Tag Archives: Lucinda Jenney

Brad reviews NEXT DOOR (1994), a “neighbor from Hell” film starring James Woods and Randy Quaid!

Posted on by Bradley Crain

This sitcom looking picture is not a good indicator of the dark places this movie will go!

NEXT DOOR (1994) is a dark suburban satire that introduces us to college professor Matt Coler (James Woods), his lovely wife Karen (Kate Capshaw), and their son Bucky, who have recently moved out to the suburbs. As the movie begins, Matt, Karen and even Bucky seem to be slightly obsessing over their next-door neighbors, Lenny and Marci Benedetti (Randy Quaid and Lucinda Jenney). For one, Lenny and Marci enjoy engaging in sexual intercourse on their backyard lawn furniture within view of each of the Coler family members. That’s quite awkward, but more irritatingly, Lenny insists on constantly watering his front yard near Matt’s property, which is having an extremely damaging effect on Matt and Karen’s beloved azaleas. Invited over to the Benedetti’s house for a cookout, Matt and Karen hope to get to know their neighbors a little better, as well as make a polite request of Lenny to not water the area near the boundary of their yards quite so much. We soon find out that Lenny, who works at the local meat packing plant, is loud, obnoxious, smarter than he looks, and seems to have a really big chip on his shoulder towards Matt, who he doesn’t see as being much of a man. He even tells Karen that her husband is a child, and that’s why he went into teaching rather than getting “a real job.” This upsets Karen so she tells Matt it’s time to leave, but before going, they ask Lenny not to water the part of his yard near their flowers so much. That night, Lenny moves the sprinkler even closer to Matt’s yard, which puts the final death knell in the azaleas. Very annoyed, but not wanting to go too far, Matt gets even by spraying Lenny’s outdoor patio furniture with a lot of water as a prank. Lenny doesn’t handle Matt’s prank very well, and this is where things begin getting out of hand, igniting a full-blown feud between the two men. Soon the annoyances of wet furniture and dead flowers give way to outright horror involving poisoned family pets, police investigations, attempted sexual assault, and even attempted murder!

NEXT DOOR, which is a made for Showtime original, starts out as an amusing and entertaining film involving innocent pranks between James Woods’ meek teacher and Randy Quaid’s boorish butcher. As the intensity of the feud picks up between the men, and the retaliations become more and more sinister, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor as it goes to places that aren’t funny at all. The story seems to be trying to make a statement about the class divide, the survival of the fittest, and the danger that lurks behind the picket fences and in the backyards of the innocent looking neighborhoods around us. It does that job well, as I certainly sensed the real danger that the more “civilized” man found himself in when he came up against a man who didn’t really concern himself with societal norms. I have to give a lot of credit to Randy Quaid’s performance as Lenny for making me feel that way. He is simply a force of nature, and his portrayal of the beer guzzling, opinionated, blue collar bully is excellent in its unhingement! Sadly, I’ve known quite a few people who acted way too much like Lenny for my comfort. James Woods is also excellent as the somewhat timid, intelligent college professor who keeps thinking he can talk his way out of this predicament. We know how intense James Woods can be in his best roles, but he’s quite different here as the man who tries to remain reasonable until the very end of the film when he’s finally forced to take a stand for his family’s safety. He doesn’t have the showy role here, but I can definitely identify with his character, as that would be me in this situation. Kate Capshaw and Lucinda Jenney are both appealing as the suffering wives, providing some good support and wit to the proceedings, but this show belongs to the men.

NEXT DOOR is a true horror film as far as I’m concerned, because if I found myself in this kind of situation with my own neighbor, I would consider it a nightmare. There have been a couple of times in my own life where I have found myself in situations with a neighbor that made me uncomfortable. One of those times involved our next-door neighbor driving across the boundary between their yard and ours and then taking our driveway out to the main road instead of using their own, less maintained driveway. This really bothered my wife as they had never asked if they could do it, and it had practically made a “path” that looked like a road at the boundary. Since it bothered my wife, we ended up having a polite conversation with our neighbors, they understood our concerns, and we worked out a plan that worked for all of us. A different time, however, one of our neighbors across the road left their pitbull out and it attacked our small dog in our own yard. It almost killed our dog, requiring her to have emergency surgery from our veterinarian to save her leg, and it also led to high vet bills. Our neighbors refused to discuss the situation with us, and being from West Virginia, my wife wanted us to take the situation to more extreme levels, including getting local law enforcement involved. In a situation like this, you have to truly consider how far you want to take a situation and then be prepared for the whatever events could follow. There’s a lot of unknown, and it’s pretty scary to be honest with you.

