The Loan Arranger”

Posted on May 1, 2024 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986! The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

Oh, hey, Charo’s back.

Episode 4.15 “First Voyage, Last Voyage/April, the Ninny/The Loan Arranger”

(Dir by Roger Duchowny, originally aired on January 17th, 1981)

April’s back!

Played by Charo, April Lopez was one of the few recurring characters on The Love Boat. Whereas other actors appeared frequently but always as different characters, Charo was always April whenever she boarded The Love Boat. The first time she boarded the ship, she did so as a stowaway. The next two times, she boarded as the cruise’s entertainment. This season, however, April boards as someone who has grown tired of show business. When last we saw her, April was in love with a guy named Tex and planning on playing Las Vegas. However, when April boards this time, she quickly informs both Julie and Isaac that she and Tex are no longer a couple and Vegas didn’t work out because she was expected to play her guitar while naked.

(“They could have at least gotten you a cello,” Isaac replies.)

April wants a new career, which she gets when she meets Ty Younger (Larry Linville), who is wealthy but who also has two bratty kids who are always chasing off their nannies. They can’t chase off April, who understands that the best way to calm a bratty child is to grab your guitar and sing to them at night. April gives up show business to become a nanny but I don’t think it’ll last. April is too impulsive to settle down, and Ty’s kids really are the worst. (As well, Charo and Larry Linville didn’t exactly generate a lot of heat in their scenes together.) April may leave the boat with a new family but hopefully, she’ll return alone in the fifth season.

Speaking of the worst, Cindy Simmons (Maureen McCormick) is dying but her parents (Ty Hardin and Kathleen Nolan) haven’t gotten around to telling her yet. Cindy thinks that she’s made a full recovery from her recent illness. Her parents don’t want to upset Cindy but when Cindy meets and falls in love with Paul Harris (Jay Thomas), they realize that they’re going to have to tell Cindy the truth. Poor Cindy! Fortunately, this is The Love Boat and Paul isn’t going to let a little thing like impending death get in the way of romance. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen Maureen McCormick on both The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. For this episode, McCormick does a pretty good job with her role and she and Jay Thomas make for an attractive couple.

“I guess I’m still getting my sea legs,” Cindy says to Paul.

“Your legs look mighty fine to me,” Paul replies.

That’s about as witty as things get on this cruise.

Finally, Joey (Richard Kline) is a mob enforcer who has been sent to collect a debt owed by Tony Patacchio, a gambling addict. However, Joey gets distracted when he meets a woman named Antoinette (Lisa Hartman) who enjoys gambling. Joey falls for Antoinette and, unable to find Tony, he even spends the night in her cabin. Hmmm …. Tony …. Antoinette …. Toni….

Yes, Joey has fallen in love with the person he was supposed to rough up. Fortunately, Joey is willing to fix a poker game so that Toni can win enough of his money to pay off her debt. When Toni realizes that Joey lost his money to her on purpose, she declares that she can’t take his money. “If we were married,” Joey says, “It would be our money.”

Richard Kline is not a particularly believable debt collector. (Tony Soprano would have tossed him in a dumpster.) It’s also strange that his boss would send him to collect a debt without bothering to give him a physical description of the person he was supposed to intimidate. The whole storyline was full of holes but I’m surprised to say that I did end up rooting Kline and Hartman to get together. The two of them had enough chemistry to overcome the fact that their story made very little sense.

Previously, whenever Charo was a guest star, she dominated the entire episode, for better or worse. With this episode, she seems kind of bored with the whole thing, as if Charo was just as fed up with show business as April. Instead, it was Maureen McCormick and Jay Thomas who dominated the episode with Richard Kline and Lisa Hartman also getting their share of good scenes. It makes for a bit of an uneven episode but I defy anyone not to feel something when Paul declares that he wants to spend the rest of Cindy’s life with her. Mixing romantic melodrama and goofy comedy is what made The Love Boat a treasure of American pop culture.

