Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1984. The show is once again on Tubi!
This week, on Fantasy Island, it’s more of the same old same old.
Episode 7.16 “Baby on Demand/The Last Dogfight”
(Dir by Jerome Courtland, originally aired on March 10th, 1984)
Former “pop singer” Joanna Jones (Tanya Tucker) comes to Fantasy Island. She is no longer concerned with her musical artistry. (“If you can call that art,” Lawrence says — Lawrence, you bitch, you!) Now, she wants to have a baby but she doesn’t want to get married. Her fantasy is to get pregnant over the weekend and never have to see the guy again.
Okay, then. I mean, does she really have to go to Fantasy Island to have a one night stand? She’s a famous and wealthy woman so it just seems odd that apparently, this is something that only Mr. Roarke can make happen.
Mr. Roarke sets her up with Harley Batten (Dean Butler) but Joanna finds herself falling for Harley so she abandons him and instead hooks up with George, who is played by Mark Venturini. Venturini later played Vic in Friday the 13th Part V. Remember the guy with the axe who gets tired of Joey bothering him while he’s chopping wood? That was Mark Venturini!
By the end of the episode, Joanna has decided to take a chance on love and she leaves the Island with Harley. This fantasy just felt odd, largely because Tanya Tucker was a terrible actress and everyone on the show seemed to be embarrassed for her whenever she had to deliver her lines. I’m pretty sure that I saw both Dean Butler and Mark Venturini looking for an exit whenever Tucker started speaking.
As for the other story, it’s yet another aviation story. World War II flying aces Paul Spencer (Leigh McCloskey) and Hunter Richter (Grant Goodeve) are turned back into young men so that they can fly their airplanes over Fantasy Island and simulate a dogfight. However, Richter is haunted by the death of his wife at Dresden and, after discovering that Spencer’s wife (Leah Ayres) bears a strong resemblance to his late wife, Richter becomes determined to engage in actual combat. In the end, Spencer refuses to fight and Richter’s code of honor prevents him from shooting down a man who will not fire back. Because, of course, World War II-era Germans were famous for their sense of fair play….
The aviation story was, at least, well-acted. But it still felt very familiar. It was obvious that the show’s writers had run out of ideas. All in all, this was another disappointing Season 7 trip to the Island.
During the Vietnam War, an American patrol is captured by a German (Vernon Welles) who plans to sell them to the VC. Only their commanding officer, Lt. Vance Calhoun (Brad Johnson), manages to get away. When he’s told the the Army can’t spare any men for a POW rescue mission, he instead recruits a group of Hell’s Angels who just happen to be hanging out in Vietnam. When the Hell’s Angels learn that there’s gold hidden in the caves near the POW camp, they hop on their motorcycles and heard on out.
You might wonder why the Hell’s Angels were in South Vietnam to begin with. The easy answer is that they were there to raise Hell and spread the legend of their motorcycle club. The truth is that they were there to win the war for America. Like many Vietnam films released in the 80s, the main message of Nam Angels is that America could have won if not for the cowardly officers who weren’t willing to rescue our POWs. America should have listened to Vance Calhoun and the Hell’s Angels. Meanwhile, the real-life Hell’s Angels sued the filmmakers for trademark infringement. It doesn’t get more American that!
As for NamAngels, it has all of the explosions and motorcycles that are promised by the title and, as always, Vernon Wells is a good villain. Considering the premise, it’s disappointing that NamAngels proves itself to be a typical straight-to-video war movie but it still features all of the action, torture, and tough talk the fans usually want from these movies. It ends with a quote from John Milton that doesn’t really have anything to do with the film that we just watched.
This was one of the 104 films that Cirio Santiago directed over his career. Reportedly, Steven Spielberg was a fan of this one, casting Brad Johnson in Always on the basis of his performance in NamAngels. Make good movies because you never know who might be watching.
Mikey (Brian Bonsall) is a little boy who kills people. Over the course of this movie, he kills eight people. He gets away with it because everyone that he meets is extremely stupid. When his teacher notices that Mikey is drawing pictures based on his previous murders, no one thinks anything of it. When she sees that Mikey is now pushing thumbtacks into his arm, no one is too concerned. When the principal goes looking for Mikey, he takes a gun which he then leaves unattended on the kitchen counter. When Mikey tells his teacher that he wants her to teach him “how to die,” everyone figures out that something’s wrong with Mikey but, by then, it’s too late.
