Tag Archives: review

Late Night Retro Television Review: Highway to Heaven 2.21 “The Torch”

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, its the most shocking episode of Highway to Heaven yet!

Episode 2.21 “The Torch”

(Dir by Michael Landon, originally aired on March 12th, 1986)

Everett Salomon (Herschel Bernardi) is a Holocaust survivor who has become wealthy and successful in the United States.  In poor health and in need of a heart transplant, Everett spends most of his time giving speeches about his experiences in the concentration camp.  He is disturbed by the rise in Holocaust denialism and has dedicated his remaining years to battling the scourge of Neo-Nazism.  In a disturbing scene that brings to mind the horrible images of the October 7 attacks, a Nazi named Cal (Robert O’Reilly) sneaks onto Everett’s property in the middle of the night and murders his dog.

Cal is a follower of Jan Baldt (Paul Koslo), a Neo-Nazi and a Holocaust denier who has turned his basement into a shooting range so that he and his buddies can fire their guns at pictures of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Moshe Dayan.  Jan is consumed by hate and he’s teaching that hate to his young son, Rolf (played by a very, very young Mark-Paul Gosselaar).  While Jan rants about conspiracies and bankers, Rolf cleans the guns in the basement.

At a Nazi rally, Jan’s speech is interrupted by Everett’s son, Joseph (David Kaufman).  Cal proceeds to make his way through the crowd and ends up shooting Joseph dead.  When Everett hears the news, he has a heart attack and is rushed to the hospital by two paramedics, Jonathan Smith and Mark Gordon.  Meanwhile, while Jan and Cal celebrate in their basement, Rolf picks up a submachine gun and, not realizing it’s loaded, pulls the trigger and guns both men down.

Everett finally gets the heart transplant that he’s needed ever since he was first liberated from the camps.  Unfortunately, that heart comes from Jan Baldt.  At first, Everett refuses to accept the heart but then the ghosts of his parents and of Joseph appear to him and tell him that he has to continue to live and let people know the truth about what happened in the camps.

Later, Everett leaves the hospital and tells the reporters waiting outside that he will never be silent.

This seems to be one of the episodes of Highway to Heaven that anyone who has ever watched the show remembers.  Because the show is usually rather gentle and non-violent, this episode can be a rather jarring viewing experience.  The first time I saw it, the only thing that stunned me more than Joseph’s death was the subsequent deaths of Jan and Cal.  The episode ends on an uplifting note but I always find myself wondering what happened to Rolf.  Without his father around to brainwash him, will Rolf be able to learn something other than hate?  Or is it too late for him?  Is Rolf damned to follow in his father’s footsteps?

With the current rise of anti-Semitism, this episode still feels incredibly relevant.  There’s really not much difference between Jan Baldt’s rants and the stuff currently being spewed by Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Brianna Joy Gray.  This episode reminds us that “never again” has to be more than just a catch phrase.

Horror on TV: One Step Beyond 2.25 “The Haunting” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

On tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond, a man suspects that his best friend is having an affair with his fiancee.  What better way to take care of the problem than by leaving his friend to die on the side of a mountain?

It seems like the perfect crime and the man might get away with it …. but only if he can do something about the ghost who seems to be stalking him in the days leading up to his wedding!

As always, this is supposedly based on a true story.

This episode originally aired on March 1st, 1960.

Enjoy!

Retro Television Review: Malibu, CA 1.14 “Murray For Mayor”

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 Thursdays, I will be reviewing Malibu CA, which aired in Syndication in 1998 and 1999.  The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, Dennis Haskins guest stars!

Episode 1.14 “Murray for Mayor”

(DIr by Gary Shimokawa, originally aired on January 24th, 1999)

Upset that his favorite tree stump has been slated to be destroyed to make room for a new road, Murray decides to run for mayor of Malibu.  When they discover that Murray’s father has given him a check for $20,000, Scott and Jason declare themselves to be Murray’s campaign managers.

Being two sociopaths, Jason and Scott proceed to spend the money on things for themselves.  It doesn’t matter, though.  Murray soon finds himself rising in the polls.

