THE WILD AND WONDERFUL WHITES OF WEST VIRGINIA (2009) – Is this your family?!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

My wife was born and raised in the great state of West Virginia. It’s one of the most beautiful states in the country. I’ve enjoyed visiting awesome places like the New River Gorge Bridge, Kanawha Falls, the Greenbrier Resort, the Mothman museum, Reddish Knob, Seneca Rocks, and Hillbilly Hot Dogs over the years! Five or six years ago, I was browsing through the movies available on Amazon Prime and I came across this documentary called THE WILD AND WONDERFUL WHITES OF WEST VIRGINIA. Being a fan of my wife and fascinated by the state, I thought I’d check it out.

But first, a little back story…. in 1991, Jacob Young, a director and producer for two seasons of a PBS documentary series called DIFFERENT DRUMMER, made a documentary short for the series entitled DANCING OUTLAW. The subject of the documentary is a man from Boone County, WV named Jesco White. Jesco is a talented “mountain tap dancer,” a skill that was passed down to him from his father D. Ray White. Jesco is also a hard-living, hellraising, gas-huffing law breaker! The documentary would go on to win a 1992 Emmy Award, as well as a 1993 American Film Institute Award for “Best Documentary.” It would also make Jesco a celebrity and pop culture figure in the state.

Now, back to THE WILD AND WONDERFUL WHITES OF WEST VIRGINIA. This 2009 documentary, directed by Julian Nitzberg and executive produced by Johnny Knoxville, takes us back to Boone County to revisit Jesco White, as well as to introduce us to a whole bunch of his extended family. I’ll just say up front that I was fascinated by this family, but I would never in a million years trust a single one of them. Jesco is in the new documentary, but there isn’t a lot of time spent with him. He did perform some of his special mountain tap-dancing as Hank Williams III sang his song “Straight to Hell” during the opening credits. I enjoyed seeing his special talent prior to the movie turning into the documentation of a slow-motion, extended family train wreck. Here are a few of the people we spend time with:

  1. Mamie White – This is Jesco’s sister. Her thoughts on life are pretty scary. Based on her own words, I have no doubt that she would steal from me and possibly kill me if it would help her get ahead in any way. She would then brag about dumping my body in a local “holler.” It was not a surprise when a portion of the running time dealt with her daughter’s release from prison.
  2. Sue Bob White – This is also Jesco’s sister, “the sexy one of the family,” according to her own words. The primary events we see in her life concerns her interactions with her son, Brandon Poe. Poe is currently in jail for shooting his own uncle multiple times in the face.    
  3. Susan Ray (Kirk) White – This is Jesco’s niece, the daughter of his sister Bo White. When we meet her, she proudly tells us the story of when she attempted to kill her husband Dennis, the father of her hyperactive son Tylor, by slashing him with a knife because she “hated that son of a bitch.” Cut to six months later and she’s in the hospital delivering a beautiful baby girl. While she’s still in the hospital we see her snorting crushed up prescription pills. Her child is promptly taken from her by social services. Her story is ultimately the most interesting, because we get to see her attempts to get clean and get her child back.
  4. Poney White – This is Jesco’s brother. After some legal trouble in the past, when we meet Poney he’s living in Minnesota where he seems to have a good job and a relatively well-adjusted family. His story seems quite successful in comparison.

We meet many more of the Whites, but I think you can see where this is going. This is a family in distress, and we see extreme examples of a culture of horrific decisions that continue to yield horrific results. With that said, I also saw bits and pieces of my own family in the Whites, and while I won’t condone a single one of their bad decisions, I won’t pass judgment on them either. During the year that the filmmakers hung out with the Whites, the matriarch of the family, Bertie Mae White, turned 85 years old. Based on some of the things she said, as well as some of her mannerisms, she reminded me a little bit of my own Grandma Crain from the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas. We see the family as they celebrate Bertie Mae on her 85th birthday. They love their mother, but they do drugs and smoke pot at her party even though she clearly doesn’t want any of that “stuff” around her. A sad section of the film is Bertie May’s passing while the documentary was being made. I know of instances where drug and alcohol abuse have wreaked havoc inside of my own family. There have been instances where extended family members have committed acts of violence that have sent them to prison. I think the fact that I can see certain characteristics of my own family through the craziness of the Whites is what fascinated me the most when I was watching. These are real people, and because of that, we know people like them, with some of them being our own family members if not ourselves. I’m not qualified to speak on how certain socio-economic factors affect any of this kind of behavior, so I won’t even try.  

