Somehow, this Mill Creek set has a Jodie Foster movie on it. Not a TV movie or something from her past, but a 1986 Jodie Foster movie where she plays Victoria, an orphaned girl who is married to the much older Oliver Thompson (John Lithgow!) and sent away to school. When she comes back, years later, she realizes that her husband and most of his family are all deranged.
A co-production between Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States with RKO Pictures, this was released in the U.S. as My Letter to George and Shocked in other areas, which is a great title but if I saw it with that name, I would have been furious that such a great name was used to describe a period film.
Perhaps most astoundingly, this was written and directed by Michael Laughlin, who wrote and directed two of my favorite movies, Strange Behavior and Strange Invaders.
Loosely based on that of Adelaide Bartlett, who was put to trial in 1886 for the chloroform poisoning of her husband, this feels like the kind of film where the story of how Foster got on board, much less decided to be a producer, feels like it would be more interesting than the movie that I just watched.
Originally a four-part miniseries adaption of the memoirs of Christabel Bielenberg, a woman who was married to a German lawyer during World War II, the version of this film on the Mill Creek The Excellent Eighties box set is two hours and twenty-seven minutes long, versus the four hour and twenty-minute original running time.
This is yet another example of a film on this set that has an early role for someone who would later become a major star. Christabel is played by Elizabeth Hurley, who had only appeared in the movie Aria and an episode of Inspector Morse before this.
This was written by Dennis Potter, who wrote Gorky Park and Pennies from Heaven. This movie really stood out to me because it showed just how quickly Hitler went from a joke that everyone ignored to something that they had to deal with someday soon to finally, a force that could jail them and destroy their lives. It felt — non-surprisingly — like the last four years of our lives.
This is the great thing about Mill Creek box sets: we probably would have never reviewed this TV Movie obscurity for the site. Well . . . maybe we would have . . . you know us and those “Big Three” network TV flicks of the ’70s and ’80s.
Before Michelle Pfeiffer outshined them all and took over the later DVD boxes.
The cheapjack DVDs you pick up from those cardboard-boxed impulse buy end caps at your favorite retail outlets (Dollar Tree, Marshalls, and Bealls; even those Walmart barrels ‘o plenty in the electronics section) woefully credit Michelle “Catwoman” Pfeiffer as the “star” of this TV mini-series that originally ran for two nights in October 1981. The cast is a TV Movie support cast-dream, with just about every actor who ever booked a supporting role on a ’70s TV series or movie (Joy Garrett, John Harkins, Macon McCalman, and James Sloyan, in particular) appearing in a wide array of bit parts. The cast is not headed by Michelle, but by ubiquitous TV actors Lindsay “Bionic Woman” Wagner, along with Jameson “Simon & Simon” Parker, and the-easily-moves-between-TV-and-film actors Dabney Coleman (McKittrick from WarGames; in production on his 178th project!) and Andrew Prine, who shows us just how great of an actor he really is — and if you’ve spent any amount of time at B&S About Movies, you know Prine’s done his share of Drive-In junk, yet always shines in his role. (If you’re new here and not familiar with Prine’s work The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Simon King of the Witches, and Hannah, Queen of the Witches will get you started down your own Prine-rabbit hole.)
Sadly, Prine isn’t here much, only acting as the story-narrating Kimbel Smyth, as the story of Callie Lord (Wagner) unfolds: She’s a 1940’s unwed mother forced to give up her son for black market adoption. Moving from her small Texas town to the big city of Dallas for a new start (to study to become a courtroom stenographer), she comes to meet newspaper editor-in-chief Randall Bordeaux (Coleman) while working as a waitress. They marry. And understanding her pain, he tracks down her once-a-rebel-always-a-rebel son, Randy (Parker). Now a powerful newspaper editor after her husband’s passing, Callie looses it all when her son is up on murder charges over his gold digging, ne’er-do-well wife (a rather pudgy Pfeiffer; not at all the svelte Cat Woman we know).
If you’re a fan of those prime soap operas of the ’80s, with their ongoing tales of secrets, lies, and betrayals committed by the underprivileged behaving very badly, there’s something here for you to spend your two-plus hours on. Just don’t be duped into thinking Michelle Pfeiffer is running the show, but Lindsay Wagner fans will enjoy it. And while Wagner’s southern accent leaves a bit to be desired, Prine thrives in southern-slang roles; even in voice over, he’s excellent.
