October Truer Crime: Escape From Terror: The Theresa Stamper Story (dir by Michael M. Scott)

Posted on October 26, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First aired in 1995, Escape From Terror stars Maria Pitillo as Theresa Stamper. When the film begins, Theresa is a naive 23-year-old woman who lives in Oklahoma with her mother (Cindy Williams). She gets a job working as a secretary for Paul Stamper (Adam Storke), the owner of Stamper Oil Company. She soon becomes more than just Paul’s secretary. At first, Paul is charming. He’s a little rough around the edges and he’s quick to get jealous, but Theresa just tells herself that Paul is under a lot of stress and that she can fix whatever’s wrong with him.

Paul and Theresa get married in Las Vegas and things quickly go downhill. Paul becomes physically abusive, along with being emotionally manipulative. He fires her from her job because no wife of Paul Stamper is going to work, especially not where other men can look at her. Theresa continues to tell herself that Paul is just under stress. Everyone else tells her that Paul is clearly on drugs and they point out that he always wears long sleeves, even in the Oklahoma heat. When Theresa eventually catches Paul hanging out at a bar and shooting up heroin in the bathroom, he proceeds to beat her badly enough to send her to the hospital. When Theresa takes her daughter and leaves Paul, Paul goes crazy and shoots her new boyfriend.

Paul goes on the run. Eventually, he’s arrested and convicted, but he manages to escape from prison and then he disappears. Five years later, Theresa starts to get threatening calls and realizes that, wherever he is, Paul is still obsessed with her. What can Theresa do?

How about telling her story to Unsolved Mysteries?

Escape From Terror was produced by Unsolved Mysteries, so it shouldn’t be a surprise when a good deal of the film’s final moments is dedicated to showing just how efficiently the show and its audience were able to track down Paul Stamper. Sheriff Bill Douglas (Brad Dourif), who has been manning the Unsolved Mysteries phone lines, tells everyone in the studio to quiet down after word comes in that Paul has been arrested. “I’ve got one more call to make,” he says.

And yes, it would be tempting to call this movie out for mythologizing the people who produced it, but the fact of the matter is that it is a true story and the real Paul Stamper actually was arrested (and subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison) after Unsolved Mysteries aired a story about him, so the show is probably justified in patting itself on the back. It’s kind of like America’s Most Wanted. As easy as it was to occasionally make fun of the show, it did work.

As for the movie, it’s actually not bad. I’ve spent enough time in rural Oklahoma that the film seems very familiar to me. Maria Pitillo and Adam Storke gave good performances as Theresa and Paul, with Adam Storke doing an especially good job of capturing Paul’s manipulative nature. It was also nice to see Brad Dourif playing a sympathetic character. Dourif may have made his name playing bad guys, but in this film, he’s the ideal small-town lawman.

I might binge Unsolved Mysteries after Horrorthon is over. Who knows? Maybe one of my older neighbors has been on the run since the ’90s. There’s really only one way to find out!

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 5.13 “The Cell Within”

Posted on February 2, 2026 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, Tubbs gets kidnapped and the entire episode is oddly dull. Presumably because it’s the final season and no one was paying attention, the show took a risk and it did not pay off.

Episode 5.13 “The Cell Within”

(Dir by Michael B. Hoggan, originally aired on March 10th, 1989)

Former criminal Jake Manning (John P. Ryan) has apparently reformed himself. As getting busted by Tubbs, Manning spent years in a tiny cell where he read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Sponsored by renegade film director Robert Phelps (L.M. Kit Carson), Jake is now a free man and a published author. Tubbs is convinced that Jake has changed his ways and when Jake invites him to a dinner party, Tubbs accepts.

(Crockett is on vacation, spending time with his son. During his brief appearance on the episode, Crockett jokes about what a great book he and Tubbs could write if they were ever arrested. Uhmm …. you were arrested, Crockett. Remember when you were a drug lord? The show appears to have forgotten but I haven’t.)

Anyway, it turns out that Jake has built a prison under his house where he keeps undesirables locked up and every few days, he electrocutes them. He kidnaps Tubbs so that Tubbs can see and hear about Jake’s view of how justice should be meted out. Jake likes to talk and talk and talk and talk.

Ugh, this episode.

I’m honestly surprised that I got through this episode because it was just so mind-numbingly dull. The show attempted to do something different with its format and that’s fine. But Jake was so long-winded and his cartoonish prisoners were such thinly drawn stereotypes that it didn’t take me long to lose interest. I’ve never liked episodes of cop shows that center around hostage situations or kidnappings. It’s hard to build much narrative momentum when no one can really move around. It gets boring to watch and that was certainly the case here. That John P. Ryan spent most of the episode wearing a flowing robe did not help matters. It made him look like a Saruman cosplayer at a Lord of the Rings convention. I probably would have laughed if it all hadn’t been so dull.

As always, it’s interesting to see Tubbs at the center of a story but even the normally smooth Philip Michael Thomas didn’t seem to know what to make of all these nonsense. As I watched Tubbs rather easily fall victim to Jake’s trap, I wondered why Tubbs has suddenly become such a stupid character. I mean, seriously, anyone should have been able to see through Manning’s invitation. For Tubbs, this episode was the equivalent of that time Trudy got kidnapped by the alien who looked like James Brown.

