Category Archives: Made for TV Movie

Tales from the Darkside episode 6: “Slippage”

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Michael Gornick, who directed this episode, ran camera on The Amusement Park and Knightriders, is the voice of Barry the talk show host in Martin, was the DP of that movie as well as Dawn of the Dead, Creepshow and Day of the Dead and went on to direct episodes of this show, Monsters and took over from George Romero for Creepshow 2.

In this installment, he’s working from a script by Mark Durand and Michael Kube-McDowell to tell the story of Rich Hall (David Patrick Kelly, Jerry Horne from Twin Peaks), is a commercial artist who begins to fade away. The company he just interviewed with doesn’t remember him, his wife Elaine (Kerry Armstrong) doesn’t even have his name on their car and even his mother no longer knows who he is.

These things could all happen at once and it’d be fine, but the succession by which they’re happening means that something supernatural is behind this.

The idea that you could disappear — not physically, but literally go away — is one of the most frightening things ever considered on this show. Some of the episodes get silly, some just have a rubber suit monster, but this one understands how to terrify you with a nearly real concept.

MILL CREEK BLU RAY RELEASE: Up All Night (2011-2012)

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Emily Spivey worked at Saturday Night Live from 2001-2010 and developed this series based on her life when she went back to working after having her son, working late nights making comedy and coming home to raise a family.

Lasting two seasons on NBC, Up All Night stars Christina Applegate as Reagan Brinkley, a producer for the Ava show and Will Arnett as stay at home dad Chris. Maya Rudolph is Ava Alexander, the host of the show who Regan works for. The show reverses the typical sitcom dynamic by having the father as the one who is level-headed while the wife is obsessed with work.

NBC wanted major changes for the third season, switching the format to the traditional multi-camera sitcom and having Applegate, Arnett and Rudolph all playing actors who star in a fictional show-within-the-show called Up All Night. Spivey and Applegate left the show and it was canceled and not due to low ratings.

It’s great to have all of these in one set, as I missed this show when it first aired and really enjoyed it.

You can get the entire series on blu ray at Deep Discount.

Tales from the Dark Side episode 5: “Mookie and Pookie”

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Justine Bateman (Family Ties) stars as Susan “Pookie” Anderson, the twin sister of Kevin “Mookie” (Ron Asher). Sadly, Mookie has a terminal disease yet he is able to place his mind into his beloved computer, something their parents Harold (George Sims, who ran camera on Cassavetes’ films Faces and Love Streams) and Ruth (Tippi Hedren!) can’t seem to understand.

This episode was directed by Timna Ranon, who did two other episodes of this show and was on second unit for God’s Gun. It was written by Marc Fields and Dan Kleinman, who wrote the only post-apocalyptic movie starring Mescach Taylor, Ultra Warrior.

It’s a pretty simple concept and perhaps not the darkest of all episodes, but consider this one a palate cleanser.

Watch the series: Lake Placid

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Sometimes, having OCD and ADD and who knows what else leads me down some strange paths. This time, it was to go all-in on Lake Placid. A note: The Lake Placid vs. Anaconda movie and Lake Placid: Legacy will be covered soon enough.

Lake Placid (1999): Not many eco-horror movies have the pedigree of Steve Miner directing and David E. Kelly writing them. Maybe it’s just that I’ve watched so many cable sequels and low budget cash-ins this week, but man — this is an actual movie! This line will make more sense by the time this article is done, as man did these movies take a dive when it comes to quality.

A SCUBA diving death in Aroostook County, Maine leads to an entire team investigating the cause. Sheriff Hank Keough (Brendan Gleason), wildlife officer Jack Wells (Bill Pullman), American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Kelly Scott (Bridget Fonda) and mythology professor Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt) soon discover that there’s a giant crocodile in the lakes, fed by kindly old Mrs. Delores Bickerman (Betty White).

The Stan Winston-created gator looks great, a moose head is gorily removed from the lake and White’s character is fun. There are also several references to Alligator, which I endorse because it’s the best of all croc or gator on the loose movies.