Who is Murray’s opponent?  It’s none other than Dennis Haskins, of Saved By The Ball fame!  Haskins plays himself in this episode, offering up a bunch of vacuous plans and slogans while continually having to explain to people that Mr. Belding was just a character that he played on television.  When Haskins learns that Scott and Jason have been using the money on things like a new television, he informs them that he will report them to the campaign board unless Murray loses.

Being two sociopaths, Jason and Scott try to sabotage Murray’s campaign by telling Murray to make increasingly outrageous promises.  But it doesn’t matter …. Murray wins the election!

Yay!  Jason and Scott are going to prison!  The show’s over!

No, not quite.  After making sure that his stump will be saved, Murray resigns as mayor.  Dennis Haskins announces that he’ll be running to replace Murray and, for some reason, this means that he’s dropping his investigation into Jason and Scott’s financial activities.  I don’t think that’s the way it works but whatever.

Meanwhile, Tracy is learning how to be a magician.  She accidentally handcuffs herself to Stads, totally ruining Stads’s date with some random guy.  Luckily, Tracy later handcuffs herself to the same guy and convinces him to give Stads a second chance.

(Where would mediocre sitcoms be without aspiring magicians and handcuffs?)

This episode was actually not as bad as it probably sounds.  Casting Dennis Haskins as himself and then having him spend the entire episode angrily saying that he’s tired of talking about Screech was actually kind of clever and probably a good reflection of what was actually happing in Haskins’s life at the time.  With its story of a washed-up celeb running for political office, this episode actually felt a bit prophetic.  (Just a few months before this episode aired, Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota.)  Just as Ben Savage had to spend his entire congressional run dealing with questions about why he no longer talks to the cast of Boy Meets World, Dennis Haskins finds his entire campaign defined by one role.

In the end, this episode predicts our cynical future.  Murray is elected despite being an idiot.  How often does that happen nowadays?

Horror Film Review: Handling the Undead (dir by Thea Hvistendahl)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Handling The Undead opens, as many Norwegian films tend to do, with a shot of an overcast sky, an ugly apartment complex, and a forest that appears to be submerged in shadows.  From the opening shots, it’s a depressing film.  Again, that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has ever watched a Norwegian film.

Three families are dealing with death. A woman has buried her young son and is now struggling not only with her grief but also her loving but overbearing father, whose attempts to make her feel better have the exact opposite result.  An old woman’s longtime spouse lies in a coffin, having not yet been put back into the Earth.  A woman is rushed to a hospital after an automobile accident and is not expected to live.

At night something happens.  The lights turn off.  Static is heard on every radio.  When the lights come back, so do the dead.  The grandfather hears his grandson wheezing and beating on his coffin and promptly digs him up.  The old woman’s spouse climbs out of her coffin on her own and returns to the home where she lived for decades.  The car accident victims opens her eyes and is alive, even though the doctor say that her heart is not beating rapidly enough to sustain life.  While the local authorities try to figure out why the dead have come back to life and to try to keep track of where they’ve all gone, their relatives spend one more day with their loved ones.

The problem is that dead may be alive but they’ve come back as silent and unemotional empty shells.  They seem to have a slight memory of their former lives but they don’t react to anything in a normal way.  Instead, they stare straight ahead.  The child has already started to decay and his return brings no happiness to his mother.  In fact, there’s not much happiness to be found anywhere in Handling the Undead.  One gets the feeling that even Ingmar Bergman would want to tell this film to lighten up.

Handling the Undead unfolds at a leisurely pace.  There are a few creepy scenes but, for the most part, the horror comes from what we’re expecting the zombies to do than what we actually see them do.  Everyone watching the movie knows what is eventually going to happen with the zombies.   We know that eventually, the undead will attack the living.  Handling the Undead, however, is more concerned with how the living would react to the dead than how the dead will eventually destroy the living.  There’s very little dialogue and every scene is darkly lit and full of shadows.  The majority of the characters hope that the returned dead will act like their old selves but they soon discover that they can’t go back to the way things once were.  It’s an intelligent film about how we grieve and deal with loss.

