Holidays on the Lens: The Spirit of Christmas (dir by David Jackson)

Posted on December 19, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 2015’s The Spirit of Christmas, Kate (Jen Lilley) is a broker who is convinced that she doesn’t have time for the good things in life. She doesn’t have time for a boyfriend. She doesn’t have time for Christmas. Instead, she’s going to spend the holidays trying to sell a historic inn. What she doesn’t know is that the inn is reported to be haunted and that the ghost, a former bootlegger named Daniel (Thomas Beaudoin), is seriously hot! Kate helps Daniel solve his murder and, in the process, falls in love.

This film is a nice mix of holiday spirit and …. well, real spirits!

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 3.17 “The Afternoon Plane”

Posted on February 10, 2025 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 Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!

This week, Tubbs has an adventure!

Episode 3.17 “The Afternoon Plane”

(Dir by David Jackson, originally aired on February 20th, 1987)

While attending a New Age-y wedding with his latest girlfriend Alicia (Maria McDonald), Tubbs wins a vacation to a tropical island!

It’s about time something …. well, I was going to say something good but honestly, I guess we should just be happy that anything is happening to Tubbs at all. When this show started, Tubbs was the audience surrogate. He was the one who came down to Miami and learned about the drug scene. We saw Miami through his eyes. But, by the time the third season rolled around, it was pretty clear that Miami Vice hard largely become the Crockett show. Don Johnson was the star and Philip Michael Thomas often seemed like a supporting character. Tubbs may have been cooler than Switek but, often times, both of them took a backseat to Crockett. This week, however, Tubbs finally get his own episode. Crockett shows up for a few minutes at the start of the episode and that’s it. This is the Tubbs show!

Of course, it turns out that the vacation does not go the way that Tubbs was expecting. He runs into a drug dealer named Leon Wolf (Vincent D’Onofrio, making his television acting debut), someone who Tubbs previously put in jail. Tubbs soon discovers that his old enemies, the Calderone family, are on the Island and they’re looking forward to getting their revenge on Tubbs. Tubbs, of course, has no legal jurisdiction on the island and the local police certainly aren’t going to help him out. In fact, many people on the island resent Tubbs because they blame America’s war on drugs for their poverty. Drug smuggling is big business and it provides an income to a lot of people who would starve otherwise.

Orlando Calderone (John Leguizamo) is coming on the next afternoon plane and no one is willing to defy Orlando by helping Tubbs get off the island. The episode becomes a Caribbean High Noon, with the clock ticking down and no one willing to stand up and help the endangered law man. There are some on the island who want to fight back and drive away the Calderones. But no one is willing to take the chance.

It would have been a lot more compelling if Orlando had been played by someone other than John Leguizamo, who is just as cartoonishly unconvincing here as he was the first time that he appeared on the show. I know that Miami Vice was early in Leguizamo’s career but his performance here is so unconvincing that it really does make the Calderones just seem like a bunch of low-level punks instead of a feared criminal syndicate. The final gun battle between Tubbs and the Calderones is handled well-enough but it’s never quite as compelling as it would be if Orlando Calderone was actually an intimidating villain. In typical Miami Vice fashion, Alicia is seriously wounded in the battle. It pays not to get involved with either Tubbs or Crockett.

This episode was a slight change of pace. Apparently, everyone but Philip Michael Thomas got to take some time off during filming and, as a result, Thomas gets to show his own unique style as Rico Tubbs. Still, this episode was never as compelling as it needed to be. Hopefully, we are now done with the Calderones.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 3.4 “Walk-Alone”

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, it’s a rare Tubbs episode!

Episode 3.4 “Walk-Alone”

(Dir by David Jackson, originally aired October 17th, 1986)

As Switek puts it, Tubbs has been walking on air for two weeks. He’s got a new girlfriend, a waitress at a hot Miami restaurant. Unfortunately, a shoot-out at that restaurant leaves her dead. Though Crockett thinks that Tubbs is still too close to the case to be trusted to investigate, Tubbs insists on being involved and Castillo agrees. (Castillo, at times, just seem to automatically do the opposite of whatever Crockett suggests.)

The shoot-out happened as a result of a drug deal that went down in the state prison. Using the name Cubero, Tubbs goes undercover as a recently transferred prisoner. He enters the prison as his usual cool and collected self. He’s promptly beaten up by the Aryan Nations. Fortunately, since this is a television show and not The Shawshank Redemption, beating him up is the only thing the Aryans do to Tubbs.

