Well, here we are. We’re more than halfway through the year and, to be honest, the Oscar forecast seems just as cloudy as ever.
To be honest, I’m starting to get the feeling that this is going to be a year where the Academy is more concerned with sending a message than anything else. Just as the Emmy nominations were all about sticking it to Trump (as opposed to actually honoring the best that television has to offer), it wouldn’t surprise me to see the Academy try to do the same thing. That doesn’t mean that the nominees aren’t going to deserve to be nominated, of course. Instead, it just means that this might be a good year for films with a political agenda.
Anyway, here are my predictions for July! They’re still pretty random, to be honest. Be sure to also check out my predictions for January, February, March, April,May, and June!
Okay, so here’s the deal. I know that this 1984 film has a strong cult following. A few months ago, I was at the Alamo Drafthouse when they played the trailer and announced a one-night showing and the people sitting in front of me got so excited that it was kind of creepy. I mean, I understand that there are people who absolutely love Streets of Fire but I just watched it and it didn’t really do much for me.
Now, that may not sound like a big deal because, obviously, not everyone is going to love the same movies as everyone else. I love Black Swan but I have friends who absolutely hate it. Arleigh and I still argue about Avatar. Leonard and I still yell at each other about Aaron Sorkin. Erin makes fun of me for watching The Bachelorette. Jedadiah Leland doesn’t share my appreciation for Big Brother and the Trashfilm Guru and I may agree about Twin Peaks but we don’t necessarily agree about whether or not socialism is a good idea. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with healthy and respectful disagreement!
But the thing is — Streets of Fire seems like the sort of film that I should love.
It’s a musical. I love musicals!
It’s highly stylized! I love stylish movies!
It’s from the 80s! I love the 80s films! (Well, most 80s films… if the opening credits are in pink neon, chances are I’ll end up liking the film…)
It takes place in a city where it never seems to stop raining. Even though the neon-decorated sets give the location a futuristic feel, everyone in the city seems to have escaped from the 50s. It’s the type of city where people drive vintage cars and you can tell that one guy is supposed to be a badass because he owns a convertible. All of the bad guys ride motorcycles, wear leather jackets, and look like they should be appearing in a community theater production of Grease.
Singer Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) has been kidnapped by the Bombers, a biker gang led by Raven (Willem DaFoe). Ellen’s manager and lover, Billy Fish (Rick Moranis), hires Tom Cody (Michael Pare) to rescue Ellen. Little does Billy know that Cody and Ellen used to be lovers. Cody is apparently a legendary figure in the city. As soon as he drives into town, people starting talking about how “he’s back.” The police see Cody and automatically tell him not to start any trouble. Raven says that he’s not scared of Cody and everyone rolls their eyes!
It’s up to Cody to track Ellen down and rescue her from Raven and … well, that’s pretty much what he does. I think that was part of the problem. After all of the build-up, it’s all a bit anti-climatic. It doesn’t take much effort for Cody to find Ellen. After Cody escapes with Ellen, it doesn’t take Raven much effort to track down Cody. It all leads to a fist fight but who cares? As a viewer, you spend the entire film waiting for some sort of big scene or exciting action sequence and it never arrives. The film was so busy being stylish that it forgot to actually come up with a compelling story.
I think it also would have helped if Tom Cody had been played by an actor who had a bit more charisma than Michael Pare. Pare is too young and too stiff for the role. It doesn’t help to have everyone talking about what a badass Tom Cody is when the actor playing him doesn’t seem to be quite sure what the movie’s about. Also miscast is Diane Lane, who tries to be headstrong but just comes across as being petulant. When Cody and Ellen get together, they all the chemistry of laundry drying on a clothesline.
On the positive side, Willem DaFoe is believably dangerous as Raven and Amy Madigan gets to play an ass-kicking mercenary named McCoy. In fact, if McCoy had been the main character, Streets of Fire probably would have been a lot more interesting.
I guess Streets of Fire is just going to have to be one of those cult films that I just don’t get.
I recorded this 1961 Italian film off of TCM on June 14th!