That said, it’s also a rather dull film.  It’s a deliberately boring film and, at times, it’s low-key approach feels almost as gimmicky as the blood and guts that can be found in more traditional zombie films.  Stretched out to 90 minutes, the running time feels like an endurance test.  And again, that’s probably what the filmmakers were going for but it doesn’t make the film any easier to sit through.  When one reaches the end of a 90-minute film that is this purposefully slow, one has the right to expect more of an emotional or intellectual payoff than this film provides.  This is a film that I can grudgingly respect but it’s not something that I’ll ever watch again.

Horror on the Lens: Nosferatu (dir by F.W. Murnau)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s Horror on the Lens is a classic film that really needs no introduction!  Released in 1922, the German silent film Nosferatu remains one of the greatest vampire films ever made.  It’s a film that we share every October and I’m happy to do so again this year!

Enjoy!

Horror Song of the Day: Main Theme From Zombi 2 by Fabio Frizzi

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s song of the day, we have Fabio Frizzi’s main theme from 1979’s Zombi 2.  If you’ve ever seen the film, it’s impossible to hear this piece of music without imagining hundreds of zombies walking across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Film’s of 2024: God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust (dir by Vance Null)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

It can be easy to forget just what a big splash God’s Not Dead made when it was released back in 2014.  Today, it’s taken for granted that every year, at least one faith-based movie will be released to terrible reviews and then “shock” everyone by opening up strong at the box office.  However, in 2014, God’s Not Dead was the film that started the whole trend, along with sparking the ongoing debate about whether or not Hollywood has the slightest idea what most Americans want to see.

That’s not to say, of course, that God’s Not Dead was a good film.  It’s not.  It’s a ludicrously simplistic and smug film that, over the course of its overly long run time, promotes the idea that the only reason atheists exist is because they’re either bitter, evil, or both.  (For the record, if a professor truly threatened to fail a paying student solely because of his religious beliefs, the end result would probably be a lawsuit.)  The idea that someone could sincerely disagree with the film’s heroes or even believe differently than them without having an ulterior motive is not one that is entertained in the God’s Not Dead universe.  Indeed, perhaps the most interesting thing about the God’s Not Dead films is that they are just as heavy-handed and often just as condescending as the secular films being churned out by the major studios.

God’s Not Dead has, to date, spawned four sequels.  The second was enjoyably campy and featured an earnest performance from Melissa Joan Hart.  The third, which is the the closest that the franchise has gotten to actually making a good film, was surprisingly even-handed, or at least as even-handed as a film in this franchise can be.  The fourth was way too talky but, because it came out during the COVID lockdowns, its condemnation of government overreach reflected the way that a lot of people were feeling at the time.  Somewhat inevitably, the fifth film finds Reverend David Hill (David A.R. White) running for Congress again the villain from the second film, dastardly atheist Peter Kane (Ray Wise).

The film opens with the death of an incumbent congressman.  His opponent, Peter Kane, tells the press that the congressman was a good man and then proceeds to gloat about his death in private.  Kane is an ultra-liberal atheist.  Usually, the villains in the God’s Not Dead universe have a dead relative to help explain why they’ve lost their faith but Kane is just evil.  (In God’s Not Dead 2, Kane specifically put Melissa Joan Hart on trial for expressing her Christian beliefs and then chortles, “We are going to prove God is dead!”)  With Kane on the verge of being elected to Congress by default, Rep. Daryl Smith (Isaiah Washington) suggests that David Hill, who went viral for denouncing Congress in the fourth film, should be the party’s new nominee.

After some hesitation, Hill agrees.  However, he drives his campaign manager, Lottie Joy (Samaire Armstrong), crazy by basing his campaign on his religious beliefs.  Of course, if you didn’t want a candidate to talk about his religious beliefs in a campaign, why would you nominate a pastor whose fame is totally based on those beliefs?  Add to that, Hill is running for a Congressional seat in Arkansas.  I have family in Arkansas.  Growing up, I occasionally lived in Arkansas.  Sure, there are liberals in Arkansas and there are atheists in Arkansas.  But none of them are going to get elected to Congress anytime soon.  Arkansas is probably one of the few states where Hill’s faith-based campaign wouldn’t be considered controversial.

