Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 4.3 “Fight For Your Life”

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and several other services!

This week, it’s a boxing episode.

Episode 4.3 “Fight For Your Life”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on September 30th, 1987)

I’m just going to say it. This episode is pretty bad.

The plot is simple enough. Jonathan and Mark are working as cornermen for boxer Morty “Sailor” Zadan (Michael Shaner). Morty coulda been a contendah, but instead his brother Jerry (Robert Miranda) always arranges for Morty to throw his fights. When Morty meets and trains a young fighter named Billy Ryan (Nick Garfield), he also starts an unlikely romance with Billy’s sister, Julia (Jennifer Parsons). The mob demands that Morty to fight Billy. They offer Billy money to throw the fight and Morty has to decide if he wants Billy to follow his example and become a bum.

As I said, it’s a simple plot but the execution is just terrible. Even by the admittedly generous standards of Highway to Heaven, the story and the dialogue is often corny and the performances are pretty much uniformly bad. At no point did I buy the romance between Morty and Julia. For that matter, I really didn’t buy the idea that Julia would be so excited about her younger brother pursuing a career that would mean getting beaten up every few weeks. By it’s nature, Highway to Heaven tends to be an old-fashioned show. But this episode really did feel like one of those old Warner Bros. B-movies from the 30s. Those movies, of course, hold up well as long as they star James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, or George Raft. Unfortunately, none of those folks show up in this episode. Instead, we just got Micahel Shaner portraying a boxer who seems like he’d lose a game of tic tac toe against Lenny from Of Mice and Men.

Jonathan and Mark don’t do much in this episode. They spend most of the story as just observers. That said, this episode does end with Jonathan beating up a bunch of gangsters, smiling because they don’t have the same powers that he has. Keeping in mind that most gangsters probably do deserve to get beaten up, it still didn’t feel like proper angel behavior.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 3.7 and 3.8 “Love and Marriage”

Posted on January 9, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, we’ve got a two-hour episode of Highway to Heaven.

Episode 3.7 and 3.8 “Love and Marriage”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on November 12th, 1986)

It’s Mark and Jonathan’s four-year anniversary!

For four years, they have been traveling around the country and helping people out. Mark is so excited that he makes a cake and decides not to watch the football game so that he and Jonathan can talk about old times.

“I remember the first time I met you,” Mark says at one point.

Later, Jonathan laughs and says that he remembers one really funny adventure they had.

Still later, Mark says, “Remember when Scotty proposed?”

Yay! I thought as I watched all of this unfold. It’s a clip show! This will be easy to review!

However, it turned out that only first 20 minutes of the episode was a clip show. Soon, Mark got a phone call telling him that his niece was getting married and that she wanted Mark to be the head usher. Meanwhile, Jonathan put on his collar and became Rev. Smith, the man who would perform the ceremony.

Unfortunately, not all is well at the wedding rehearsal. When the grandparents of the bride — Clarence (Bill Erwin) and Rose (Mary Jackson) — decide to get a divorce, this leads to the parents of the bride — Frank (Robert Mandan) and Carla (Barbara Stuart) — splitting up as well. Seeing her elders splitting up, Trish Kelly (Anne Marie Howard) decides that there is no way she could marry Brad (Dean Scofield).

It falls to Jonathan and Mark to bring all of the couple back together. Mark invades Clarence’s dreams and shows him how empty his life would have been if he had never married Rose. Jonathan appears to Carla and explains that he’s an angel. He gives Carla a chance to appear to Frank as a totally different woman. Calling herself Ono, Carla dates Frank for a week but Frank eventually tells her that he loves his wife too much to be unfaithful to her. Frank says that dating Ono made him realize how much he loved Carla. It’s a good thing that Carla actually was Ono or Frank probably would have gotten the heck slapped out of him.

Seeing all of the members of her family getting back together inspires Trish to go ahead and give marriage a try. Jonathan performs the wedding but now it’s a triple wedding as the grandparents and their parents join their daughter and renew their vows. Wow, you all, way to hog the spotlight on Trish’s special day.

This episode was a bit too cutesy for its own good. I think if Jonathan and Mark has only been repairing one or two relationships, it would have been fine. But three just felt like showing off and, more importantly, it left the episode feeling a bit overcrowded and overstuffed.

Fortunately, next week’s episode is one that I’ve actually seen before and I can promise you that it’s going to be a huge improvement!

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #66: Desperate Lives (dir by Robert Michael Lewis)

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

YouTube, my old friend, you have failed me.

For the longest time, the 1982 anti-drug melodrama Desperate Lives has been available for viewing on YouTube. I first watched it two years ago, after I read an online article about a scene in which a teenage Helen Hunt takes PCP and jumps through a window. And, when I watched it, I was stunned. I knew that the film was going to be over-the-top and silly, largely because it’s hard to imagine how a film featuring a teenage Helen Hunt taking PCP could be anything other than that. But, even with my experience of watching over the top message movies, nothing could have quite prepared me for Desperate Lives.

So, I figured, for this review, that I’d say a few snarky words about Desperate Lives and then I’d just add something like, “And you can watch it below!” And then I would embed the entire movie and all of y’all could just click on play and watch a movie on the Lens.

Unfortunately, Desperate Lives has been taken off of YouTube. I assume the upload violated some sort of copyright thing. And really, it’s kinda stupid because seriously, Desperate Lives is one of those films that really deserves to be seen for free on YouTube.

Oh well. You can still watch a video of Helen Hunt jumping through that window. The video below also features some additional elements from Desperate Lives.

For instance, you get to see Diana Scarwid playing the angriest high school guidance counselor in the world. Scarwid knows that students like Helen Hunt are using drugs and that her fellow faculty members are turning a blind eye to everything’s that’s happening. From the minute she first appears on screen, Scarwid is shouting at someone and she doesn’t stop screaming until the film ends.

And you also get to see Doug McKeon, playing Helen Hunt’s brother. McKeon goes for a drive with his girlfriend, who has just taken PCP herself. As their car goes flying off a mountain, she says, “Wheeee!”

In the video below, you also get to see that the only reason Helen Hunt used drugs was because her boyfriend begged her to. That’s a scenario that seems to show up in a lot of high school drug films and it’s strange because it’s something that I’ve never actually seen happen or heard about happening in real life. In fact, in real life, most users of hard drugs are actually very happy to not share their supply.

Unfortunately, the video below does not feature any scenes of Sam Bottoms as the world’s most charming drug dealer and that’s a shame because he gives the only good performance in the entire film (sorry, Helen!).

Even worse, the video doesn’t include any scenes from the film’s memorably insane conclusion, in which Scarwid searches every single locker in the school and then interrupts a pep rally so she can set everyone’s stash on fire in the middle of the gym. Making it even better is that all the students are so moved by Scarwid’s final speech that they start tossing all of the drugs that they have on them into the fire.

Which means that the film essentially ends with the entire school getting high off of a huge marijuana bonfire.

No, that scene cannot be found in the video below. But you can find Helen Hunt jumping through a window so enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEpyLzHeozY