Cranky Lesbian

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Valentine Magic on Love Island Offers ’70s TV Nostalgia Galore

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On February 14, 2024

In TV Movies

Adrienne Barbeau and Janis Paige in Valentine Magic on Love Island.

Cheesier than a 32 oz. Velveeta loaf, Valentine Magic on Love Island (1980) was a trifle intended to entertain not only parents but the children they’d conceived while rolling around on shag carpets to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. Combining the worst of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island — director Earl Bellamy (Flood!) was a veteran of both — it opens with grating tropical theme music even more hilariously horrible than Cloris Leachman’s Someone I Touched ballad.

As we’re introduced to a slew of characters bound for the mysterious island — one wins a paid trip, another is written a Love Island prescription by his doctor, and so on — we’re reminded of 1974’s Death Cruise. In that ABC Movie of the Week, featuring luminaries such as Tom Bosley, Kate Jackson and Celeste Holm, tourists were picked off by an assassin aboard a massive cruise ship. Much to our disappointment, no one is murdered on Love Island.

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Faye Dunaway Crashes A Family Thanksgiving

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On November 19, 2023

In TV Movies

Faye Dunaway stuffs a turkey with dermal fillers in Hallmark’s A Family Thanksgiving.

There are those who will watch A Family Thanksgiving (2010) for the reassuring comforts of its adherence to Hallmark formula: nothing says the holidays quite like an ambitious, career-driven woman realizing the error of her ways in a festive family setting. A second, smaller group of us merely want to hear Faye Dunaway cry “Tina, bring me the carving knife!”, an opportunity that screenwriter Emily Baer senselessly squandered.

Minor consolation can be found in Dunaway’s Stevie Nicks meets Mother Goose wardrobe and ill-fitting wig, which might’ve been salvaged from a drag bar’s dumpster after a What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? revue. A Family Thanksgiving is also saucier than the average Hallmark offering, featuring both scatological humor and — heavens to Betsy! — sex. It’s not often you see the heroine tear off her love interest’s clothes in one of these movies, but don’t get too excited: it’s made less unseemly by a time-travel loophole that places the action within the bonds of holy matrimony.

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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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Second Serve: Vanessa Redgrave Plays Doubles in Richards Biopic

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On July 20, 2023

In TV Movies

Vanessa Redgrave in Second Serve.

There is initially something jarring about Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Renée Richards, the pioneering transgender athlete, in Second Serve. Her unconvincing male appearance pre-transition conjures memories of Jean Arless as gawky Warren in William Castle’s Homicidal, a classic Psycho knockoff with a memorable gender gimmick, and you worry this 1986 CBS adaptation of Richards’s autobiography might cheapen a complex story. But it doesn’t take long for the magnetic Redgrave to draw you in, particularly when filmed in medium-closeups that remove her hips (which, like Shakira’s, don’t lie) from the equation.

We’re introduced to Renée first as Dr. Richard Raskind (changed to Radley for the film), and Redgrave exudes an Anthony Perkins quality—lanky, haunted, alternately reserved and impetuous—that suits the character well. You suspect she understands Richard, whose private struggles with gender dysphoria aren’t immediately revealed, more intuitively than director Anthony Page (I Never Promised You a Rose Garden) and screenwriters Gavin Lambert and Stephanie Liss. Yet there are limits to her powers of empathy. You’d never guess from Redgrave’s vaguely WASPy characterization (and sometimes thinly-suppressed British accent) that she’s playing a Queens-bred Jew.*

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Park Overall Calculates The Price of a Broken Heart

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On April 5, 2023

In TV Movies

Park Overall in The Price of a Broken Heart.

Like Park Overall in The Price of a Broken Heart (1999), I would be stunned if my husband cheated—mostly because I don’t have one. But if you were to traffic in heterosexist stereotypes, as Lifetime movies do, my wife is essentially an old-school husband. Society views her as the more dominant and valuable partner because of her career; I’m the one who does her laundry.

How would I react if she ran off with her secretary? Well, I’d be surprised, mostly because she lacks the requisite immaturity, free time and organizational skills for such pursuits. (“Can you pls wash my lacy black bra and book a hotel room for my affair tomorrow? Thx,” she might text me before an assignation.) One thing I’m confident I wouldn’t do is sue her mistress, the course of action Overall’s Dot Hutelmyer charts in The Price of a Broken Heart, a sort of tawdry primetime domestic spin on The Price is Right.

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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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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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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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Jaclyn Smith Believes in Santa in The Night They Saved Christmas

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On December 9, 2022

In TV Movies

Jaclyn Smith with her brood in The Night They Saved Christmas.

There is no greater ’80s holiday fantasy movie than A Smoky Mountain Christmas (1986), with its savory squirrel stew blend of witchcraft, fairy tales, backwoods orphans, country music stardom and poisoned maybe-lesbian pies. But once you’ve completed your annual viewing of that Dolly Parton classic, you might consider checking out The Night They Saved Christmas (1984), another family-oriented telefilm that will leave you staring at the screen in confusion, murmuring “What the jingle hell is this?”

Nearly as bad as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, it essentially hinges on whether an oil company will slaughter Santa and his elves (who number in the thousands) for a shot at greater riches. But there’s so much more to it than that, nearly all of it bleak and depressing. The Night They Saved Christmas doesn’t only inspire ’80s nostalgia because of its sophisticated robot toys, parents on the verge of divorce, fashionable winter jumpers and references to Saudi involvement in American oil. It’s also a heartwarming reminder of our constant proximity to ruthless annihilation in the waning years of the Cold War.

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Luke Macfarlane Romances Candace Cameron Bure in A Shoe Addict’s Christmas

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On December 2, 2022

In TV Movies

Luke Macfarlane and Candace Cameron Bure in A Shoe Addict’s Christmas.

It seems like only yesterday that I sexually harassed Luke Macfarlane on this very site, but it was in fact almost 15 years ago. How time flies! Since then, Macfarlane has continued to work steadily as an actor despite fears that coming out would hinder his career. His heartthrob status is reflected not only in his popularity among Hallmark viewers but in his recent high-profile gig as Billy Eichner’s leading man in Bros (now streaming on Peacock or Amazon), which billed itself as a landmark gay film but may ultimately be remembered for a sanctimonious publicity strategy that was unpersuasive to theatergoers.

I respect Macfarlane for coming out when he did and was disappointed for him that Bros was upstaged by its own hype. Since I’m reviewing holiday telefilms at the moment, I decided to look into his Hallmark catalogue and quickly hit upon A Shoe Addict’s Christmas (2018). It stuck out for several reasons, including Jean Smart’s third billing in the cast and its ridiculous title. But what really commanded my attention was the identity of his love interest. Macfarlane was paired with… Candace Cameron Bure (No One Would Tell). Bure needs no introduction to gay (and gay-friendly) audiences, so I’ll assume we’re on the same page about why this seemed worth investigating. Let’s reluctantly bypass the “Which one’s the shoe addict?” jokes and get down to business.

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