Tubbs is being targeted by all the prisoners, from the Aryans to the Muslims. But when words get out that he’s a big-time drug dealer, Commander Fox (Keven Conway) makes a deal with him. If Tubbs keeps Fox and his men supplied with drugs, Tubbs (or Cubero) will be kept safe.

Unfortunately, when Switek, Zito, and Trudy go the prison to see Tubbs, a prisoner recognizes them. Tubbs’s cover is blown. Crockett wants to go into the prison to save him but Castillo points out that everyone in the prison knows that Crockett is a cop. (Tubbs has been Crockett’s partner for three years now so why did Castillo assume no one in the prison would be able to make him?) Castillo goes into the prison to save Tubbs from both the guards and the prisoners. The episode ends with Castillo gunning down a few guards and saving Tubbs’s life. Way to go, Castillo! The main lesson here seems to be that Castillo would rather risk of his own life than depend on Crockett for anything.

This was …. well, this episode was okay. The plot was nothing special. For all the talk about how Florida’s state prison was the most dangerous place in the world, it actually came across as being a rather mild place. Tubbs got beaten up and he got threatened but he didn’t get shanked and or any of the other things that one tends to associate with prison. The prison guards were not the most intimidating or interesting villains to appear on Miami Vice, even though one of them is played by a young Laurence Fishburne.

(This episode all features a youngish Ron Perlman, playing a good guy who I kept expecting to turn out to be a bad guy because he was being played by Ron Perlman.)

In the end, this episode was a bit forgettable, though it did allow the often-underused Philip Michael Thomas a chance to have the spotlight for once. He does a good job, even if he doesn’t get to bust out his fake Caribbean accent.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 3.2 “Stone’s War”

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, another friend of Sonny’s gets killed.

Episode 3.2 “Stone’s War”

(Dir by David Jackson, originally aired on October 3rd, 1986)

Sonny Crockett’s old friend, journalist Ira Stone (Bob Balaban), returns to Miami and he’s in trouble once again.

The last time we saw Stone, he appeared to be dying as the result of being severely wounded by Col. William Maynard (G. Gordon Liddy). I guess Stone survived because this episode opens with him and a cameraman in Nicaragua, filming anti-Communist rebels opening fire on a village. They even gun down a priest! However, it turns out that the rebels have got some help from some men who appear to be American. Stone’s cameraman is shot. Apparently leaving him to die, Stone grabs the tape of the attack and then flees to Miami.

In Miami, Stone tracks down Sonny, who is reluctant to get involved with Stone. However, when it becomes obvious that some agents of the government are not only following Stone but also trying to assassinate him, Crockett changes his mind. It turns out that the men in Nicaragua do indeed work for Col. Maynard. Maynard makes a return appearance, showing off a necklace of ears that have been chopped off of communists in an attempt to get businessmen to invest in his army. This episode drops some very obvious hints that Maynard is now working for the U.S. government.

In their efforts to help Stone get his tape to the public, Crockett and Tubbs get a few people killed. Local reporter Alica Mena (Lonette McKee) is murdered after Maynard’s men break into her office to search for the tape. In the end, Stone himself is once again wounded by Maynard’s man and this time, he actually dies on-camera. As for Maynard, he once again boards a private plane and escapes. The episode ends on a properly cynical note, with Crockett listening to reports blaming the death of the priest on the Nicaraguan government.

Actually, this whole episode feels a bit cynical. On the one hand, this episode criticizes the American government for being so anti-communist that it tries to overthrow the governments of other counties. On the other hand, a good deal of the episode’s running time is devoted to showing off Sonny’s new car, a 1986 Ferrari Testarossa. There’s even an extended chase scene that seems to exist largely so the show can work in as many close-ups of Sonny changing gears as possible. It’s a cool car but just try to get one in Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Cuba. (Or, I should say, try to get one without being related to someone who is in power.)

Ira Stone was a bit more compelling in his previous appearance on the show. In this episode, Balaban’s performance is almost too low-key. It lacks the manic instability of his first appearance, in which Stone was portrayed as being almost as mad as Maynard. This time out, he’s just another independent journalist who is convinced the government is out to get him. Fortunately, G. Gordon Liddy returns to Maynard and takes so much obvious joy in the role that he’s fun to watch. As I mentioned when Liddy last appeared on this episode, my father had a “G. Gordon Liddy for President” bumper sticker. As far as Watergate felons are concerned, Liddy was certainly less annoyingly self-righteous and more honest about his amorality than John Dean has turned out to be.