Ultimately, I would have to admit that I didn’t really enjoy NEXT DOOR very much, but I did find it fascinating. I appreciated the great performances of Woods and Quaid, but the movie made me very uncomfortable. If my discomfort was director Tony Bill’s (MY BODYGUARD, FIVE CORNERS, FLYBOYS) goal, it certainly worked. I just think that the farcical nature of the black humor at the beginning didn’t quite mesh with the dark and disturbing elements at the end. Or maybe it just took me places I wasn’t really prepared to go. Either way, it’s still an interesting relic of the 90’s made-for-premium-cable-TV movie. You never knew where those movies were headed! If you’re interested, as of this writing, it’s available for streaming on Tubi.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 4.13 “Vote of Confidence”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show can be purchased on Prime!

This week, Crockett and Tubbs are not looking for bull semen.

Episode 4.13 “Vote of Confidence”

(Dir by Randy Roberts, originally aired on February 12th, 1988)

After spending last week trying to retrieve a cannister of bull semen, this episode finds Crockett, Tubbs, and Switek actually doing Vice work for once.  At the start of this episode, they stop a train that doubles as a rolling bordello.  They arrest a man named Tom Pierce (Larry Pine), a congressman who just happens to be running for governor!

(Tubbs thinks that Pierce has some good ideas.  Crockett doesn’t believe in voting.  Try to get away with that on a television show in today’s hyperpartisan climate.)

Tubbs and Crockett are frustrated when the district attorney declines to prosecute Pierce.  The D.A. says that they can’t prove that Pierce was actually on the train to hook up with a prostitute.  He could have just been passing out campaign literature.  Crockett and Tubbs are outraged, wondering why the prostitutes should be arrested but not the people who keep them in business.  Crockett and Tubbs see it as another example of the rich and powerful being let off the hook and they’re probably right about that.

Still, Pierce’s campaign is rocked by the news of his arrest and, when he withdraws from the election, Internal Affairs investigates to make sure that Crockett and Tubbs didn’t set him up.  While Crockett and Tubbs are definitely innocent, they still suspect that someone may have indeed set Pierce up.  When Pierce disappears, they wonder if maybe he’s been abducted or murdered.  Their investigation leads them to a notorious political prankster (Barry Lynch) and a shady press operative (Jonathan Hadary).

This episode was apparently based on the same scandal that, decades later, would inspire The Front Runner.  It was an improvement on last week’s but then again, anything would have been an improvement on last week’s episode.  Just the fact that Crockett and Tubbs were actually doing police work as opposed to stifling laughs every time someone mentioned “bull semen” guaranteed that this episode would shine compared to last week’s episode.  On the plus side, this episode features a return of the cynical Crockett and Tubbs that we all know and love.  On the negative side, the story itself is so bland that it fades from the memory as soon as the episode ends.  This episode was competently done but bland.  That’s the problem with episodes that are meant to be “ripped from the headlines.”  Headlines eventually fade.

Retro Television Review: Homicide: Life On The Street 3.3 “Extreme Unction”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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 Homicide: Life On The Street, which aired from 1993 to 1999, on NBC!  It  can be viewed on Peacock.

This week, the White Glove Killer is discovered.

Episode 3.3 “Extreme Unction”

(Dir by Keith Gordon, originally aired on October 28th, 1994)

For all the hours that Pembleton and the other detectives put in and for all the motives that were considered and the suspects were interviewed, the murderer of Katherine Goodrich and two other women is captured not through deductive brilliance but because she herself enters the police station.