From 280 BC to 226 BC, a 108 feet high statue of the sun-god Helios stood in the Greek city of Rhodes. It was reportedly built to celebrate a major military victory and it overlooked the harbor, serving to both welcome friends and intimidate enemies. No one’s quite sure what it actually looked like but we do know that it was considered, by its contemporaries, to be one of the Seven Wonders of the World. No trip to Greece was complete without a stopover in Rhodes so that the curious could feast their eyes upon the Colossus. Eventually, the statue was destroyed in an earthquake and it was never rebuilt.
The statue serves as the centerpiece for the aptly named 1961 film, The Colossus of Rhodes. The film opens with its dedication and ends with the earthquake that toppled it. (Of course, in the film, the earthquake occurs just a week or two after the dedication.) The film imagines that the Colossus was not just a monument to a God. No, instead, this film suggests that the Colossus was an elaborate torture chamber, one that could pour fire down on anyone trying to sail underneath it. Inside the Colossus is an elaborate labyrinth of dungeons, where anyone who has displeased the king is punished.
And, indeed, quite a few people have displeased the king. King Serse (Roberto Camardiel), it turns out, is a mad tyrant who spends all of his days eating grapes and having people executed in the coliseum. (He’s like Nero but without the artistic temperament.) Not only do the rebels want him dead but so does his evil second-in-command, Thar (Conrado San Martin). With the people angry that they’ve been forced to build a giant statue for no reason other than their king’s vanity, it seems like a perfect time for a revolution!
Caught in the middle of it all is Darios (Rory Calhoun). Darios is from Athens and the only reason he came to Rhodes was to visit his uncle and see the statue. At first, Darios is more interested in trying to get laid than the revolution. When that doesn’t quite work out, Darios tries to leave the island, just to discover that, thanks to the Colossus, escape is impossible. When Darios is accused of being a supporter of the revolution, he has no choice but to take up arms against Serse, which is exactly what Thar wants him to do…
The plot’s is more than a little convoluted and Darios is never the most sympathetic of heroes but The Colossus of Rhodes is still an enjoyable example of the peplum genre. Though the acting is frequently stiff, the film is visually impressive, with both the Colossus and ancient Rhodes brought to wonderfully decadent life. The idea that the Colossus was actually just an elaborate torture chamber is handled well and the frequent battle scenes are well-choreographed. (I was particularly impressed with a scene of Darios fighting off an army while also trying to maintain his balance on the Colossus’s arm.) And, of course, the climatic earthquake is as grandly operatic as you would hope. Say what you will about the Italian film industry, it always delivered what audiences wanted.
That said, the main reason that The Colossus of Rhodes is known today is because it was the Sergio Leone’s first directorial credit. (It was, however, the second film that he actually directed. Though uncredited, he previously replaced Mario Bonnard as the director of 1959’s The Last Days of Pompeii.) While The Colossus of Rhodes was obviously very different from the spaghetti westerns for which Leone is best known, there are some thematic similarities between the film and Leone’s future work:
For instance, much like Clint Eastwood in the Dollars Trilogy, Charles Bronson in Once Upon A Time In The West, and the gangsters in Once Upon A Time In America, Darios starts out as an amoral hero. When Darios does join the revolution, it’s reminiscent of James Coburn aiding Rod Steiger in Duck, You Sucker.
The corrupt and greedy Serse has much in common with the crooked land barons and businessmen who lurked behind-the-scenes in Once Upon A Time In The West.
Even the torture chamber in the Colossus brought to mind the grisly torments that both Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach had to endure in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
(Unfortunately, unlike other Leone films, Ennio Morricone did not provide the score for The Colossus of Rhodes. Instead, Angelo Francesco Lavagnino provided a rather standard “epic” orchestration.)
The Colossus of Rhodes may not be a great film but, as an early work of a great filmmaker, it’s definitely worth watching.
The 2017 film, My Friend Dahmer, opens in a suburban high school in the 1970s. It’s a school like any other, with the usual collection of jocks, nerds, geeks, and outcasts. Jeff (Ross Lynch) is the token weird kid. Every school has one. He’s obviously intelligent but there’s something off about him. He shuffles around the school with his eyes down. When he speaks, he rarely shows any emotion, leaving you to wonder if he’s just shy or if he’s lost in a world of his own. There are rumors, of course, about all the strange things that Jeff has done. Some people say that they’ve seen him collecting dead animals. Jeff has told people that he has a shack where he uses acid to dissolve carcasses. Jeff frequently comes to school drunk, reeking of alcohol. And then there’s his parents! His father (Dallas Roberts) tries to be strict but usually just comes across as befuddled. Meanwhile, his mother (Anne Heche) alternates between doting on her oldest son and making paranoid accusations.