As a whole, this wasn’t a bad episode. Like last week’s episode, it was serviceable but it still seemed to be lacking the spark that distinguished the show’s first two seasons. For the second week in a row, Miami Vice puts more emphasis on its guest stars than the main cast and, perhaps as a result, the main cast seems to largely be going through the motions. (Zito and Gina don’t even appear in this episode. Castillo is barely present, which is interesting considering that the character is supposed to have connections in U.S. intelligence that would have perhaps been a bit helpful this time around.) Still, it was good to see both Stone and Maynard return to the show and remind the viewers that the vice in Miami is often the result of conflicts happening elsewhere.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 2.18 “French Twist”

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Crockett learns an important lesson about trusting the French.

Episode 2.18 “French Twist”

(Dir by David Jackson, originally aired on February 21st, 1986)

An infamous French drug dealer and terrorist named Bandi (Xavier Coronel) has escaped from a Canadian prison and surfaced in Miami, where he murders an innocent hospital worker and takes off with a van full of morphine. While Tubbs tries to protect the only witness, a rebellious teenage photographer named Cindy (Shari Headley), Crockett works closely with Danielle Hier (Lisa Eichorn), a French INTERPOL agent who has been sent to Miami by her boss, Zolan (played, in an odd cameo, by folk singer Leonard Cohen).

In fact, Crockett may be working a bit too closely with Danielle because he’s the only person who doesn’t seem to notice that there’s something suspicious about her. Tubbs feels that there’s something that Danielle is not telling the Vice Squad and he’s right. While Castillo is under orders to take Bandi alive so he can be sent to face prison in Canada, Danielle has been sent to assassinate Bandi on behalf of French Intelligence.

This is a typically cynical episode of Miami Vice. The latter half of the first season and the majority of the second season have been full of episodes in which competing government agencies screw up Tubbs and Crockett’s efforts to clean up Miami. This episode is unique in that the competing government agency is French but otherwise, the theme remains the same. The War on Drugs can never be won because too many people are benefitting from it. When watched today, it’s helpful to have some knowledge of what was going on in France from the 60s to the 80s. Many French terrorist organizations — on both the left and the right — funded their activities through the heroin trade and it’s easy to see Bandi as a stand-in for the infamous ex-OAS drug lords of the era. As for Danielle, it’s mentioned that one of her previous missions involved blowing up a Greenpeace boat, which is something that French Intelligence actually did around the same time that this episode aired.

This is yet another episode the ends with a fateful gunshot in the night. In this case, it’s Crockett killing his lover to save his partner. It’s an ending that doesn’t quite have the emotional resonance to it that it’s had when used during previous episodes, largely because there’s very little romantic or sexual chemistry between Don Johnson and Lisa Eichorn. Eichorn, who was so good in Cutter’s Way, struggles a bit with her French accent and the final twist involving her character feels a bit too obvious. It’s hard to believe that Sonny — world-weary Sonny who lives on a boat and whose best friend is a crocodile and who has experienced plenty of CIA duplicity in both Vietnam and Miami — wouldn’t have been able to see right through her.

This was a forgettable episode, one that went through the motions without making much of an impression. It happens …. even in Miami.

Lifetime Christmas Movie Review: Christmas Perfection (dir by David Jackson)

Posted on December 25, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For me, Christmas Perfection was about as perfect as a Christmas film can get.

It’s all about Darcy (Caitlin Thompson), who grew up dreaming of the type of perfect Christmas that she never actually got to experience. Her parents are divorced and can hardly handle being in the same room together. Her best friend has the type of dark sense of humor that doesn’t always go along with Yuletide joy. Her best friend since childhood, Brandon (James Henri-Thomas), is obviously in love with her but Darcy continually insists that he’s just a friend. She dreams of a perfect boyfriend, one who makes every Christmas special.

Every December, Darcy sets up her Christmas village. It’s a recreation of the perfect Irish village that she always used to hear about when she was younger and it’s full of figures that are based on the people from Darcy’s life. Darcy has created the perfect world in which she wishes she could live.

And then one day, through a little Christmas magic, Darcy wakes up in her perfect village!

