Tag Archives: Matthew Laborteaux

Retro Television Review: The Love Boat 6.4 “The Same Wavelength/Winning Isn’t Everything/A Honeymoon for Horace”

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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986!  The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

Come aboard, we’re expecting you….

Episode 6.4 “The Same Wavelength/Winning Isn’t Everything/A Honeymoon for Horace”

(Dir by Robert Scheerer, originally aired on October 23rd, 1982)

Yeesh!  This episode!  Because I’m on vacation, I’m going to lay out the facts quickly and simply.

  • Julie’s hair still looks awful.  Seriously, she looks like she should be playing the demanding gymnastics coach in a Peter Engel-produced high school sitcom.
  • Horace (Jack Gilford) and Twinkie (Nancy Walker) board the boat.  They’re in their 80s and they’re newlyweds!  Awwwww!  Horace is nervous about his honeymoon because it’s been forever since he’s kissed a woman so he asks Julie if he can practice on her.  Julie, her eyes oddly glazed over, agrees.
  • Twinkie, who loves to party, tells Julie that she’s actually been married to Horace for 30 years and he just said that he was a newlywed to trick Julie into kissing him.
  • Later, when confronted by Doc and Julie, Horace and Twinkie confess that they’re not actually married.  However, they are brother and sister.  WHAT!?
  • Turns out that Twinkie “likes to party” and Horace “likes to kiss pretty girls” so they lied so that they could do both.
  • Horace, you’re going to jail!  Oh wait, no, he’s not.  The Love Boat crew has a good laugh over it and Julie, to be honest, seemed to be pretty coked up in this episode so perhaps she had a good reason for wanting to avoid dealing with the cops.  Okay, Julie, do what you have to do, I guess.
  • Meanwhile, psychic Tess Macgill (Connie Stevens) falls in love with passenger Mike Gordon (Charles Seibert).  Unfortunately, Mike is still in love with his wife, despite the fact that they’re now separated.  It’s a good thing that there’s a psychic on board to let Mike know that his marriage is over.
  • Finally, Jack Bronson (David Doyle) boards the boat with his teenage son, Chip (Matthew Labyorteaux).  Jack is an old friend of Captain Stubing’s and he’s convinced that winning is everything!  As for Stubing, he’s just happy that Vicki will finally have someone her own age to spend some time with.  I’m happy too.  Seriously, Vicki hardly ever gets to talk to anyone under the age of 50.
  • Jack is convinced that Chip is a world-class athlete but that’s just because Chip has been lying to his father.
  • Vicki is great a table tennis.  Jack pressures Chip to play her.  Chip fakes a wrist injury to get out of it.
  • Eventually, Chip tells his father the truth and Jack realizes that he’s been pushing his son way too much.  That’s not a bad lesson but David Doyle is miscast as a competition-obsessed father.  He comes across as being too nice.  Jack is a role for Bo Svenson.

This episode …. bleh.  The psychic story was bland and the story with the elderly siblings was creepy.  The Jack and Chip story was, at least, tolerable.  Julie’s terrible new haircut continues to annoy me.  This was not the best cruise in the history of The Love Boat.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 1.23 “The Right Thing”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Thursdays, I will be reviewing Highway to Heaven, which aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989.  The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee and several other services!

This week, Jonathan encourages an elderly man not to give up.

Episode 1.23 “The Right Thing”

(Dir by Victor French, originally aired on March 27th, 1985)

Elderly Harry Haynes (Lew Ayres) lives with his son (Michael Durrell), his daughter-in-law (Marcia Rodd), and his grandson, Matt (Matthew Labyorteaux).  When Harry wets the bed one too many times, his daughter-in-law demands that he be moved to a nursing home.  (I suppose it’s a sign of the time that, too modern ears, that may sound like the set up for a tasteless joke but it’s actually how the episode begins and Lew Ayres does such a good job portraying Harry’s shame and panic that your heart just breaks for him.)  Harry isn’t happy about going to the nursing home and he’s on the verge of giving up on life.  Fortunately, the new orderly is Jonathan Smith and Harry is the week’s mission.  Jonathan isn’t just in the nursing home to pass out magazines and books.  He’s also there to encourage Harry not to give up hope.

This episode is the epitome of what most people would probably come up with if they were asked to describe a typical episode of Highway to Heaven.  It’s sentimental, emotional, and so achingly sincere that it’s hard not to get caught up in it, regardless of how heavy-handed and occasionally simplistic the storytelling may be.  With Jonathan’s encouragement, Harry starts to run with his grandson.  Harry and Matt enters a grandparent/grandson relay race together.  Harry’s son says that, if Harry wins, he’ll be allowed to move back home.  Harry does win  but it turns out that no one told his daughter-in-law about the deal.  To the show’s credit, Harry’s daughter-in-law is not monster.  She’s just exhausted from having to take care of the house, her teenage son, and an elderly man.  Harry realizes that it wouldn’t be fair to her for him to move back in so, instead, he announces that he’s going to travel and see as much of the world as he can in the time he has left.

There was nothing subtle about the plot of this episode but Lew Ayres gives a sensitive and honest performance as Harry and Matthew Labyorteaux matches him as Harry’s grandson.  (Lew Ayres was an excellent actor whose career began in the early days of Hollywood.  He starred in the Oscar-winning All Quiet on The Western Front but his own pacifist beliefs led to him being temporarily blacklisted when he registered as a conscientious objector.  He later made a comeback, appearing in films like Johnny Belinda and Advise and Consent but never receiving an Oscar nomination, due to the controversy over his beliefs.)  This is a sweet episode, even if it is perhaps a bit simplistic with its message that old age can be held off by simply not giving up.  Sad to say but aging is going to get us all eventually.

A Movie A Day #277: Deadly Friend (1986, directed by Wes Craven)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Things I learned from watching Deadly Friend:

Girls love nerds who build robots.

In 1986, nerds could build robots that displayed human feelings.

Angry old neighbors hate robots.

If a nerd can build a robot that displays human feelings, then he can also bring his girlfriend back to life by putting a computer chip from the robot in her brain.

Once brought back to life, the girlfriend will start to behave just like the robot.

Basketballs can be used to do anything.

Deadly Friend is best remembered for the scene where the newly revived Samantha (Kristy Swanson) throws a basketball with such force that it causes the head of her neighbor (Anne Ramsey) to explode.  It is also remembered for BB, the big yellow robot that was built by Paul (Matthew Laborteaux).  Deadly Friend starts out as the ultimate nerd fantasy: a beautiful girlfriend. a big robot, and a killer basketball.  By the end of the movie, the fantasy has turned into a nightmare.

Deadly Friend was Wes Craven’s follow-up to A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Craven intended for the film to be a dark love story between a teenage outcast and his zombie girlfriend, with a strong emphasis on the hypocrisy of the adults around them.  Craven said that, in his version of Deadly Friend, people like Samantha’s abusive father were meant to be scarier than Zombie Samantha With A Microchip In Her Brain.  Warner Bros. wanted a film that would appeal to teenage horror fans and demanded Elm Street-stlye nightmares and buckets of more blood.  As a result, Craven practically disowned the finished movie and Deadly Friend is a tonally inconsistent, with sentimental first love scenes competing for space with heads exploding and necks being snapped.  Despite good performances from Laborteaux and Swanson, the final film is too much of a mess to work.  However, I know that I will never look at a basketball the same way again.