For a few years, Mikey had a strong cult following because of the killer kid theme and a few scenes of Josie Bissett in a hot tub. But it really is a dumb movie and Brian Bonsall gave a lousy performance as Mikey. It takes a good deal of stupidity for an adult to get murdered by a ten-year old and this movie proves it.
So, imagine that you’ve got a huge film franchise that was built around one iconic character. And guess what? In the previous installment of your huge film franchise, that iconic character was killed so graphically that there’s no possible way that he could just pop up and go, “It was just a flesh wound.” What do you do?
This is the problem that was facing Paramount Pictures when it came to making a fifth Friday the 13th film. The previous installment made a lot of money but it also ended with Jason pretty decisively dead. Paramount’s solution? Friday the 13th without Jason. Released (much like me) in 1985 and directed by Danny Steinmann, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning remains a controversial film among fans of the franchise. A lot of people claim that it’s the worst installment. Myself, I consider it to be one of the best.
Friday the 13th: A New Beginning opens (like many great B-movies) with a cemetery in the rain. Wearing a yellow raincoat, Tommy Jarvis (played in a cameo by Corey Feldman) approaches a grave that is marked “Jason Voorhees.” Suddenly, two rather moronic gravediggers come running up. While Tommy hides in the nearby bushes, the gravediggers dig Jason up. “Yee-haw!” one of them shouts.
(I know this because I turned on the close captioning as I watched the film. It’s one thing to hear the dialogue in a Friday the 13th film being spoken. It’s another thing to see it actually written out at the bottom of your screen.)
Suddenly, Jason — complete with hockey mask and machete — pops out of the grave and kills the two grave robbers. He walks over to where Tommy is hiding, lifts up his machete, and — suddenly, Tommy(now played by a brooding and sexy John Shepherd) wakes up! It turns out that several years have passed and Tommy, after spending five years in a mental asylum, is now on his way to Pinehurst, a halfway house that just happens to be located in the Crystal Lake area.
A New Beginning has such a bad reputation that it’s often forgotten that this opening sequence is one of the few genuinely scary sequences to be found in the entire franchise. Everything from the ominous dark skies to the lushly green bushes that Tommy hides in to the artful way the lightning storm is used to punctuate the sense of danger contributes to making this sequence feel very ominous and genuinely nightmarish. It’s a bit shocking (yet undeniably effective) to go from the impressionistic lushness of Tommy’s dream to the rather harsh and grainy look of the rest of the film.
(For those of you who are familiar with Italian horror, it almost feels like the dream was directed by Dario Argento while the rest of the film was done by Joe D’Amato.)
Anyway, Tommy gets dropped off at Pinehurst where he meets the two liberal do-gooders who are in charge of the facility, Matt (Richard Young) and Pam (Melanie Kinnaman). He also meets “Reggie the Reckless” (Shavar Ross), the bratty little grandson of Pinehurst’s cook, as well as the other residents of Pinehurst. Pam and Matt inform Tommy that Pinehurst has no rules. Or as they inform him, “It’s an honor system.”
It quickly becomes apparent that they might want to reconsider that honor system because not only do Eddie (John Robert Dixon) and Tina (DebbiSue Voorhees) get caught having sex on the neighbor’s property but Vic (played by Mark Venturini, who was all sexy and dangerous in his 2 minutes of screen time) ends up hacking the annoying Joey (Dominick Brascia) up into little pieces with an axe.
(In Vic’s defense, he looked really good with an axe and Joey was really annoying.)
While Vic is whisked off to jail (Sadly, never to be seen again) two paramedics scoop up remains of Joey. One of the paramedics — Roy (Dick Wieand) — stares at the body for a long time and doesn’t seem to find his coworkers jokes humorous. Hmmm…wonder what’s up with that?
As tragic as the death of Joey is, it does lead to one of my favorite lines of all time when, the morning after the murders, the remaining residents of Pinehurst gather for breakfast and they notice that two extra places have been set for the dead Joey and the incarcerated Vic. Stuttering Jake (Jerry Pavlon) exclaims, “You don’t set a place for a dead person!” And you know what? He’s right.
Soon, people all over town are getting murdered. The guys who talks to himself while snorting cocaine (played, in a rather funny performance, by Bob DeSimone) gets an axe to the forehead. The waitress (Rebecca Wood-Sharkey) who flashes her boobs at a mirror and goes, “It’s showtime!” gets murdered as she leaves work. Two Jersey Shore wannabes are killed when their car stalls. The Sheriff (Marco St. John) looks over one crime scene and says, “What the Hell’s going on here?” Roy, standing behind him, says, “You talking to me, Sheriff?” Hmmm…it’s odd how Roy keeps popping up in the movie for no reason…
The Mayor (played by Ric Mancini) confronts the Sheriff and demands to know who is killing everyone in town. “Jason Voorhees,” the Sheriff slowly responds. “Jason Voorhees is dead! He was cremated” the Mayor screams as he empties on ashtray on the sheriff, “THIS IS JASON VOORHEES!” This is probably my favorite scene in the entire movie because St. John underplays his entire role while Mancini overplays and delivers every line as if he’s in a community theater production of Lost in Yonkers.