It’s a village where every day is Christmas. Every day, Darcy wakes up and puts on a perfect Christmas sweater. Her parents, who love each other and never fight in this perfect fantasy world, start every day with a perfectly prepared breakfast. In her perfect Christmas village, everyone gathers in the pub and dances and Darcy ends up each day by making a snowman with her perfect boyfriend, Tom (Robbie Silverman).

Everything’s perfect, right?

But then, something unexpected happens. Suddenly, Brandon shows up! It turns out that, through the same magic that transported Darcy, Brandon is now a part of the Christmas village. Brandon takes one look around and tells Darcy that this is insane. She’s created a world that’s so perfect that it’s also a prison. By creating a rigidly perfect Christmas, Darcy has lost sight of what the holiday is all about!

Darcy dismisses Brandon’s concerns. But, as day after day passes, she starts to realize that a world without spontaneity isn’t a world worth living in. Tom may be the idealized guy but that also means that, at the end of every day, he’s going to make the exact snowman in the exact same way and he’s not going to listen to Darcy’s suggestions for how they could make the snowman different. I mean, everyone knows what a snowman is supposed to look like, right?

Now, I know this might sound like it’s just a Christmas-themed version of Groundhog Day and certainly, that’s a legitimate comparison. That said, I still liked the film. It even brought tears to my mismatched, multi-colored eyes. I looked at Darcy and I watched her obsessive attempts to make the holidays perfect and, as a child of divorce, I knew exactly what she was going through. Year after year, you wonder why you couldn’t keep your parents together and you fool yourself into thinking that, if you can just get them together for one perfect day, you can magically erase all of the pain and sadness of the year before. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that and sometimes, like Darcy, we spend so much time pursuing an idealized dream that we forget that there’s still joy and happiness to be found in the messiness of reality as well. It may not always be easy to find but it’s there. You just have to be willing to look for it.

The film may be called Christmas Perfection but it’s message is that Christmas and families and friends don’t have to be perfect to be special. And that’s a good message for us all.

Cleaning Out The DVR: Off The Rails (dir by David Jackson)

Posted on November 11, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Hi there! So, as you may know because I’ve been talking about it on this site all year, I have got way too much stuff on my DVR. Seriously, I currently have 205 things recorded! I’ve decided that, on January 15th, I am going to erase everything on the DVR, regardless of whether I’ve watched it or not. So, that means that I’ve now have only two months to clean out the DVR! Will I make it? Keep checking this site to find out! I recorded Off The Rails off of the Lifetime Movie Network on March 26th!)

Oh, poor Nicole (Hannah Barefoot)!

When we first meet her, Nicole is recovering from amnesia. She knows that she was injured in a catastrophic train derailment. She knows that she’s married to Mark (Thomas Beaudoin), who seems like the perfect husband. She knows that her therapist is Dr. Teres (Andrea Cirie). She knows that she’s oddly obsessed with maps and that she teaches at the local college. However, she is still not totally sure what her life was like before the accident. And sometimes, she wonders if she can actually trust Mark. For instance, she suspects that, while she was in her coma, Mark added onto the deck in the back yard. Mark swears that it was her idea but why would she want to do that?

Nicole is also convinced that she has never had a Facebook account. She swears that she’s never been on Twitter. She doesn’t even know what Instagram is! “You call me a Luddite!” she says to one of her friends, “I do remember that!” But, if that’s true, why do all of her friends swear that they’ve talked to her on Facebook? And why are all sorts of sleazy men approaching her, all claiming that they met her online?

That’s not all Nicole has to worry about. There’s also the weird visions that she’s having, many of them involving being watched by a menacing-looking raven. And then there’s the French Canadian photographer (Andreas Damm). Nicole is not sure who he is but she sure did take a lot of happy pictures with him. Could it be that she wasn’t as happy in her marriage as both Mark and her therapist insist?

There were some parts of Off The Rails that I really liked. The story was, at times, genuinely intriguing and I always appreciate it whenever Lifetime films mix a little surrealism in with the melodrama. The first part of the film does a very good of creating a properly ominous atmosphere and Hannah Barefoot does a good job portraying Nicole’s confusion and paranoia. Obviously, it demanded a considerable suspension of disbelief to buy into the idea that Nicole could possibly be so ignorant of social media in 2017 but then again, that’s Lifetime for you. Social media is always the source of all evil in the world of Lifetime.

