Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewingthe Canadian sitcom, Check it Out, which ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988. The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi and Peacock!
This week, Marlene gets an opportunity!
Episode 3.11 “The Naked Truth”
(Dir by Alan Erlich, originally aired on November 21st, 1987)
Women Of The World magazine wants to do a story on Marlene’s life as a cashier. All of her coworkers try to worm their way into the interview but Marlene succeeds in kicking them all out of the breakroom. The reporter from the magazine informs Marlene that her life story is fascinating and now they’ll just need to take some naked pictures to go along with it.
Howard is stunned when Marlene says she’s going to pose nude. Marlene points out that Howard keeps adult magazines in his desk drawer. Howard denies it before then opening up his desk drawer and checking them out. Howard fears that Marlene is going to make Cobb’s look bad. Marlene, in the end, chooses not to get the pictures done because she doesn’t want her future daughter to be ashamed of her. Personally, I would have preferred for Marlene to have said, “It’s my decision and I’ll make sure my daughter understands that she has to do what’s right for her instead of worrying about what everyone else says,” but whatever. It’s just a silly sitcom.
Meanwhile, Viker’s wife is pregnant! Awwww, Viker! Gordon Clapp got to a do and say a lot in this episode, which I enjoyed. Viker is one of the more consistently funny characters on this show. Gordon Clapp played Viker’s stupidity with such an earnest sincerity that you just want someone to hug the guy.
This was not a bad episode. Gordon Clapp and Kathleen Laskey were often this show’s strongest assets and this episode featured both of them. Laskey did a great job portraying Marlene’s dilemma while Clapp made me laugh at even the silliest of jokes. Nope, not a bad episode at all, even if I do think Marlene should have just told everyone that it was none of their business what she chose to do.
This week, I was super-excited to discover the original Unsolved Mysteries on Tubi! I’ve been listening to Robert Stack as he talks about unsolved crimes and a paranormal mysteries and I have to say that Mr. Stack was truly an American treasure! I like that most of these episodes have updates and it looks like they’re still being updates. That said, I find the mysteries with no updates to be the most intriguing.
In other news, Case and I are nearly finished with Dark. We’ll be watching the final episode next Tuesday.
I am now caught up on Kitchen Nightmares. Chef Ramsay is saving restaurants that don’t really deserve to be saved. I don’t care if Gordon showed them their aware of their ways. There’s no way I’d eat in any of those places!
I watched a good deal of the news stations — BBC, FOX, C-SPAN, CNN, a little MSNBC, though that network is kind of annoying and whiny right now — this week. I won’t go into too much detail but I think I’m starting to become a news junkie.
I went over to Pluto TV this weekend and I turned on Dr. Phil for background noise. This poor woman was convinced that she was married to Tyler Perry.
King of the Hill on Hulu has definitely been my comfort show this week. It’s a Texas show and I’m a Texas girl.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Saturdays, I will be reviewing Welcome Back Kotter, which ran on ABC from 1975 to 1979. The entire show can be purchased on Prime.
Wedding bells are ringing!
Episode 4.21 “Ooh Ooh, I Do: Part Two”
(Dir by Norman Abbott, originally aired on May 25th, 1979)
Horshack’s getting married!
For some reason, the Sweathogs throw him a bachelor party in Barbarino’s trashy apartment. Barbarino isn’t there. I assume he’s at work or maybe he finally moved back in with his family after realizing just how ugly and depressing his apartment was. Seriously, I will never understand why a show would try to get viewers invested in such an ugly location.
Anyway, the bachelor party is a bust. Epstein dresses up in drag and dances for Horshack. The Sweathogs love it. Horshack loves it. But then the Sweathogs make a joke about how Horshack and Mary Johnson are going to be so poor that Mary is going to have to get a job washing bricks to support them. Horshack realizes that they’re right. He’s getting married in high school and he has absolutely zero marketable skills. In fact, he’s such a weirdo that most people go out of their way to avoid him. How is he going to support Mary?
Horshask freaks out and runs away. After Mary shows them the note that Horshack left, in which he said that he was running away to become the type of man who could support her, the Sweathogs search all over Brooklyn for him. Epstein goes to a Marine recruiting station. Washington and Beau …. eh, I watched this show like 20 minutes ago and I’ve already forgotten what they did. That’s how well-written this episode was. Mary, however, knows that Horshack’s favorite movie is Wuthering Heights so she finds him at the local move theater.
They get married! The ceremony is small and pathetic. I don’t think a single member of Horshack’s family showed up. Gabe does show up and, when the Sweathogs realize that Horshack needs a ring to give Mary, Gabe gives up his own wedding ring. Julie approves. They’re probably going to get divorced as soon as the show ends.
Gabe, who is usually portrayed as being very concerned with the future of his students, is totally cool with Horshack getting married while still a high school student. At no point does he suggest that Horshack might be rushing into things or that a stunted manchild who can’t get a job might not be a good husband. This was one of Kaplan’s rare appearance during the final season of the show but he doesn’t act much like the Mr. Kotter that we got to know over the previous three seasons. It’s kind of like when Steve Carell came back for The Office finale and only said one line. It just doesn’t feel right.
Apparently, this episode was meant to a backdoor pilot for a series that would have focused on Horshack and Mary. I can’t imagine that working, though I would say that Mary and Horshack do look cute together at the end of the episode.
Speaking of endings, there are only two more episodes left! Will the Sweathogs finally graduate? We’ll find out!
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
If you’re having trouble sleeping tonight, you can go over to Tubi and watch 1992’s Mind, Body & Soul.
Brenda (Ginger Lynn) has a new boyfriend! After years of getting stuck with duds, Brenda is happy to finally be dating Carl (Jesse Kaye), who is handsome and successful and has a thing about wanting her to drip hot candle wax on his body. Everything’s going fine until Carl asks her to come hang out with some friends of his. It turns out that they’re all Satanists and they’re planning on sacrificing a woman. Fortunately, the police arrive before the sacrifice can be carried out. Unfortunately, all the Satanists run off and leave innocent Brenda takes the blame.
After she’s arrested and spends several days in jail, Brenda is finally bailed out by defense attorney John Stockton (Wings Hauser). Because Carl apparently blew up her apartment (and, the police say, himself with it), Brenda doesn’t have anywhere to stay. She accepts John’s offer to stay at his place. John promises to be a perfect gentleman. He’s a former probation officer and he just wants to help.
And Brenda definitely needs some help! She suspects that Carl isn’t really dead. She keeps having bizarre visions of the robed and masked leader of the cult. She suspects that the cult might still be after her and, when she agrees to appear on a local talk show to tell her story, she finds herself stunned to be sitting across from an actual witch. Her former cellmate, Rachel (Tamara Clatterbuck), has just been released from prison and is willing to help Brenda out. Again, Brenda needs the help. The cult is after her and it’s going to take a lot of intelligence to survive and that’s probably going to be Brenda’s downfall because it’s hard to think of a dumber character than Brenda.
(Seriously, if my boyfriend took me to a Satanic cult meeting on a date, I would be out of there before they even got around to the human sacrifice part of the night.)
This film is so incredibly dumb that I don’t even know where to begin. Occasionally, I’ll see an incoherent horror film and I’ll give it a good review because the incoherence can sometimes add to the terror. Two of my favorite directors, Lucio Fulci and Jean Rollin, both deliberately made horror films that didn’t make sense because they were tying to capture the feeling of being in a nightmare. Mind, Body & Soul makes sense as long as you accept that Brenda, Rachel, and almost every other character in this film is mind-numbingly dumb. The plot works as long as you accept that there is not a shred of intelligence to be found amongst any of the characters, including the bad guys. This is a dumb film that is never scary. It does feature a fair amount of nudity, which I imagine was probably meant to be the film’s main selling point.
On the plus side, Wings Hauser is always entertaining. You’ll be able to guess the big plot twist that involves his character but no matter. With his quick smirk, he at least seems to be enjoying himself. As was so often the case, Hauser’s performance is the only one in this film that feels like an actual performance. Wings Hauser was an actor who always gave it his all, even while appearing in something like this.
First released in 2004, Irish Eyes tells the story of two brother, born eleven months apart.
Tom Phelan (John Novak) is the older brother, the one who is destined to go to law school, join the Justice Department, and to marry Erin (Veronica Carpenter), the daughter of one of Boston’s most prominent attorneys. Tom’s future lies in politics. As he makes his reputation by taking down members of the Boston underworld, he finds himself being groomed for attorney general and then who knows what else.
