Tag Archives: Christopher Atkins

Insomnia File #74: Listen To Me (dir by Douglas Day Stewart)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you were struggling to get to sleep last night, you could have jumped over to Tubi and watched the 1989 film, Listen to Me.

Listen to Me tells the story of two poor but ambitious teenagers who receive debate scholarships to fictional Kenmont University.  Monica Tomanski (Jami Gertz) is a liberal from Chicago.  Tucker Muldowney (Kirk Cameron) is a “shit-kickin’ conservative” who is from Oklahoma.  Despite their different political beliefs, Monica and Tucker find themselves assigned to be debate partners by the college’s legendary debate coach, Charlie Nichols (Roy Scheider).

At Kenmont, debate is as popular and as important as football is at some other colleges.  The entire student body shows up to listen to the debates and to cheer for their side.  It’s like Oxford, if Oxford was solely populated by 80s teen actors.  (Seriously, there’s a lot of familiar faces wandering around that campus.)  Charlie is convinced that this could be the year that he wins the national tournament.  Gar McKellar (Tom Quill), the troubled son of Sen. McKellar (Anthony Zerbe), is one of the best debaters in the country.  However, Gar fears that winning a national debate tournament will somehow lead to him going into politics.  He wants to be a writer and he’s got a self-destructive streak.  As you probably already guessed, this all leads to Tucker and Monica debating the arrogant Harvard team in front of the Supreme Court.  The topic?  Whether or not Roe v Wade should be overturned….

A few thoughts on Listen to Me:

Kirk Cameron’s “Oklahoma” accent is, without a doubt, the worst that I have ever heard in any film ever made.  When I was growing up, I did occasionally live in Oklahoma.  I still visit Oklahoma frequently.  Yes, people in Oklahoma do have an accent.  However, that accent sounds nothing like whatever Cameron was trying to do in this film.  Whenever Kirk Cameron speaks, he sounds less like an Oklahoma farm boy and more like the tubercular son of a once proud New Orleans family.  Beyond the accent, Cameron just isn’t believable as a quick-on-his-feet debate champ.  He overplays when he should underplay and underplays …. well, I can’t think of a single scene that he underplays.  It’s just not a good performance.

Jami Gertz is a bit more convincing as Monica.  (It perhaps helps that Gertz, like her character, is actually from Chicago.)  But, for the majority of the film, Monica is seriously underwritten.  She’s a straw feminist, who largely exists so that Tucker can tell her to loosen up.

As for the other debaters, we don’t learn much about them.  That’s a shame because some of them — like Amanda Peterson’s crippled debater — seem like they would be much more interesting to follow than either Gar, Tucker, or Monica.  It’s a crime to cast Peter DeLuise as an Ivy League debater without giving us a chance to actually see him debate.

Roy Scheider gives the best performance in the film, which isn’t really a surprise.  That said, Charlie Nichols was a terrible debate coach, one whose entire philosophy seemed to be based on teaching his debaters to make loud and emotional arguments and hope that the judge doesn’t understand how competitive debating is supposed to work.

Would the Supreme Court really judge a national debate tournament?

As for the debates themselves, it’s hard not to notice that all of the arguments are emotional.  There’s little talk of evidence or research or anything else.  Instead, the characters talk about how abortion has personally effected them.  (The Harvard team is portrayed as being snooty villains when they dare to bring up an actual clinical study about abortion.)  Admittedly, I did not do college debate but I was involve with Speech and Debate in High School and, when it came to debate, I always tried to get by with the same cutesy techniques that everyone uses in this film.  If the judge was a man, I definitely showed a little leg.  If someone asked me about a study that disproved my argument, I’d respond by citing a fictional study that disproved their study.  I was the Queen of Dramatic Personal Anecdote!  And I rarely made it out of the preliminary rounds because most judges — the good ones, at least — were able to tell that I hadn’t bothered to do my homework and that I was just trying to skate by on charm and wit.  My coach often told me that if I would actually do the work, I’d probably make it to the semis and beyond but …. eh, doing the work was just too much …. well, work.  So, you can imagine my surprise when Tucker and Monica used the same techniques that I used and were declared to be the best debaters in the country!

Seriously, I was robbed!

Listen to Me is a very 80s film, right down to the debate montages and the explanations about why Roe v Wade would never actually be overturned.  It tries to do for college debate what numerous other college-set films did for football an binge-drinking.  Unfortunately, the film’s intentions are defeated by a didactic script and a miscast lead.  It feels considerably longer than 100 minutes, which might help you with your insomnia.

Previous Insomnia Files:

