Author Archives: Lisa Marie Bowman

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Highway to Heaven 1.4 “The Return Of The Masked Rider”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, Jonathan and Mark clean up a troubled neighborhood!

Episode 1.4 “The Return of the Masked Rider”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on October 3rd, 1984)

This week, Jonathan and Mark end up a gym in a city.  Jonathan applies for a job as a cut man.  The gym’s owner, Mau Mau (Stoney Jackson), is doubtful because Jonathan can’t give him any references to call but then Jonathan magically heals a cut over a boxer’s eye.  Jonathan gets the job and just in time because this neighborhood needs to be protected.

The problem is that the neighborhood is being ruled by Thumper (Darin Taylor) and the Satan’s Helpers.  Everyone in the neighborhood is scared of the Satan’s Helpers and who can blame them when the gang literally identifies with Satan?  I mean, they’re not only fans of Satan but they’re helping him as well!  Anyway, the statewide boxing championship is coming up and Thumper is going to be fighting another neighborhood boxer, Joey (Chip MacAllister).  The Satan’s Helpers demand that Joey throw the fight and to make sure that Joey does so, they kidnap his grandfather (Hank Rolike)!

Mark suggests that Jonathan just “zap” the gang members and bring an end to the whole thing but Jonathan explains that their mission is not to take out the gang.  Their mission is to encourage the other residents in the neighborhood to take back the streets, “like the Guardian Angels!”  You heard it, folks.  God supports vigilantism.

Luckily, Morton Clay (John Agar) lives in the neighborhood as well.  Morton was once a movie star, playing the Masked Bandit.  Now retired and nearly forgotten, Morton lives in an apartment building with several of his former co-stars.  Jonathan encourages Morton and his friends to put on their old costumes and march down to the headquarters of the Satan’s Helpers.  The rest of the neighborhood is so amazed by the parade of old timey heroes, that they follow.

The Satan’s Helpers are so intimidated by sight of the entire neighborhood gathered together that they decide to stop helping Satan and they release the grandfather.  Yay!  Meanwhile, at the boxing match, Joey refuses to take a dive and he knocks out Thumper.  Yay!  The neighborhood is saved.

When people refer to Highway to Heaven as being a campy show, they are probably referring to episodes like this one.  Undoubtedly, the episode is well-intentioned.  Watching it, you can tell that Michael Landon was hoping that this episode would inspire people to take pride in the neighborhoods, just like the Masked Bandit and his friends!  But the episode’s extremely earnest approach feels a bit naïve.  There’s nothing particularly intimidating about the Satan’s Helpers and it certainly doesn’t help their credibility that they’re scare off by a bunch of elderly people wearing costumes.

Next week, Mark and Jonathan break into the country music world!

Horror On TV: The Hitchhiker 6.6 “Toxic Search” (dir by Jerry Ciccoritti)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight’s episode of The Hitchhiker features two friends who get into a fight over whether or not its ethical to dump toxic waste near a small town.  Unfortunately, exposure to the toxic waste leads to madness.  This episode features a good performance from Zach Galligan as the polluter who learns the errors of his way.

This episode aired on October 26th, 1990.

Retro Television Review: Jennifer Slept Here 1.4 “Boo”

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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing Jennifer Slept Here, which aired on NBC in 1983 and 1984.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, Debbie Reynolds drops by!

Episode 1.4 “Boo”

(Dir by John Bowab, originally aired on November 11th, 1983)

This week’s episode of Jennifer Slept Here opens with Jennifer tormenting Joey while he tries to make a snack.  Whenever Joey tries to grab a bowl and a box of cereal, Jennifer materializes and says, “Boo!”  I guess when you’re a ghost, you have to find a way to pass the time.  Seriously, though, Joey acts like he’s about to have a heart attack every time that he sees Jennifer.  He should be used to her by now.

In other words — STOP BEING SUCH A WIMP, JOEY!

Joey is upset because he’s stuck at home while his parents take his little sister to a costume party but then Marc shows up with two twins (played by Jacqueline and Samantha Forrest).  The twins seem to like Joey and Marc but again, Joey can’t leave the house.  Jennifer suggests to Joey that he suggest that they just have a party at the house.  Joey follows Jennifer’s advice and it turns out that the twins really want to have a …. séance!

