Love on the Lens: Amy Fisher: My Story (dir by Bradford May)

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor Amy Fisher!

In the 1993 made-for-TV movie, Amy Fisher: My Story, Amy Fisher (played by Noelle Parker) is an insecure teenager growing up on Long Island. She goes to high school. She has a boyfriend. She has lots of girl friends. She has a part-time job. She has a car. Everything should be perfect but it’s not. For one thing, her creepy father (played by veteran Canadian character actor Lawrence Dane) likes to come into her room while she’s trying to sleep and sit on the edge of her bed. Her mother (Kate Lynch) refuses to believe that there’s anything strange about the way her husband treats their daughter.

When Amy and her father take her car to the local auto body shop, she meets the handsome and slick Joey Buttafuoco (Ed Marinaro). Amy is polite to Joey but Joey takes one look at Amy and he smiles in a way that immediately lets us know that he’s not to be trusted. Soon, he’s going out of his way to spend time with Amy and eventually, he seduces her in the house that he shares with his wife, Mary Jo (played by Check It Out‘s Kathleen Laskey). Soon, Joey and Amy are checking into cheap motels together. Amy think that she’s in love with Joey and Joey says that he loves her (though only when he wants her to do something).

Joey eventually coerces Amy into becoming an escort, enjoying the stories of her spending time with other older men. And yet, when Amy follows his orders and gets a gym membership, Joey freaks out when she attracts the attention of a man who is close to her own age. For her part, Amy starts to wonder whether she and Joey will ever truly be together. Joey insinuates that his wife would have to die before he could even think of marrying Amy Fisher. Amy happens to have a friend who has a gun….

Amy Fisher: My Story largely plays out in flashbacks and is narrated by Amy as she sits in her jail cell. It’s based on the same true story that inspired Casualties of Love, with the main difference being that this is Amy’s version of the story. And it must be said that Amy’s version, with Amy as an insecure and abused teenager being groomed by a manipulative sociopath, feels considerably more plausible than Casualties of Love‘s portrayal of Joey Buttafuoco as being the misunderstood Saint of Long Island. Working to Amy Fisher: My Story‘s advantage is that it doesn’t let Amy off the hook. Ultimately, she’s the one who decides to knock on Mary Jo’s front door and then shoot her when she answers. Amy is not portrayed as being a saint but she’s not a one-dimensional psycho either. Instead, she’s a naive and emotionally damaged girl who is so desperate to feel loved that she allows Joey to push her over the edge.

Amy Fisher: My Story is a well-done look at a sordid story. Ed Marinaro is appropriately sleazy and macho as Joey. Noelle Parker gives a quiet but strong performance as Amy Fisher, playing her as someone who knows that she’s being manipulated but who still finds herself clinging to the smallest shred of hope that she’s not. While the film never quite transcends its tabloid origins, it still provides a worthy reminder that there’s always a human behind the headlines.

(Canadian) Guilty Pleasure No. 49: Heavenly Bodies (dir by Lawrence Dane)

Posted on October 24, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“She’s reaching the top …. with everything she’s got!”

That’s the tag line of the 1984 Canadian film, Heavenly Bodies. It’s a perfectly vapid tagline for an entertainingly vapid movie. It was on TCM last night and I just finished watching it. It takes a lot to get me out of my horror film habit in October but how could I resist a movie about Canadian gym rivalries?

Now, even though this isn’t a horror film, it is a Canadian film from the 80s which means that it features a lot of performers who will be familiar to fans of old school slasher films. For instance, the film stars Cynthia Dale, who was also in the original My Bloody Valentine. Cynthia plays Samantha, an administrative assistant who quits her job and opens up her own independent gym, Heavenly Bodies. Samantha is an aerobic dance instructor, perhaps the best in all of Ontario. Samantha is also a single mother but there’s no better way to find a lover than to teach him aerobics.

Heavenly Bodies was also directed by a veteran of Canadian exploitation, Lawrence Dane. Remember Happy Birthday To Me? He plays the father in that movie. I’d love to know the story of what led to Lawrence Dane not only directing but apparently also helping to write the script for a movie about an independent health club. I mean, to go from working with David Cronenberg and winning Genie Awards to directing Heavenly Bodies seems like quite a career trajectory. As a sidenote, how much more interesting would Heavenly Bodies be if it had been directed David Cronenberg? I imagine that all the leg cramps would be a bit more graphic.