His father demands that Jeffrey make some friends. That’s why Jeff ends up in such unlikely places as both the school band and the school’s tennis team. Still feeling out-of-place, Jeff starts to act out in school. Walking through the hallway, he’ll suddenly start shouting and twitching. Jeff becomes known as the kid who will do anything. One his classmates, an artist named John “Derf” Backderf (Alex Wolff), even starts to draw pictures based on Jeffrey’s antics. Derf and his friends describe themselves as being Jeffrey’s fan club. For the rest of the school year, they encourage Jeff to act stranger and stranger. It would be incorrect to say that Derf and Jeff are really friends. In fact, towards the end of the school year, Derf starts to realize that he’s basically been exploiting Jeff for his own amusement. And yet, Derf and his friends provide perhaps the closest thing to “normal” human interaction that Jeff will ever experience.
As you’ve probably already guessed from the film’s title, Jeff is Jeffrey Dahmer, the infamous Milwaukee-based serial killer and cannibal who is estimated to have killed 17 young men before he was arrested in 1991. (In 1994, Dahmer was murdered in prison by an inmate who claimed to have been motivated by Dahmer’s lack of remorse.) Dahmer committed his first murder when he was 18, a fact alluded to towards the end of the film when we see Dahmer picking up a hitchhiker. (Disturbingly, the only time in the film in which Dahmer smiles and sounds like a “normal” person is when he’s trying to convince that hitchhiker to get in his car.) With the exception of that one scene, My Friend Dahmer deals with the year before Dahmer started his killing spree, when Dahmer was just the token weird kid.
The fact that we know what Jeffrey Dahmer is ultimately going to becomes add an ominous subtext to every scene in the film. Throughout, there are signs that something is wrong with Dahmer and yet neither his classmates nor his teachers ever seem to take those signs seriously. When Dahmer brutally cuts open a fish because he wants to see what’s inside of it, his friends are disgusted but they assume that’s just Dahmer being weird again. When he shows up drunk for class and his grades start to go downhill, his teachers just ignore him. No matter what he says (and he does say some truly disturbing things), everyone just shrugs it off. Their attitude is that Jeff’s the weird kid so, of course, he’s going to say weird things.
To its credit, My Friend Dahmer resists the temptation to sensationalize or make excuses for the monster that Jeffrey Dahmer became. Ross Lynch plays Dahmer as a hulking, inarticulate time bomb. It’s not so much that Dahmer can’t control his dark thoughts as he really has no desire to do so. The film contrasts Dahmer’s darkness with the light-hearted and, quite frankly, dorky guys who briefly became his clique. (Again, despite the film’s title, it would probably be a bit of a stretch to say that Dahmer had any real friends.) One practical joke, in which Derf sneaks Dahmer into every club’s yearbook picture, is so likable in its dorkiness that you almost forget that Derf’s scheme centers around a guy who will grow up to murder 17 people. In the end, both Dahmer’s crimes and his fate feels as inevitable as the fact that Derf will ultimately write and draw graphic novel about their relationship.
By any stretch of the imagination, it’s not a happy or pleasant film. I watched the film last night and I doubt I’ll ever watch it again. And yet, it’s an effective film, one that left me wondering what happened to some of the “weird kids” that I went to school with. Do we ever really know what’s going on inside someone’s head? Ross Lynch turns Dahmer into a disturbingly familiar monster while Alex Wolff is sympathetic in the role of Derf. Anne Heche goes a bit overboard as Dahmer’s unstable mother but Dallas Roberts has a few good scenes as the father who can only watch helplessly as his son grows more and more disturbed. The film is a disturbing trip into the heart of darkness, one that will haunt you after it ends.
