Late Night Retro Television Review: Baywatch Nights 2.9 “Night Whispers”

Posted on September 10, 2024 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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, a detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on YouTube!

This week, a vampire comes to California!

Episode 2.9 “Night Whispers”

(Dir by Reza Badiyi, originally aired on November 24th, 1996)

The mysterious Francesca (Felicity Waterman) is being held in police custody as a suspect in the murder of a jogger. The jogger was found with his throat slit. Ryan, who was there when the body was found, suspects that Francesca might be vampire.

Why? Ryan has her reasons.

Francesca speaks with the same type of unplaceable Eastern European accent that all vampires tend to speak with.
Francesca wears sunglasses inside and says she can’t go out during the day because her eyes are just too sensitive to the sunlight.
Francesca occasionally wears a cape.
Francesca wears gloves to hide her vampire hands.
Francesca’s gown was splattered with the dead guy’s blood.
Francesca does not cast a reflection in her apartment’s mirror.

(Why do vampires even own mirrors?)

Ryan seems like she has a pretty good case but Mitch is skeptical. Mitch doesn’t believe in any of that supernatural stuff, despite the fact that he’s spent the past few months dealing with sea monsters, ghosts, and government conspiracies. Just a few episodes ago, he stepped into a house and was transported through time!

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I understand skepticism. For the most part, I’m a skeptic too. But the main reason that I’m such an adamant skeptic is because I haven’t ever had anything supernatural happen to me. Now, if I started meeting ghosts and sea monsters on a regular basis, I would probably become less of a skeptic. I would reexamine all of my prejudices and I would say, “Hey, maybe something is out there.”

Not Mitch, though! Mitch listens to Ryan explain why she thinks Francesca is a vampire and he laughs it off. What’s odd is that it takes Ryan forever to get around to mentioning that Francesca does not cast a reflection. Instead, she fixates on Francesca wearing gloves in California. Trust me, the whole mirror thing is a lot more convincing than the glove thing. Some people wear gloves and some people don’t but everyone (except for the undead) casts a reflection. Ryan also points out that Francesca doesn’t have a birth certificate and ….. SHE’S NOT REGISTERED TO VOTE!

A trip to the police station to visit Francesca goes terribly wrong when Francesca gets out of her cell and proceeds to stalk Mitch, Ryan, a detective, a pimp, and two prostitutes through the building. Though Francesca is willing to drink anyone’s blood, it becomes obvious that she’s obsessed with capturing the Hoff and really, who can blame her? I imagine she would be quite popular with her co-workers if she was the one who turned the Hoff into a vampire.

This is a deeply silly episode but the same can be said of just about every episode of Baywatch Nights. There’s no reason to take this show seriously. The important thing is that the action movies fairly quickly, Felicity Waterman appears to be having a ball as the vampire, and the Hoff and Angie Harmon get to show off the chemistry that made Baywatch Nights a lot more fun than it had any right being. This may not be a classic vampire tale but it’s an entertaining one.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Baywatch Nights 2.6 “The Cabin”

Posted on June 18, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Baywatch Nights travels not to the beach but instead to a cabin in the woods!

Episode 2.6 “The Cabin”

(Dir by Reza Badiyi, originally aired on November 3rd, 1996)

The sixth episode of Baywatch Nights‘s second season opens with a young woman who is being terrified in a cabin in the woods. The woman is dressed for the 1990s but she’s being chased by an axe-wielding man named Horse Calhoun (Dennis Burkley), who is dressed for the 1890s. The woman manages to escape Horse and his axe and let’s get credit where credit is due. It’s a truly well-done sequence, featuring Dennis Burkley giving a ferocious and scary performance as Horse.

Diamont hires Mitch and Ryan to investigate the cabin, specifically because he thinks that the cabin is haunted and he wants to get the opinion of two skeptics. (Ryan believes in ghosts but thinks that they are rare. Mitch does not believe in ghosts but says they still scare him. I have to go with Mitch on this one.) Diamont specifically tells Mitch and Ryan not to enter the cabin until he is able to join them later. So, of course, as soon as they arrive, Mitch and Ryan go right into the cabin.

That turns out to be a mistake. While Ryan keeps herself busy putting away groceries, Mitch explores the cabin and soon discovers that they’re not alone. There’s a woman (Lisa Stahl) is a bathtub who encourages Mitch to “take off your clothes” and join her. There’s a decadent, cigar-chomping man (Danny Woodburn) who seems to be very amused with himself. And, of course, there’s Horse Calhoun, rampaging down hallways and throwing axes at Mitch’s head.

The cabin, it turns out, is home to a portal, one that leads back to a New York brothel in the 1890s. One hundred years ago, an insanely jealous Horse Calhoun killed everyone at the brothel. Can Mitch and Ryan return to their own time before Horse adds them to his list of victims?