Samantha is selected to host her own exercise show on Canadian TV and a bigger Canadian gym decides that the only way to deal with this upstart is to destroy Heavenly Bodies by buying out their lease …. or something. To be honest, I really couldn’t follow half the plot of Heavenly Bodies. I just know that there was a lot of dancing and lot of exercising and a lot of shots of Samantha walking around Toronto. The film came out a year after Flashdance and all of the scenes of Samantha walking around the city are basically filmed in exactly the same way as the shots of Jennifer Beals walking around Pittsburgh. (There’s even a scene where Samantha stands in front of a poster for Flashdance, trying to convince people to join her gym.) Whereas you kind of admired the way that Jennifer Beals handled herself on the dangerous streets of Pittsburgh, you never really worry about Samantha because …. well, it’s Toronto. As I watched the film, I started to think about the fact that Canada consistently sends its best actors to the U.S. while those of us in the States consistently send our bad movies up north. I’m not sure if that’s really a fair trade.

Anyway, the two gyms decide to settle their differences with an exercise marathon that is televised on Canadian TV. (I’m going to assume that the film takes place in-between hockey seasons.) Basically, the exercise marathon is one of those things where you have two teams and everyone just keeps exercising until they drop. The last person standing is the winner and their gym gets …. I don’t know, bragging rights? I mean, I’m not even how they were able to convince anyone to put an exercise marathon on TV. I guess it was an 80s thing.

Can you guess who wins the exercise marathon?

Listen, Heavenly Bodies is technically a bad movie but I still like it because there’s a lot of dancing and everyone in the cast is so enthusiastic about whatever it is that they think they’re doing. There’s something to be said for enthusiasm. Add to that, the exercise marathon just has to be seen to believed. This is a film of the 80s and its Canadian to boot so how can it not be a guilty pleasure of sorts?

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Horror Film Review: Happy Birthday To Me (dir by J. Lee Thompson)

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“John will never eat shish kebab again!” announces the poster for the 1981 Canadian slasher film, Happy Birthday To Me.

Happy Birthday To Me is famous for three things. One of those things is the poster above, which was apparently so controversial that it actually led to the film being banned in some countries. That said, it’s a brilliant poster, one that probably belongs in the Film Poster Hall of Fame. If I had been alive and old enough to sneak into the movies in 1981, that poster would have drawn me into the theater.

The other interesting thing about the poster is that no one in the movie is named John. There is a shish kebab scene, of course. But it happens to a guy named Steven, not to anyone named John. Of course, the poster also says that Steven likes to ride a motorcycle but, in the movie, the motorcycle rider is a pervy French-Canadian named Etienne. Maybe the film’s producers feared that American audiences would not be willing to watch a movie featuring a character named Etienne. (They were probably right, by the way. Happy Birthday To Me came out decades before Degrassi: The Next Generation taught America that it has nothing to fear from the Canadians.)

As for what else Happy Birthday To Me is famous for — well, first of all, there’s the actual shish kebab scene itself. As cringe-inducing as it may appear to be on the poster, it’s even more disturbing in the actual film. Interestingly enough, there’s not a lot of blood in the scene. In fact, it’s one of the few scenes in Happy Birthday To Me to not be drenched in blood. However, there is a lot of gagging and gurgling and the sounds are all the more disturbing because they’re taking place off-camera. Making it even more unsettling is that Steven (played by Matt Craven, who has since become a distinguished character actor) is one of the few likable characters in the movie. In a movie full of snobs, pervs, and weirdos, Steven is the guy who is always encouraging people to stop fighting, make love, and gamble.

Finally, Happy Birthday To Me is famous for not making a damn bit of sense.

Actually, to be fair, the movie does make sense up until the final ten minutes or so. Up until that point, it’s simply been a well-made slasher film, albeit an above average example of the genre. There’s a killer on the loose, killing students at Crawford Academy. All of the victims are members of the Top Ten, an exclusive clique of rich and spoiled teens. (Interestingly enough, not every member of the Top Ten is killed. In fact, some of the people who you are sure are due to be killed somehow manage to survive.) One member of the Top Ten, Ginny (Melissa Sue Anderson), should be excited about her upcoming birthday party but instead, she is haunted by flashbacks to a car accident and the brain surgery that she was forced to undergo afterward. (Footage of actual brain surgery was used in the film.) Her father (Lawrence Dane) is clueless. Her therapist (Glenn Ford) insists that Ginny needs to move on with her life. But Ginny can’t escape the feeling that something is not right, especially when all of her friends start to disappear.