Retro Television Reviews: Fantasy Island 4.10 “High Off The Hog/Reprisal”

Posted on January 23, 2024 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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1986. Almost the entire show is currently streaming is on Youtube, Daily Motion, and a few other sites.

The plane has arrived!

Episode 4.10 “High Off The Hog/Reprisal”

(Dir by Michael Vejar, originally aired on January 10th 1981)

This week’s episode of Fantasy Island is all about being someone that you’re not.

For instance, Hadley Boggs (Stephen Shortridge) wants to thank his family for taking out a mortgage on the family farm, just so he could go to MIT. Hadley has a great future ahead of him but he just wants his dad (Noah Beery, Jr.), mother (Dody Goodman), and sister (Misty Rowe) to have a chance to be live like rich people for the weekend.

Fantasy Island to the rescue!

When the Boggs family arrives, they are shocked to discover that they are going to be living in a mansion. Mr. Roarke has arranged for them to host a cocktail party with ten of the richest men on the island. Unfortunately, he makes the mistake of telling Tattoo to place an invite for the party in the Fantasy Island Chronicle. (Yes, Fantasy Island has a newspaper and, in this episode, it appears to be printed in red ink.) Tattoo decides to spice things up by claiming that the Boggs family owns a uranium mine. Mr. Roarke is not happy.

“But, boss,” Tattoo says, “I am your best assistant!”

“That does not matter,” Roarke snaps before explaining that the Boggs family could be in a lot of trouble if they start buying things with money they don’t have or selling property they don’t own.

And, of course, that’s just what happens. Roger Fox (Shecky Greene) offers the father of the family a few million dollars for the mine. Thinking that it’s all part of the fantasy, Dad agrees. Roger then sells the non-existent mine to someone else because it turns out that Roger is a con artist at heart. Fortunately, with Roarke’s help, the family is able to con Roger into giving them back the non-existent mine and Hadley even falls in love with Roger’s daughter, Kathi (Kathrine Baumann). To be honest, I had a hard time following exactly how Mr. Roarke conned Roger into giving up his fake mine but I’m glad things worked out.

This fantasy was …. eh. The problem is that Hadley’s family was presented as being borderline idiots, what with their amazed reaction to existence of cars, airplanes, servants, and checking accounts. It’s one thing to make them a poor farm family. It’s another to treat them as if they’re the members of a cargo cult that has never had contact with modern human beings before. West Virginia is not the Amazon Rain Forest.

The other fantasy featured Maureen McCormick in one of her six trips to the Island. This time, she plays Trudy Brown (Maureen McCormick), an orphaned gymnast who is treated terribly by her aunt (Janis Paige) and her cousin (Holly Gagnier). Trudy wants to win the Fantasy Island Gymnastics Competition and, in the process, she wants to defeat her cousin. Mr. Roarke gives her the power of telekinesis, which Trudy promptly used to make her cousin fall off the high beam. Roarke gives Trudy a stern talking to.

It’s a struggle but eventually, Trudy realizes that she doesn’t want to win through magic powers. Nor does she want to hurt her cousin or anyone else competing. Roarke takes away her powers and Trudy, having learned a valuable lesson, wins the competition on her own.

This fantasy was actually a lot of fun, just because it gave the viewer a chance to see what Carrie would have been like if Maureen McCormick had played the title role instead of Sissy Spacek. McCormick seems to be having lot of fun loosening screws with her mind. Toss in some gymnastics with the telekinesis and you have classic Island fantasy!

This episode had one boring fantasy and one good fantasy. Luckily, the good overshadowed the boring.

Retro Television Reviews: The Love Boat 2.3 “Rocky/Julie’s Dilemma/Who’s Who?”

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Julie’s parents set sail on The Love Boat!

Episode 2.3 “Rocky/Julie’s Dilemma/Who’s Who?”