Sean Phelan (Daniel Baldwin) is the younger brother. Haunted by the murder of his father and stuck at home taking care of his mother (Alberta Watson) while Tom goes to college, Sean soon pursues a life of crime. He falls under the influence of the Irish mob, led by Kevin Kilpatrick (Wings Hauser). Sean quickly works his way up the ranks. It doesn’t matter how much time he does in prison. It doesn’t matter how many people he has to kill. It doesn’t matter if it alienates the woman that he loves or if it damages his brother’s political career, Sean is a career criminal. It’s the one thing that he knows. When Sean finds himself as the head of the Irish mob and also the American connection for the IRA, his activities are originally overlooked by his brother. Sean even threatens a reporter who makes the mistake of mentioning that Sean and Tom are brothers. But soon, Tom has no choice but to come after his brother. What’s more important? Family or politics?
Obviously (if loosely) based on Boston’s Bulger Brothers (Whitey became a feared criminal while brother John became a prominent Massachusetts politico), Irish Eyes doesn’t really break any no ground. Every mob cliché is present here and so is every Boston cliché. Don’t rat on the family. Don’t betray your friends. The only way to move up is to make a move on whoever has the spot above you. Every bar is full of angry Irish-Americans. Every fight on the street turns deadly. Everyone is obsessed with crime or politics. The film, to its credits, resists the temptation to have everyone speak in a bad Boston accent. (The Boston accent, much like the Southern accent, is one of the most abused accents in film.) Sean narrates the films and you better believe he hits all of the expected points about life on the street.
That said, it’s an effective film with enough grit and good performances to overcome the fact that it’s just a wee predictable. Daniel Baldwin is appropriately regretful as Sean and John Novak does a good job of capturing the conflict between Tom’s love of family and his own political ambitions. Curtis Armstrong shows up and is surprisingly convincing as a psychotic IRA assassin. Admittedly, the main reason that I watched this film was because Wings Hauser was third-billed in the credits. Hauser only appears in a handful of very short scenes and that’s a shame. In those few scenes, he has the rough charisma necessary to be believable as the crime boss who holds together the neighborhood and it’s hard not to regret that he didn’t get more to do in the film. That said, the film still works for what it is. It’s a good mob movie.
This film was originally entitled Irish Eyes. On Tubi, it can be found under the much clunkier name, Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy.
The 1987 film, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, opens with Tim Madden (Ryan O’Neal) talking to his father, tough Dougy (Lawrence Tierney). Dougy has stopped by Tim’s New England home to let Tim know that he has decided stop chemotherapy and accept his eventual death from cancer because, as Dougy puts it, “Tough guys don’t dance.” The tone of Dougy’s voice is all we need to hear to know that, in his opinion, his son has spent way too much time dancing.
Tim is an ex-convict turned writer and, when we first see him, he’s obviously had a few rough nights. He explains to Dougy that he woke up after a bender with his ex-girlfriend’s name tattooed on his arm, blood all over his jeep, and two heads dumped in his marijuana stash. Tim says that he’s hopeful that he’s not the murderer but he can’t be sure. He’s been drinking and doping too much. He suffers from blackouts. He’s not sure what happened.
The majority of the film is made up of flashbacks, detailing Tim’s affairs with a number of women and also his odd relationship with the town’s police chief, Luther Regency (Wings Hauser). Luther is married to Tim’s ex-girlfriend, Madeleine (Isabella Rossellini), who long ago accompanied Tim on a trip to North Carolina where they hooked up with a fundamentalist preacher (Penn Jillette) and his then-wife, Patty Lariene (Debra Sundland). (Tim found their personal ad while casually skimming the latest issue of Screw, as one does I suppose.) Patty Lariene eventually ended up married to Tim, though she has recently left him. As for Madeleine, she has never forgiven him for a car accident that they were involved in. Is Tim capable of loving anyone? Well, he does say, “Oh God, oh man,” repeatedly when he discovers that his wife has been having an affair.
Tim tries to solve the murders himself, finding that they involve not only him and Luther but also Tim’s old prep school friend, Wardley Meeks III (John Bedford Lloyd) and also some rather stupid drug dealers that Tim hangs out with. The plot is almost ludicrously convoluted and it’s tempting to assume that the film is meant to be a parody of the noir genre but then you remember that the film is not only based on a Norman Mailer movie but that it was directed by Mailer himself. Mailer, who was the type of public intellectual who we really don’t have anymore, was blessed with a brilliant mind and cursed with a lack of self-awareness. There’s little doubt that we are meant to take this entire mess of a film very seriously.