Lake Placid 2 (2007): Sheriff James Riley is now on the case of the gators and if you know your made for SyFy movies, you know that he has to be played by one-time Duke of Hazzard John Schneider. Instead of Betty White feeding gators, you get her sister Sadie, played by Cloris Leachman (they were both on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, so at least the casting has some meta quality). Instead of Steve Miner and David E. Kelly, we have David Flores directing and Howie Miller and Todd Hurvitz writing.

It is, as they say, a major step backward.

I was going to ask where a cop would get a grenade launcher and then I remembered that in my hometown of 7,436 people the police all have AR15s, ballistic armor and a battle armored SWAT vehicle. So this isn’t all that far-fetched, I guess.

In case you wondered, yes, a small dog is menaced by the gator.

Lake Placid 3 (2010): Sadie Bickerman has died and left her home to her nephew Nathan (Colin Ferguson from Eureka), who plans on fixing it up with his wife Susan (Yancy Butler) and their son Connor, who inherits the Bickerman family trait of feeding gators and making them into human masticating killing machines.

In this movie, an entire family of gators bites down on peeping toms and skinny dippers, keeping the cable movie from showing too much gore or too much skin. It also has a literal home invasion via crocodile years before Crawl.

Director Griff Furst — Stephen’s son — has been in nearly ninety movies and also directed Swamp Shark, Alligator Alley and Trailer Park Shark. Writer David Reed is now a writer and a producer of The Boys.

The end of this movie directly ties into the fourth movie.

Lake Placid: The Final Chapter (2010): David E. Kelly, which wrote the original Lake Placid, gave this movie 4.5 out of 5 stars and said, “Is this the last one really? The ending doesn’t make me think so. I am glad to see Robert Englund in this and some of the cast from the previous movie! The effects are still lame as second and third, but the story is good.”

David Reed was back as the writer and sequel king Don Michael Paul (Kindergarten Cop 2, Jarhead 2: Field of Fire, Sniper: Legacy, Tremors 5: Bloodlines, Sniper: Ghost Shooter, Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell, Death Race: Beyond Anarchy, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, Jarhead: Law of Return, Bulletproof 2 and Tremors: Shrieker Island) was new to the series, making what was claimed to be the last film in the series. Come on, people.

After the events of Lake Placid 3, Reba (Yancy Butler) is still alive and she starts this off by killing the last remaining crocodile in the supermarket. Now an EPA agent, she returns to Black Lake a year later to work with sheriff Theresa Giove (Elisabeth Röhm). And in every Lake Placid there must be a Bickerman and this time it’s Jimmy, played by Robert Englund.

Butler is pretty great in this, the crocodile is somehow twenty feet long and a whole bus full of kids gets menaced.

There’s an opportunity to make the Lake Placid movies high trash, yet no one ever seems to go for it. You know there will be more, so that’s my challenge to croc creatives: go wild.

KINO LORBER BLU RAY RELEASE: Ants AKA It Happened at Lakewood Manor (1977)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This film was originally on the site on December 31, 2021. Thanks to the new Kino Lorber blu ray release, I’m sharing a revised article on the film. The Kino Lorber release has a brand new 2K scan as well as commentary by author and film historian Lee Gambin, new interviews with Barbara Brownell, Barry Van Dyke, Anita Gillette, Moosie Drier and production assistant and daughter of producer Alan Landsburg, Valerie Landsburg. You also get both the TV and theatrical cuts of the film. It’s available directly from Kino Lorber.

Guerdon Trueblood, who wrote this, really had quite the resume. The grandson of General Billy Mitchell, the founding father of the U.S. Air Force, he was a dependable writer for TV as well as writing and directing The Candy Snatchers. You can also check out a few other TV movies he wrote like The Savage Bees, SST Death Flight, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo and even the theatrically released — and reviled — Jaws 3D.

Ants — also known as It Happened at Lakewood Manor and Panic at Lakewood Manor — was directed by Robert Scheerer, who also made Poor Devil, the “Primal Scream” episode of Kolchak and episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.

Probably the main reason to watch this is Lynda Day George, who we all know and love from movies like Pieces, Day of the Animals, Beyond Evil and Mortuary. But you also get Myrna Loy, Suzanne Somers (just before Three’s Company), Bernie Casey and Brian Dennehy, who was in twelve movies and TV programs in 1977.

