Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.
It’s Christmas in Baltimore.
Episode 6.8 “All Is Bright”
(Dir by Matt Reeves, originally aired on December 12th, 1997)
It’s the holidays! Falsone (ugh) is still talking about suing to get custody of his kids. (Seriously, Falsone — either do it or shut up about it. We already had to go through this crap with Felton a few seasons ago.) Lewis and Kellerman are worrying about whether or not Georgia Rae has footage of Kellerman executing Luther Mahoney. Bayliss is suddenly making out with Cox at the Christmas party. Well, why shouldn’t he? It’s impossible to go in a bar or even a shop in Baltimore without running into Dr. Cox.
Meanwhile, Gharty and Ballard are investigating the murder of man in a laundromat. Someone beat him to death and poured bleach down his throat. It turns out that the man was HIV+ and he infected a woman named Rita (the great Kathryne Erbe). Rita is now visibly sick and dying while the man who infected her wasn’t showing any signs of being sick at all. Rita’s guilt is never really in question. The issue is that Ballard feels sorry for Rita and understands her anger while the older and more-traditionally minded Gharty sees her as just being another murderer. It’s a pretty simple story but Callie Thorne and Peter Gerety sold it. The fact that Gharty is obviously in love with Ballard adds a whole other level of meaning to their scenes together.
Speaking of love, Munch’s ex-wife Gwen (Carol Kane) showed up at the bar and recruited Munch to help with her mother’s funeral. Only real-life author Peter Maas showed up for the ceremony. Munch, of course, asked Gwen about Lennie Briscoe. Belzer and Kane were a great team. I’m a bit disappointed that there was apparently never a Munch/Gwen spin-off.
Watching Gharty and Ballard provided a needed relief from all of the Falsone-centered episodes that I’ve had to sit through recently. This was a simple episode but a good one.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC! It can be viewed on Peacock.
This week, Pembleton, Lewis, Bayliss, and (ugh) Flasone investigate a shooting at a Vietnamese restaurant.
Episode 6.7 “Saigon Rose”
(Dir by Nick Gomez, originally aired on November 21st, 1997)
There’s an incredibly dumb moment in this week’s episode of Homicide. In an otherwise deserted hallway, Flasone confronts Kellerman with his suspicion that Kellerman executed Luther Mahoney and now, as a result, innocent people have been killed due to Georgia Rae Mahoney’s vendetta. (As if Georgia Rae wouldn’t have launched a vendetta if the killing hadn’t been an execution….) Kellerman and Falsone have a scuffle in the hallway and they both end up pulling their guns and having a brief, John Woo-style stand-off. When another cop comes walking down the hallway, they reholster their weapons.
It’s an idiotic moment that should have had no place on Homicide. It also gets at what is so annoying about Falsone. Why is Falsone investigating this? No one has asked him to investigate it. No one else seems to care about whether or not Kellerman murdered Luther. Most would probably say that Luther got what he deserved. But Falsone is on a crusade and the show seems to think that it makes him a hero, as opposed to a rat.
While Kellerman and Falsone are threatening to kill each other, Pembleton, Lewis, and Bayliss are investigating a shooting at a Vietnamese restaurant. Almost everyone who worked at the restaurant — including an off-duty cop — is found dead. The only survivors are two teenagers who hid in the kitchen. When interrogated by Pembleton and Lewis, they reveal that one of the shooters was a local cop named Toinette Perry (Camille McCurty Ali).
Toinette was hired as a cop despite having a history of mental instability. Her father had a friend at city hall and pulled some strings. Her father subsequently disappeared. Pembleton and Lewis think that Toinette recruited her cousin, Curtis (Dion Graham), to commit the robbery with her. Bayliss and Falsone are sent to arrest Curtis, which just proves that you can’t get away from Falsone on this show. He has to be involved in everything.
This episode wasn’t particularly complex. The mystery was easily solved and, while the episode did hint that the off-duty cop resented Toinette for being a “diversity hire,” it didn’t really pursue that angle with any real depth. That’s not necessarily a complaint. Homicide is at its best when its just about the detectives doing their jobs. Camille McCurty Ali gave a chilling performance as the sociopathic Toinette.