(That Mike Huckabee has a cameo as himself should be all the reminder that viewers need that Arkansas is not at all hesitant about electing pastors to higher office.)

It’s heavy-handed and cartoonish, which is probably to be expected.  Unfortunately, it’s also rather boring, with not even Ray Wise’s villainy providing much entertainment value.  Outside of arguing that atheists are evil and that separation of church and state is just a catch phrase, the film argues that money is a divisive force in politics and that politicians shouldn’t be bought.  Wow, really!?  It’s a film about politics that has little fresh insight to offer.  David Hill goes from being a media-savvy pastor to being an innocent naïf who is shocked to discover that politics is a dirty business.  God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust makes Billy Jack Goes To Washington seem like a hard-hitting portrayal of American politics.

I will give this franchise some credit for maintaining a surprising sense of continuity.  As I mentioned earlier, Ray Wise returns as the character that he played in the second film.  Paul Kwo is back as Hill’s associate pastor.  Dean Cain returns as the amoral businessman from the first film.  You have to imagine that Kevin Sorbo is kicking himself for allowing his smug professor character to die in the first film.  What’s funny is that the college student who kicked off the franchise by refusing to sign a piece of paper declaring God to be dead has pretty much vanished from the films.  Whatever happened to that kid?

In the end, we all know where this is going.  The next film will undoubtedly feature David Hill running for president.  2028 is right around the corner.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Monsters 2.18 “The Offering”

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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing Monsters, which aired in syndication from 1988 to 1991. The entire series is streaming on YouTube.

This week features the most fearsome monster yet.

Episode 2.18 “The Offering”

(Dir by Ernest Farino, originally aired on February 18th, 1990)

After a serious auto accident, Lewis (Robert Krantz) wakes up in a hospital with a bandage wrapped around his head.  Dr. Hubbard (Orson Bean) tells Lewis that he’s suffered a concussion and must rest.  All Lewis wants to know is whether or not his mother’s surgery went okay.  Dr. Hubbard sighs and says that they were not able to get all of the cancer.

Lewis’s comatose mother is a patient at the same hospital and, when Lewis sneaks into her room to visit with her, he’s shocked to discover that he can see a giant insect-like creature that is hovering over the bed and producing slugs that are burrowing under his mother’s skin.  Lewis sees the same thing when he looks at other cancer patients but Dr. Hubbard insists that Lewis is only having hallucinations.

In order to try to help Lewis come to terms with both his accident and his mother’s cancer, Dr. Hubbard allows Lewis to watch as a patient undergoes radiation treatment.  Lewis is the only one who can see that the slugs are drawn to the radiation and will leave a patient’s body to find the source of it.  Still unable to convince Hubbard that what he’s seeing is real, Lewis sneaks out his room, steals a radioactive isotope, and prepares to make the ultimate sacrifice to save his mother.

The Offering is a return to form for Monsters.  Full of atmosphere and featuring a genuinely disturbing set of monsters, this is an effective and well-acted episode that works because it captures the helplessness that everyone will feels when a family member or loved one is seriously ill.  I lost my mother to cancer and my father to Parkinson’s, two diseases that are still not as understood as they should be.  Like Lewis, I spent a lot of time wishing that I could somehow just see and understand what was causing their illnesses so that I could know how to save them.  Cancer and Parkinson’s and dementia are all monsters that we wish we could just squash under our heel as easily as we could a bug.

In the end, Lewis eats a glowing radioactive isotope so that all of the cancer slugs will be drawn to his body.  Couldn’t he have just used the isotope to lead the slugs out into the middle of the street or something?  Lewis offers up his own life to save his mother.  It reminds me of the old Norm McDonald joke, that dying of cancer is the equivalent of beating cancer because the cancer dies with you.  That’s a good way to look at it.  Cancer never wins.