Daily Archives: June 28, 2023

Retro Television Reviews: The Love Boat 2.21 “A Good and Faithful Servant/The Secret Life of Burl Smith/Tug of War/Designated Lover”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986!  The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

This week, we have a special 90-minute episode of The Love Boat!

Episode 2.21 “A Good and Faithful Servant/The Secret Life of Burl Smith/Tug of War/Designated Lover”

(Dir by Roger Duchowny, originally aired on February 17th, 1979)

It’s a Mills family reunion as John, Juliet, and Haley all board The Love Boat.  Despite being related, the three of them appears in three separate and unconnected stories.  (There is one moment where Juliet walks past John and he gives her a slightly quizzical  “Do I know you?” look.)

John Mills plays Bertram MacDonald, the long-time butler and chauffeur to Estelle Castlewood (Celeste Holm).  Estelle has booked herself a vacation cruise on the Pacific Princess and she’s surprised to discover that Bertram has also booked a cruise.  As Bertram explains it, the only time that he can take a vacation is when Celeste takes a vacation.  At first, Bertram promises to stay away from Celeste during the cruise so that they can both enjoy their vacations without feeling like employer and employee.  However, fate keeps bringing them together and soon, Bertram tells Celeste that he has to resign from his position because he’s now in love with her.  Fortunately, Celeste is also in love with him so it all works out.  Upon returning to America, Bertram again drives Celeste home but, this time, Celeste sits up front with him instead of in the back of her limo.  This was a rather sweet story, largely because John Mills and Celeste Holm had a lot of chemistry and, being two veteran actors, they both knew exactly how to deliver their sentimental dialogue without making it sound overly calculated.

Juliet Mills plays Millicent, who is separated from Sherman (David Hedison).  Millicent boards the cruise with her 8 year-old son, Lucas (Keith Coogan) and she is shocked to discover that Sherman has decided to take the cruise as well.  Lucas blames himself for the separation but, fortunately, he gets a pep talk from a real-life baseball star, Reggie Jackson.  (Yes, I did ask my sister who he was.)  Even better, Sherman and Millicent realize that they still love each other and agree to call off the divorce.  Yay!  Again, this was another story that worked because of the chemistry between the two leads.  Juliet Mills and David Hedison were convincing as a couple who, for all of their ups and downs, were still willing to give their marriage another chance.

Now, you may be wondering what Reggie Jackson was doing on the cruise.  It turns out that Reggie is an old friend of Isaac Washington’s.  Apparently, Isaac was known as “Freight Train Washington” in high school.  Reggie went on to become a multi-millionaire athlete while Isaac went on to become a bartender on a cruise line.  When Reggie boards the boat, he tells Isaac that he doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s famous.  However, in an amusing twist, Reggie soon becomes frustrated when he gets what he asked for. He’s soon reduced to telling people that he’s Reggie Jackson, just to have them reply that he looks nothing like Reggie Jackson.  Not even Captain Stubing believes that he’s Reggie Jackson!  Fortunately, Reggie is finally able to convince Cleo (Telma Houston) that he is who he says he is and the two of them leave the boat together.  As an actor, Reggie Jackson was a bit stiff but he still had decent comedic timing and it was hard not to be amused at his growing frustration over being anonymous.

Finally, Haley Mills plays model Cheryl Tyson.  Gopher is excited that Cheryl is going to be on the cruise.  She’s his favorite model!  He even has a big poster on the wall next to his bed in his cabin.  Unfortunately, every time that Gopher is near Cheryl, he loses the ability to speak in complete sentences.  As such, Gopher spends the majority of the episode fantasizing outlandish, film-inspired scenarios that all lead to him sweeping Cheryl off her feet.  Gopher imagines himself as an explorer, an admiral, a knight, a spy, and as Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.  He imagines himself as Elton John, performing Pinball Wizard as the Love Boat crew dances around.  He even imagines being in a love triangle with Julie and Cheryl.  Eventually, Cheryl gives him a pity date and it’s …. well, this whole storyline was pretty stupid.  Fred Grandy was likable in the role and Gopher could be an amusingly goofy character but his fantasies were just so silly and poorly written that I couldn’t wait for them to be over.  It’s nice that the show finally gave Grandy a showcase but neither he nor Haley Mills were particularly well-served by this episode.

This was an uneven episode.  Even though the stories featuring John and Juliet Mills and Reggie Jackson were nicely done, the Hayley Mills/Fred Grandy stuff took up the majority of the episode and it dragged the whole thing down.

Next week …. Freight Train Washington falls in love!

The TSL Grindhouse: Exterminator 2 (dir by Mark Buntzman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Four years after the end of the first Exterminator, the man they drove too far is driven too far again….