(Dir by Allen Baron and Roger Duchowny, originally aired on September 23rd, 1978)

After last week’s hurricane and hostage situation, things calm down a bit for this week’s episode of The Love Boat.

Julie is super-excited because her parents, Bill (Norman Fell) and Martha (Betty Garrett), are going to be on this cruise. Her parents, meanwhile, are only slightly excited about seeing where Julie works and getting to see all of the members of the crew. They would perhaps be more excited if not for the fact that they’re planning on getting a divorce as soon as the cruise is over. They haven’t told Julie, of course. In fact, they tell Captain Stubing before they tell Julie. Why would they tell someone whom they’ve only know for ten minutes before they would tell their own daughter? What awful parents!

When they do eventually tell Julie, she has an emotional breakdown and runs through the corridors of the ship, sobbing. Listen, I’ve been there. When my parents told me that they were getting divorced, I had a difficult time with it as well. Of course, I was twelve years old, whereas Julie is in her late 20s. Still, it’s never easy. Fortunately, Julie realizes that her parents still love each other so she just sets them up with different people on the boat so that they can get jealous and fall back in love. And it works! Julie’s parents get back together….

Which is nice, I guess. I mean, one doesn’t watch The Love Boat because one wants to see a realistic story about the complexities of love and marriage. Still, the show made it look so simple that it got on my nerves. It’s not that simple and any actual child of divorce can tell you that. Again, it’s The Love Boat so perhaps I shouldn’t judge too harshly but I would have had so much more respect for the show if Bill and Martha had told Julie that they were still getting a divorce at the end of the cruise. It would have been a lot more honest than presenting a story where a marriage can be saved by wishful thinking.

While Julie was trying to save her parent’s marriage and prevent several years of awkward holidays, a young girl named Rocky (Melissa Gilbert) was developing her first crush on a boy named Norman (Jimmy Baio). It was actually a sweet little story and both Melissa Gilbert and Jimmy Baio gave likable performances. When Rocky learned that her family would be moving after the cruise, she was upset until she learned that their new home would be in El Paso, which was also where Norman and his family lived. Again, it was simple but sweet. And it went along well with the divorce storyline. While one relationship nearly ended, another began.

Finally, in the silliest story of the week, TV network censor Pat (Dody Goodman) boards the ship and is told that she will be sharing a cabin with Marion Atkins. That’s fine with Pat. Her main concern is making sure that nothing shocking or sordid happens on the cruise. However, it turns out that Marion Atkins (played by James Coco) is actually a guy! Fortunately, Marion turns out to be just as puritanical as Pat. He even brings a bunch of pamphlets on chastity with him for the cruise. Pat and Marion first meet while wandering around the ship and they fall very chastely in love. Since their morals forbid them from following each other to their cabin, they somehow manage to go nearly the entire cruise without realizing that they are living together. When they do realize that they’re cabinmates, they resolve to get married as soon as the boat docks. This whole story was just incredibly dumb and not in a fun way either. Obviously, The Love Boat was taking a swipe at the same network censors who probably insisted that the show be relatively discreet about what was going on behind the closed doors of the ship’s cabins. But Pat and Marion were both so incredibly clueless that it was hard to care about them one way or the other.

This was a bit of uneven episode but, in the end, the boat still looked like a fun place on which to hang out and work. And really, that’s the important thing.

Cool as Ice (1991, directed by David Kellog)

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Jedadiah Leland

Johnny Van Owen (Robert “Vanilla Ice” Van Winkle) is a rapper who travels across the country on his big yellow motorcycle, with his loyal crew traveling behind him. When one of the motorcycles is damaged, Johnny and the crew pull into a repair shop owned by Roscoe (Sidney Lassick) and Mae (Dody Goodman). Even though their repair shop looks like something out of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Mae says that Roscoe can fix anything.