Unfortunately, there’s a twist at the end of Off The Rails that simply does not work and it actually cheapens the film a bit. I understand that it’s a Lifetime film and that, therefore, things can never end on too dark of a note but, in this case, the movie’s story demanded and deserved an ending that was just a bit more bittersweet.

Still, I’d recommend Off the Rails. Up until that final shot, it’s a nicely done Lifetime mystery. You’ll probably figure out the solution early but it’s still entertainingly melodramatic and just weird enough to be worthwhile.

2016 in Review: The Best of Lifetime

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, I continue my look back at the year 2016 with the best of Lifetime! Below, you’ll find my nominations for the best Lifetime films and performances of 2016! Winners are starred and listed in bold!

Best Picture
Bad Sister, produced by Robert Ballo, Timothy O. Johnson, Rukmani Jones, Ken Sanders
The Cheerleader Murders, produced by Sharon Bordas, Arthur Edmonds III, Hannah Pillemer, Fernando Szew, Jennifer Westin
Girl in the Box, produced by Stephen Kemp, Charles Tremayne, Thomas Vencelides
Inspired to Kill, produced by Johnson Chan, Michael Fiefer, Douglas Howell, Stephanie Rennie, Vincet Reppert, Nathan Schwab, Tammana Shah, Shawn Tira
Manson’s Lost Girls, produced by Nancy Bennett, Kyle A. Clark, Lawrence Ducceschi, Joan Harrison, Jonathan Koch, Stephen Kronish, Steven Michaels, Lina Wong
Mommy’s Little Girl, produced by Tom Berry, Steve Boisvert, Neil Bregman, Cinthia Burke, Christine Conradt, Curtis Crawford, Pierre David, Donald M. Osborne, Andrew E. Pecs
*A Mother’s Escape, produced by Sharon Bordas, Lori Bell Leahy, Michael Leahy, Kristofer McNeeley, Fernando Szew
My Sweet Audrina, produced by Dan Angel, David Calvert-Jones, Harvey Kahn, Kane Lee, Tom Mazza, Mike Rohl, Jane Startz
The Night Stalker, produced by Matthew R. Brady, Patrick G. Ingram, Michel Rangel, Alisa Tager
The Wrong Car, produced by Mark Donadio, Miriam Marcus, Molly Martin, Michael O’Neil

Best Director
Doug Campbell for Bad Sister
Megan Griffiths for The Night Stalker
*Blair Hayes for A Mother’s Escape
David Jackson for The Cheerleader Murders
Leslie Libman for Manson’s Lost Girls
Mike Rohl for My Sweet Audrina

Best Actress
*Tara Buck in A Mother’s Escape
India Eisley in My Sweet Audrina
MacKenzie Mauzy in Manson’s Lost Girls
Alyshia Ochse in Bad Sister
Karissa Lee Staples in Inspired To Kill
Addison Timlin in Girl in the Box

Best Actor
Zane Holtz in Girl in the Box
Lou Diamond Phillips in The Night Stalker
*Eric Roberts in Stalked By My Doctor: The Return
Antonio Sabato, Jr in Inspired To Kill
Jason-Shane Scott in The Wrong Roommate
Jeff Ward in Manson’s Lost Girls

Best Supporting Actress
*Toni Atkins in My Sweet Audrina
Eden Brolin in Manson’s Lost Girls
Zoe De Grande Maison in Pregnant at 17
Beth Grant in A Mother’s Escape
Ryan Newman in Bad Sister
Zelda Williams in Girl in the Box

Best Supporting Actor
Blake Berris in Wrong Swipe
Rogan Christopher in Pregnant at 17
*Rhett Kidd in The Wrong Car
Christian Madsen in Manson’s Lost Girls
William McNamara in The Wrong Roommate
James Tupper in My Sweet Audrina

Best Screenplay
Bad Sister, Barbara Kymlicka
*The Cheerleader Murders, Matt Young
Girl in the Box, Stephen Kemp
Mommy’s Little Girl, Christine Conradt
A Mother’s Escape, Mike Bencivenga, Blair Hayes, Kristofer McNeeley
My Sweet Audrina, Scarlett Lacey

Best Cinematography
The Cheerleader Murders, Denis Maloney
Mommy’s Little Girl, Bill St. John
*A Mother’s Escape, Samuel Calvin
My Sweet Audrina, James Liston
The Night Stalker, Quyen Tran
The Wrong Car, Terrence Hayes