Red Sparrow is a spy thriller that features a lot of spies but not many thrills. Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika Ergova, a Russian ballerina whose career with the Bolshoi is ended when another dancer drops her on stage. Fortunately, Dominka’s sleazy uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts) has a new career in mind! Maybe Dominka could be a sparrow, a spy who seduces the enemy! Just in case Dominka doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life seducing westerners, Ivan arranges for her to witness a murder and then informs her that she’ll be eliminated as a witness unless she does what he tells her. This, of course, leads to Dominkia attending State School 4, where she is schooled in the arts of seduction by Matron (Charlotte Rampling). Upon graduation, Dominka is sent to Budapest, where she falls in love with a CIA agent named Nash (Joel Edgerton) and a lot of predictable spy stuff happens. Despite all of the sex and violence, it’s just not much fun.
Red Sparrow has all the ingredients to be an enjoyably trashy 90-minute spy flick but instead, it’s a slowly paced, 140-minute slog that just seems to go on forever. Throughout the film, director Francis Lawrence (no relation to the film’s star) struggles to maintain a steady pace. Too much time is spent on Dominka’s life before she suffers the injury that should have opened the film. Meanwhile, the only interesting part of the film — Dominka’s education at State School 4 — goes by far too quickly and, despite the fact that she was giving one of the few interesting performances in Red Sparrow, Charlotte Rampling vanishes from the film early on. Once Dominkia gets to Budapest, the film really slow down to a crawl. Joel Edgerton’s a good actor and an even better director but he gives an overly grim and serious performance in Red Sparrow and he and Jennifer Lawrence have next to no romantic chemistry.
(That lack of romantic chemistry petty much dooms the final forty minutes of the film. It’s easy to imagine a much better version of Red Sparrow in which Bradley Cooper played the role of Nash. True, that would have been like the 100th time that Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence starred opposite each other but why not? It worked for William Powell and Myrna Loy.)
As for Jennifer Lawrence, her performance is okay. It’s not one of her best and there’s a few moments where it seems as if she’s more concerned with maintaining her Russian accent than with what’s actually going on in the scene but, for the most part, it’s a good enough performance. That said, you do have to wonder how long she can go without having another hit film. Despite being heavily hyped, Passengers, Mother!, and Red Sparrow all underperformed at the box office. (In defense of Mother!, it was never going to be a box office hit, regardless of who starred in it.) As talented as she is, it’s sometimes hard not to feel that, as an actress, Jennifer Lawrence has lost some of the natural spark that took viewers by surprise in Winter’s Bone, launched a whole new genre of dystopian YA adaptations with The Hunger Games, and which previously elevated unlikely films like The House At The End Of The Street. She was a far more interesting actress before she became J Law.
Here’s hoping that she finally gets another role worthy of her talent!
The 1958 best picture nominee, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, opens with a 30-something Paul Newman doing something stupid.
It’s a testament to just how incredibly handsome Paul Newman was in the 1950s that he can still be sexy even while he’s stumbling around in a drunken haze and attempting to jump over hurdles on a high school football field. Newman is playing Brick Pollitt, youngest son of the wealthy cotton farmer Big Daddy Pollitt (Burl Ives). Brick was a star athlete in high school but now, he’s a drunk with an unhappy marriage and a lot of bitter feelings. When Brick attempts to jump over the hurdles, he breaks his ankle. The only thing that keeps Brick from being as big a loser as Biff Loman is the fact that he looks like Paul Newman.
Brick is married to Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor), a beautiful woman who may have grown up on the wrong side of the tracks but who has married into money. The only problem is that it doesn’t seem like Brick is ever going to get that money. With Big Daddy getting older, everyone in Mississippi is wondering which Pollitt son will inherit his fortune. Will it be drunken, self-pitying Brick or will it be Goober (Jack Carson) and his wife (Madeleine Sherwood)? One point in Goober’s favor is that he and his wife already have five rambunctious children while Brick and Maggie have none. In fact, gossip has it that Brick and Maggie aren’t even sleeping in the same bed! (While Maggie begs Brick to make love to her, Brick defiantly sleeps on the couch.) The other problem is that, for whatever reason, Brick harbors unending resentment towards … well, everything. Perhaps it has something to do with the mysterious death of Brick’s best friend and former teammate, Skipper…
Brick, Maggie, Goober, and the whole clan are in Mississippi to celebrate Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. Big Daddy is happy because he’s just been told that, despite a recent scare, he does not have cancer. What Big Daddy doesn’t know is that his doctor (Larry Gates) lied to him. Big Daddy does have cancer. In fact, Big Daddy only has a year to live.