And the film’s theme isn’t hard to pick up on. By investigating the murders, Tim faces his own troubled past and finally comes to understand why tough guys, like his father, don’t hesitate to take action. Tough guys don’t dance around what they want or need. That’s a pretty common theme when it comes to Mailer. Tim Madden is not quite an autobiographical character but he is, by the end of the story, meant to represent the type of hard-living intellectual that Mailer always presented himself as being. Unfortunately, Ryan O’Neal wasn’t exactly an actor who projected a good deal of intelligence. And, despite his lengthy criminal record off-screen, O’Neal’s screen presence was somewhat docile. That served him well in films like Love Story and Barry Lyndon. It serves him less well in a film like this. It’s easy to imagine O’Neal’s Tim getting manipulated and, in those scenes where he’s supposed to be a chump, O’Neal is credible enough in the role. It’s far more difficult to buy the idea of Tim actually doing something about it.
Indeed, it’s hard not to feel that co-star Wings Hauser would have been far more credible in the lead role. But then, who would play Luther Regency? Hauser gives such a wonderfully unhinged and out-there performance as Luther that it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. Maybe Hauser could have played both Tim and Luther. Now that would have made for a classic film!
Tough Guys Don’t Dance is weird enough to be watchable. The dialogue is both raunchy and thoroughly humorless, which makes it interesting to listen to, if nothing else. The moments that are meant to be funny are so obvious (like casting noted atheist Penn Jillette as a fundamentalist) that it’s obvious that the moment that feel like clever satire were actually all a happy accident. As far as Norman Mailer films go, this one is not as boring as Wild 90 but it also can’t match the unhinged lunacy of a frustrated Rip Torn spontaneously attacking Mailer with a hammer at the end of the unscripted Maidstone. It’s a success d’estime. Mailer flew too close to the sun but the crash into the ocean was oddly entertaining.
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing St. Elsewhere, a medical show which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1988. The show can be found on Hulu and, for purchase, on Prime!
It’s time to go under the knife in Boston.
Episode 1.16 “The Count”
(Dir by Kevin Hooks, originally aired March 8th, 1983)
Harold Beaumont (Michael Halsey), an adult film actor better known as The Count, has checked into St. Eligius. Of course, Dr. Samuels immediately recognizes him because Samuels is obsessed with porn. Dr. Annie Cavanero does not recognize him but, once she learns what he does for a living, she has to tell him that she finds his work to be offensive because Dr. Cavanero’s entire personality pretty much revolves around getting offended by stuff.
It’s not much of a plot. There’s a process server (William G. Schilling) who wants to serve the Count with a courts summons so Samuels and Cavanero help the Count hide and disguise his identity. It’s silly and dumb story that involves the two of the least likable members of the show’s regular cast.
Meanwhile, Dr. Wendy Armstrong (Kim Miyori) comes to suspect that one of the hospital’s heart surgeons, Dr. Larry Andrews (Peter Michael Goetz), is giving pacemakers to people who don’t actually need them. She takes her concerns to Dr. Craig. Craig, an old friend of Dr. Andrews, is initially dismissive but he later confronts Dr. Andrews and finds out that Armstrong was correct. Dr. Andrews explains that it takes a lot of money to fund his lifestyle. This story was an improvement over the Count but it perhaps would have had more power if it had been someone like Dr. Ehrlich who suspected that Dr. Andrews was giving people pacemakers that they don’t need. Ehrlich actually has a complicated relationship with Dr. Craig and his own less-than-stellar record as a resident would have added some ambiguity to storyline. Dr. Armstrong, on the other hand, has been portrayed as being hypercompetent and a bit self-righteous and, if we’re going to be honest, she’s kind of a boring character.
Speaking of Dr. Ehrlich, he is getting fed up with living with Fiscus. Howie Mandel is driving someone crazy? Who could have seen that coming?
This week’s episode was pretty forgettable. The story involving Dr. Andrews had potential but choosing to make the show’s least interesting characters the center of an entire episode was a decision that really didn’t pay off.
Through the Shattered Lens