That gets to the heart of what I really enjoy about A New Beginning — not only does this film have the largest body count of any film in the series, it also has the most genuinely eccentric cast of characters. Absolutely nobody in this film behaves like a conventional human being. It goes beyond just the normal odd slasher movie behavior. Instead, watching this film is like peering into some sort of parallel universe where some minor shift in the Earth’s tilt has caused everyone to go a little crazy. Probably the closest the film comes to a normal person is poor traumatized Tommy and he only says about ten lines in the entire film. (That said, John Shepherd did a really good job and had a lot of presence of Tommy. There’s an oddly eerie scene about halfway through the film where Tommy stares up at a neon sign and, as I looked at his face illuminated by the glowing blue of the sign, I realized that what I had always heard about good acting — that it all starts with expressive eyes — was true.)
(In a perfect world, Tommy would have eventually ended up with Vi — played by Tiffany Helm — the new wave girl who spends almost the entire movie dancing in her room. Seriously, they would have made a cute couple.)
Anyway, once our killer has gotten through killing random townspeople, he starts to kill off the residents at Pinehurst. After taking part in one of the most explicit sex scene in the history of the franchise, Eddie and Tina are rather brutally killed off. (That’s a shame because Voorhees and Dixon both had a really good and fun chemistry together and were both likable actors. Unfortunately, their characters were sex-crazed and you know what that means…) While Matt goes off to try to find the missing Eddie and Tina, Tommy, Pam, and Reggie go off to hang out with Reggie’s rather odd brother Demon (played by Miguel Nunez, Jr.) who wears more jewelry than I do and sings a duet with his girlfriend while he’s sitting on the most disgusting toilet in the history of film. (Seriously, I had to look away…)
Anyway, the remaining residents of Pinehurst are all killed by a seemingly resurrected Jason (however, Jake and Robin — played by Juliette Cummins — do get to watch A Place In The Sun before they die so at least something good happened to them that night) and Pam ends up spending almost the entire rest of the movie running around in the rain and tripping in the mud whenever Jason shows up. Jason eventually corners Pam, Tommy, and Reggie in a barn but then ends up falling out of a window and landing on some conveniently placed spikes. Jason’s hockey mask falls off and — surprise! — it wasn’t Jason after all. Instead, it was Roy, the weird Paramedic who kept showing up randomly and looking around kinda guilty-like whenever anyone mentioned anything about the murders. Wow!
One of my favorite films book is Peter M. Bracke’s Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th. Taking on the series on a film-by-film basis, Crystal Lake Memories is a fascinating oral history that is full of all sorts of interesting behind-the-scenes facts. Reading the chapter on Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, one is left with the impression that 1) everyone on the film was constantly snorting cocaine and 2) director Danny Steinmann is perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the history of the films.
In Crystal Lake Memories, depending on who is being interviewed, Danny Steinman comes across as either a maniac, a bully, or an underappreciated genius. Quite a few people claim that Steinmann was out-of-control. However, actress DebiSue Voorhees (who you would expect to have all sorts of unpleasant stories about the film since she’s the one who had to spend an entire shooting day laying on the ground naked in front of a bunch of strangers) is a lot more complimentary, saying that Steinmann was a “gentleman” throughout the entire shoot. What everyone seems to agree on is that he was the son of wealthy art dealer and that he got his start as a director by making a hardcore porn film before moving on to make two wonderfully trashy exploitation films — The Unseen and Savage Streets. Steinmann was apparently hired to bring a certain rough edginess to A New Beginning and he obviously did just that as A New Beginning had more violent deaths and more nudity than any previous installment of the series. Because of the need to get an R rating, a lot of bloody footage hit the cutting room floor but what was left is surprisingly effective. (Pictures of what was cut can be found on several sites online and yes, it’s all pretty gruesome.)
