The Dummies”

Posted on May 17, 2023 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!

Welcome aboard. Don’t expect much from your cruise this week.

Episode 2.14 “Julie Falls Hard / Double Wedding / The Dummies”

(Dir by Bob Claver, originally aired on December 16th, 1978)

Agck! It’s the most horrifying episode in the history of the Love Boat!

Your eyes do not deceive you. There are indeed two ventriloquists on this week’s cruise. Married entertainers Patti Harmon (Ruth Buzzi) and Michael Harmon (Sid Caesar) have been hired to amuse the ship’s passengers. Unfortunately, they’ve recently separated. Patti thinks that Michael is incapable of expressing his emotions unless he’s carrying around his dummy. And it turns out that she’s right because Michael really does carry that dummy around with him everywhere and he has frequent conversations with it. Even when Michael inevitably apologizes for being a bad husband and asks Patti for another chance, he has to use the dummy to do it.

Seriously, it’s creepy! I mean, everything works out in the end. Michael and Patti decide to give their marriage a second chance and their dummies end up kissing as well. But seriously, ventriloquist dummys are just weird. Have you seen that episode of The Twilight Zone where the guy tries to switch one dummy out for another so the original dummy gets mad and destroys his replacement? Have you seen the classic Anthony Hopkins film, Magic? CREEPY!

Of course, this episode features not just the scariest story in Love Boat history. It also features the stupidest. Two twins (Cyb Barnstable and Trish Barnstable) board the cruise with their fiancés (played by David Nelson and Fred Travelena). No one can tell the twins apart! Not even Isaac!

Anyway, the twins worry that they might be making a mistake because it seems like each one is marrying a man with the opposite personality. The twin who likes to stay up late is engaged to the man who goes to bed early. The twin who likes to be responsible and level-headed is engaged to man who is wild and unpredictable. So, when the twins disembark the boat so that they can get married in Mexico, they decide to switch places on their wedding day. But then when the twins return to the boat with their new husbands, they decide that they made a mistake so they switch back. They can do that because they’re twins! Seriously, that’s the entire story.

Bleh! This was so stupid. Even writing about it was painful.

Finally, Julie’s in love!

Jack Chenault (Tony Roberts) is taking the cruise with his two young daughters and, when he sees Julie, it’s love at first sight. The daughters wants their Dad to marry Julie as well. One of the daughters is played by a very young Melora Hardin, who would grow up to play Jan Levinson on The Office.

After knowing Julie for one day, Michael announces that he’s in love with her and he wants her to come live with him in Alaska. Julie is tempted but ultimately, she can’t leave her life on the boat behind. Jack is heart-broken but Julie promises to see him the next time that she’s in Alaska. So, I imagine we will never hear about Jack again.

This third storyline wasn’t bad. Especially when compared to the other two, it was actually sweet and rather touching. It helps that Tony Roberts gave a convincing performance Jack. That said, asking someone to marry you after only knowing them for one day? Unless you’re a young king looking to legitimize the Treaty of Troyes, that’s never a good idea.

This week’s cruise was not a good one. Hopefully, next week’s will be less scary and less dumb.

Shattered Politics #60: Absolute Power (dir by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The main reason that I enjoyed the 1997 Clint Eastwood film Absolute Power was because it features a murderer who also happens to be the President. As someone who dislike the idea of any one person having absolute power, I always get annoyed by the attitude that authority is something that has to be automatically respected. Instead, I’ve always felt that all authority should be distrusted and continually questioned.

Just take President Alan Richmond (Gene Hackman) for example. At the start of Absolute Power, he’s a popular President. He’s quick with a smile. He’s quick with a memorable line. I imagine that excerpts from his State of the Union speech would probably be very popular on YouTube. However, at the start of the film, elderly burglar Luther Whitney (Clint Eastwood) witnesses President Richmond getting violent with Jan Levinson-Gould. When Jan resists him, two Secret Service agents (Scott Glenn and Dennis Haysbert) run into the room and shoot her.

Okay, technically, the victim was not really The Office‘s Jan Levinson-Gould. (They both just happen to be played by Melora Hardin.) Instead, her name was Christy Sullivan and she was also the wife of one of Richmond’s top financial supporters, Walter Sullivan (E.G. Marshall). After the murder, President Richmond and his chief-of-staff, Gloria Russell (Judy Davis), attempt to frame Luther for the crime.

Absolute Power is pretty much your typical Clint Eastwood action picture. In the role of Luther, Eastwood snarls his way through the film and never dispatches a bad guy without providing a ruthless quip. (When one bad guy begs for mercy, Luther replies that he’s “fresh out.”) Luther has an estranged daughter, a lawyer named Kate (Laura Linney) and, despite the fact that she’s helping the homicide detective (Ed Harris) who is trying to capture him, Luther still pops up to look out for her. In the end, Luther’s not only try to prove that the President is a murderer but he’s trying to be a better father as well! Awwwwwww!