Johnny says it’s all cool because he’s got his eye on Kathy Winslow (Kristin Minter), an honors student who is about to leave for college and who is dating Nick (John Haymes Newton). Johnny is so in love with Kathy that he rides his motorcycle in front of her while she’s riding a horse and she nearly breaks her neck as a result. Johnny doesn’t apologize because Johnny’s cool as ice. Instead, Johnny renames Kathy “Kat” and then takes one look at Nick and says, “Drop that zero and get yourself a hero.” Just to make sure there’s no confusion how Johnny feels about his romantic rival, he also calls Nick “Dick.” Later, Johnny performs a rap just for Kat and Kat agrees to go on a date with him to an abandoned construction site.

Kat’s father (Michael Gross) is in the witness protection program but, when he and Kathy appear on the news, he’s spotted by two gangsters who kidnap Kat’s younger brother. Kat’s father assumes that Johnny must be working with the gangsters so Johnny has to clear his name by defeating the gangsters and performing the rap to end all raps.

Cool As Ice was an attempt to update the old Elvis formula with infamous white rapper Vanilla Ice in the place of the King of Rock and Roll. The end result was a box office flop that hastened the demise of Vanilla Ice’s career. (At the same time the film came out, some journalists dug into Ice’s background and discovered that he wasn’t a gangster from Miami but instead he was a douchey ex-jock from Lake Highlands, Texas.) Even today, it’s still surprising to see what a terrible actor Vanilla Ice truly was. The role doesn’t demand that he do much, other than smirk and rhyme a few insults but Vanilla Ice wasn’t even up to successfully doing that. Most musicians at least have enough stage presence that they can get by onscreen, even if they don’t have a large amount of range. Vanilla Ice is a blank onscreen. It doesn’t do Vanilla Ice any favors that he’s surrounded by people who actually can act, like Michael Gross, Kristin Minter, and Sidney Lassick. Even John Haymes Newton, playing the stock bad boyfriend role, gives a better and more sympathetic performance than Vanilla Ice.

I went into this movie knowing that it would be bad but I had no way of preparing myself for just how bad it was. It’s almost so bad that it’s watchable, though for all the wrong reasons. Watching Vanilla Ice in this movie, I saw why grunge (and not poppy white boy rap) replaced hair metal as the 90s favorite music.

Back to School Part II #14: Grease 2 (dir by Patricia Birch)

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, the whole reason that I watched Grease last week was so I would be prepared to watch the 1982 sequel Grease 2 over the weekend. As I’ve mentioned many times on this site, I absolutely hate Grease and I know what you’re probably asking yourself:

“But Lisa, if you hate Grease so much, why did you want to see Grease 2?”

Well, there’s a very good answer to that question but I’m not going to reveal it. I’m going to encourage you to learn to love the mystery. For whatever reason, I wanted to watch Grease 2. Perhaps it was because I’ve heard that Grease 2 is the worst sequel ever made. I really didn’t see how that was possible. How, I wondered, could a film be any worse than the original Grease?

And, so, I watched Grease 2 on Netflix and yes, it was really, really bad. But you know what? It was so bad that it became almost compulsively watchable. Unlike the first Grease, which is full of slow spots, Grease 2 is oddly exciting in its mediocrity. I watched much of it in open-mouthed horror, wondering if things could possibly get any worse. And, with each scene, it did get worse. It was so overwhelmingly and shamelessly bad and so thoroughly misguided that, strangely enough, I really want to rewatch it.

Grease 2 takes place in 1961. There’s a whole new gang of students at Rydell High! Well, actually, Frenchy (Didi Conn) has returned. You may remember that, in the previous film, Frenchy dropped out of high school and went to beauty school. (She was also visited by Satan, who came to her disguised as the Teen Angel.) But now Frenchy is back, trying to pass a chemistry class so she can … well, I’m not really sure what the whole deal with Frenchy was. I imagine that Didi Conn was probably free for a weekend.