When Pamela Wilgis (Lucinda Jenney) first enters the station, she claims to have just witnessed two men dumping the third victim.  Pembleton is dismissive of her until she mentions the white gloves, a detail that has not been released to the public.  While Pembleton talks to her, the other detectives check out Pamela’s apartment and discover 12 sets of white cotton gloves hanging in her bathroom.  Pamela is the murderer.

When Pembleton asks Pamela about the gloves, Pamela suddenly starts speaking in an Irish accent.  Later, she starts speaking like an angry and rebellious child.  Later still, she reverts to being a wide-eyed innocent who says she had no idea how she ended up in the interrogation room.  Pembleton is convinced that she’s faking her alternate personalities but, despite his best efforts, he can never get her to actually confess that she committed the murders.

From the start, Homicide has emphasizes the role of luck in solving murders.  The majority of the show’s murders are solved precisely because someone thought they could outsmart the police or because they made a very obvious error.  For all of Pembleton’s strengths in the Box, his interrogation technique works best when he’s dealing with someone who doesn’t understand how the system works.  Pamela, on the other hand, obviously understands what he’s trying to do.  She knows the system and she knows how to game it.  Pamela does eventually confess but not Pembleton.  Instead, she does an interview with the obnoxious reported played by Tony Todd, blaming her crimes on the abuse she suffered as a child and her dissociative disorder.  Pembleton’s pride is hurt but he also finds himself struggling with his faith.  How can Pamela, after killing three saintly women, now avoid paying for her crimes?  Even with the thrilling interrogation scene between Pembleton and Pamela and the excellent performances of Andre Braugher and Lucinda Jenney, it’s all feels a bit anticlimactic.  But it also feels appropriate for the world in which Homicide takes place.

This episode also wrapped up a few other plotlines.  Munch, Bayliss, and Lewis finally own their bar.  Good for them.  I’m not really a bar person or a drinker but I probably would have enjoyed visiting the Waterfront whenever Munch was working the bar.  Even more importantly, Felton returned to his mentally unstable wife.  And again, that’s a good thing if just because I was getting sick of listening to Felton whine about his marriage.  So was Kay.

This episode was effective enough.  The scenes between Andre Braugher and Lucinda Jenney alone made the episode memorable.  At the same time, as I watched, it occurred to me that, if this episode had aired during the first season, the White Glove Murders probably never would have been solved.  If Adena Watson had died during the third season, one can be sure Bayliss would have gotten a confession out Risley Tucker.

Next week, we find out why Detective Crosetti has yet to return from Atlantic City.

January True Crime: Shoot First: A Cop’s Vengeance (dir by Mel Damski)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Made for television in 1991 and possessing a rather unwieldy title, Shoot First: A Cop’s Vengeance tells the story of two friends in San Antonio in the early 80s.

Farrell Tucker (Dale Midkiff) and Stephen Smith (Alex McArthur) are both cops.  They entered the police academy together, they graduated as a part of the same class, and they both hope to be partners while working to keep the streets of San Antonio safe.  Tucker is laid back and friendly and not one to worry too much about following all of the regulations.  Stephen Smith, on the other hand, is uptight and, at first, by-the-book.  He grew up in a poverty-stricken, crime-riddled neighborhood and it left a definite impression on him.  He hates crime and criminals but what he really can’t stand is a justice system that seems to be more concerned with the victimizers than with the victims.  Tucker and Smith enjoy spending their time together, drinking at the local cop bars and practicing their shooting on the weekends.  Tucker’s not much of a shot, whereas Smith is a sharpshooter who rarely misses.

At first, no one notices or even cares that some of San Antonio’s less upstanding citizens are getting gunned down in the streets.  But when Smith somehow manages to be first on the scene to a series of shootings, it gets the attention of Internal Affairs.  With Sergeant Nicholas (Terry O’Quinn) investigating the possibility of a cop-turned-vigilante and Chief Hogan (G.D. Spradlin) announcing that no one is above the law, Smith starts to get a bit paranoid and Tucker is forced to consider that his friend could very well be a murderer.