As I said, it all makes sense up until the final ten minutes or so of the film. That’s when the film produces a twist that is so out-of-nowhere and nonsensical that you cannot help but admire the film’s audacity. I’m not going to spoil the twist, other than to say that it makes no sense and I absolutely loved it. From what I’ve read, it appears that the twist ending was almost literally made up on the spot and it’s just so weird that it elevates the entire movie.

Of the many slasher films that came out in the early 1980s, Happy Birthday To Me is one of the best. It’s a classic that need not ever be remade. (I doubt any remake could match the audacity of the original’s finale.) Nicely acted, intelligently directed, and batshit insane when it needed to be, Happy Birthday To Me is an October essential!

More Pure 80s Hokum: The Park Is Mine (1985, directed by Steven Hilliard Stern)

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Jedadiah Leland

The_Park_Is_Mine_VideoCover Tommy Lee Jones is Mitch, a troubled Vietnam veteran who has just lost his job and who can not convince his ex-wife to let him spend any time with his kids. One day, Mitch receives a letter from Mike, a friend who has recently committed suicide. In the letter, Mike explains that he has been stashing weapons and explosives in Central Park. Before he discovered that he had cancer, Mike had been planning to take over the park as a symbolic protest against government bureaucracy. Now that Mike is dead, it is now Mitch’s job to declare, “The park is mine!”

When Mitch takes over the park, he announces that he does not want to hurt anyone. Instead, he wants everyone in New York to spend some time to thinking about their lives. “There’s a lot of people like me, who don’t feel like they have any control over their lives,” he says, “Think about how you treat people and how you want to be treated.” Meanwhile, he will be camping out in the park for 72 hours and anyone who tries to come after him runs the risk of getting shot or blown up. Then he orders everyone to vote for Bernie Sanders and make America great again. Or at least he would if this film had been made today, instead of in 1985.

Deputy Mayor Dix (Peter Dvorsky) is so evil that he makes Ghostbusters‘s Walter Peck look reasonable. Dix is personally offended that Mitch has taken over Central Park. He is so offended that he is even willing to first call out the National Guard and then hire foreign mercenaries to sneak into the park and track Mitch down.

Reporter Valerie Weaver (Helen Shaver) also sneaks into the park so that she can interview Mitch. When Mitch captures her, he shouts at her, “GET NEKKID!” No, it’s not that type of movie. Mitch just wants to make sure that she’s not carrying any weapons on her. (The Park Is Mine was made for HBO. Even in the 80s, HBO understood the importance of getting nekkid.)

One of my favorite things about The Park Is Mine is that, after he goes to all the trouble to paint his face and dress up in camouflage, Mitch still spends the entire movie wearing a blue Yankees cap that would make him an easy target for anyone with a scope.

The Park Is Still Mine

My other favorite thing is that, after Mitch asks everyone to think about how they treat people, a crowd of people gathers outside the park. When a reporter interviews them, a burly man with a hockey mullet and dressed in denim steps up and says, in a perfect Canadian accent, “My name is Elton Costanza. I’m from Queens!”

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I’m not sure if Elton Costanza is meant to be related to George Costanza. He does look like he could be a distant cousin.

The rest of the film’s depiction of New York City is about as plausible as Elton’s accent. For a film taking place in New York in the 80s, the streets are too clean and the people are too friendly. Even when that crowd shows up to support Mitch, they are the most polite crowd that anyone could hope for. That may be because. though The Park Is Mine takes place in New York, it was filmed in Toronto.

The Park is Mine is both thoroughly implausible, totally heavy handed, and stupidly entertaining. Tommy Lee Jones is one of the few actors who can actually sell a line like, “The park is mine!” and Yaphet Kotto provides good support as a policeman who is sympathetic to Mitch. Peter Dvorsky is all too believable as the ultimate example of heartless bureaucracy. The most interesting thing about The Park Is Mine is that it comes down, without a hint of ambiguity, on the side of a domestic terrorist. That probably would not be allowed to happen today. In fact, the entire film feels like a relic of a past age, a celebration of an individualistic philosophy that America once embraced but, ever since the trauma of 911, has been in the process of abandoning. If Mitch was unhappy with America in the 80s, imagine how he would feel about the Patriot Act, NSA spying, too big to fail bailouts, and campus safe spaces.

Like Let’s Get Harry, The Park Is Mine is pure 80s hokum that deserves a nostalgic DVD release.

Hopefully, one with Tommy Lee Jones providing commentary.

The Park Is Definitely Mine