This episode is an example of Baywatch Nights at its best. The plot is totally ludicrous and the low-budget forces the show to keep things simple (it’s a rather rustic brothel) but the idea behind the plot is properly creepy and Woodburn, Stahl, and especially Burkley all do a good job bringing their undead characters to life. (Heh heh….) Burkley makes Horse into a fierce madman, one who throws his axes with the authority of someone who no longer cares who might get in the way of the blade. Finally, this episode featured a lot of Hasselhoff/Harmon chemistry. Harmon was earnest and determined while Hasselhoff …. well, he was the Hoff. We’re lucky to have him.

The Cabin was Baywatch Nights as its best.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Baywatch Nights 1.19 “Epilogue”

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, Griff gets a storyline! Who? Oh yeah, Griff! He’s like the photographer who hangs out at the detective agency sometimes. He was played by Eddie Cibrian and he was listed in the opening credits so I guess he was supposed to be a major character, despite never doing or even saying anything.

Anyway, on to this week’s episode….

Episode 1.19 “Epilogue”

(Dir by Reza Badiyi, originally aired on April 27th, 1996)

Griff is concerned about his old friends, RJ (Jared Murphy) and Rene O’Gill (Julianne Morrs). Their mother has just recently died and Rene suspects that she was murdered by their stepfather, Robert Houston (Ben Murphy). RJ, meanwhile, is a junky for both adrenaline and amphetamines and his girlfriend, Candy (Carmen Electra), seems like she might be a bad influence. Both RJ and Rene are due to receive a good deal of money from their trust funds and, if anything happened to them, that money would go to Robert.

Wanting to learn the truth about her mother’s death, Rene hires Mitch and Ryan to investigate. Because Mitch is a terrible private eye, he decides to have Donna go undercover to discover if Robert is hiding anything. Keep in mind that Donna does not work for the detective agency, has got a club to run, is already training to become a lifeguard, and has absolutely no investigative experience. And, of course, it turns out that there really wasn’t any need to have Donna go undercover because, just as Mitch is terrible at investigating stuff, Robert is terrible at covering up the fact that he’s a murderer.

How does Mitch solve this case? When he discovers that someone has been calling Rene’s answering machine and getting her messages without her knowledge, Mitch says, “Dial Star 69.” That’s the extent of Mitch’s detective work in this episode.

(Answering machines and Star 69, could this show be any more of a product of the 90s?)

The main problem here is that the episode revolves around Griff and his romantic feelings for Rene but since Griff is a character who has only appeared in a handful of episodes and never really made much of an impression, it’s hard to really get either emotionally or mentally involved with his story. When RJ is killed during a jet ski race, Griff gets upset and blames Robert but again, we don’t know Griff, we don’t know RJ, and we don’t know Robert.

The best that can be said about this episode is that it features some fun flirtation between David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon, though not nearly enough. Probably the most interesting thing about this episode is that it tries to be noticeably more racy than previous episodes and the editing often feels so abrupt that it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there was a more explicit version of the episode made for Europe. Carmen Electra plays a femme fatale here and she does do a good job of being playfully evil. Later, she would join the cast of regular Baywatch, playing a different character who didn’t murder anyone.

Next week …. oh, who knows? I just want to get to the second season already. That’s when all the aliens and undead Vikings start to show up.

Late Night Retro Television Review: Baywatch Nights 1.13 “Payback”

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week …. eh, I don’t know. This is a messy episode. Geraldo Rivera is in it for some reason.

Episode 1.13 “Payback”

(Dir by Reza Badiyi, originally aired on February 17th, 1996)

This episode was a mess. It’s hard to know where to even start.

In a reminder that Baywatch Nights, during the second half of its first season, was trying to be more like the show it was spun off from, this episode begins with an extended sequence featuring a woman in a yellow bikini. She swims. She walks along the beach. She washes the sand out of her hair in one of those beach showers. And then an unseen person shoots her in the neck and the camera lingers on her body for an uncomfortable amount of time. The mix of sex and violence doesn’t feel particularly appropriate for a show that, at its best, is essentially just a goofy detective show.

After this opening, we are presented with Ryan and Mitch at some sort of party. Ryan has just come back from Catalina and, just as I would do, she took some Dramamine so she wouldn’t get car sick. Unfortunately, she has a little bit too much champagne at the party and is soon in a daze. Mitch takes her back to his place where Ryan demands to know why he’s never tried to “jump all over” her. Ryan then strips down to her underwear and ends up in Mitch’s bed.

Mitch, it should be said, is a total gentleman and sleeps on the couch. But, the next morning, he decides that it would be fun to keep Ryan in suspense as to whether or not they had sex the night before.

To any men reading: DO NOT DO THIS!

Seriously, this joke is totally out of character for Mitch. For that matter, it’s a bit out of character for Ryan as well. (Everything we’ve learned about Ryan would suggest that she would be smart enough to know better than to mix Dramamine and champagne.) David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon did have a likable chemistry. It’s a shame that the show tried to rush things with stuff like this instead of letting it develop naturally.

