Larry Thomas | Through the Shattered Lens

It’s not easy being a Clown.

The Clowns, of course, is the name of the band that’s at the center of this sleazy slasher film. The Clowns (who were played by a real-life band called The Names) wear clown make-up and sing songs about how they want to chop up the members of their audience and “send you home in a box.” When Clown groupies start to turn up dead during a 24-hour Clown orgy, the police suspect that the Clowns are the murderers and they send an undercover cop to one of their performances. It turns out that the Clowns are innocent because the murders continue even while they’re performing on stage. But if the Clowns aren’t the killers, who is?

Terror on Tour is one of the many zero budget extravaganzas to come out in the early 1980s, trying to capitalize on the slasher boom and the popularity of bands like Alice Cooper and KISS. It’s not every good, mostly because the members of The Names couldn’t act worth a damn and the film is so badly lit and the sound is so poorly recorded that watching the movie will make you want to sleep long before it makes you want to rock. You won’t remember the name of a single member of the band but you will remember the groupie who says, “This cocaine is making me horny,” with all the passion of Kramer saying, “These pretzels are making me thirsty” in that Woody Allen movie. Speaking of Seinfeld, Larry Thomas plays the band’s manager. Years later, Thomas would receive an Emmy nomination for playing the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld. He would also go on the imdb and post an apology for having appeared in Terror on Tour. Larry, everyone has to start somewhere! And you were by far the best actor in the movie. You didn’t look straight at the camera once.

The best scene is one member of the band shouting, “I need a joint!” until someone brings him one. That’s the advantage of being a star, I guess.

If there’s an Eye Rolling Hall of Fame, the recent Lifetime film Mommy, I Didn’t Do It definitely has earned inclusion.

Seriously, this film was full of some championship-level eye rolling. It’s a courtroom drama and a murder mystery. Ellen Plainview (Danica McKellar) is an attorney whose teenager daughter, Julie (Paige Searcy) is on trail for murdering one of her former teachers. When Julie is first arrested, Ellen rolls her eyes. When Ellen visits Julie in jail and explains that they don’t have the money to bail her out, Julie rolls her eyes and sighs. You can just tell she’s thinking, “My God, mom, you’re so lame!” When Detective Hamer (Jaleel White) explains why all the evidence points to Julie, Ellen again rolls her eyes and Detective Hamer counters her by rolling his own eyes. When Ellen approaches the dead man’s wife (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), the wife not only rolls her eyes but narrows them as well.

It gets even better once the trial begins. The prosecutor, Kimberly Bains (Jen Lilley), rolls her eyes whenever Ellen makes an objection. Whenever a witness testifies that Julie was obsessed with the victim, Ellen rolls her eyes and then Julie rolls her eyes at her mother rolling her eyes and then Kimberly rolls her eyes at both of them. When the weird boy who is obsessed with her tries to save Julie by confessing to the murder, the amount of eye rolling probably sets a world record. In the real world, of course, this type of courtroom behavior gets people cited for contempt but, in the world of Lifetime, it’s just the way that people communicate.

Don’t get me wrong. The film itself did not make me roll my eyes. Yes, it was totally implausible and it was full of silly scenes but it’s a Lifetime film. That’s what we expect Lifetime. Even more importantly, that’s what we want from Lifetime. When it comes to a quality Lifetime film, there’s really only two rules: 1) the more ludicrous, the better and 2) the more melodramatic, the more entertaining.

While the film’s story might be ludicrous, the mother-daughter relationship between Ellen and Julie felt very real and both Danica McKellar and Paige Searcy gave sincere and believable performances as mother and daughter, which went a long way towards explaining all the eye rolling. Seriously, when I was Julie Plainview’s age, I rolled my eyes for 24 hours a day and I wasn’t even accused of murder.

Mommy, I Didn’t Do It is actually a sequel to a previous Lifetime movie, The Wrong Woman. In that one, Ellen was wrongly accused of murder and was arrested by the same idiot detective who arrests her daughter in Mommy, I Didn’t Do It. (If nothing else, these two films show how vindictive authority figures can be.) As long as this is going to be a franchise, I’d like to suggest that the next installment could feature Eric Roberts, recreating his role from Stalked By My Doctor and its sequel. Maybe he could treat Julie while Ellen defend him in court.

Seriously, it sounds like a great idea to me.