Again, it’s all pretty predictable but the film is worth seeing just for the chance to witness Gene Hackman play one of the most evil Presidents ever. As far as soulless chief executives are concerned, Alan Richmond makes Woodrow Wilson look like a humanitarian! And Hackman does a good job embodying the affable type of evil that could conceivably translate into an electoral landslide.

Absolute Power may not be a great film but it’s a good one to watch whenever you need an excuse to be cynical about the absolute power of the government.

Guilty Pleasure No. 13: Lambada (dir by Joel Silberg)

Posted on September 22, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last year, I was doing a search for dance scenes on YouTube and I came across a handful of scenes from a film called Lambada. The scenes all had an undeniably cheap look to them and featured a rather stiff dancer who was wearing one dangling earring. The scenes were so memorably bad that I promised myself that, if I ever got the chance, I would watch this Lambada.

Well, I got that chance last night when Lambada turned up on NUVOtv. I forced my BFF Evelyn to watch the movie with me because I thought I might want to use the movie for one of my What Evelyn and Lisa Watched Last Night reviews. However, as we watched Lambada, I realized that the only way to review this movie was to consider it as a guilty pleasure.

First released way back in 1990, Lambada tells the story of Mr. Laird (J. Eddie Peck), an idealistic math teacher in Beverly Hills by day and a sexy dancer at night. Did I mention that when Mr. Laird dances, he calls himself Blade? Because he so does!

However, Blade isn’t just dancing for fun or to deal with what appears to be a split personality. Instead, he uses dance skills to impress the poor kids at the clubs so that he can then lure them into a backroom where he helps them prepare to take the GED.

He’s a dancer with a conscience and who doesn’t love that, right?

However, eventually Mr. Laird is spotted dancing by Sandy (Melora Hardin, a decade and a half before playing Jan on The Office), one of his students from Beverly Hills. When he doesn’t respond to her crush, she reveals his secret and — for reasons that are never quite clear — this puts his job in jeopardy.

Why did Lambada turn out to be such a guilty pleasure?

Just consider the following:

1) Cast in the key role of “Blade” Laird, J. Eddie Peck looks good but gives a performance that almost epitomizes the concept of anti-charisma. When he’s teaching in Beverly Hills, he wears sexy glasses. When he’s dancing in the barrio, he loses the glasses and instead wears one dangling earring. When a female student in Beverly Hills hits on him, he awkwardly smiles. When he dances, he moves so stiffly that he resembles a mannequin on a treadmill. That’s about the extent of Peck’s performance.

2) Melora Hardin, on the other hand, is completely natural and likable in the role of Sandy but, even though this film was made 16 years before the premiere of the Office, Hardin has already picked up a lot of the techniques that she would use to make Jan Levinson-Gould such a memorable character. Every time that Sandy smiles nervously or looks annoyed by another character, it’s impossible not to be reminded of Jan struggling to manage Michael Scott. As Nathan Rabin pointed out in his review of this film over at the A.V. Club, Lambada really does feel like Jan Levinson: The Early Years.

3) If Lambada was made today, it would be called Twerking and, while watching, it was hard not to imagine Melora Hardin chasing J. Eddie Peck with a big foam finger.

4) An aggressively forgettable song called Set The Night On Fire is played about a hundred times over the course of the film. The song is so generic and forced, and everyone in the film has to pretend to be so in love with it, that it becomes oddly fascinating.

5) The club that Blade dances at has an upside down police car hanging from the ceiling. The club, itself, gives off a definite human trafficking vibe but that police car is pretty neat.

6) One of Mr. Laird’s Beverly Hills students is named Egghead. Naturally, he’s the smartest student and he’s obsessed with computers. Evelyn and I both found ourselves wondering if Egghead was just a nickname or if his parents actually named him that in order to force him to grow up to be intelligent. (Even Mr. Laird calls him Egghead, which — if that’s not the student’s name — seems a bit unprofessional for a teacher.) It may not sound like much but it provided us with hours of amusement.

7) There’s a scene where Egghead uses his computer to inspire an entire classroom to spontaneously start dancing. What makes this scene especially memorable is that the computer dances along with them.

8) Whenever Blade is teaching his GED class, the students respond to almost everything he says by cheering. If nothing else, I’m sure many teachers have fantasized about being as irrationally loved by their students as Blade.

9) Eventually, Blade’s GED students compete with the Beverly Hills students. No, it’s not a dance-off. It’s a math-off! That’s right — they’re competing to see who can correctly answer the most math questions. And, believe it or not, the future of Blade’s career depends on whether or not his GED students can win. Apparently, this is how the California educational system worked back in 1990.

10) Finally, the ultimate reason that Lambada is a guilty pleasure is because — regardless of how silly and ludicrous the film may seem to us today — it was actually produced and released into theaters. That means that, somewhere out there, there are people who actually paid money to see this movie. They may not admit it but they’re out there.

They’re out there.