Meanwhile, Laura Ballard was rushed to the hospital after a night eating crabs with Gharty. (My boyfriend assures me that this is a Baltimore thing.) It turns out that Laura has an allergy to shellfish. Gharty is horrified at the thought of living in Baltimore and not being able to eat crabs. It was a cute storyline, largely due to Peter Gerety’s performance as Gharty.
This was not a bad episode but Falsone needs to leave Kellerman alone!
There is exactly one effective sequence to be found in Maximum Overdrive, a horror film from 1986 that attempts to show us what would happen if all of Earth’s machines decided to destroy humanity.
It takes place at the end of a little league game. The coach, happy that his team has won, declares soda for everyone! He walks over to the soft drink machine and puts in his coins and…nothing happens. The coach stares at the machine perplexed. His team gathers around him.
Suddenly, a can flies out of the machine and hits the coach in the groin. Coach falls to his knees, just to get another can driven straight into his skull, leaving him with a big bloody hole in his head. As the coach twitches, his teams starts to run away. Suddenly, the machine is shooting cans out at them. Some of the kids escape but quite a few don’t.
Suddenly, as the kids flee, a driverless steamroller crashes through a fence and drives across the field, graphically flattening one of the players…
It’s over-the-top, it’s kind of scary, it’s fun in a naughty sort of way, and it’s exciting to watch. It’s totally absurd and yet it’s effective at the same time. It’s a really brilliant scene, one that hints at what Maximum Overdrive could have been. It hints that Maximum Overdrive‘s first-time director did have some potential and watching it, one is tempted to feel a pang of regret over the fact that he never directed another film after this one.
However, then you watch the rest of Maximum Overdrive and you realize that one effective scene was a total fluke. To your horror, you realize that this film’s director (and screenwriter) has decided to set nearly the entire film in the ugliest and most disgusting truck stop in the world. You realize that the director has no idea how to maintain suspense and that his idea of horror appears to be having a lot of trucks constantly circling the truck stop. And then, worst of all, you realize that the unlikable caricatures inside the truck stop are meant to be our heroes!
And you find yourself wondering if things could possibly get any worse. Well, believe me — they can.
First off, a guy named Camp Loman (Christopher Murney) shows up and reveals himself to be a total lech and then starts trying to sell bibles and really, what do you expect from someone named Camp Loman? And, what’s annoying, is that the film’s director seems to think that he’s blowing our mind by presenting us with an hypocritical bible salesman. I mean, seriously — the amount of time devoted to Camp Loman will make you nostalgic for scenes of a steamroller crushing a child.
And then Emilio Estevez shows up as our hero but he scowls through the entire movie and delivers all of his lines through gritted teeth, as if he’s pissed off about appearing in Maximum Overdrive and really, who can blame him? That said, it doesn’t really make for an enjoyable performance.
But hey — Emilio’s not the only person in the truck stop. There’s also Pat Hingle, playing the owner of the truck stop. He’s overweight, wears a tie, smokes a cigar, and speaks with a vaguely Southern accent. Hmmmmm, do you think he’s going to be a bad guy?
Oh! And let’s not forget the waitress played by Ellen McElduff. “WE MADE YOU!” she shouts at the machines and then she shouts it again and again and again and again and it’s almost as if the film is being directed by a guy so in love with his own dialogue that he doesn’t realize how annoying the same line gets when it’s screeched over and over again.
And I haven’t even gotten to the helium-voiced newlyweds yet…
When I recently watched Maximum Overdrive on Encore, there were a lot of things that annoyed me, such as the bad pacing, the bad acting, the bad dialogue, the bad special effects, the bad cinematography, and the bad everything else. But what really got to me was just how inconsistent this movie was. Some machines turned into killers but oddly, others did not. At one point, a machine gun starts shooting at the people in the truck stop but the weapons that Pat Hingle keeps in the truck stop never turn on their human masters. Seriously, if you’re going to make a terrible movie, at least be consistent.
So, you may be asking, why is this an Icarus File? Well, it was directed by Stephen King, the writer who is routinely called the “master of horror.” King may be a great writer but, judging from this movie, he was a really crappy director. I imagine, when the film was in pre-production, the logic was that if King could write a scary book then he could definitely direct a scary movie.
Nope.
It turns out that, just as Icarus should never have gotten so close to the sun, Stephen King should never have directed a movie.