And, of course, Tucker’s right!  The first scene features Tucker confronting Smith and then the majority of the film is told in flashback.  Even if not for that narrative choice, one could guess at Smith’s guilt just from the title of the film.  When Shoot First: A Cop’s Vengeance was released on home video, the title was changed to Vigilante Cop, which made Smith’s guilt even more obvious.  Finally, some viewers will guess that Smith is guilty because the film is based on a true story.  Officer Stephen Smith actually did go on a killing spree, gunning down men who he felt had escaped the law and even sending threatening letters to his chief when the latter announced that vigilante activity would not be tolerated.  Officer Stephen Smith went from being a follower of the rules to someone who attempted to write his own rules.  It’s an interesting story for anyone who wants to google it.

As for the film, it’s adequate without being particularly memorable.  Alex McArthur and Dale Midkiff both give good performance as Tucker and Smith and the cast is full of talented people like Terry O’Quinn, G.D. Spradlin, Bruce McGill, and Lynn Lowry.  Observant viewers will even notice a long-haired Jeremy Davies, showing up for a split-second.  I liked the performance of Loryn Locklin, as the waitress who marries Smith and then discovers that her charming husband actually has some very serious issues.  The main problem with the film is that the story moves a bit too slowly for its own good and some of the Texas accents were more than a little dodgy.  If you’re looking for an action film, this won’t be for you, though the shootings are surprisingly graphic for something that was made for television.  Shoot First: A Cop’s Vengeance is a rather routine telling of an interesting story.

Thinner (1996, directed by Tom Holland)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Billy Halleck (Robert John Burke, in a fat suit) is a morbidly obese attorney who might be destined to die of a heart attack but who definitely will not be serving jail time despite running over an old gypsy woman. After a corrupt judge and crooked cop, both of whom are friends of Billy’s, conspire to get Halleck acquitted, all three of them are cursed by the woman’s husband (Michael Constnatine). The judge turns into a lizard while the cop is covered in sores. Halleck, however, finally starts to lose weight! At first, he’s happy. He’s finally getting thin and all he had to do was run over an old woman! But then, he realizes that he’s never going to stop getting thinner and he’s going to just waste away.

Thinner is based on a novel by Richard Bachman, who was actually Stephen King. Like most of the Bachman books, Thinner is nastier than most of the King books. Billy is a terrible character and he deserves exactly what’s coming to him. The book is not usually listed as being one of King’s better efforts and the movie doesn’t get much love either. I’ve always liked Thinner, though. It’s like a really good episode of Tales From The Crypt, with Billy paying the price for his sins. Billy actually gets several chances to redeem himself but, because he’s such a terrible character, he keeps messing them up. Instead of begging for forgiveness, Billy hires a gangster (Joe Mantegna) to try to take out the gypsies. Even when the dead woman’s husband gives Billy a chance to escape his fate with some shred of dignity, Billy would rather go after his perceived enemies. Many bad things happen to Billy but he brings them all on himself. Even when it becomes obvious that he’s under a curse, he still thinks he can plea bargain his way out of it.  He’s a lawyer, through and through.

Thinner is frequently cartoonish and broad but that works for the story that it’s telling. Robert John Burke’s performance may not have many shadings to it but again, it’s right for the story that’s being told.  My favorite performance in the film was Joe Mantegna’s turn as the gangster and fans of Late Night Cinemax will feel a rush of nostalgia when Kari Wuhrer makes an appearance as the beautiful daughter of the woman that Billy ran over.  Thinner is a middle-tier King adaptation, neither as bad nor as good as some others. I dug it.

Cleaning Out The DVR: Crime + Punishment in Suburbia (dir by Rob Schmidt)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Lisa is once again trying to clean out her DVR!  She’s got about 182 films on her DVR and she needs to get them all watched by the end of this year!  Will she make it?  Not if she’s too busy writing cutesy introductions for her reviews to actually watch the movies!  She recorded Crime + Punishment in Suburbia off of Flix on February 25th!)

Oh, dammit.