All in all, this was not a good episode. It’s the final season so it makes sense that you’re going to get a few clunkers. Hopefully, next week will be better.

Horror Film Review: Godzilla (dir by Roland Emmerich)

Posted on October 15, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s a giant lizard rampaging through New York, the result of a mutation that happened as a result of being exposed to radiation. The military tries to stop the lizard but it turns out that stopping a giant lizard is not that easy. Scientists try to understand the lizard and how it came to be a destructive giant. The media breathlessly reports from the scene as two wisecracking cameramen do their best to record every second of the mayhem. The reporters call this lizard …. GODZILLA!

But is it Godzilla?

No, it’s not. Oh, it may be called Godzilla. And the movie itself may be called Godzilla. But the creature at the center of the 1998 American film Godzilla is definitely not Godzilla.

Godzilla was released with a great deal of fanfare in 1998, with commercials and toys and a lot of hype. Diddy, back when he was still calling himself Puff Daddy, recorded a song for the soundtrack and upset thousands of Led Zeppelin fans like my Dad who found themselves having to deal with kids who thought Kashmir was called Follow Me. (Diddy singing, “Follow me?” AGCK! How cringey is that!?) But, like many of the film of Roland Emmerich, it’s been almost totally forgotten in the years since.

And why not? It’s a forgettable film. It’s the epitome of an assembly-line action blockbuster, the type of thing that Roland Emmerich is known for. There’s comic relief, in the form of Hank Azaria. There’s a nerdy scientist hero in the form of Matthew Broderick. Broderick’s scientist has an ex-wife and yes, Godzilla’s invasion of New York gives them a chance to get back together. There’s a mysterious Frenchman who is played, somewhat inevitably, by Jean Reno. The Mayor of New York is a fat guy named Ebert (Michael Lerner) and he has an assistant named Gene (Lorry Goldman) and they get a lot of screentime because Emmerich wanted to make fun of two films critics who didn’t care much for his work. In fact, the Mayor and his assistant get so much screentime that it distracts from the rest of the film. Emmerich was directing a multi-million dollar reboot of a beloved franchise and he was more concerned with a petty feud.

He certainly wasn’t concerned with Godzilla. Personally, I like the giant lizard and one of the only effective moments in the film is when the lizard discovers that its children have been killed by the military. But that lizard is not Godzilla and the fact that Emmerich made a Godzilla film without Godzilla indicates that he didn’t really care about the monster or its fans. This film has no love for its source material and that’s a shame. The Godzilla films are fun! And the fact that the majority of the ones made up until the release of this film looked kind of cheap and featured a Godzilla who was obviously a man in a rubber suit only added to the fun. There’s not much fun to be found in this version of Godzilla. The movie looks great without ever making much of an impression.

And you know what? Having gotten this review out of the way, I’m ready to get back to reviewing the true Godzilla films. They may not have cost as much as Emmerich’s film but they’ve got heart.

Previous Godzilla Reviews:

A Movie A Day #122: The Lost Capone (1990, directed by John Gray)

Posted on May 9, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

Chicago. 1915. Up-and-coming gangster Al Capone (Eric Roberts) berates his younger brother, Jimmy (Adrian Pasdar), for not being aggressive enough in a street fight. Not wanting to follow his brothers into a life of organized crime, Jimmy runs away from home and eventually finds himself in Harmony, Nebraska. Claiming to be a World War I vet named Richard Hart, Jimmy impresses everyone with both his marksmanship and his incorruptible nature. Soon, the new Richard Hart has been named town marshal. While Al Capone is taking over the Chicago rackets, Richard is keeping the town safe with his Native American deputy, Joseph Littlecloud (Jimmie F. Skaggs), and starting a family with the local school teacher, Kathleen (Ally Sheedy). When illegal liquor from Chicago starts to show up on a nearby Indian reservation, Richard Hart comes into conflict with the Chicago Outfit and his secret is finally revealed.

There is a sliver of truth to this made-for-TV movie. Al Capone really did have a brother named James, who ended up changing his name to Richard Hart and working as a prohibition agent in Nebraska. Otherwise, the movie changes so many facts that it is hard to know where to begin. In real life, Al and James Capone grew up in New York. James, who was actually several years older than Al, ran away from home not to escape Al’s bullying but because he wanted to join the circus. (Al was only 9 when James ran away.) James changed his name to Richard Hart not to keep people from realizing that he was related to Al but because he admired silent screen cowboy William S. Hart. Though James did work in law enforcement, he never came into conflict with Al Capone’s organization and, in fact, regularly visited Chicago.

The Lost Capone is a forgettable mix of western and gangster clichés, featuring a notably stiff performance from Adrian Pasdar in the lead role. It does feature two of the strangest performances that I have ever seen. Eric Roberts, complete with a phony scar, playing Al Capone is just as weird as it sounds, while Ally Sheedy plays a wholesome and always smiling teacher but delivers her lines in the same halting tone of voice that she used as the “basket case” in The Breakfast Club.

There is probably a good movie that could be made about the life of James Capone/Richard Hart but The Lost Capone is not it.