Back in 2020, my wife and I visited the courthouse in Madison, WV, which is the county seat of Boone County, and a place that is shown multiple times throughout the documentary. I’ve included a picture below. We ate at a local grocery store in town that served a nice bologna sandwich for lunch. This is a very normal town and county, yet this is also where almost all of the action in the wild and wonderful Whites takes place. One of my takeaways from THE WILD AND WONDERFUL WHITES OF WEST VIRGINIA is my continued amazement of the types of things us “normal” people are capable of. 

Late Night Retro Television Review: Friday the 13th 2.21 “Wedding in Black”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a new feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Friday the 13th: The Series, a show which ran in syndication from 1987 to 1990. The show can be found on YouTube!

This week, the departed return!

Episode 2.21 “Wedding in Black”

(Dir by Rodney Charters, originally aired on May 8th, 1989)

In South America, a man named Calvin Collier (Stephen Meadows) is carrying around a snow globe and strangling women.  After he kills a young Jill Hennessy (credited here with playing “Spanish Hooker,”), Calvin is taken to prison.  However, an ominous voice says that it has need of Calvin’s soul.

In Africa, Brother Antonio (Guy Bannerman) is caught trying to rape a woman and is promptly set on fire.

In America (or maybe Canada), Maya Zedler (Carolyn Dunn) is released from prison and promptly kills herself.

What do all three of these people have in common?  They all know the folks at Curious Goods!  Calvin is a friend of Micki’s.  Brother Antonio is an acquaintance of Jack’s.  Maya used to be Ryan’s girlfriend.  And even though all three of them are now dead, Lucifer sent them back into the world of the living because he’s decided that he wants Micki to give birth to his child.

Calvin and Antonio show up and draw Micki and Jack out of the store and into a sudden blizzard.  Suddenly, all four of them find themselves in the castle that sits in the middle of Calvin’s snow globe.  Calvin sets about trying to seduce Micki on behalf of Lucifer.

Meanwhile, Maya shows up and tries to keep Ryan distracted so that he won’t go looking for Micki and Jack.  However, it turns out that Maya still has a conscience and eventually, she turns on Lucifer and sacrifices herself to help Ryan.

This episode was an interesting change of pace.  The snow globe may have been an antique but wasn’t one of the antiques and instead of Micki and Ryan stumbling into whatever terrible thing was happening, Lucifer instead came directly for them.  If nothing else, this episode showed that the producers of Friday the 13th: The Series understood the danger of falling into a rut and that they were capable of changing things up without losing the overall macabre atmosphere of the show.  The scenes in the castle were appropriately surreal and both Chris Wiggins and the often underused Robey gave good performances.  Of the three souls, Guy Bannerman made the strongest impression just by playing his character as being totally and unashamedly evil.

At the same time, it was hard not to feel that this episode was a bit of a missed opportunity.  While it was interesting to have Micki, Jack, and Ryan meet up with three spirits of people who they used to know, it’s hard not to feel that the episode would have worked better if the producers had reached into the past and brought back some of the show’s former guest stars.  Not an episode passed in which Micki, Jack, or Ryan doesn’t lose someone that they cared about and it would have been fun to see some of those people come back.  Imagine the emotional impact if John Stockwell or Catherine Disher or maybe one of Jack’s old war buddies had returned to life.

All in all, this was a good episode that could have been even better.

Due to the holidays, this is my final Friday the 13th review for 2024.  These reviews will return on January 3rd!

Retro Television Review: St. Elsewhere 1.5 “Samuels and the Kid”

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 Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988.  The show can be found on Hulu!

This week’s episode of St. Elsewhere featured Dr. Craig winning an award.  Good for him!

Episode 1.5 “Samuels and the Kid”

(Dir by Thomas Carter, originally aired on November 30th, 1982)

This week’s episode of St. Elsewhere was kind of boring,  It wasn’t a bad episode because the show was well-acted and even the boring subplots felt as is they were part of a bigger whole but, especially when compared to last week’s episode, Samuels and the Kid just wasn’t as compelling.

The Kid of the title is Robbie Durant (Jeremy Licht), a young patient who needs to have some minor surgery done on his ankle.  Dr. Samuels take a really intense interest in the kid, bonding with him and even offering him tickets to a Patriots football game.  At first, it seems like Samuels is just trying to be nice to a kid who is in a scary situation.  (When I was growing up, I spent a few nights in the hospital because of my asthma and it always scared me to death.)  But, at the end of the episode, it is revealed that Samuels had a son who was Robbie’s age who died in a freak accident.  As for Robbie, the operation is a success but he still dies as the result of an embolism.  It was sad but, at the same time, I knew Robbie was going to die as soon as he showed up in the hospital.  I’ve seen enough medical shows to know.