As for the Lakewood Manor, a real estate madman wants to turn it into a casino while its owner (Loy) wants to keep it as it is. As it involves a pit of venomous ants that can’t be destroyed by pesticides and love to murder people. Imagine — millions of ants covering people, who can’t move or they’ll be killed, ants upon ants taking the life of the soon-to-be Chrissy Snow.

From the moment that two construction workers discover just how aggressive these ants are — they get buried alive before they can tell anyone — you know that these ants mean business. The Board of Health thinks that whatever is killing everyone is some kind of violent outbreak and quarantine the hotel, but it turns out that there’s a giant pit of ants, ants that can’t be stopped with pesticides. Millions of ants, ants smart and mean enough to build bridges over the dead bodies of their fellow insects and cross water and fire just to kill anyone that gets close to them.

There’s a square up reel at the end, as only two of the many characters in this movie survive and they’re told that there’s no way this could happen again because the hotel had “unique environmental conditions vital for the existence of the ants’ nest.” Seeing as how there was never a sequel, maybe they were right.

I also love that this movie was sold with an image of Somers — after she became a big star — covered in ants. She was terrified of them but the producers somehow convinced her to do it.

In the 70s, I spent most of my childhood worrying that I would be killed by a bug. Now, I’m more sure it’s going to be a heart attack any day now.

KINO LORBER BLU RAY RELEASE: Terror Out of the Sky (1978)

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The Savage Bees was a big deal. I mean, Jeannie Devereaux (Gretchen Corbett) trapped in a VW Bug during Mardi Gras? Well, on December 26, 1978 CBS brought Jeannie back — now played by Tovah Feldshuh — put her in a love triangle with her boss David Martin (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) and her kinda sorta boyfriend Nick Willis (Dan Haggerty), then has a bunch of bad bees get in with the good bees and before you know it, a softball game and a marching band are the targets of the swarm.

With dialogue like “Oh my God! His mouth. It’s full of bees!” and appearances by Lonny Chapman (Long John the tattoo artist in The Witch Who Came from the Sea), Ike Eisenmann from the Witch Mountain movies, Joe E. Tata before he owned the Peach Pit, Richard Herd (Schizoid), Charles Hallahan (The Thing) and Steve Franken (who also battles Ants! a year before), this is also the kind of movie with a National Bee Center ready to defend our country for the threat of killer bees.

You know, I read a review of this and the kid writing about it pish poshed the notion of killer bees. Well, I was there, every night when the news told us we were all going to get stung a thousand times and die. It’s easy to laugh about without living that life. I did. Bees were all we talked about. Also: quicksand.

Director Lee H. Katzin also made the bizarre and wonderful movies The Phynx and What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? He also directed Savages, World Gone Wild and the pilot of Samurai, a show that would have had Joe Penny fighting crime as a sword-wielding vigilante.

Writer Guerdon Trueblood was a great cause of the week movie guy. I mean, the same talent did The Savage Bees, Ants! and Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo. He moved on to airplane movies (SST: Death Flight, Terror Out of the Sky) and also wrote Jaws 3-D and directed The Dandy Snatchers.

This being the 70s, the whole movie is more about a woman choosing between two horrible men than it is about bees. That said, there are some moments of fun, like the end when Zimbalist wears an anti-bee suit that is soon covered by millions of black and yellow striped monsters.

The new Kino Lorber blu ray release of Terror Out of the Sky has a new 2K master, commentary by film historian David Del Valle and filmmaker David DeCoteau (who made his own bug movie 1313: Giant Killer Bees) and trailers for the film. You can get it from Kino Lorber.

Tales from the Dark Side episode 4: “The Odds”

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Tommy Vale (Danny Aiello) never skips a chance to bet. So when a dead man comes back — Bill Lacey (Tom Noonan) — and wagers that Tommy will be dead in 24 hours, he takes that bet. And then we wait.

This episode feels almost like a stage play with Aiello’s quiet dignity even in the face of his corrupt life and the fact that he’s never been taken advantage of when betting up against a man who he thinks is Lacey’s son but who could very well be a ghost.

