David Soul of Starsky & Hutch, was produced for ABC, so you can temper your tawdrier expectations: it goes about as far as bare shoulders. A quasi-erotic thriller that’s notably short on eroticism, Eyes holds your attention mostly because of Soul’s intriguingly oddball performance. It also mixes things up a little by making Dawber the more dedicated peeper.

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Stoned: Scott Baio’s Reefer Madness

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On January 6, 2023

In TV Movies

“It’s just me. It’s just me and my ganja.“

There are life lessons that only Afterschool Specials and the school of hard knocks can teach us, and the wisdom imparted by Scott Baio’s Stoned (1980) is simple. If you smoke the devil’s lettuce, like Baio’s wiry, acne-scarred Jack Melon—known to some as Melonhead—you might nearly kill someone.

Jack, a lonely, awkward high schooler with an absent mother and gruff father, plays second fiddle at home to brother Mike (Vincent Bufano), a college-bound star swimmer who appears to be his only friend. When stoner classmates Alan (Steve Monarque) and Teddy (Jack Finch) offer him weed from their usual bathroom stall, he declines. “A goon like him? Pot would definitely do him good,” they derisively declare.

One of Stoned’s finer qualities is that Jack isn’t given a sob story. (Another is Baio’s knack for physical comedy.) His lack of social prowess isn’t a commentary on his character, it’s a natural byproduct of his age. He’s a quiet, puberty-stricken geek with an odd gait who experiences boredom so crushing that he walks down the street kicking a can. When a blowup with Mike leaves him vulnerable to Alan and Teddy’s invitations to smoke, he’s less interested in pot than companionship.

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Have I Got a Christmas for You: A Very ’70s Hallmark Take on Jewish-Christian Relations

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On December 24, 2022

In TV Movies

Herb Edelman and Don Chastain pray in Have I Got a Christmas for You.

On the count of three, readers, let us sing in unison: “We wish you a Jewish Christmas, we wish you a Jewish Christmas. We wish you a Jewish Christmas and a goyish New Year.”

That’s all I could think of at the start of Hallmark’s unusual 1977 holiday television presentation, Have I Got a Christmas for You, which opens with Milton Berle tossing a few bucks to a bell ringer dressed as Santa Claus. Directly approaching the camera afterward, he begins his narration: “As you may have guessed, our story has to do with Christmas. Which, in itself, is not exactly unusual this time of the year. Except for one thing—it began some weeks ago in Temple Beth Shalom, at a board of trustees meeting.”

By then I was already nervous, I’ll confess, and half-expected a cut to an assembly of shadowy money lenders, even though Uncle Miltie grew up as Mendel Berlinger and was unlikely to lead us astray. “I was convinced it would end in disaster,” he admits, as we join a contentious meeting already in progress, with Sydney Weinberg (Jack Carter) making an unusual proposal: That the synagogue perform “a gesture of goodwill and thanks to our Christian neighbors” by covering for essential workers on Christmas Eve, as an Italian coworker did for him ahead of Yom Kippur.

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