Whenever I watch Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, I find it’s helpful to try to imagine what it would have been like to watch the movie in the 1950s. Imagine how audiences, at a time when married couples were still regularly portrayed as sleeping in separate beds and when men were naturally assumed to be the kings of their household, reacted to seeing a film where Elizabeth Taylor was literally reduced to begging Paul Newman to make love to her while Newman hopped around on a crutch and continually found himself getting stuck in embarrassing situations. Though it may seem tame by today’s standards, the film was undeniably daring for 1958 and watching it is like stepping into a time machine and discovering that, yes, there was a time when Elizabeth Taylor wearing a modest slip was considered to be the height of raciness.
Of course, the film itself is quite toned down from the Tennessee Williams’s play on which it was based. Williams reportedly hated the changes that were made in the screenplay. In the play, Skipper committed suicide after confessing that he had romantic feelings for Brick, feelings that Brick claims he did not reciprocate. That was glossed voter in the film, as was the story of Skipper’s unsuccessful attempt to prove his heterosexuality by having sex with Maggie. By removing any direct reference to the romantic undercurrent of Brick and Skipper’s relationship, the film also removes most of Brick’s motivation. (It’s still there in the subtext, of course, but it’s probable that the hints that Newman and Taylor provided in their performances went straight over the heads of most audience members.) In the play, Brick is tortured by self-doubt and questions about his own sexuality. In the film, he just comes across as being rather petulant.
And again, it’s fortunate that, in the film, Brick was played by Paul Newman. It doesn’t matter how bitter Brick becomes or how much he whines about not wanting to be around his family. One look at Newman’s blue eyes and you understand why Maggie is willing to put up with him. In the role of Maggie, Elizabeth Taylor gives a performance that manages to be both ferocious and delicate at the same time. Maggie knows how to play the genteel games of the upper class South but she’s definitely not going to let anyone push her around. It’s easy to see why Big Daddy prefers the company of Maggie to his own blood relations. It’s not just that Maggie’s beautiful, though the implication that Big Daddy is attracted to her is certainly present in the film. It’s also the she’s the only person around who is as strong and determined as him.
Indeed, seen today, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof‘s main strength is that it’s a masterclass in good acting. Williams’s dialogue is so stylized and his plot is so melodramatic that one bad performance would have caused the entire film to implode. Fortunately, Newman and Taylor make even the archest of lines sound totally natural while Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are both the epitome of flamboyant charisma as Big Daddy and Big Mama. It takes a lot of personality to earn a nickname like Big Daddy but Ives pulls it off.
Along with being a huge box office success, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof was nominated for best picture of 1958. However, it lost to Gigi.
I recorded A Night To Regret off of Lifetime on June 19th, 2018!
Poor Chelsea Bilson (Mollee Gray)!
She’s got a lot to deal with. She’s a college student who is always busy. Her mother (Marguerite Moreau) is pressuring her to become an attorney, constantly asking her about her grades, and continually talking about how expensive Chelsea’s education is turning out to be. Her boyfriend has just dumped her, specifically because Chelsea doesn’t ever seem to have any time for him.
All Chelsea wants to do is direct a movie but even that’s become a struggle. Because her mother is only interested in financing Chelsea’s education, Chelsea is not only having to pay for the movie herself but she’s also having to do it all without her mother finding out what’s going on. Can you blame Chelsea for just wanting to spend a night unwinding?
It’s while she’s out with her friend Sara (Gigi Zumbado) that Chelsea runs into Mila (Kirsten Pfeiffer) and Liam (Tyler Sellers). Mila and Chelsea were childhood friends. As Chelsea explains it, she and Mila were always getting in trouble together. Mila eventually ended up living on the streets but it appears that she’s doing much better now. Now, she has expensive clothes and a nice apartment. And she even has a handsome business partner in Liam.
What is Mila’s business?
She’s a webcam girl and, in Lifetime films, that always means trouble!