Director Waris Hussein, whose TV career began in Britain with a dozen episodes of Doctor Who in the mid-’60s and moved into the theatrical realms with the very early Gene Wilder film Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970), serviceably moves the camera about the solid set design that transitions from the 1940s to the late 1970s. We could easily do a week of just Waris Hussein TV movies, but we’ll call out the two we remember best: The Henderson Monster, a 1980 Frankenstein-esque horrror starring Stephen “7th Heaven” Colllins, and the really good John Savage-starring Coming Out of the Ice, a 1982 Cold War bio-drama. Teleplay scribe Thomas Thompson is an old TV western scribe whose career goes back to the days of The Rifleman, Rawhide, Wagon Train, The Virginian, Bonanza, and High Chaparral, but . . . he penned one of the great TV movies, well two: The Death of Richie (1977) and — the one that we really need to re-watch (and review!) after all these years — the two-night mini-series rating winner, A Death in Canaan (1978), which stars the sorely-missed-from-acting Paul Clemens (The Beast Within).
You can, of course, pick this up as one of the 50 movies offered on Mill Creek’s Excellent Eighties box set. There’s also a freebie upload on You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
As London recovers from World War II, an aimless young man — who is bisexual and already married — named Johnny (Gary Oldman) is sent to prison. He gives his dog Evie to his parents, Tom and Millie, who are conniving at best and abusive at worst. The man who really falls in love with the dog is Johnny’s older ex-lover and best friend Frank (Alan Bates).
Based on the 1960 J.R. Ackerley novel, this film was directed by Colin Gregg, who also directed the Liam Neeson-starring Lamb, which you guessed it, is also on this Mill Creek box set.
If you ever wonder how much our world has changed, when the trailer for this movie played in the U.S., it was sold as a light-hearted comedy about a dog and nothing was said about the romance between two of its leads.
Editor’s Note: Beware of the duplicate titles snafu, for there are two Slipstream movies: The 1973 one by William Fruet of Funeral Home, Baker County, U.S.A., Killer Party, and Blue Monkey fame, which is a Canadian drama about a troubled disc jockey: that’s the Slipstream no one knows. Then there’s the one that everyone knows — and most haven’t seen: the Mark Hamill one that, regardless of its pedigree, fails on all levels. And we wish that Mill Creek would save the 1973 one from obscurity and put it on a box set. You have two choices to pick up a copy of the Mark Hamill Slipstream: we reviewed it on November 5, 2020, as part of their Sci-Fi Invasion set and we’re revisiting it — with this second, alternate take — as part of its inclusion on Mill Creek’s Excellent Eighties 50-film pack, which we are reviewing all this month.
The overseas 25-minute making-of documentary courtesy of Pineapples 101 Movie Memorabilia Emporium blogspot.
This is a movie that many of us encountered, not in theaters as intended (at least not in the U.S.), or on VHS where it ended up: but as an oft-run movie on HBO. And regardless of how many times the pay-channel ran the film, most of us never finished it.
Why? Because it’s boring. But how is that possible?
We have Gary Kurtz who produced the first two Star Wars films with George Lucas at the helm. We have director Steven Lisberger who set the tone for future computer-animated universe films with Tron. And how can we forget Kurtz also gave us The Dark Crystal, and a bit further back, Two-Lane Blacktop and American Graffiti. Behind the camera is Frank Tidy, who got his start working with the Scott brothers, Ridley and Tony, in commercials and came to shoot The Duellists for Ridley, as well as one of the better Star Wars droppings with Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (a film that’s still eluded a B&S once-over). We’ve got a score by Elmer Bernstein, whose work goes all the way back to Cat-Women of the Moon (you’ve seen, at the very least, ten movies in your lifetime with his composing and/or conducting). Behind the typewriter is, in part, Charles Pogue, who gave us David Cronenberg’s The Fly reboot and the Star Wars-inspired swords-and-sorcery romps Dragonheart and Kull the Conqueror. In the plot department: you’ve got a Mad Mad-cum-The Road Warrior post-apocalyptic vibe about dueling bounty hunters. In front of the camera: you’ve got Mark Hamill from Star Wars and Bil Paxton (who was fantastic) in Aliens, along with support roles by both Ben Kingsley and F. Murray Abraham.
So what went wrong?
Maybe it’s because the film opens with a homage to the “Crop Duster Scene” from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (You Tube) that many seemed to miss — and those that “got it,” weren’t wowed by it. Then there’s that kiss of death: the dreaded voiceover that sets up the mythology where “global warming” finally did it: the Harmonic Converge baked the Earth, split the continents and created a “river of wind” that rendered the planet into one big dust bowl. The few who survive are the ones who’ve learned to harness the wind and solar power, just as Al Gore has always hoped for.