Best Costuming
Girl in the Box, Barb Cardoso, Tania Pedro
Manson’s Lost Girls, Dorothy Amos
*My Sweet Audrina, Farnaz Khaki-Sadigh
The Night Stalker, Rebecca Luke
The Red Dress, Sophie Pace
Toni Braxton: Unbreak My Heart, Mary McLeod

Best Editing
The Cheerleader Murders, Eric Potter
Girl in the Box, Julian Hart
Manson’s Lost Girls, Josh Hegard
*A Mother’s Escape, Travis Graalman
My Sweet Audrina, Charles Robichaud
The Night Stalker, Celia Beasley

Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Girl in the Box, Claudia Breckenridge, Jen Fisher, Oriana Rossi, Alex Rotundo, Collette Tolen
Killing Mommy, Cinthia Burke, Christie Capustinsky, Kevin Crawley, Kirsten Fairfield, Margaret Harding-Crawley, Corey J. Stone
*Manson’s Lost Girls, Jenni Brown Greenberg, Randi Mavestrand, Kelly Muldoon, Natalie Thimm
A Mother’s Escape, Jenny Hausam, Toni Mario
My Sweet Audrina, Alannah Bilodeau
Toni Braxton: Unbreak My Heart, Tara Hadden-Watts, Alexandra Holmes

Best Original Score
911 Nightmare, David Findlay
*The Cheerleader Murders, Cladue Foisy
Inspired To Kill, Brandon Jarrett
A Mother’s Escape, Todd Haberman
My Sweet Audrina, Graeme Coleman
The Wrong Car, Ed Grenga

Best Production Design
Bad Sister, Lia Burton, Danielle Lee
Girl in the Box, Andrew Berry, Jere Sallee
*Manson’s Lost Girls, Cynthia E. Hill, Linda Spheeris
A Mother’s Escape, Zackary Steven Graham
My Sweet Audrina, Tink, Janessa Hitsman
Toni Braxton: Unbreak My Heart, James Robbins, Courtney Stockstad, Amanda Christmas

Best Sound
*Center Stage: On Pointe
The Cheerleader Murders
Honeymoon from Hell
I Have Your Children
Inspired to Kill
Toni Braxton: Unreak My Heart

Best Visual Effects
Final Destiny
*Flashback
House of Darkness
The Inherited
Little Girl’s Secret
The Watcher

Congratulations to all the nominees and thank you for keeping us entertained in 2016!

Want to see my picks for the best of Lifetime in 2015? Click here!

And if you want to see my picks from 2014, click here!

Tomorrow, I’ll continue my look back at 2016 with the 16 worst films of the year!

Previous Entries In The Best of 2016:

Cleaning Out The DVR, Again #16: The Cheerleader Murders (dir by David Jackson)

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Lisa is currently in the process of trying to clean out her DVR by watching and reviewing all 40 of the movies that she recorded from the start of March to the end of June. She’s trying to get it all done by July 10th! Will she make it!? Keep visiting the site to find out!)

The 16th film on my DVR was The Cheerleader Murders and what can I say other than, “Yay!” No, no — it’s not that I dislike cheerleaders. While I did frequently turn down the chance to become a cheerleader while I was in high school, that was solely because my sister, our own Dazzling Erin, was already a cheerleader and I was going through one of my “I want to be known for being myself” phases. No, I was excited about rewatching The Cheerleader Murders because I remembered that this was one of the best films to ever premiere on Lifetime!

As I started to watch The Cheerleader Murders, I found myself wondering whether it would stand up to a second viewing.

Well, it more than stood up. If anything, The Cheerleader Murders is even better the second time around!

The Cheerleader Murders plays out like an odd combination of YA fiction and disturbing horror. The film opens with a few scenes of disaster and what’s interesting is that, while all of the scenes are tragic, they’re also darkly humorous. We see a car full of cheerleaders and jocks crash, killing everyone inside. We see the prom king and queen falling to their death while trying to get the perfect selfie. As these disasters play out, we hear our narrator, Ellie (Samantha Boscarino), explaining that her hometown is cursed. It’s all so cheerfully morbid that, from the minute it began, I was in love with this film.