Director James Steven Sadwith is probably best known for the Sinatra and Elvis miniseries that he directed. He co-wrote this with Carole Lucia Satrina, who also wrote three of the Cannon Movie Tales, Red Riding Hood, Puss In Boots and Beauty and the Beast.

The joy of this episode is seeing Aiello and Noonan act opposite one another. This is one of the rare episodes of this show with some restraint in the storytelling instead of a monster of the week and that makes this quite an enjoyable twenty plus minutes.

Anacondas: Trail of Blood (2009)

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Originally airing on SyFy on February 28, 2009, this movie was somehow topped when that network crossed it over with Lake Placid.

Dr. Amanda Hayes (Crystal Allen) and Peter Murdoch (John Rhys-Davies) are back from the last movie and the evil elite rich guy has figured out how to inject that baby anaconda from the last movie with blood orchid serum that allows it to continually regrow cells, because if you have created a monster snake, why not make one that can’t be killed because that seems like the kind of plan that often works.

The thing is, Murdoch has bone cancer and he thinks the blood of that snake can heal him, so he sends out a team of tough guys that will most assuredly get killed by snakes to get that blood orchid snake plasma cocktail.

I kind of love that after all this work, Murdoch injects the serum, gets over his cancer and then a snake decapitates him.

How did I watch four of these movies? Why did I watch four of these movies? OCD is weird because you only feel completeness when you tackle challenges and surpass them, but I’m not doing anything good for humanity. I’m in a basement watching snake movies and drinking too much Pepsi. Someone stop me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Anaconda 3: Offspring (2008)

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Originally airing on July 26, 2008 on SyFy, this movie gives us what we always wanted: David Hasselhoff in a big snake movie.

Shot at the same time as Anacondas: Trail of Blood in Romania, a place where you may say, “Where the fuck are the anacondas?” and “Did they make every sequel in the former Soviet Union?”

Remember that blood orchid? Well, a serum made from it and an anaconda taken from the Amazon River have somehow ended up within crawling distance of the Danube thanks to a project that God himself will smite and destroy the life of rich fool Peter Murdoch (John Rhys-Davies, who was on SyFy like all day every day) and man, his assistant doesn’t even make it to the first commercial.

Now the queen anaconda is loose and Dr. Amanda Hayes (Crystal Allen) and snake hunter Stephen Hammett (Hasselhoff) must stop the snakes before they eat everyone in Bucharest. The truth is — I mean, do you even care if I keep you from watching this, I mean spoil this for you — is that Hasselhoff is trying to get a baby anaconda that has been given special powers thanks to the experiments Dr. Hayes has done and give it to Murdoch.

If you ever wanted to see a movie where Hasselhoff gets swarmed by baby snakes and blown up, this would be it.

Director Don E. FauntLeRoy worked with Victor Salva on Jeepers Creepers, Jeepers Creepers 2, Rosewood Lane and Dark House, so now I hate that I watched this even more. He was also the director of photography on Munchie and The Skateboard Kid, which may or may not be worse than the above issue.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Tales from the Dark Side episode 3: “Pain Killer”

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Harvey Turman (Lou Jacobi, a Canadian comedian who released “Al Tijuana and his Jewish Brass,” a comedic take on Herb Albert as a Yiddish bandleader and yes, that’s a real thing) has non-stop back pain that Dr. Roebuck (Farley Granger) believes is all caused by Harvey’s wife Nadine (Peggy Cass) and that if he kills her, he’ll heal up.

The truth is a bit more complicated — or a twist ending — but writer Haskell Barkin must have had a rough marriage himself. His career is interesting, though, writing tons of Hanna Barbera cartoons like Jabberjaw, Yogi’s Space Race, The Jetsons and episodes of The Love Boat. He also contributed to the 80s version of The Twilight Zone and Monsters, the follow-up to Tales from the Dark Side.

Director Armand Mastroianni has a great horror background, making The Supernaturals, He Knows You’re Alone, The Clairvoyant, Cameron’s Closet and episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series and three other episodes of this series.

This is more of a throwaway comedy episode, but at least it has a moment where the couple watches Night of the Living Dead on TV, which was a public domain film that cost nothing to add to the show. More importantly, it was created by the show’s producer, George Romero.