Joey is totally excited because he has his own ghost!  However, Jennifer informs him that she doesn’t want to perform like a trained seal so he’s going to have to figure out his own way to party with the twins.  Suddenly, the studio audience goes wild as Debbie Reynolds materializes in Joey’s bedroom.  It turns out that Debbie Reynolds is playing Jennifer’s mother, who is also a ghost.  Jennifer’s mom has spent 24 years searching for Jennifer.  Why?  Because she’s still upset over the fact that Jennifer didn’t thank her when she won a Golden Globe.  Jennifer’s mother has tracked down her daughter so that she can demand to be given credit for her daughter’s career!

(Really?  It’s just a Golden Globe.)

Jennifer and her mother argue over whether or not Jennifer has ever given her mother enough credit.  Jennifer’s mother eventually announces that she’s leaving and proceeds to walk through a wall.  Desperate for her mother to return, Jennifer asks Joey to perform a …. wait for it …. a séance!  Joey gets Jennifer to agree to help him to impress the twins in return for him trying to contact her mother.

At the séance, Marc says they should contact Jennifer’s mother but Joey is like, “Let’s contact her mother!”  As it storms outside, Jennifer does things like forcing everyone to keep their hands on table and causing candles to float around the living room.  It scares and impresses the twins and they suggest a trip to their place where they have a hot tub.  But Jennifer tells Joey that he can’t leave because the séance isn’t over.  Realizing that Jennifer is right, Joey says he can’t go to the hot tub because he has to clean up the house.

“Joey,” Marc announces, “I don’t know what’s wrong with but someday, it’s going to keep you out of the army.”

Okay, 80s TV show, way to be cringey there.

Anyway, Jennifer’s Mother does eventually appear and Joey gets to go hot tubbing with the twins while Jennifer and her mom work on their relationship in the living room.  And I have to say that, after a really silly 19-minute build-up, the final scene between Ann Jillian and Debbie Reynolds was actually very sweet and touching, perhaps more so than you would expect from a sitcom about a ghost and her dorky teenage roommate.

This episode did not get off to a great start but that final scene between Ann Jillian and Debbie Reynolds saved it.  The show definitely worked best when it focused more on Jennifer and less on the people who lived with her.

Horror Scenes That I Love: Donald Pleasence in Halloween 4

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Donald Pleasence was born in the UK in 1919, the son of a railway station manager.  Pleasence briefly tried to follow in his father’s footsteps before, at the age of 20, realizing that he would much rather be a professional actor.  With his intense demeanor, Pleasence soon became an in-demand character actor and remained one for the rest of his life, only taking a break from acting when he served in World War II.  (A devout Methodist, Pleasence originally registered as a conscientious objector but changed his stance once the Blitz began.)   When he was taken prisoners by the Germans and sent to a POW camp, he organized plays among his fellow prisoners as a way to keep everyone’s spirits up as they waited for the war to end.

Pleasence’s experience as a POW led to him being cast in The Great Escape.  His ability to play villains led to him being cast as the original Blofeld in You Only Live Twice.  He appeared in classic horror films like Death Line and Wake In Fright.  In 1978, he was offered the role of Dr. Loomis in Halloween, after it had been turned down by both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.  Pleasence played Loomis with a righteous intensity that seemed to grow a bit more unhinged with each subsequent sequel.  Though he was, by his own admission, not a huge fan of the genre, Pleasence became a horror icon to a whole new generation of film goers.

1998’s Halloween 4 does not have a great reputation but it does have one of my favorite Loomis scenes.  In this scene, a hitchhiking Dr. Loomis is picked up by an old man (Carmen Filipi) who is on a mission of his own.  It’s hard not to regret that these two didn’t get their own spin-off.

October True Crime: Judgment Day: The John List Story (dir by Bobby Roth)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1971, a 46 year-old account named John List committed a shocking crime.

To the outside world, John List was a normal suburbanite.  He was perhaps a little bit strict but then again, it was 1971 and all of the traditional morals that John List had grown up with were being challenged in the streets and in the movies.  Neither he nor his family were particularly sociable but again, it was assumed that they just liked the privacy that was afford to them by the mansion in which they lived.  List was married to Helen.  They lived with their three teenage children and List’s 84 year-old mother.  John List was a hard worker, he taught Sunday School, and, again, he was seen as being perfectly normal.