Dr. Cavanero was at a bed-and-breakfast when she learned that one of her patients had gone into labor and was at her apartment alone.  Cavenro had to beg people for change so that she could use a pay phone to call the patient’s neighbors so that she could talk them through delivering the baby.  Seen today, the most interesting thing about this storyline is that it takes place at a time when people had to carry around quarters so that they could call each other in case of an emergency.  (There is a very dusty old payphone a few blocks away from my house.  I assume it doesn’t work and I don’t think it’s been touched by human hands since the 90s — and I’m certainly not going to touch it! — but it’s always interesting to see it sitting there like some haunted beacon of the past.)

Dr. Fiscus continued to have sex with Kathy Martin.  Good for them but I really don’t know that I need to spend a good deal of time listening to Howie Mandel talk about his sex life.

Dr. Chandler (Denzel Washington) accused a nurse of being incompetent.  Nurse Rosenthal (Christina Pickles) got mad at him for yelling at the nurse in the hospital hallway.  Dr. Westphall mediated and agreed to move the nurse to another floor.  Denzel Washington is always fun when he’s yelling at people.

There was one very funny scene.  Dr. Craig won an award for surgeon of the year and gave an extremely long, pompous, and rather bitter acceptance speech.  (The award was a plaster cast of his own hands.)  William Daniels played the scene perfectly and I have a feeling that Dr. Craig is going to end up becoming my favorite character.  As a bonus, Daniels’s wife, Bonnie Bartlett, appeared as Craig’s wife.  By the middle of Craig’s speech, even she had stoppled listening and lit a cigarette.

As I said, this was a little bit of a boring episode.   Still, I look forward to the future of the show!

Speaking of the future, this is my last St. Elsewhere review of 2024.  My next review of this show will post on January 3rd!

 

Live Tweet Alert: Join #FridayNightFlix For Strange Brew!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on Twitter and Mastodon.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, at 10 pm et, #FridayNightFlix presents Canada’s Strange Brew!

If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag!  It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

Strange Brew is available on Prime!  See you there!

MURPHY’S LAW – Don’t F#&k with Jack Murphy!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

I became obsessed with actor Charles Bronson in 1986 after receiving a VHS copy of DEATH WISH 3 as a Christmas present. Going along with that obsession was my desire to see every Charles Bronson movie that had ever been made. As much as I enjoyed re-watching DEATH WISH 3, it was always a treat when I could rent a different Bronson film at the video store. The current Bronson movie at the video store in 1987 that appealed to me as a 13 year old boy was MURPHY’S LAW, so I wanted to rent it as often as possible. There were even a couple of times when different friends asked me to spend the night, and I had one requirement for saying yes… that we rent MURPHY’S LAW! Y’all, don’t think too bad of me for this admission. Remember, I was only 13 years old, I couldn’t drive, and I didn’t have a job so if I had to use a friend’s mom to get my Bronson fix, that’s just what I had to do! Based on the timing of my initial Bronson obsession, DEATH WISH 3 and MURPHY’S LAW are 1-2 in the films that I’ve watched the most times during my life.

In MURPHY’S LAW, Charles Bronson plays Jack Murphy, a tough cop who seems to be experiencing a series of unfortunate events:

  1. A thief named Arabella McGee (Kathleen Wilhoite) tries to steal Murphy’s car and drives it through the window of a pizzaria. We know that’s his car because he loudly proclaims, “That’s MY car!!” He even wastes money on a sack of groceries by throwing it at his car while she’s driving away. He’s able to chase her down on foot, but she kicks him in the testicles and runs off leaving him doubled over in pain, grocery-less, and clutching the family jewels!
  2. A mafia kingpin named Frank Vincenzo (Richard Romanus) wants to kill him because Murphy was forced to shoot and kill the kingpin’s brother. We know the cop and the kingpin don’t like each other, because a little before the shooting they have a slight disagreement in front of the mafioso’s mother over whether the brother is a scum-sucking pimp or a talent agent. Unable to resolve the debate amicably, the mafioso inquires as to whether or not Jack has ever heard of “Murphy’s Law, if anything can possibly go wrong it will?” Murphy responds with an alternative version of Murphy’s Law, the only law that he knows, and one that I greatly prefer. You get the feeling that this argument may be revisited later in the film.     
  3. Murphy’s now ex-wife Jan (Angel Tompkins) is performing extremely artistic striptease routines at a local club called Madam Tong’s. She’s also making love to the manager of the club. Rather than drinking at home alone until he passes out like most depressed men, Murphy hangs out at Madam Tong’s watching her shake her goodies for a bunch of horny lowlifes, before following them home and watching from outside until they turn off the bedroom lights. Very sad indeed.
  4. And here’s the worst part, on one of those typical nights where he’s obsessively stalking his wife, another mystery woman (Carrie Snodgress) knocks him in the head, shoots the slimy manager and Mrs. Murphy with his gun, and then frames him for their murders. Arrested for the murders and subsequently handcuffed to the thief who tried to steal his car, Murphy must stage a daring helicopter jailbreak in order to find out who framed him and clear his name before everything and everyone he holds dear is taken from him!