Amid this “green new deal” backstory: We meet Will Tasker (Mark Hamill) and Belitski (British actress Kitty Aldridge, who came to marry Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits) who are — as in Mad Max — part of a ragtag not-the-Main Force Patrol law enforcement agency that allows their agents to sideline as bounty hunters. After a run-in with Matt Owens (Bill Paxton) and confiscating his illegal arms contraband, Owens kidnaps Tasker’s bounty (British Shakespearean stalwart Bob Peck) to collect the reward and recoup the cost of his arms shipment. Oh, and Peck is actually a healing-android (he can heal blindness) who perpetually quotes the poems of Lord Byron to communicate his feelings, which leads Owens to call his new solar-wind plane shipmate, Bryon. Before you know it: Owens gets caught up in Bryon’s quest to reach a mystical land beyond the Slipstream where others, like him, live in peace and harmony.
In the end: No one was ready for an off-the-road aviation-version of The Road Warrior (or Kevin Costner’s all-water version, either). And for as many who consider this Mark Hamill’s best role, there are those who say this role — as well as his work (in the even more abysmal) Time Runner (Australian made) and The Guyver (Japanese made) — is why Harrison Ford and not him — became an A-List Hollywood leading man. Yes, there’s a reason why Hamill retreated (abet successfully) into video game and anime voice work: Slipstream is one of those reasons.
Meanwhile, as Hamill kept pumping out one late-’80s clinker after clunker, poor Gary Kurtz didn’t fair much better. After his creative fallout with George Lucas that lead to Kurtz leaving the franchise during the pre-production of Return of the Jedi and still feeling the sting of his first post-Star Wars outing, The Dark Crystal, bombing with critics and audiences, Kurtz was hoping for a box office bonanza that would set up another franchise. Instead, Slipstream — even more so that The Dark Crystal — was a critical and commercial box office bomb that also failed to find a cult audience on home video. The film drove him into bankruptcy that, in turn, lead to his divorce. Worse: he burned though his Lucasian cash windfall to create his fantasy world solely dependent on wind and sun, just like Al Gore always wanted.
So, was it all worth it? The criticism on this British-made sci-fi’er splits down the middle with no middle ground: Star Wars ephemera-oids either love it or hate. And you can decide by checking out Slipstream on Tubi or own a copy as part of its inclusion on Mill Creek’s Sci-Fi Invasion and Excellent Eighties50-film box sets.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies and publish music reviews and short stories on Medium.
Editor’s Note: No sooner did we finish our review of Tomboy for Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-film pack, we discovered it’s also on their Excellent Eighties 50-film set. It’s a fun film that bears recycling and repeating. So here we go with a new, second fresh take on the film.
Tomasina “Tommy” Boyd isn’t like the other girls. No, she’s not sneaking into school and switching her gender like Terri/Terry Griffith. But unlike all her friends, she’s more into fixing and racing cars than boys. This is presented as something completely out of the sphere of reality, as if she were some mutant.
Herb Freed, who directed Tomboy, has a pretty fun resume, with movies like Beyond Evil, Haunts and Graduation Dayto his credit.
For some reason, this confident woman has a crush on a total jerk, racecar driver and male chauvinist Randy Starr (Gerard Christopher, Superboy), who doesn’t take her seriously because, you know, she’s a girl.
Certainly, the main reason to see this is because Betsy Russell has the lead. Modern folks may know her from the Saw movies, but for my generation, she was much better known for starring as Molly “Angel” Stewart in Avenging Angel, as well as appearances in Private School, Cheerleader Camp and Camp Fear, which steals its poster art from Body Count.
I love that someone once asked about Russell how the trailer for this movie positions Tomasina as a strong woman and then cuts to her in the shower. Teh actress replied, “I’ve never really paid attention to that. I guess strong females still have to take showers. They still like to feel sexy, so I don’t think there’s one thing that should stop someone from feeling sexy and showing their body if that’s what they choose to do. I don’t think it makes any difference in the world.”
Kristi Summers from Savage Streets and Hell Comes to Frogtown plays our heroine’s friends, who cares more about boys than cars and she’s normal, of course. Plus, Cynthia Thompson — Cavegirl! — and scream queen Michelle Bauer also show up.
If this movie came out in 2020, it would be decimated on social media and rightly so. I mean, can you imagine a movie that purports to being female empowerment coming out today where the main character only proves herself by repeatedly showing off her breasts?
Editor’s Note:We jammed on this sharkster back in 2018 for our “Bastard Pups of Jaws” week. Well, when Mill Creek boxes ’em up, you watch it again, for another take.Hey, Treat Williams stars and makes everything watchable, twice.
How is it that Mill Creek hasn’t done an all-shark disc set of every Jaws ripoff out there? Well, no worries. We love our Jaws ripoffs at B&S About Movies and included this obscurity as part of our “Bastard Pups of Jaws Week” on December 19, 2018. And we love our shark flicks so much, we rolled out a “Bastard Sons of Jaws Week.” Like we said: we love our shark flicks. And to the Italian, Spaniard, and Mexican filmmakers that make them: we thank you. And while we’d rather Micheal Sopkiw as our “Brody,” we get the very cool and always game Treat Williams in the bargain.
And a great poster. And the better the poster, the badder the film. And when we say bad, we mean “bad,” as in awful, and not “so bad it’s good.”
Treat, Treat, Treat. I get it, work is work. But when you have a contract slide over to your chair on a conference table at your agent’s office and it clearly shows the project is a joint Italian-Spanish-Mexican production . . . maybe just eat Campbell’s Tomato Soup and Cheese Sandwiches for a just a bit longer until a network TV guest spot pops up (you were great as ex-football star Jake Stanton on “Spiraling Down” for Law and Order: SVU, by the way). But there’s mortgages to pay and taxes to cover. Plus . . . you get a really nice vacation on a producer’s dime in the Dominican Republic (that’s doubling for Miami, Florida, and Cancun, Mexico, here).
Sure, other actors have done a lot worse than Night of the Sharks for just those reasons: but political intrigue, diamond theft, and man-eating pet sharks?
So we meet David Ziegler (Treat Williams; we’ve reviewed several of his films; we love ’em ‘ere at B&S), a ne’er-do-well beach bum who makes his way as a shark hunter with his buddy and business partner, Paco (Holy Crap! Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas from Starsky and Hutch!). Oh, and they have a “Cyclops” — their pet man-eating shark.
Then we meet David’s film-flaming brother James (Italian actor Carlo Mucari as the Americanized Charles Mucary); he’s got a corrupt businessman (John Steiner, aka Overlord, from Yor, Hunter from the Future) — with connections to the President of the United States — on the hook, so he decided to extort $2 million in diamonds. And James runs to David for help and upsets his peaceful, beach bum existence. And along comes the assassins. And David’s ex-wife (Janet Agren from City of the Living Dead, Eaten Alive!, and Hands of Steel), of course, gets involved to screw David for the diamonds that he took from James’s dead hand.
Or something like that. Yawn. When does the action start? When do get to the “We need a bigger boat” part?
Anyway, David decides to kick ass like a gunless-MacGyver — using only his martial arts skills, an array of blades — and his shark buddy. And along the way, Christopher Connelly from Atlantis Interceptors shows up as a priest because, well, it’s an Italian film and all Neapolitan ripoffs must have a priest in them, regardless of genre.
The twist of this mess is that it’s not even a shark movie: it’s a political intrigue-cum-diamond heist-cum mobster movie that figured a nice big shark on the theatrical one-sheet would sucker people to see the movie. And it worked. And don’t let it work on you. But it’s the always likeable Treat Williams — who always reminds me of Kurt Russell and vise-verse and how they never played brothers in a movie is beyond me.
Sure, you can stream Night of the Sharks on Amazon Prime with a subscription, but why? We found a freebie stream on You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
I’ve watched plenty of Steven Hilliard Stern movies, like The Park Is Mine, The Ghost of Flight 401, Miracle On Ice, Mazes and Monsters, Still the Beaver, Not Quite Human (written by Alan Ormsby!), I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? and Murder In Space, but he’s probably best known for his redneck opus, Rolling Vengeance. It’s probably the best — and only — movie where a man reacts to the death of his wife and children by making a monster truck and killing everyone responsible.
This is Showgirls with the sleaze dialed down for TV consumption. But hey — it’s got Rita Moreno as Rosella DeLeon, an old dancer trying for one more run and in love with Joey DeLeon (Tony Curtis). Then there’s Jillian Brooks (Lesley Anne Warren), the New York dancer. And newcomer Marci (Dianne Kay, Eight Is Enough) as the innocent girl new to Vegas.