On November 9th, 1971, John List methodically murdered his wife, his children, and his mother.  He left his mother in her upstairs apartment while the rest of his family was laid out, in sleeping bags, in the ballroom.  (Detectives later surmised that List stopped in the middle of his murder spree to have lunch and then attended his son’s soccer game before taking him home and killing him.)  List left behind several notes, explaining that he was in a bad financial situation and that he feared that his family was heading down an immoral path that would have condemned their souls to Hell if he hadn’t killed them first.  And then, John List vanished.

For the rest of the 70s and the 80s, John List was phantom.  Some speculated that he had committed suicide while others thought that he had changed his identity and had probably remarried.  In 1987, the classic thriller The Stepfather was released in theaters.  Inspired by List’s crimes, The Stepfather starred Terry O’Quinn as Jerry Blake, a real estate agent who was obsessed with creating the perfect family.  The Stepfather imagined its killer as a friendly but rigid man who snapped whenever his illusion of perfection was threatened.  It also imagine him as someone who moved from town to town, searching for a new family that wouldn’t let him down.

As for the real John List, it turned out that those who suspected him of having changed his identity were correct.  And, just as The Stepfather suggested, he had remarried and was actually now a real stepfather.  List remained free until his story was included in a 1989 episode of America’s Most Wanted.  A forensic scientist included a bust of what John List might have looked like in 1989 and a viewer realized that the bust looked a lot like an accountant named Bob Clark.  “Bob Clark” was arrested and eventually, he confessed that he was actually John List.  Despite his attorney’s attempt to argue that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, John List was eventually convicted of five counts of murder.  He spent the rest of this life in prison, dying of natural causes in 2008.

The 1993 film Judgement Day: The Story of John List tells the story of List’s crimes and his subsequent attempt to build a new life for himself.  John List is played by Robert Blake, which turns out to be a bit of a problem as Blake gives such a twitchy and obviously unstable performance that it’s hard to believe that he could have successfully gone into hiding for 18 years.  Carroll Baker and Beverly D’Angelo are not given much to do as, respectively, List’s mother and List’s first wife while David Caruso appears as the detective who is determined to catch List.  Though this film was made long before CSI: Miami, I still found myself expecting Caruso to say something quippy and put on his sunglasses.

Judgment Day doesn’t add much to the story of John List.  It certainly doesn’t offer up any new insight into what led to List becoming a murderer, beyond the fact that List himself was just kind of a jerk.  It’s pretty much a by-the-numbers production that’s only interesting today because of Blake’s subsequent legal problems.  (For the record, I’ve always felt Robert Blake was innocent.)  When it comes to John List films, stick with The Stepfather.

4 Shots From 4 Horror Films: Special George Romero Edition

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.

This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order!  That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!

Today’s director is one of the most important names in the history of American horror cinema, George Romero!

4 Shots From 4 George Romero Films

Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir by George Romero)

Dawn of the Dead (1978, dir by George Romero, DP: Michael Gornick)

Day of the Dead (1985, dir by George Romero, DP: Michael Gornick)

Land of the Dead (2005, dir by George Romero, DP: Miroslaw Baszak)

Horror Film Review: Empire of the Ants (dir by Bert I. Gordon)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ants are interesting creatures.  On the one hand, they work hard and they can design and build a complex home in just a matter of hours.  They’re loyal to the other members of their tribe and they all happily do whatever needs to be done to keep their community healthy and moving forward.  They’re family-orientated.  They take care of their children.  They eat earth worms.  They fight other ants.  They can carry several pounds over their own weight.  They like to move in a single-file line.  These are all things that people, in general, admire.  If you had to hire someone to do some yardwork, you would want someone who had the attitude of an ant.

At the same time, ants also have no respect for privacy, they tend to get everywhere, and they bite you and leave behind those ugly red marks that take forever to go away and that can itch like heck.  I was once outside barefoot, helping someone wash his car, when I suddenly felt a really intense pain in my foot.  I looked down and saw that I had stepped straight into an ant hill.  It was not only an ant hill but it was a FIRE ANT HILL!  I grabbed a hose and I washed all of the ants off my foot but it was still one of the most painful experiences of my life.  Ants are hard-working and industrious but they’re also kind of mean and they really don’t like humans.  (Maybe they would like us more if people stopped kicking ant hills and using magnifying glasses to set them on fire.)  Ants will break into your house and then bite you when you tell them to go away.  My point is that you might like ants but ants do not like you and you better remember that!