Unlike most people, I actually think that A New Beginning is one of the best films in the franchise, precisely because it is so ludicrous and over-the-top. What Danny Steinmann did with this film was that he took everything that one expected from a Friday the 13th film and he pushed it all to its most logical extreme. Everyone knew that, regardless of whether the film was being made by a major studio or not, the Friday the 13th films were meant to trashy, ludicrous, sleazy, and fun. Steinmann was just the only one who had the guts to admit it by making a film that not only admitted what it was but celebrated it as well. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is the most openly grindhouse of all of the Friday the 13th films and for that, it deserves more credit than it’s gotten.
Despite upsetting a lot of fans (not to mention the critics), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning was a box office success which could only mean that there would be another installment in the franchise. Coming tomorrow: my review of Friday the 13th: Jason Lives.
Return of the Living Dead has to go down as one of the funniest and inventive take on the zombie subgenre that began after the release of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Due to a dispute between Romero and John Russo (co-producer of the original NOTLD), the sequels to Night of the Living Dead that were produced and directed by Romero dropped the “Living Dead” part in their titles. Russo retained the rights to create sequels using those words while Romero just kept the word “Dead” in the follow-up films to Night. It took Russo awhile, but he finally got to use those naming rights with 1985’s Return of the Living Dead.
Even though there were some acrimony between Romero and Russo, the screenplay for Return of the Living Dead makes several complimentary nods to Night of the Living Dead. The film’s premise was what if Romero’s first film was actually based on a true event and that the government and the military covered it up before people got a wind of it. The film takes that simple premise and creates an action-packed horror-comedy that still stands the test of time.
Unlike Romero’s films, Return of the Living Dead actually gives an explanation as to what causes the dead to return to life with a singular purpose of attacking the living. The cause of all this undead mayhem was due to a bioweapon nerve toxin called 2-4-5 Trioxin which was originally designed by the military to defoliate marijuana crops. To say that the side-effects of the gas had some interesting effects was an understatement. The zombies created by Trioxin do attack the living but they’re also much more livelier and smarter (retaining agility, strength and mental capacity of their previous life) than the traditional Romero-zombies. They also do not feed on just humans. They also feed on other animals. The last major difference between the Romero-zombies and the Trioxin-zombies was that the latter only wanted to feed on live brains to end the pain of being dead. These differences made for a much faster-paced horror movie. As much as I consider the Romero zombie films as the best out there, I hold a special place in my horror-fan heart for these Trioxin dudes.
The story by John Russo would be turned into a screenplay and directed by Dan O’Bannon also made Return of the Living Dead behave more as a horror-comedy than just a straight-up horror. The dialogue between the characters were full of great one-liners that would’ve sounded cheesy if not for the great and game performances from the cast. Clu Gulager as Burt Wilson (owner of the medical supplies warehouse where the lost canister of Trioxin was being stored in) did a great job being incredulous at the events happening around him. His back and forth with his friend Ernie (played with Peter Lorre eyes by Don Calfa), the local mortuary’s gun-toting mortician, keep the film lively and hilarious in-between scenes of horror.
The scene stealers in the film must go to a bumbling pair of Burt’s employees who inadvertently release the toxic and reanimating gas from the warehouse’s inventory of Trioxin canister. James Karen as the worldly and cynical Frank was a riot from start to end. His over-the-top performance had me in stitches. He played Frank with such a manic, panicky style that it was difficult not to get caught up in his hysterics. To balance out Frank’s Hardy with his more subdued, but no less panicked Laurel, was Thom Mathews as Freddy. Mathews would later appear in other horror movies in the decade and even reprise a similar role in this film’s sequel. His performance as the straight man to Karen’s fool was also very good. His slow decline into becoming one of the zombies after the initial inhalation of the Trioxin gas in the film’s introduction was funny and sad. Of all the zombies in the film he gets the brunt of the slapstick sequences, especially once he starts hunting his girlfriend for her brains. His professing of his love for her and at the same time wanting her to give up her brain was hilarious, if not creepy as well.
Another thing that Return of the Living Dead had that made it different from Romero’s zombie movies were the scenes of gratuitious nudity throughout the film. A majority of the nude scenes were courtesy of scream queen Linnea Quigley as the punk rock Trash whose morbid obsession with all things death made her an early victim for the zombies and later on as one of their leaders. I know that kids my age at that time replayed over and over the scene of her strip-tease down to nothing atop a graveyard headstone. Even now many fans of the film consider that sequence as one of their favorite.
Return of the Living Dead still counts as one of the best zombie movies out there and preceded the UK’s Shaun of the Dead by two decades as a great horror-comedy. There was a sequel a few years later to capitalize on the popularity of the first film. It tried to capture the hilarity and horror of the first one but did not measure up in the end.
Dumb. Just dumb.
Through the Shattered Lens 