DAY 3. Linda Blair!

If you grew up in the early 90s, you remember the headlines. You couldn’t turn on the news or flip through a tabloid without a show about the Playboy Bunny cop who supposedly blew away her husband’s ex-wife and then made a break for it. It was the kind of tawdry, real-life soap opera that television networks couldn’t resist, so naturally, we got Calendar Girl, Cop, Killer? The Bambi Bembenek Story.

Let’s be honest: this isn’t high art. It’s a classic, ripped-from-the-headlines TV movie that feels like it was put together while the ink on the newspaper was still wet.  It’s got that quintessential 90s made-for-TV feel, with lighting just a little too flat, pacing a bit rushed, and the moral ambiguity of the case sanded down to fit into a two-hour time slot.

Lindsay Frost plays Laurie “Bambi” Bembenek, and she does a decent job navigating the impossible tightrope of the role: is she a victim of a corrupt Milwaukee police force or is she the cold-blooded killer everyone in the courtroom thinks she is?

She’s surrounded by a roster of “Hey, it’s that guy!” character actors who make this a fun watch for any pop-culture junkie. Timothy Busfield (fresh off thirtysomething) plays the husband, Fred Schultz, while Linda Blair shows up as Jane Mader. We get the always-menacing Tobin Bell as Dan Cushman, the reliably grizzled Ed Lauter as Lieutenant Driscoll, and Peter Jurasik bringing some credibility to the ensemble. Even the smaller roles are peppered with familiar faces like the late Don S. Davis (General Hammond from Stargate SG-1) and character veteran John Karlen.

Behind the lens, the film was steered by veteran TV director Jerry London (Shogun, Rent-a-Cop). If you grew up watching network television in the 80s and 90s, you’ve seen London’s work. He was a master of the event miniseries and the ripped-from-the-headlines drama. For this script, writers Larry and Paul Barber took on the unenviable task of adapting John Greenya’s book, condensing a massive, messy, multi-year legal circus into a digestible two-hour narrative. They leaned into the tabloid beats, keeping the pacing brisk enough to avoid getting bogged down in the finer points of Wisconsin criminal law.

The film dives headfirst into the sensationalism of the case, exploring the bad marriage, the security job at Marquette, and the eventual prison break that turned her into a folk hero with the “Run, Bambi, Run” slogan.

What elevates this above your average bargain-bin drama is the sheer absurdity of the facts it’s trying to juggle. You have a woman who was a cop, a model, a convict and a fugitive, all in the span of a few years. The movie doesn’t have the budget to be a sprawling crime epic, so it leans into the character study angle, focusing on the media frenzy. It’s a fascinating, if messy, time capsule of a moment in American true crime history.

Is it a masterpiece? No. But like a lot of the best low-budget or TV-movie efforts, it has a weird, earnest energy. It’s convinced that its subject is the most important story in the world, and there’s something undeniably compelling about that.

You can watch this on YouTube.