I have seen some really pretentious movies before but Crime + Punishment in Suburbia is really something else.  As you might be able to guess from the title, the film is supposedly based on the Dosteyevsky novel but it takes place not only in modern times but in suburbia as well.  Oh, and it actually has next to nothing in common with Doteyevsky novel, beyond a murder and occasional religious symbolism.  And by occasional, I mean that there’s a scene where Vincent Kartheiser wears a Jesus t-shirt.

Kartheiser plays Vincent, a teenager who I think we’re supposed to think is dark and disturbed but instead he just comes across like a weird little poser.  I mean, honestly, it takes more than just wearing black clothes to be weird.  I had a closet full of black clothes when I was eighteen and it still never brought me any closer to enlightenment.  Anyway, Vincent is a classmate of Roseanne (Monica Keena) and Roseanne is dating a handsome but dumb jock named Jimmy (James DeBello).  Roseanne’s mother is named Maggie (Ellen Barkin) and Maggie has recently married an abusive drunk named Fred (Michael Ironside).

Fred is a total jerk so Maggie goes out with her best friend, Bella (Conchata Ferrell), to a bar.  It’s at the bar that she meets Chris (Jeffrey Wright), a handsome and charming bartender.  Soon, Chris and Maggie are having an affair and when Fred finds out, he rapes his stepdaughter.  Roseanne convinces Jimmy to help her murder Fred but, after the deed is done, Roseanne finds herself struggling with her conscience.

Now, of course, in Crime & Punishment, the whole point is that the murder itself was largely random and motiveless.  The rest of the book deals with the protagonist’s attempt to come to terms with not only his crime but also with the meaninglessness of it all.  In Crime + Punishment in Suburbia, Roseanne has a good reason for killing Fred.  Fred is such a monster that there’s no real confusion as to why Roseanne did what she did.  One could argue, quite convincingly, that if she didn’t kill Fred, he would have ended up killing her.  That makes the film’s later attempt at moral ambiguity feel rather hollow and empty.

The other problem with Crime + Punishment in Suburbia is that we don’t see the story through Roseanne’s eyes.  Instead, the entire movie is narrated by Vincent.  Now, Vincent Kartheiser is not a bad actor.  Anyone who has seen Mad Men knows that.  And, in this film, he occasionally gets to flash a cute smile that makes the character a little bit bearable.  But the character he plays, Vincent, is so weird and off-putting that you have no desire to spend 100 minutes listening to him portentously talk about his existence.  Considering that Monica Keena actually gives a pretty good performance as Roseanne, the decision to tell her story through Vincent’s eyes feels all the more mistaken.

The only thing more overwrought than Vincent’s narration is Rob Schmidt’s direction.  This is one of those films that uses every narrative trick in the book to tell its story.  Look at the wild camera angles!  Look at the sudden slow motion!  Look at the freeze frame!  This is one of those movies that you watch and you just want to shout, “Calm down!” at the director.

Crime + Punishment in Suburbia is one to avoid.

A Movie A Day #70: Wired (1989, directed by Larry Peerce)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Sometimes, you watch a movie and all you cay say, at the end, is “What the Hell were they thinking?”

Wired is one such movie.  Based on a widely discredited biography by Bob Woodward, Wired tells two stories.  In the first story, John Belushi (Michael Chiklis, making an unfortunate film debut) wakes up in a morgue and is told by his guardian angel that he has died of a drug overdose.  Did I mention that his guardian angel is Puerto Rican cabbie named Angel Vasquez (Ray Sharkey) and Angel drives Belushi through a series of flashbacks?  Belushi meets Dan Aykroyd (Gary Groomes, who looks nothing like Dan Aykroyd).  Belushi gets cast on Saturday Night Live.  Belushi marries Judy (Lucinda Jenney).  Belushi uses drugs, costars in The Blues Brothers, dies of a drug overdose in a sleazy motel, and plays a pinball game to determine whether he’ll go to Heaven or Hell.  While this is going on, Bob Woodward (J.T. Walsh) is interviewing everyone who knew Belushi while he was alive.