Seeing that Chelsea needs money and some confidence boosting, Mila tries to turn Chelsea into a webcam girl. It’s not really something Chelsea is interested in doing, though she does make a thousand dollars as the result of one eager fan. That allows her to pay for one more day of shooting, which is a good thing.
What isn’t such a good thing is that it soon becomes apparent that Chelsea’s fan is more than a little unstable and obsessed. Even after Chelsea makes it clear that she wants nothing to do with him, he still tries to contact her. He sends her a message letting her know that he likes what she’s wearing. Chelsea looks outside her bedroom window, just in time to catch a truck driving away.
Meanwhile, Chelsea’s mom has a new friend! His name is Jake Peters (Kevin McNamara) and he’s a personal trainer! He has a disconcerting habit of showing up wherever Chelsea happens to be. Jake seems friendly but there’s something a bit off about him. He’s a little bit too friendly and he tends to speak in weird self-help clichés. And, of course, there’s the fact that Jake murdered his mother at the start of the film…
Yep, Jake has some issues. And it’s not a spoiler to tell you that he’s also Chelsea’s stalker. He’s got plans to make Chelsea’s one night as a webcam girl a night to regret!
I had to work the film’s title into that last paragraph because I think it’s a pretty good title. As soon as you hear those words, “A Night To Regret,” you’re immediately intrigued. A Night To Remember ended with the Titanic hitting an iceberg. How will A Night To Regret end?
Well, in A Night To Regret, the iceberg is Jake, who is a thoroughly creepy and unsettling character, so much so that you have to feel that both Chelsea and her mother were incredibly naive to not immediately turn and run the first time that they saw Jake approaching them. Jake is the type who will murder a random passerby, smirk about it, and then not understand why some people are turned off by his behavior. Kevin McNamara does a great job playing Jake, turning him into a memorable Lifetime villain.
I also liked the performances of Kirsten Pfeiffer and Tyler Sellers are Mila and Liam. (Interestingly enough, Liam is an anagram of Mila and vice versa.) Pfeiffer kept you guessing as to whether Mila was just a concerned friend or if her motives were more sinister while Sellers was so charming as Liam that you regretted he wasn’t in more of the movie. Also giving a good performance was Tina Huang, who projected a wonderful, no-bullshit attitude as Detective Morita.
A Night To Regret is a typical stalker flick but the performances of McNamara, Pfeiffer, Sellers, and Huang keep things interesting.
Let us begin the rest of 2018 with this article that I found while looking through the January 18th, 1929 edition of the Deseret News (which was published out of Salt Lake City):
The lesson?
(Other than the fact that I’m an unapologetic history nerd, of course. Seriously, I love this stuff.)
I recorded My Husband’s Secret Life off of Lifetime on March 25th.
Agck!
That looks like quite an accident, doesn’t it?
Lying on the ground is Freddy (Brett Donahue). Freddy owns a flower store so you might wonder how exactly he ended up lying in the middle of the street, covered in blood. Some of it could have to do with the fact that Freddy is the husband who is mentioned, in the title, as having a secret. Freddy may seem like a nice guy but he sure is shady about certain aspects of his past. For instance, why does he carry a lighter that was made in Russia? And when he talks in his sleep, why does he speak with slightly foreign accent? And then there’s his slightly creepy and rather overprotective mother.
As for why he’s lying in the middle of the road, he’s just been run by a man named Arthur (Joe Cobden). Arthur drinks too much and is frequently a nervous wreck. Interestingly enough, he once had a respectable job and a strong family. Whenever Freddy and Arthur meet, it’s on one of those park benches that practically screams, “Secret spy meeting place!”
Hovering over him is Jennifer Jones (Kara Killmer). Jennifer is Freddy’s wife and, to be honest, she was a bit concerned about her marriage even before Freddy ended up in the middle of the street. They’ve been married for seven years and yet, there’s still things that Jennifer doesn’t really known about Freddy. And when she just happens to spot him in the city, getting yelled at by an angry woman, Jennifer’s suspicions become even stronger. It gets even worse when she twice tries to call him and, after first ignoring her, he answers the second time and blatantly lies about where he is.
Later, when she confronts him, he admits that he was lying about where he was but then asks her why she didn’t call him out if she knew he was lying. I mean, how dare she allow him to lie!? That’s classic gaslighting and enough to make everyone watching the film shout, “Get away from him!”