  1. Story of Mankind
  2. Stag
  3. Love Is A Gun
  4. Nina Takes A Lover
  5. Black Ice
  6. Frogs For Snakes
  7. Fair Game
  8. From The Hip
  9. Born Killers
  10. Eye For An Eye
  11. Summer Catch
  12. Beyond the Law
  13. Spring Broke
  14. Promise
  15. George Wallace
  16. Kill The Messenger
  17. The Suburbans
  18. Only The Strong
  19. Great Expectations
  20. Casual Sex?
  21. Truth
  22. Insomina
  23. Death Do Us Part
  24. A Star is Born
  25. The Winning Season
  26. Rabbit Run
  27. Remember My Name
  28. The Arrangement
  29. Day of the Animals
  30. Still of The Night
  31. Arsenal
  32. Smooth Talk
  33. The Comedian
  34. The Minus Man
  35. Donnie Brasco
  36. Punchline
  37. Evita
  38. Six: The Mark Unleashed
  39. Disclosure
  40. The Spanish Prisoner
  41. Elektra
  42. Revenge
  43. Legend
  44. Cat Run
  45. The Pyramid
  46. Enter the Ninja
  47. Downhill
  48. Malice
  49. Mystery Date
  50. Zola
  51. Ira & Abby
  52. The Next Karate Kid
  53. A Nightmare on Drug Street
  54. Jud
  55. FTA
  56. Exterminators of the Year 3000
  57. Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster
  58. The Haunting of Helen Walker
  59. True Spirit
  60. Project Kill
  61. Replica
  62. Rollergator
  63. Hillbillys In A Haunted House
  64. Once Upon A Midnight Scary
  65. Girl Lost
  66. Ghosts Can’t Do It
  67. Heist
  68. Mind, Body & Soul
  69. Candy
  70. Shortcut to Happiness
  71. Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders
  72. Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders II
  73. Don’t Kill It

 

Cinemax Friday: Die Watching (1993, directed by Charles Davis)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Mentally scarred by the night that his mother murdered his father, Michael Terrence (Christopher Atkins) is a video editor who makes his living filming naked models and who deals with his mental issues by then asphyxiating those same models.  Michael’s main kink is that he ties his victims up in front of a monitor and then films them as they die, basically forcing them to witness their own murders.  In other words, Michael is one sick puppy who has perhaps seen Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom a few too many times.

Despite the fact that dead actresses and models are turning up all over Los Angeles, Detectives Lewis (Tim Thomerson) and Barry (Carlos Palomino) have no idea that Michael is responsible.  In fact, no one suspects Michael.  His neighbor, an aspiring artist named Nola (Vali Ashton), even hires Michael to help her promote her artwork.  Despite the fact that Nola already has a boyfriend, she and Michael fall in love.  Falling in love causes Michael to lose his urge to kill but it may already be too late as a video of one of his murders has fallen into the wrong hands.

For some reason, Christopher Atkins was a direct-to-video and Cinemax mainstay in the 90s.  I’ve never understood why because he was a terrible actor with absolutely no screen presence.  Unlike C. Thomas Howell, who was bland in mainstream films but usually surprisingly good when he did direct-to-video work, Atkins was always forgettable regardless of whether he was appearing in a major studio production or something like Die Watching.  For a film like this to work, the film has to convince you that there’s at least a chance the murderer could have been a decent human being if not for his tragic past.  Atkins just comes across like a natural born weirdo.  Atkins gives a sweaty and nervous performance but he makes Michael so obviously disturbed that it’s impossible to buy that Nola would dump her boyfriend for him.  Judd Nelson or, again, C. Thomas Howell probably could have pulled off the role.  Christopher Atkins just feels wrong.

Of course, the target audience for this film doesn’t care about the acting or the plot or anything else.  They care about the women and those who watch a film like this solely for the nudity won’t be disappointed.  Vali Ashton is actually really likable as Nola, though the film is stolen by Erika Nann, who plays Nola’s sex-obsessed roommate and who gets the best lines.  (Of course, there’s a difference between getting the best lines in Die Watching and getting the best lines in something like Hamlet.)  It’s also good to see Tim Thomerson in practically anything, even when it’s something as dumb as Die Watching.  

Die Watching is pretty dire but it does predict the rise of a very specific type of internet culture.  When Michael accidentally sends one of his murder tapes to a producer instead of one of his sex tapes, the producer is not disturbed but instead, he’s intrigued by the commercial possibilities.  Even Michael knows that’s messed up!  If Die Watching were made today, of course, that producer would probably own an adult website and he would be talking about selling the murder videos on the dark web.  It just goes to show that the more things chance, the more they remain the same.

 

Death From Above: Beaks: The Movie (1987, directed by Rene Cardona, Jr.)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The birds are pissed off.  A hang glider gets pecked to death while flying through the sky.   A chicken farmer is devoured. A professional hunter loses an eye to a bird and then has to use the remaining one to watch as the birds savagely attack his granddaughter’s birthday party.  A family on vacation is forced to run for cover as their attacked by pigeons and doves.  From South America to Spain to Puerto Rico, the birds are organizing and they are attacking.  Can journalist Vanessa (Michelle Johnson) and her cameraman Peter (Christopher Atkins) figure out why the birds are attacking or are they destined to become the latest victims of the avian terror?

This may sound like the Hitchcock film but Beaks was directed by Mexico’s Rene Cardona, Jr. and that makes all the difference.  Following in the footsteps of his father, Cardona was the king of Mexican B-movies.  There was no idea strange enough or plot stupid enough that Rene Cardona, Jr. couldn’t take it and turn it into a really bad movie.  Even by his standards, Beaks is bad as pigeons and doves are tossed at screaming actors.  Why are the birds attacking?  Caronda shows us a polluted lake as if to say, “Any questions?”  In the end, the birds attack until they suddenly don’t anymore but don’t get too cocky because there are other animals out there that are looking mighty disgruntled.

For some reason, in the late 80s and early 90s, Christopher Atkins had a very busy career in bad movies.  Seeing the Atkins name in the cast was usually a good sign that it was time to change the channel.  In Beaks, he gets the best line when he says, “These birds know what they’re doing!”  The film’s second best line goes to another actor, Gabriele Tinti, who says, “Fucking bird, flapping everywhere.”

If Hitchcock made The Birds with less skill but more gore and gratuitous nudity, the end result would still be better than Beaks.