There are so many things wrong with Wired that it is hard to know where to even begin.  I haven’t even mentioned the scene where Bob Woodward travels back in time and has a conversation with Belushi while he’s dying on the motel room floor.  Wired tries to be a cautionary tale about getting seduced by fame and drugs but how seriously can anyone take the message of any movie that features Ray Sharkey as a guardian angel?  The scenes with Woodward are strange, mostly because the hero of Watergate is being played by an actor best known for playing sinister villains.  (Seven years after playing Bob Woodward, J.T. Walsh was actually cast as Watergate figure John Ehrlichman in Nixon.)  Considering that this was his first movie, Michael Chiklis is not bad when it comes to playing a drug addict named John but he’s never convincing as John Belushi.  He never captures the mix of charisma and danger that made John Belushi a superstar.  Wired wants to tell the story of Belushi’s downfall but never understands what made him special to begin with.

Wired tries to be edgy but it only succeeds for one split second.  During the filming of The Blues Brothers, a director who is clearly meant to be John Landis walks over to Belushi’s trailer.  Listen carefully, and a helicopter can be heard in the background.

As for the rest of Wired, what the Hell were they thinking?

Back to School #60: Crazy/Beautiful (dir by John Stockwell)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh, memories!

I don’t know if I can describe how much my girlfriends and I loved Crazy/Beautiful when it first came out in 2001.  We saw it in the theaters, we rewatched it when it came on cable, and after I bought it on DVD, we watched it at my house.  We loved the movie because we all dreamed of having a sensitive, hot boyfriend like Carlos Nunez (played by Jay Hernandez), who would love us no matter how obnoxious or bratty we may have been.  Even if we sometimes got annoyed with her, we still all related to out-of-control Nicole (Kirsten Dunst), who everyone in the world had given up on but who ultimately just wanted her father to pay as much attention to her as he did to his new wife and his new baby.  We liked the film because we wanted to be both crazy and beautiful.

And, of course, there was all the sex, all of it filmed in beautiful soft-focus with the camera always suggesting that it was showing more than it actually was.  Crazy/Beautiful was one of those films that made you feel grown up while still being very careful not to lose its PG-13 rating.

Yes, back in the day, I loved Crazy/Beautiful.

And you know what?

It may just be the nostalgia talking but I still love it.  I recently rewatched Crazy/Beautiful and, despite the fact that I was now watching as a “critic” as opposed to a 15 year-old with issues, I quickly fell under the film’s spell.  There’s just something about Crazy/Beautiful that I simply cannot resist.

It’s a beautiful film.  Director John Stockwell has made a career out of making movies about pretty people hanging out on pretty beaches and Crazy/Beautiful has a lot of both.  When Carlos, a responsible high school senior who lives in East Los Angeles and who is hoping to attend the U.S. Navy Academy, first meets Nicole, she’s doing community service by picking up trash on the beach.  What Carlos doesn’t find out until later is that Nicole is the daughter of U.S. Rep. Tom Oakley (played, somewhat inevitably, by Bruce Davison).  Nicole is haunted by her mother’s death and feels that her well-meaning but ineffectual father has abandoned her.  At first, her relationship with Carlos seems to be yet another part of her rebellion but soon, both she and Carlos are madly in love.

Can Carlos save Nicole from herself?  Can Nicole love Carlos without leading him down the path of self-destruction?  Will Nicole and her father ever reconnect?  Will … oh, who cares?  You already know the answers.  Crazy/Beautiful is less about the story and more about how the story is told.  Stockwell keeps the story moving along and fills the screen with colorful and romantic images that make Crazy/Beautiful into the perfect teenage daydream.  He also makes perfect use of the undeniable chemistry between Jay Hernandez and Kirsten Dunst.  Both of the stars give such good performances that you really do come to care about the characters that they are playing and hope that things work out for them.  Kirsten Dunst, in particular, gives a brave performance and doesn’t shy away from playing up Nicole’s abrasiveness.  It takes courage to play a character who can be unlikable.  It takes talent to make that unlikable character sympathetic and, fortunately, Kirsten Dunst shows a lot of both in Crazy/Beautiful.

CrazyBeautiful