Tag Archives: Kim Johnston Ulrich

I Watched Perry Mason: The Case Of The Murdered Madam (1987, Dir. by Ron Satlof)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Former madam Suzanne Domenico (Ann Jillian) attempts to blackmail four rich men who are planning on embezzling money from a bank and is found dead by her husband, Tony, shortly afterwards.  Tony (Vincent Baggetta) is arrested and charged with murdering his wife.  Tony’s older brother used to run around with Della Street (Barbara Hale) and Della is able to get Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) to defend him in court.  Paul Drake, Jr. (William Katt) is brought in to do the investigative legwork.  Once again, Paul falls for a younger woman (Daphne Ashbrook) who will probably never be mentioned again in any of the other movies.

This movie was a little sad because it was obvious that Raymond Burr was not in good health.  He spends most of the movie sitting or moving with crutches.  In the movie, they say that Perry is using crutches because of a skiing accident but looking at Raymond Burr, there’s no way to imagine him skiing.  Burr is still as sharp as ever when asking questions in the courtroom but it’s still clear that he was in pain when he did this movie.  Perry being sidelined does mean that Barbara Hale and William Katt get to do more than usual.  After spending the last few movies constantly getting outrun and smacked around, Katt finally gets to beat someone up in the movie.

The mystery isn’t bad, even though I guessed who the murderer was long before the trial started.  The entire embezzlement scheme comes down to embezzling a few cents a day so that no one will notice.  That’s the same thing they tried to do in Office Space!  Luckily, no one got murdered that time.

Overall, this was a good entry in the Parry Mason movies, especially for those of us who like watching Paul Drake, Jr.  I’m starting to wonder if all of Perry and Della’s friends are going to end up getting accused of murder at some point.  My aunt and I always used to joke about how often Jessica Fletcher’s nephew was accused of murdering someone.  It might be just as dangerous to be a friend of Perry Mason’s!

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 1.20 “The Cocoon”

Posted on 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire show is streaming on Tubi.

This week, Billy Drago learns an important lesson about cheating, greed, and cocoons.

Episode 1.20 “The Cocoon”

(Dir by John Gray, originally aired on April 29th, 1989)

A woman (Kim Ulrich) is involved in a serious traffic accident, one that should have killed her.  Instead, she survives the accident with hardly a scratch but also without her memory (or so she claims).  A greedy police detective named Richard (Billy Drago) is called in when it is discovered that the woman has a good deal of money but no identification on her.  When the woman says that she knows that she’s wealthy, Richard becomes very interested in helping her regain her memory.

Richard’s girlfriend, Sarah (Silvana Gallardo), is a psychic.  Richard brings her to see the woman, hoping that Sarah will have a vision.  When she handles the woman’s comb, Sarah has a vision of the woman in the 1920s, seducing a man who has been missing for over 60 years.  But the woman appears to be in her 20s in both the present and in Sarah’s vision.  Richard suggests that Sarah might be seeing the woman’s grandmother.

Of course, the truth is a bit more complex.  The woman has been alive for centuries, surviving by wrapping her lovers in a cocoon and then feasting off their life force.  The woman is hoping to make Richard her next lover and Richard, being a bit of a sleazeball, is prepared to go along with it.  However, Sarah has a few tricks of her own….

This was an interesting and ambitious episode, one that attempted to tell a very complex story in just 21 minutes and on a very limited budget.  Unfortunately, the show didn’t really have the resources to do this particular story justice but it’s still hard not to admire the imagination involved.  Throughout the episode there are moments that work really well, like a sequence where Sarah has a vision of all of the different costumes that the woman has worn through the centuries.  The episode also ends with an entertaining little twist.  It’s effective, even if the scenes involving the actual spinning of the cocoon fall victim to the show’s low budget.

Billy Drago was a veteran screen bad guy, one who almost always cast as an evil henchman.  (In Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, Kevin Costner memorably threw him off of a roof.)  This episode gives Drago a rare leading role, though Richard is just as amoral and sleazy as the characters for which Drago was best known.  Drago does a good job in the lead, playing Richard as being a not particularly smart guy who is undone by his own cockiness.  If nothing else, it’s impossible not to enjoy seeing him get his comeuppance.

Next week on Monsters …. Adrienne Barbeau dabbles in the magical arts!

I Want My R-TV: Spellcaster (1992, directed by Rafal Zielinski)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Give Charles Band a castle and a D-List celebrity and he’ll give you a movie!

In Spellcaster, which Band produced in 1988 but didn’t release until 1992, the castle is in Italy and there’s not one but three D-list celebrities.  British DJ Richard Blade plays Rex, who is a VJ on R-TV, a cable station that only shows music videos.  (A music station that actually plays music?  Imagine that!)  Bunty Bailey, who was the hot girl in Aha’s Take Me On video, is Cassandra, an alcoholic rock star.  Finally, Adam Ant is Signor Diablo, who owns the castle.

The plot of the movie is that R-TV is hosting a contest where the winners get to go to Diablo’s castle and not only meet Rex and Cassandra but also search for a million dollar check.  The contest winners are a snooty British woman, a sex-obsessed Italian, a sexy French woman, an overweight New Yorker, a blonde vegan, and a brother and a sister who could really use the money.  They are a collection of clichés and none of them are very interesting, sympathetic, or smart.  Not even the Italian notices that their host is named Mr. Devil.

The search for the money is a bust because the guests keep dying.  For instance, the overweight New Yorker eats a stuffed pig, turns into a pig himself, and then gets shot by the snooty British woman, who just happened to bring a rifle with her because all snooty Brits enjoy hunting.  Another person ends up getting eaten by a chair that has a lion’s head carved into it.  When the lion comes to life and chomps down its jaws, the teeth are obviously foam rubber.  It all has to do with Signor Diablo’s crystal ball, where he’s building a collection of souls.

With the casting Adam Ant and Bunty Bailey, Spellcaster tried to be a horror movie for the MTV generation but it came out several years too late.  By the time Spellcaster was released, grunge had taken over MTV and both Adam Ant and the Take Me On video seemed like relics from another age.  The film itself is a mostly dull affair, one that will be best appreciated by people who are nostalgic for the type of bad movies that used to show up on late night cable.