The T-bird and the Pink Ladies are still around but they have a whole new membership. The head of the Pink Ladies is Stephanie Zinone (played, in her film debut, by Michelle Pfeiffer). Her boyfriend, Johnny Nogorelli (Adrian Zmed), is the chain-smoking leader of the T-birds. Actually, Johnny is now her ex-boyfriend. He cheated on her over the summer.

And there’s a new boy at Rydell! He’s originally from England and he’s Sandy’s cousin! His name is Michael Carrington (superhandsome Maxwell Caulfield, who is perhaps fated to always be best known for playing Rex Manning in Empire Records) and, when we first meet him, he’s getting off a school bus and he’s wearing a suit! Michael really likes Stephanie but you have to be a T-bird if you’re going to date a Pink Lady and…

AGCK!

Sorry, that was a primal scream. Trying to describe the plot of Grease 2 inspires a lot of primal screams.

Anyway, this is a film is also a musical but apparently, none of the original Grease composers were involved with the sequels. All the songs kinda sound like something you would hear in a parody of Grease, as opposed to a sequel. Also adding to bizarre feel of this sequel is that everyone delivers their lines as if they’re appearing in a stage production, projecting to the back of the theater and overenunciating every single syllable. This may have made sense for Grease, which was adapted from an actual stage show and, despite efforts to open up the action, was still deliberately stagey. Grease 2, meanwhile, is an adaptation of a stage show that never actually existed.

The film starts with a 7 minute production number called Back To School Again. As the Pink Ladies and the T-birds and all the other students show up outside of Rydell, they sing, “Woe is me! The Board of Education took away my parole.” And the scene just keeps going and going, until you start to wonder if Rydell High is a cult compound.

This is followed by a song about bowling (!) that’s called “Score Tonight.”

And it just keeps getting worse from there. The film becomes sickly fascinating as you find yourself trying to predict how much more worse it can possibly get. You may be tempted to give up but you’ll definitely want to stick around for the scene in which Michael discovers that Stephanie wants a “cool rider.” How does he know that? She sings a song about it!

Naturally, Michael gets a motorcycle, a helmet, and pair of goggles and he starts to romance Stephanie. Stephanie doesn’t know who that Michael is the mysterious motorcyclist, despite the fact that Michael is just wearing a helmet and a pair of goggles. Though you have to admire Pfieffer’s commitment to her role (and she gives a fairly good performance, considering the material she was working with), you can’t help but feel that Stephanie might not be the smart. Especially after she sings, “Who’s that guy?”

Uhmmm … it’s Michael. It’s not like he’s dressed up like a bat or wearing the Iron Man armor. He’s just got a helmet and goggles on. Add to that, while Maxwell Caulfield doesn’t give a bad performance (he seems to be doing the best he can with what he’s been given to work with), he also doesn’t attempt to act any differently when he’s the mysterious motorcyclist than when he’s Michael.

There are other things going on as well. The film is full of vignettes about life in 1961, all featuring the students and teachers at Rydell High. For instance, former teen idol Tab Hunter shows up as a substitute teacher and sings a song about reproduction.

And again, it’s so bad that you can’t look away and you watch knowing that you’ll never get the images and the songs out of your head. So compulsively watchable is this bad movie that I may have to watch it again after I finish this review. (Then again, I’ll probably just rewatch the fifth season of Degrassi…)

(That said, I would actually argue that Grease 2 is a better directed film than the first Grease. Grease 2 was directed by Grease‘s choreographer and, as opposed to the first film, the dance numbers are actually framed with modicum of care.)

(By the way, I’ve always wanted to use the phrase “modicum of care” in a review.)

Anyway, Grease 2 apparently bombed at the box office and, as a result, there have been no further Grease films. It’s a shame because you so know that Grease 3 would have taken place in 1967 and featured hippies.

Oh well.

We’ll survive…

Back to School Part II #10: Grease (dir by Randal Kleiser)

Posted on August 25, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When it comes to reviewing Grease on this site, the film and I have a long and twisted history. There have been several times when I was tempted to review Grease but one thing has always stopped me:

I absolutely hate this film.

Grease is one of my least favorite films and, to be honest, just thinking about it causes me pain. Just about everyone that I know loves Grease. They love the songs. They love the music. They love the performances. They want to see it on stage. They want to see it on the big screen. They watch every time it pops up on AMC.

Growing up as a theater nerd means being surrounded by people who love Grease. I cannot begin to count the number of times that I forced to watch this movie in school. So many theater teachers seemed to feel that showing Grease in class was some sort of reward but, for me, it was pure torture. And the fact that I was usually the only one who disliked the film made the experience all the more unbearable.

Back in 2014, when I was doing the first set of Back To School reviews, I was planning on reviewing Grease. But I just could not bring myself to voluntarily relive the film. Instead of putting myself through that misery, I decided to watch and review Rock ‘n’ Roll High School instead. It was the right decision and I stand by it.

Jump forward two years and here I am doing Back to School again. And again, for some reason, I had put Grease down as a film to review. It’s just a movie, right? And yet, after I finished writing my excellent review of Animal House, I again found myself dreading the idea of having to even think about Grease.

So, I said, “Fuck this,” and I promptly erased Grease from the list and I replaced it with Skatetown USA. Then I watched Skatetown and I’m glad that I did because that was an experience that I can’t wait to write about! And yet, I still had this nagging voice in the back of my mind.

“You’re going to have to review Grease at some point,” it said, “If not now, when?”

The voice had a point. However, I was soon reminded that there was an even more important reason to review Grease. A little further down on my list of Back to School films to review was a little film called Grease 2. How could I possibly review Grease 2 if I hadn’t already reviewed Grease? My OCD would not allow it!

And so, here I am, reviewing Grease.

Grease, of course, is a musical about teenagers in 1958. Danny (John Travolta) is in love with Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) and Sandy is in love with Danny. But Danny’s a greaser and Sandy’s Australian! Will they be able to work it out, despite coming from different worlds? Of course they will! Danny’s willing to dress up like a jock in order to impress Sandy while Sandy’s willing to wear black leather to impress Danny! Yay! They go together! And they’ve got a flying car, too! YAY!

And then Satan arrived…

Of course, there’s other subplots as well. For instance, Frenchy (Didi Conn) nearly drops out of school but she’s visited by Satan (Frankie Avalon) and he manages to change her mind. And Rizzo (Stockard Channing) might be pregnant because Kenickie (Jeff Conaway) hasn’t bought any new condoms since the 8th grade. Comparing the sensitive way that teen pregnancy was handled on a show like Degrassi: The Next Generation with the way it’s handled in Grease is enough to make you want to sing “O Canada” every day for the rest of your life.

Here’s what I do like about Grease: Stockard Channing is great as Rizzo, though it’s hard not to feel that she deserves better than a doofus boyfriend like Kenickie and a boring bestie like Sandy. I also like You’re The One That I Want. That’s a fun song.

But as for the rest of the movie … BLEH! I mean, it is so BORING! It takes them forever to get to You’re The One That I Want. Olivia Newton-John is so wholesome that she literally makes you want to tear your hair out while John Travolta pretty much acts on auto pilot. As for the supporting cast, most of them appeared in the stage production of Grease and they still seem to be giving stage performances as opposed to film performances. They’re still projecting their lines to the back of the house. Worst of all, it’s obvious that director Randal Kleiser had no idea how to film a musical because the dance numbers are so ineptly staged and framed that, half the time, you can’t even see what anyone’s doing with their feet. If you can’t see the feet, it defeats the whole purpose of having an elaborate dance number in the first place!

So, no, I don’t like Grease.

Sorry, everyone.

However, I’m sure I’ll enjoy Grease 2….