John Bennett Perry | Through the Shattered Lens

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 the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1987’s The Last Fling! It can be viewed on YouTube and Tubi.

Phillip Reed (John Ritter) is an attorney who has never gotten married, despite all of his friends trying to set him up with single women. Even his law partner (Scott Bakula) worries about how Phillip’s love life is going. Phillip’s married best friends (Paul Sand and Kate Zentall) think that Phillip is scared of commitment. Phillip’s mother (Paddi Edwards) thinks he’s gay. Joanne Preston (Shannon Tweed) enjoys sleeping with him but she owns a lot of cats that make him sneeze. And since he’s played by John Ritter, you better believe that every sneeze is more dramatic than the last.

Gloria Franklin (Connie Selleca) is engaged to marry Jason Elliot (John Bennett Perry) but she worries that her rigidly controlled lifestyle has caused her to miss out on enjoying her time as a single person. When she finds out that Jason is going to go to Las Vegas for a wild bachelor party, she decides to have one last fling of her own.

Phillip and Gloria meet each other at the zoo. (Again, because Phillip is played by John Ritter, there are multiple shots of him making monkey noises while looking at the gorillas.) Gloria tells Phillip that her name is Marsha Lyons. Their meeting leads to Phillip and Gloria/Marsha spending the weekend in Mexico together. (A very young, pre-Saved By The Bell Mario Lopez shows up as the kid who gives them their renal car.) Despite an unseen mishap that causes their car to catch on fire, Phillip and Gloria spend a romantic night at a villa. When Phillip wakes up the next morning, he’s convinced that he’s finally found the woman with whom he wants to spend the rest of his life. However, Gloria is already gone. She leaves behind a video confession, in which she tells Phillip that she’s going to be getting married.

Phillip returns to Los Angeles, determined to track down the mysterious Gloria and stop that wedding.

The Last Fling is an uneven romantic comedy. It starts out as an amiable and sweetly funny film, with both Connie Sellecca and John Ritter giving likable performances. But once Phillip returns from Mexico and starts searching for Gloria, it gets a bit too manic for its own good. Instead of being a funny movie about two human beings looking for love, it instead becomes a live-action cartoon with John Ritter running from one location to another while being chased by Gloria’s husband-to-be. The movie ends up getting so frantic that it actually becomes a bit annoying, which is a shame considering how things started. By the end of the movie, Phillip is so obsessive that it’s hard not to feel that Gloria would be better off just staying single and maybe spending the next weekend in Mexico with Scott Bakula.

The director of The Last Fling played Buzz in Rebel Without A Cause. Fortunately, no one plays chicken in this movie.

Long before he found fame playing Deputy Hawk on Twin Peaks, Michael Horse made his film debut in one of the most notorious box office flops of all time, The Legend of the Lone Ranger.

Michael Horse played Tonto, the young Comanche who rescues his childhood friend, John Reid (Klinton Spilsbury), and nurses him back to health after Reid has been attacked and left for dead by the notorious outlaw, Butch Cavendish (Christopher Lloyd). Reid was a civilian, accompanying a group of Texas Rangers led by his older brother, Dan (John Bennett Perry). When Cavendish attacked, John was the only survivor. John wants to avenge his brother’s death but first, Tonto is going to have to teach him how to shoot a six-shooter and how to ride his new horse, Silver. Finally, John is ready to don the mask and becomes the Lone Ranger. It’s just in time, because Cavendish has kidnapped President Grant (Jason Robards).

An even bigger flop than the more recent Lone Ranger film starring Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp, The Legend of the Lone Ranger failed for several reasons. For one thing, the film has a major identity crisis. The violence is not for kids but most of the dialogue and the performances are. For another thing, it takes forever for John Reid to actually put on the mask and become the Lone Ranger. By the time the William Tell Overture is heard, the movie is nearly over.

It was made to capitalize on the same type of nostalgia that previously made Superman a hit and, just as Superman introduced the world to Christopher Reeve, The Legend of the Lone Ranger introduced the world to a football player turned actor, named Klinton Spilsbury. Unfortunately, the world did not want to meet Klinton Spilsbury, whose blank-faced performance was so bad that James Keach was brought in to dub over all of his dialogue. Spilsbury did not help himself by reportedly acting like a diva during the shooting, demanding constant rewrites, and getting into bar brawls offset. Of the two actors who made their screen debuts in The Legend of the Lone Ranger, Michael Horse has worked again. Klinton Spilsbury has not.

When The Legend of the Lone Ranger went into production, the film’s producers made the incredibly boneheaded move of getting a court injunction barring Clayton Moore (who had played the role on TV) from wearing his Lone Ranger uniform is public. Since the semi-retired Moore was living off of the money that he made appearing as the Lone Ranger at country fairs and children’s hospitals, this move was a public relations disaster. (For his part, Moore filed a counter suit and continued to make appearances, now wearing wrap-around sunglasses instead of his mask.) Moore refused to appear in a cameo and spent much of 1981 speaking out against the film.

Finally, the main reason that Legend of The Lone Ranger flopped was because it opened on the same Friday as a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The rest is history.