It’s not going to change your life, but it’s definitely a great Sunday afternoon watch. Does anyone still do that? Well, I do.
Originally titled El Sueño del Mono Loco (The Dream of the Mad Monkey), this is based on the Christopher Frank book. While it has the 90’s genre of erotic thriller attached to it, this is very much in the world of the giallo.
To wit: Jeff Goldblum’s Dan Gillis is a stranger in a strange land, one of the key tropes of the giallo, a writer in Paris who has been left behind by his wife and suddenly a single father to his son Danny. A writer by trade, he’s brought in by a producer to work with an enfant terrible young director named Malcolm Greene on a script.
Ironically, the actor playing that young director — Dexter Fletcher — would grow up and move on from acting (he was Baby Face in the absurd and wonderful child gangster musical Bugsy Malone) to directing some of today’s biggest films, such as Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman.
What draws us closer to the psychosexual domain of the giallo is that Gillis soon becomes obsessed by Malcolm’s sister Jenny (Liza Walker from Hackers in her first film). While presented as somewhere in her teens, she’s also a lolita who possesses the sexual attention of every man she meets, from our protagonist to her brother.
Miranda Richardson also figures in as Dan’s disabled agent who, like everyone in this movie, just wants to get horizontal with one of West Homestead’s favorite sons.
I’m not saying this is a good movie. I’m just saying that it’s interesting that somehow Goldblum made two movies one after the other — this and Mister Frost — that are borderline bonkers horror experimentations that no one really talks about. This is after he was a star from The Fly and yet here he is, making really strange movies in foreign lands. Leave it to a Mill Creek box set to bring this to my attention.
Because we love Deborah Foreman as much as we love innocuous ’80s comedies. So, for its inclusion on its first Mill Creek set, in this case, their Excellent Eighties set, we’re taking another crack at it. Granted, it’s not all very good, but it’s better than most of the lost ’80s comedies of the Mill Creek sets we’ve unpacked this February.
Not only have we watched My Chauffeur more than once — the same goes for Deborah’s work in Valley Girl, April Fool’s Dayand Waxwork. Again, swoon, Deborah Foreman. She recently popped back up in 2020’s Grizzly II: The Revenge. And they should have given her a bigger part — beyond a walk on — in the abysmal 2020 Valley Girl remake — which should not exist. And now that’s she back, Lifetime and The Hallmark Channel needs to put Deborah on the shortlist for their films. I can attest for Sam, as well as myself, that we would watch everyone of them. Yes, even the Hallmark ones. All for the love of Deborah Foreman.
Look, women wearing a man’s suit — going back to Diane Keaton setting the tone in Woody Allen movies — is hot. So our hormones run a wee-bit hot when Deborah Foreman slips into a tux and heels. For she really was the “New Wave Carole Lombard crossed with Shirley MacLaine.” And she never broke through. And instead, we got Jennifer Anniston, who is only Jennifer Anniston by way of her celebrity marriage to Brad. If not for that, Jen would be in Courtney Cox land with the rest of the who-cares Friends cast. At least Deborah Foreman can stand tall on talent alone.
Anyway, Deb is Casey Meadows, who comes to work as a limo driver for Brentwood Limo Services. Brentwood is the “golf course,” if you will — since all ’80s comedies lead back to Caddyshack. Howard “Dr. Johnny Fever” Hesseman runs and E.G Marshall from Creepshow owns Brentwood. And Hesseman’s McBrider hates Casey. The other drivers hate Casey, since, well, driving is a “man’s job.” They even set her up for failure with a troublesome rockstar — and she pulls though and makes the client happy.
Along the way, love blooms between Foreman’s commoner driver and E.G’s son played by Sam “Flash Gordon” Jones — on his way to the late ’80s post-apoc slop that is Driving Force and the early ’90s Basic Instinct wannabe that is Night Rhythms. Penn and Teller show up. Linnea Quigley (still at it in The Good Things Devil’s Do) shows up. Oh, and there’s some shenanigans with an oil shriek that gets Casey fired. And all the loose ends between all of the characters ties up nicely, even though how everyone is “connected” is a wee-bit incestuous. But that was “comedy” in the ’80s.
It’s not the greatest comedy. It’s not Caddyshack. But it’s alright (yuk, yuk!). And you can watch it on Tubi and Vudu for free. Here’s the trailer and a scene clip to sample.
We’ve since taken a deep dive into the career of this film’s writer-director, David Beaird, with a review of his much loved, second feature film, The Party Animal.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
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