As you may remember, the first Exterminator ended with the CIA shooting vigilante John Eastland (Robert Ginty) because Eastland’s anti-crime activities were somehow making the President look bad.  The wounded Eastland fell into the Hudson River.  “Washington will be pleased,” the CIA agent said to the gunman.  However, the film’s final shot revealed that Eastland had survived his plunge.

1984’s Exterminator 2 opens with Eastland returning to New York City.  He’s got a small apartment and a police scanner and when he hears a report that an elderly couple is being menaced by a group of thugs, he puts on a welding mask and uses his flame thrower to set the criminals on fire.  Of course, he doesn’t actually arrive in time to save the old couple from getting shot and killed.  Just because Eastland has decided to become a vigilante, that doesn’t mean that he’s particularly good at it.

The first Exterminator was a grim and gritty thriller that took itself very seriously.  In fact, one could argue that it took itself a bit too seriously.  Exterminator 2, which was produced by Cannon Films, takes a slightly different approach.  This is obvious as soon as Mario Van Peebles shows up as X, a cult leader who is looking to take over the New York drug trade.  Van Peebles, with his model good looks and his quick smile, is not exactly the most intimidating of villains.  And X is not exactly the most brilliant of bad guys.  For one thing, he drives a car with a big red X spray painted on one of the doors, which doesn’t seem to be the smartest thing to do when you have both the police and crazed vigilante hunting for you.

Fortunately, for X, John Eastland is easily distracted.  After he sets a few people on fire, he seems to lose interest in actually being a vigilante and instead, a large portion of the film is taken up with him getting a job collecting garbage with his friend, Be Gee (Frankie Fasion).  (Much like the previous film’s Michael Jefferson, Be Gree served with Eastland in Nam.)  Eastland also meets and falls in love with a dancer named Caroline (Deborah Geffner).  Unfortunately, a trip to Central Park leads to Caroline getting attacked by a bunch of X’s followers.  With Caroline in a wheelchair, Eastland has little choice but to pick up his flame thrower and transform his garbage truck into a tank of destruction….

Exterminator 2‘s production was a troubled one.  Director Mark Buntzman was one of the producers of the first Exterminator and apparently, Cannon disliked his first cut of Exterminator 2.  Director William Sachs (who was Cannon’s resident “film doctor”) was brought in to do extensive reshoots in Los Angeles.  Unfortunately, by the time Sachs was brought in, Robert Ginty had already moved on to another project and Sachs was forced to use his stunt double for any scenes involving Eastland.  (This is one reason why Eastland spends much of the film wearing a welder’s mask.)  Also because of Ginty’s absence, Sachs ended up adding a lot of scenes that focused on Van Peebles’s performance as X, with the end result being that the film often seems to be more about X and his gang than it is about Eastland and his hunt for revenge.  (Unfortunately, this also led to a lot of unresolved subplots, including one in which X orders one of his roller skating henchman to kidnap a woman off the street so she can be used to test a new batch of heroin.)  Many of the scenes featuring Ginty have a totally different feel to them from the scenes featuring Van Peebles and Ginty’s stunt double.

The end result is a film that really doesn’t have any sort of narrative momentum.  One is never really sure what either X or Eastland is hoping to accomplish.  Instead, they just kind of wander around until they have their final confrontation.  Along the way, there’s a few poorly edited fights but there’s also a lot of scenes that are just included to serve as filler.  As I already mentioned, Van Peebles is not a particularly menacing villain but Ginty also isn’t a particularly compelling hero.  Ginty’s goofy screen presence was nicely subverted by the grime and grit of the first Exterminator but, in the second film, he just comes across as being petulant and even a bit whiny.

The first Exterminator famously ended with the lines, “Washington will be pleased.”  I don’t think anyone would particularly be pleased with Exterminator 2.  As a final note, I will admit that I was so bored with this film that, when I watched it, I barely noticed when it ended and Tubi segued into showing a film called Executioner 2.  That pretty much sums up the entire Exterminator 2 experience.

Music Video of the Day: Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx (1989, directed by Jim Yukich)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Both this video and this post count as a rush job.  I’m writing this at the last second so I picked an easy video to write about.  Meanwhile, in 1989, Richard Marx was so busy touring that director Jim Yukich was forced to go with a simple approach to the video for Right Here Waiting.  The footage of Marx performing the song in an empty auditorium was filmed in Los Angeles during a soundcheck.  Black-and-white tour footage was then added to turn that soundcheck into a music video.  Though the video was simple by necessity, it also captured the loneliness of being on the road and separated from your significant other.

Right Here Waiting was the second single off of Marx’s second studio album, Repeat Offender.  He wrote the song for his then-wife Cynthia Rhodes, who was shooting a film in South Africa.  It went on to become one of Marx’s biggest hits and is still regularly covered by other artists.

Enjoy!