The 1977 film, Empire of the Ants, is all about humanity’s mixed feelings towards ants.  Joan Collins plays a shady real estate agent who leads a group of potential home buyers into the bayou because she wants to trick them into buying some worthless property on a nearby island.   What Collins and her clients don’t know is that a barrel of radioactive waste was recently dumped off of a nearby boat and when the waste washed on shore, a bunch of ants got into it and it caused them to become giant ants!  The giant ants are industriously creating their own sugar-based society but they’re also attacking and brainwashing humans!

Needless to say, this is a Bert I. Gordon film.  Gordon took his “Mr. Big” nickname quite literally and, as a result, he spent almost his entire career making movies about animals and occasionally humans who were turned into giants by radiation.  Apparently, radiation can do anything!  Empire of the Ants is a typical Gordon film, in that the special effects are just bad enough to be kind of charming.  The ants are either awkwardly super-imposed into the scene or they are clearly made out of plastic.  There’s a scene where an ant grabs a man by his neck and it would be really terrifying if not for the fact that the ant’s head appears to have been made from Styrofoam.  Unfortunately, even though the special effects are bad in an amusing way, Empire of the Ants is still a pretty boring film.  Gordon devotes way too much time to the people heading out to look at Joan Collins’s beachfront property.  No one is watching a film like this for human drama.

This movie is based on a short story by H.G. Wells.  Wells, reportedly, considered it to be the worst thing he had ever written.

Horror Film Review: Beginning of the End (dir by Bert I. Gordon)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1957 film, Beginning of the End, is perhaps the ultimate horror film for people who dislike Illinois.

Because it’s a Bert I. Gordon film and Gordon took his “Mr. Big” nickname seriously, it deals with giant monsters.  In this case, the monsters are a bunch of locust who ate all of this radioactive grain that was being stored in a silo.  The locusts grew to giant size and then they went on a rampage.

Fortunately, the rampage appears to be localized to Illinois.  Apparently, the locusts have enough respect for state boundaries that they know better than to hop into Indiana, Missouri, or Wisconsin.  Instead, the locusts take out the farming community of Ludlow and then start making their way to Chicago, perhaps hoping to battle the Chicago Outfit for control of the city’s politics.  Do they seriously think Mayor Daley is just going to sit back while a bunch of locusts overrun his city?

The government wants to cover up the locust rampage because they don’t want to risk a mass panic in the 47 states that they actually care about.  (This film came out before Alaska and Hawaii joined the Union.)  However, when enterprising reporter Audrey Aimes (Peggie Castle) comes across the remains of Ludlow and discovers that the U.S. military has taken over the area, she is determined to discover what happened.  She hooks up with Dr. Ed Wainwright (Peter Graves), whose work in making food bigger led to the giant locust attacks in the first place.  In most movies, Ed would shoulder most of the blame for the locust attack but Beginning of the End seems to understand that these things happen when you’re dousing food with radiation and then keeping the food in a poorly secured silo.

Of course, the main reason why it’s not Ed’s fault is that Ed is played by Peter Graves and seriously, who could blame anything on Peter Graves?  Graves was one of those actors who could deliver even the silliest of dialogue with a straight face and he certainly gets to do that in Beginning of the End.  He seems to be taking the situation seriously, even if no one else is.

One reason why it is a little bit difficult to take the situation seriously is because it’s about giant locusts.  Now, make no mistake about it.  I’m enough a country girl that I know how destructive locusts can be.  The problem is that locusts may be destructive but they don’t look all that menacing.  Even giant locusts just look like really ugly grasshoppers.  This film uses a lot of rear projection and still photography to create the idea of giant locusts crawling over buildings and threatening the soldiers who have been sent to fight them.  As is so often the case with Bert I. Gordon’s film, there’s a definite charm to the cheap special effects.  But still, locusts are locusts.

Chicago haters will love the scene where General Hanson (Morris Ankrum) announces that the locusts have only left him with one option, the drop an atomic bomb and wipe the city off the face of the Earth.  Fortunately, Ed is there to suggest another solution.  Good old Peter Graves.  I don’t know what we would have done without him.

As a final note, I’ll just mention that the poster for this film is actually more exciting than the film itself:

Horror on the Lens: Baffled! (dir by Philip Leacock)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Leonard Nimoy is a race car driver who can see into the future and who uses his powers to solve crimes!