There are several reasons that I loved MURPHY’S LAW back in the eighties, and that I still enjoy it now. First, of course, is Charles Bronson. He was around 64 years old when he filmed MURPHY’S LAW, but he’s still in great physical condition in 1986. One of Bronson’s greatest strengths is his screen presence, and he still dominates each frame he’s in. Second, the film has an excellent supporting cast. Carrie Snodgress is having a ball playing the main villain in the film. I’ve seen her in quite a few movies, like PALE RIDER with Clint Eastwood, and 8 SECONDS with Luke Perry, but I’ve never seen her in a role like this. Snodgress was nominated for an Oscar for her role in a 1970 film called DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE. I’ve never seen that one before, but I should probably check it out! I love Kathleen Wilhoite as Arabella McGee, the thief who ends up handcuffed to Bronson. Her vocabulary, while probably not very realistic for the streets of LA at the time, was hilarious to me as a teenager. I enjoy calling the people I love “snot licking donkey farts” on occasion to this very day. It’s Kathleen Wilhoite singing the title song over the closing credits! And Robert F. Lyons is very special to me in his role as Art Penney, Jack Murphy’s partner. We got to interview him on the THIS WEEK IN CHARLES BRONSON podcast about his roles on DEATH WISH 2, 10 TO MIDNIGHT, and MURPHY’S LAW. He was so generous with his time, and just a hell of a nice guy! I’ve attached a link to the YouTube video of the interview with Mr. Lyons if you’re interested in the great stories he tells us about his time in Hollywood! Finally, MURPHY’S LAW was directed by J. Lee Thompson, my personal favorite director who worked with Bronson. Thompson directed Bronson in 9 different films, beginning with ST. IVES in 1976 and ending with KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS in 1989. No matter the material, you always knew that Thompson would deliver a film with a certain quality that made Bronson look good!

I’ll always be a fan of MURPHY’S LAW, partly for nostalgic reasons, but mainly because I think it’s an entertaining mid-80’s action film for Bronson at a time when he was one of the kings of the video store!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 3.5 “That’s Our Dad”

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 Freevee and several other services!

This week, Jonathan and Mark are in Hollywood …. again!

Episode 3.5 “That’s Our Dad”

(Dir by Victor French, originally aired on October 29th, 1986)

Two orphans, Sarah (Kelley Parker) and Joey (R.J. Williams), are upset because they’re about to be split up.  A family wants to adopt Sarah but they don’t feel like bringing along her best friend, Joey.  Joey and Sarah wish that they could live with Bill Cassidy (Ned Beatty), the star of America’s favorite sitcom, That’s My Dad!

Sarah and Joey run away from the orphanage and end up at the studio at the exact same time that Bill is holding auditions to find a new co-star for That’s My Dad.  Sarah and Joey tell Bill about their tragic backgrounds and how they each lost their parents.  Bill, thinking that the kids are doing audition pieces, is so impressed that he tells his producer that he wants the kids to be hired immediately.  The kids think that this mean they’re being adopted!  Yay!

Unfortunately, Bill is a bitter man who, in private, doesn’t behave like the perfect father that he plays on television.  Adopt two kids?  Why would Bill want to do that!?  Fortunately, Jonathan and Mark just happen to be installing a new security system at Bill’s home.  Jonathan helps Bill to see that, even though he’s bitter, he could still redeem himself by adopting two random children.  The end result is an episode that pretty much epitome of Highway To Heaven, shamelessly sentimental but heartfelt enough to be effective.

This was not Ned Beatty’s first appearance on Highway to Heaven.  During the first season, he played two roles in The Banker and the Bum.  Beatty does a pretty good job in this episode, playing Bill Cassidy as someone who can be unpleasant but not so unpleasant that his later change of heart doesn’t feel credible.  From the first minute we meet Bill, we know he’s going to turn out to be not such a bad guy, if just because that’s what always happens on Highway to Heaven.  On this show, even the most unlikable of characters usually achieve some sort of redemption.  The main theme is the no one is bad as they originally seem.  That’s actually a pretty sweet message when you think about it.

Highway to Heaven did quite a few shows about show business.  I’ve read that Michael Landon was something of a workaholic and, as a result, he later felt that he missed out on spending time with his children.  Certainly, that would explain why almost every Hollywood episode of Highway to Heaven seems to feature an actor or director who needs to learn to make time for the people in their lives.

Speaking of making time for the people in your life, it’s the holidays.  This is going to be my final Highway to Heaven review for 2024.  These reviews will return on January 2nd!