What’s that? Oh, you don’t believe that Ellie and her town are cursed? Well, just consider this. When Ellie was thirteen, her older sister broke up with her boyfriend. So the boyfriend broke into the house, killed her sister, and then shot Ellie’s father as Ellie watched!

THAT’S A CURSE RIGHT THERE!

Jump forward three years later. Ellie is now a 16 year-old cheerleader. She’s popular and she’s also a good student. Though you have to wonder about the standards of her high school because she goes to one of those Lifetime high schools where no one ever has to actually go to class or anything like that. Instead, everyone hangs out at the lockers and gossips. Even better, if you do go to class, you can apparently just walk out whenever you want. This happens several times during this film and we never actually hear a teacher say anything like, “Wait! You can’t just stand up and walk out of class just because your friend is motioning to you from the hallway!”

Ellie has everything but she’s still convinced that she’s cursed. If she’s not cursed then how do you explain the mysterious disappearance of two her fellow cheerleaders? Admittedly, one of the cheerleaders is found rather quickly. Or, I should say, her bloody, severed foot is found rather quickly. Someone spots it off the side of the road. (The camera zooms in on the big toe so that we can see the heart that she painted on her the nail. That’s the type of cheerfully over-the-top film that The Cheerleader Murders is.) The other cheerleader eventually shows up in orange grove, being chased by a masked man with a huge knife.

Like any good YA heroine, Ellie is determined to solve the mystery. Fortunately, she has help. Her dead father shows up occasionally and offers up cryptic advice. Ellie also has frequent dreams, some of which are rather dark and disturbing by Lifetime standards.

The more that Ellie digs into the mystery, the more obvious it becomes that she knows absolutely no one who isn’t sleazy or insane. Who killed the cheerleaders? Was it the school weirdo or the two jealous nerds who are always gossiping about the dead? Maybe it was the coach, who was apparently having an affair with both a cheerleader and Ellie’s favorite teacher. Or perhaps that teacher got jealous and decided to seek revenge! And, come to think of it, Ellie’s boyfriend seems like he might have some issues too. And, of course, there’s Ellie. Who is to say that the curse hasn’t driven her insane? It’s hard not to notice that, whenever the killer strikes, Ellie is usually riding her bicycle right past the crime scene.

One of the more interesting things about the film is that no one else at the high school seems to be that upset over the dead cheerleaders. The school year goes on. The remaining cheerleaders continue to cheer at all the football games and, with the exception of Ellie, nobody even seems to shed a single tear over all the teenagers dying in town. Along with the ghosts and the nightmares and the constant shots of Ellie intensely riding her bicycle from crime scene to crime scene, all of this conspires to give The Cheerleader Murders an oddly surreal feel.

The Cheerleader Murders is one of my favorite Lifetime film because it literally has no boundaries. There is no moment too over-the-top that this film cannot find an excuse to include it. The acting is good, the horror (and there is horror) is effective, and the mystery is cheerfully ludicrous. Make sure you catch The Cheerleader Murders the next time it’s on Lifetime because seriously, this film is a classic!

(By the way, I made Erin watch The Cheerleader Murders with me when it originally aired. She said it was actually a pretty accurate portrayal of the life of a cheerleader, except for the murders.)

Hallmark Review: The Wishing Well (2009, dir. David Jackson)

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Valerie Troutman

It’s not often that I review two movies from two relatively different sources that are both by the same director, but that’s the case this time. David Jackson is also the director who brought the Halloweentown series to an end with Return To Halloweentown. This time he took on something much easier than ripping off Harry Potter with a miscast lead. It’s about a wishing well! Sort of.

The movie begins before the title card appears, and we meet Abby Jansen played by Jadin Gould. She will be your smiling one-dimensional little girl for the movie. I mean your Hallmark Bailee Madison stand-in for the movie. Then we cut to stock footage of New York City before we meet our leading lady named Cynthia Tamerline played by Jordan Ladd.

She works for Celeb magazine where not only is Charles Shaughnessy her boss, but her secretary is Lurch with a nose ring.

Obviously this movie needs to find an excuse to get Cynthia out with the country folk now. That’s why Shaughnessy calls her in and tells her either publish, perish, or become a nanny for my kids. He suggests that she write a story for one of his other magazines called Great Housekeeping. It’s for people who think Good Housekeeping just isn’t good enough. I thought she chose to write about a woman named Angela and her charity to save the vampire flies, but somehow that will cause her to end up in Slow Creek, Illinois to find a celebrity who may have visited their wishing well. But before that, she looks up Angela’s push to save the vampire fly on CelebrityCauses.us. No affiliation with CelebrityCauses.org. This one has Darcy from A Gift Of Miracles writing for it too.

