Late Night Retro Television Review: Baywatch Nights 1.19 “Epilogue”

Posted on March 26, 2024 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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, a detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on You tube!

This week, Griff gets a storyline! Who? Oh yeah, Griff! He’s like the photographer who hangs out at the detective agency sometimes. He was played by Eddie Cibrian and he was listed in the opening credits so I guess he was supposed to be a major character, despite never doing or even saying anything.

Anyway, on to this week’s episode….

Episode 1.19 “Epilogue”

(Dir by Reza Badiyi, originally aired on April 27th, 1996)

Griff is concerned about his old friends, RJ (Jared Murphy) and Rene O’Gill (Julianne Morrs). Their mother has just recently died and Rene suspects that she was murdered by their stepfather, Robert Houston (Ben Murphy). RJ, meanwhile, is a junky for both adrenaline and amphetamines and his girlfriend, Candy (Carmen Electra), seems like she might be a bad influence. Both RJ and Rene are due to receive a good deal of money from their trust funds and, if anything happened to them, that money would go to Robert.

Wanting to learn the truth about her mother’s death, Rene hires Mitch and Ryan to investigate. Because Mitch is a terrible private eye, he decides to have Donna go undercover to discover if Robert is hiding anything. Keep in mind that Donna does not work for the detective agency, has got a club to run, is already training to become a lifeguard, and has absolutely no investigative experience. And, of course, it turns out that there really wasn’t any need to have Donna go undercover because, just as Mitch is terrible at investigating stuff, Robert is terrible at covering up the fact that he’s a murderer.

How does Mitch solve this case? When he discovers that someone has been calling Rene’s answering machine and getting her messages without her knowledge, Mitch says, “Dial Star 69.” That’s the extent of Mitch’s detective work in this episode.

(Answering machines and Star 69, could this show be any more of a product of the 90s?)

The main problem here is that the episode revolves around Griff and his romantic feelings for Rene but since Griff is a character who has only appeared in a handful of episodes and never really made much of an impression, it’s hard to really get either emotionally or mentally involved with his story. When RJ is killed during a jet ski race, Griff gets upset and blames Robert but again, we don’t know Griff, we don’t know RJ, and we don’t know Robert.

The best that can be said about this episode is that it features some fun flirtation between David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon, though not nearly enough. Probably the most interesting thing about this episode is that it tries to be noticeably more racy than previous episodes and the editing often feels so abrupt that it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there was a more explicit version of the episode made for Europe. Carmen Electra plays a femme fatale here and she does do a good job of being playfully evil. Later, she would join the cast of regular Baywatch, playing a different character who didn’t murder anyone.

Next week …. oh, who knows? I just want to get to the second season already. That’s when all the aliens and undead Vikings start to show up.

Cleaning Out The DVR: Get Over It (dir by Tommy O’Haver)

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“I wouldn’t play with that, Kelly,” Berke Landers (Ben Foster) says as Kelly Woods (Kirsten Dunst) playfully aims a crossbow at him.

Kelly laughs and tells him that it’s just a prop.

Berke suggests again that she should probably stop aiming it at him.

Kelly laughs and proceeds to fire an arrow straight into Berke’s arm.

The next scene, of course, is Berke in the back of an ambulance, groaning in terrible pain while Kelly apologizes and a paramedic repeatedly warns Berke not to look at his arm. In most movies, that would seem like a pretty dramatic plot development and, at the very least, you would expect that Berke would try to avoid Kelly and perhaps have his arm in a sling for the rest of the film. In the 2001 film, Get Over it, Berke recovers rather quickly, he and Kelly fall in love, and the film ends with Kelly making a joke about how she thought the crossbow was a prop.

That’s just the type of film that Get Over It is. This is a film from the age when all teen comedies were very loosely based on Shakespeare and they usually had a three word name like She’s All That or Drive Me Crazy or …. well, Get Over It. Ben Foster has the type of role that would usually go to Freddie Prinze, Jr. Sisqo has the Usher rule of the supercool sidekick who raps over the end credits. Shane West speaks with a British accent and steps into the Matthew Lillard role of the obnoxious teen celebrity. Melissa Sagemiller is the girl who the main guy thinks he’s in love with while Martin Short plays the eccentric and overdramatic theater teacher. And finally, Kirsten Dunst gets to play another version of her Bring It On role as the quirky and perky girl who wants to do the right thing. Meanwhile, Zoe Saldana, Mila Kunis, Colin Hanks, Swoosie Kurtz, and Ed Begley, Jr. all have small parts. It’s a good cast, if nothing else.

Get Over It centers around a high school production of a musical version of A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Basketball star Berke auditions for the play because he thinks that it will convince his ex-girlfriend, Alison (Sagemiller) to take him back. Instead, Alison ends up falling for the duplicitous Striker Scrumfeld (West), who has the exact type of personality that you would expect someone named Striker Scrumfeld to have. Meanwhile, Berke is falling in love with Kelly, who is the sister of his friend, Felix (Colin Hanks).

It’s all very predictable but, at the same time, the cast is absolutely charming and there’s enough quirky humor to make it memorable. I’ve watched Get Over It several times and, every time that I rewatch it, I’m always a little bit surprised to rediscover just how funny it actually is. For instance, as Berke leaves Alison’s house after being dumped by her, Vitamin C and a marching band suddenly appear behind him and start to perform Love Will Keep Us Together until Berke finally loses it and starts screaming. The musical production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream is the perfect parody of every pretentious high school play ever produced and Martin Short cheerfully throws himself into being the director for Hell. Ben Foster is a bit too intense to be a romantic or, for that matter, comedic leading man but the rest of the cast is enjoyably laid back and fully embrace their quirky roles.

Get Over It may not be a classic but it is a fun 90 minutes.

Vampire Party: An American Vampire Story (1997, directed by Luis Esteban)

Posted on October 27, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

When his parents leave to spend the summer in Europe, Frankie (Trevor Lissauer) has the entire mansion to himself. Frankie wants to spend the time getting closer to his girlfriend, Dee Dee (Daisy Torme), but his best friend Bogie (Danny Hitt) says that it’s time to “party hearty!” (That’s right. Someone in a film made after 1991 says that it’s time to party hearty.) Bogie thinks that the best way to party would be to invite Moondoggie (Johnny Venocur) and his gang (which includes Carmen Elecrta) to hang out at the house. But then it turns out that Moondoggie is a vampire and once he’s invited in, he refuses to leave! Even worse, Dee Dee dumps Frankie for Moondoggie! Luckily, there is one man on the beach who can help Frankie out of his predicament. They call him the Big Kahuna, he wears a Hawaiian shirt and he’s played by Adam West.

This is really, really dumb but at least it’s got Adam West saying lines like, “Stop that sucking!” and “Holy wipe out!” The movie is supposed to be a throwback to the old Frankie and Annette beach party movies from the 60s, just with vampires. (Moondoggie’s real named is Count Erich Von Zipper.) What the movie didn’t take into account is that there was already a perfectly good Beach Party movie with vampires and it was called The Lost Boys. Don’t be fooled by that PG-13 rating or the way that Carmen Electra is posing on the poster. An American Vampire Story is a tame and bloodless vampire story. The cast is game but most of the jokes fail to land like they should and ultimately, only Adam West keeps the anemic tale alive.