But, shortly afterward, Freddy ends up in the middle of the street and, suddenly, the whole idea of leaving him gets a lot more awkward. Freddy’s in a coma now and how can you leave someone when they’re in a coma? While Jennifer waits for Freddy to wake up, her mother-in-law continues to push her away. What was Jennifer’s husband hiding and why is his mother searching through his house in the middle of the night? Jennifer is determined to find out!
In all probability, you’ll figure it out long before Jennifer does. I mean, honestly, when a guy starts speaking in a foreign accent in his sleep, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he’s probably not who he says he is. In fact, it takes a certain suspension of disbelief to accept that Freddy could have fooled Jennifer for all this time.
But — hey, this is Lifetime and Lifetime is all about suspending your disbelief and having a good time! Kara Killmer gives a sympathetic lead performance and Joe Cobden has a few good scenes as the perpetually shaky Arthur. At its most effective, My Husband’s Secret Life deals with a question that we’ve all asked (whether we admit it or not): How well do we know the people we love?
My Husband’s Secret Life is also known as Sleeper.
I recorded Family Vanished off of the Lifetime Movie Network on July 6th!
“Give me my wedding ring, you white trash bitch!”
— Lisa (Kelly Packard) in Family Vanished (2018)
Here’s two lessons that I learned from Family Vanished:
Be careful how much information you post online.
Seriously, Lisa (Kelly Packard) thought it would be a good idea to post how much she had sold a painting for online. She also thought it would be a good idea to let the world know that she, her husband (Madison Dirks), and her daughter (Elisa Luthman) would all be in Hawaii on a work vacation.
What happened as a result? Well, Mike (Todd Cahoon), Carol (Jennifer Taylor), and their daughter (Megan Littler) saw Lisa’s posting. And they decided that Lisa and her family must have a lot of money. So, they broke into the family’s house. They lived there for several days. They tried on everyone’s clothes. They slept in everyone’s beds. They made the house their own and, since they never took off their black gloves, they managed to do it without leaving behind any DNA or fingerprint evidence.
Of course, they quickly discovered that Lisa and her family wasn’t as rich as they assumed. In fact, a quick perusal of Lisa’s diary revealed that the family itself wasn’t particularly happy. Still, Mike and Carol were determined to get something for all of their trouble so they stayed in the house until Lisa and the family returned from their vacation.
Second lesson learned:
2. You can only push people so far before they snap.
Sure, Mike and Carol had a lot of fun tormenting Lisa and her family. They revealed that Lisa had been unfaithful. They forced Lisa’s husband to bark like a dog. They taunted Lisa’s daughter for having won so many trophies in school. Mike and Carol had a lot of fun but they failed to consider just how far some people will go to get revenge.
When their initial ordeal finally ended, Lisa and her husband were not happy to learn that the police had no real leads as to where Mike and Carol went off to. So, they decided to investigate on their own. And when they did track down Mike and Carol, well, let’s just say that even the most normal-seeming people can be pushed too far…
So, Family Vanished was a film that I had mixed feelings about. I’m not a huge fan of movies about people being held hostage. Films about hostage situations are always a bit too predictable for me. It always starts with the hostages pleading for their lives and then the nosy neighbor comes over and there’s the big tense scene where the main hostage has to try to get rid of him while someone stands behind the front door with a gun or a knife pointed at his back. The hostage takers always start taunting the hostages. I’ve seen it so many times that I just automatically get bored with the situation.
So, the first half of Family Vanished didn’t do much for me but then Lisa and her husband set out to get revenge and it became this totally different, wonderfully over-the-top movie! I loved watching Kelly Packard and Madison Dirks get mean and vengeful. Kelly Packard has appeared in many Lifetime movies but I think this is the first one where she actually gets to kick some ass and both she and Dirks seemed to be having a lot of fun with the role reversal. Add to that, Mike and Carol were so obnoxiously cruel that it was impossible not to get some guilty pleasure out watching Lisa demanded the return of her wedding ring.
With its theme of a terrible crime leading to an even worse revenge, Family Vanished is what I imagine a Wes Craven-directed Lifetime movie would have been like. It’s Lifetime’s Last House On The Left.
Through the Shattered Lens 