This time she ripped off numerous encyclopedia entries about flies, but it is a little odd that she copied from the United Church Of God’s magazine Vertical Thought.

Anyways, she’s off to Slow Creek, Illinois, which is the “Home of the Wishing Well.” Not just any wishing well, but the Wishing Well. That is till the 2011 Canadian film Wishing Well came out to give them some stiff competition for that title.

She arrives at the hotel where she is going to stay and finds that Ernest Borgnine runs the place. Cynthia is in town for a story that she can take back to Celeb magazine…I thought. Regardless, this is where I am obligated to say that these townsfolk are probably hiding a terrible secret about a Muslim American solider who died overseas and whose father was murdered in the town. I mean the movie has Borgnine, it’s a small town, and Cynthia’s last name is Tamerline which is close enough to Cass Timberlane played by Spencer Tracy in the movie of the same name. That meant while watching this movie, I immediately thought of the film Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) which had Tracy and Borgnine in it. Great movie by the way that I simply updated to a modern context. Here’s the trailer.

But onward with this movie now.

Annoying little girl tells us that wishes come true if you believe and make the right wish. Then we find out that not only is the hotel run by someone Retired and Extremely Dangerous, but that the diner is run by ‘Hot Lips’ O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).

Now Cynthia visits the local paper and finds out that it’s run by the little girl’s dad played by Jason London.

So this is what happened to Eric Camden’s associate pastor’s twin brother.

Cynthia starts to look into this wishing well of theirs. Turns out it was once a hot attraction, but then this happened.

Don’t you just hate it when your ex shows up and your wish doesn’t come true, but your ex’s does. Now writer Enid Jones had it out for the well.

But this isn’t enough for her so she goes to dig in the archives. Long story short, Ronald Reagan once visited their well back in the 1960’s.

That and a UFO was seen on a farm in Slow Creek. Interesting! What else is interesting is that they didn’t pull this Reagan and a wishing well thing completely out of their ass. Reagan actually did visit a wishing well in Dublin, Ireland back in the 1980s. Hmmm…I guess that means I need to listen to some Irish music while I finish writing this review. Well, Dropkick Murphys (Flannigan’s Ball) is Irish enough for someone who is a quarter Irish and from the Bay Area.

Oh, and since Reagan was mentioned. I guess I need to break out Genesis’ Land Of Confusion as well.

More annoying girl, and then Cynthia wakes up the next day to find out that she is now in the Twilight Zone. She is just somebody who has been hired as a local reporter. She calls up people back in New York City, but they don’t know who she is. She doesn’t try to tell them anything personal that only she would know, but just keeps calling.

This is when you can say the film goes on autopilot. Cynthia becomes more of a fixture in the town and discovers just how important this paper is to its residents. The paper is in trouble and might be bought out soon. The little girl is still annoying. A guy dies and she writes his obituary. Another guy sets his house on fire trying to beat his record for how many of his collectible lighters he can have going at once. I’m not making that up. During the scene where he explains his little game and current record I said to my dad that he didn’t mention this is the third house he’s gone through playing this game. Then she is waking up in bed to a phone call telling her his place is burning down. Of course! She writes an article that moves people about the fire. Finally, the townsfolk watch a meteor storm.

Then this big city guy’s mustache shows up to buy the paper. It’s okay though because it turns out the guy who died left a huge amount of money to the paper in his will. I guess that’s better than the huge wad of cash in a can from Christmas Land.

Now just in case you thought you were finally getting this Twilight Zone like story, she wakes up on a plane back to New York City to receive praise for the story she wrote for the magazine. Yep, makes as much sense as you think it does. By that, I mean very little. She leaves her job at Celeb magazine and goes back to Slow Creek where smiley and her dad know who she is. Then it just ends abruptly.

That’s it! It’s quite lousy. Even my Dad said this was a stinker and he’s usually easy to please with these movies. No reason to waste your time with this. Go watch Bad Day At Black Rock instead.

Since I happened to catch her this way. I’m really sorry Jordan.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to throw a coin in a wishing well because I’m shipping up to Boston to find my wooden leg and I can use all the luck I can get.