Seriously, if that’s not enough to get you to watch the 1973 made-for-TV movie Baffled!, then I don’t know what is.  In the film, Nimoy takes a break from racing so that he and a parapsychologist (played by Susan Hampshire) can solve the mystery of the visions that Nimoy is having of a woman in a mansion.  This movie was meant to serve as a pilot and I guess if the series had been picked up, Nimoy would have had weekly visions.  Of course, the movie didn’t lead to a series but Baffled! is still fun in a 70s television sort of way.  Thanks to use of what I like to call “slow mo of doom,” a few of Nimoy’s visions are creepy and the whole thing ends with the promise of future adventures that were sadly never to be.

Enjoy Baffled!  Can you solve the mystery before Leonard?

October Positivity: Image of the Beast (dir by Donald W. Thompson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1981’s Image of the Beast picks up from where A Distant Thunder ended.

The world is in economic and political chaos, largely as a result of millions of people vanishing a few years before.  (The government says the people were abducted by UFOs but everyone left behind knows it was actually the rapture.)  Brother Christopher and the United Nations are controlling the world.  Order is kept by UNITE.  Those who fail to get the Mark on either their palm or their forehead are not allowed to buy food or get healthcare.  In fact, Brother Christopher has declared that the mark is no longer optional and anyone who refuses to get it will be executed.

A Distant Thunder ended with Patty Myers (Patty Dunning) facing the guillotine and that’s where Image of the Beast picks up.  She is given one final chance to voluntarily take the mark before being put under the blade but, in obvious fear and shock, Patty says nothing.  Two UNITE soldiers tie her the ground, with her neck directly under the guillotine’s blade.

Finally, Patty yells, “I want the mark!”

However, at the same time that Patty makes the declaration, an earthquake hits and the skies turn black.  The cowardly soldiers run off, leaving Patty under the blade.  Realizing that she is witnessing the breaking of one of the apocalyptic seals, Patty attempts to free herself from her bounds.  Unfortunately, she moves around so much that the loosened blade comes crashing down and she promptly loses her head.

So much for Patty!

The action then shifts to a new character, a Christian rebel named David Michaels (William Wellman, Jr., who also played a different role in every single Billy Jack movie).  David, who has disguised himself as a member of UNITE, is looking for Leslie (Wenda Shereos), another Christian who escaped from execution during the earthquake.  David doesn’t find her but he does stumble upon Kathy (Susan Plumb), Kathy’s son (Ben Sampson), and the Rev. Matthew Turner (Russell S. Doughten, JR., who not only produced the Thief In The Night films but who also directed films like Nite Song).  Rev. Turner lives in a farmhouse and looks a lot like Santa Claus.  He has a helpful graph on his wall that can be used to understand just how far along the world is into the apocalypse.

As Rev. Turner explains it, computers are the new “golden calf.”  Why, people believe that computer can do anything better than humans!  They’re letting computer run their lives and Brother Christopher is using that to his advantage!  (Keep in mind, this film was made in 1981 so the computer that he’s talking about are those big, boxy computers that took hours to do the simplest tasks.)  Fortunately, David used to be a computer technician and he thinks that he’s come up with a way to 1) create a counterfeit mark and 2) corrupt Brother Christopher’s precious computer system!

(Calculators, interestingly enough, are referred to as being hand computers.  If nothing else, this film proves that paranoia about technology is hardly a new phenomena.)

Much like the previous films in the series, there’s a lot of scenes of the heroes trying to sneak around Des Moines without blowing their cover and revealing themselves to be believers.  And like A Distant Thunder, there’s a lot of talk about events that are happening that we never actually see.  This one of those films that deals with its low budget by having all of the big events happen off-screen.  The characters in this film spend a lot of time listening to breathless news reports on the radio and on television.  And while that can feel a bit anti-climatic, it’s also strangely effective in its way.  It captures the feeling of finding yourself in a situation where you’re never quite sure if you’re hearing the truth and it also captures the feeling of helplessness that comes from knowing that there are huge things happening that you can’t control.  While the film is a bit too talky for its own good, director Donald W. Thompson does a good job of creating an atmosphere of sustained paranoia.  Every time that David and Kathy walk around Des Moines, you’re expecting someone to grab them.  The fact that Des Moines, itself, is hardly a shadowy metropolis adds to paranoia.  “If this could happen in Iowa,” the film seems to be saying, “it could happen anywhere.”

Image of the Beast was a success on the church circuit and it was followed by one final Thief in the Night film, which I will discuss tomorrow.