As for the show’s plot, there are actually two cases. The lesser of the two features Garner helping out a young photographer named Griff Walker (Eddie Cibrian). Griff accidentally got a picture of a model’s murder and he’s worried that murderers are after him. Garner confronts the model’s ex and tells him to back off on trying to intimidate Griff. It’s a weird plotline that was obviously only included to introduce the character of Griff. (This is the third episode to feature Cibrian in the opening credits but the first to actually feature his character.)

Meanwhile, a reporter named Albert Romero (Geraldo Rivera …. yes, the one and only) comes to Mitch after some mobsters kidnap his wife, Bobbie (Meilani Paul). Bobbie was previously being used to smuggle drugs. Now, they want to use her to smuggle a bomb. Fortunately, the mobsters are pretty dumb and Mitch is easily able to thwart them. Unfortunately, this storyline features a lot of Geraldo. As anyone who has ever watched him do anything can tell you, Geraldo Rivera is a person who is incapable of sounding natural or sincere. Everything about him is calculated and over-rehearsed and that certainly comes through in his performance here. Only Geraldo Rivera could make overacting boring.

As I said, this was a messy and way too busy episode. It’s also one that nearly sabotaged the most appealing part of the show, Ryan and Mitch’s friendship. I can’t wait until the UFOs and the sea monsters and the Vikings show up during the second season.

Late Night Retro Television Reviews: Baywatch Nights 1.9 “Blues Boys”

Posted on January 9, 2024 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 Tuesdays, I will be reviewing Baywatch Nights, an detective show that ran in Syndication from 1995 to 1997. The entire show is currently streaming on Youtube!

This week, Mitch considers the blues!

Episode 1.9 “Blues Boy”

(Dir by Reza Badiyi, originally aired on November 25th, 1995)

Lyle Logan (Michael Preston) is a 13 year-old musical prodigy who plays a guitar on the Malibu Pier with his guardian, Ned Simon (Greg Wrangler). Seven years earlier, Lyle witnessed the murder of his father by his Uncle Willie (Nathan Cavaleri). Now, Uncle Willie has just been released from prison and he’s searching for Lyle because he believes that Lyle knows where his father stashed the money from a robbery.

Uncle Willie has his men abduct Ned, planning on using him for leverage to get to his nephew. Lyle approaches Mitch and hires the detective agency to track Ned down. However, Mitch, Ryan and Garner are more interested in learning the truth about Lyle’s background. Though Lyle at first refuses to open up and even tries to run away when Mitch asks him about his background, Lyle eventually comes to trust the group. Together, they save Lyle from Uncle Willie. As for the stash of money, it’s in a first aid kit that breaks apart when it’s tossed into the ocean. The money watches up on the beach, where everyone goes crazy trying to grab some for themselves.

This was a pretty simple episode. In fact, it was a struggle to come up with 200 words to say about the plot. There’s not a lot going on, beyond Lyle running up and down the pier and Uncle Willie-looking evil. The only thing that kept this from being an episode of Baywatch was the presence of Angie Harmon and the lack of red bathing suits. In many ways, this episode highlights one of the biggest problems for Baywatch Nights. Far too often, the show just feels like a detective-themed episode of Baywatch (a show that actually did feature several detective-themed episodes both before and after the Baywatch Nights experiment). This episode, for instance, barely features any scenes that take place at night. Mitch does most of his investigating during the day, which is when he really should be working as a lifeguard.

The episode’s inability to escape the shadow of its parent show is exemplified by a scene that occurs about halfway through the episode. We get an extended sequence in which Ryan, Garner, and Mitch listen to Lyle play his guitar and they all have flashbacks to their past. Ryan’s memories deal with being the daughter of a navy officer. Garner remembers tossing a football back and forth with his father. And Mitch …. well, Mitch just has Baywatch flashbacks. It’s one of those silly, overly earnest scenes that one expects to find any production starring David Hasselhoff. (And the montage is, of course, scored by the Hoff singing a song.) Still, it’s hard not to notice that, while Ryan and Garner both have a past, Mitch just has another television show.

The episode ends with Lyle meeting and playing with B.B. King. Hopefully, B.B. adopted the kid. Seriously, he had been through a lot.

Retro Television Reviews: Policewoman Centerfold (dir by Reza Badiyi)

Posted on November 20, 2022 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 Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1983’s Policewoman Centerfold. It can be viewed on Tubi!

Jennifer Oaks (Melody Anderson) is a former wild teen turned cop. While her friends from high school walk the streets, Jennifer rides in a squad car. It’s not always easy. She is one of the only women on the force and the men refuse to take care her seriously, no matter how times she proves herself as a police officer. Recently divorced, she live in a trailer park with her son, Tommy (Jerry Supiran). At the start of the film, her partner informs her that he’s going to be requesting a new partner because apparently, his wife has issues with him working with another woman.

Jennifer’s new partner is Nick Velano (Ed Mariano). “Are you Italian?” she asks him at one point, because I suppose the fact that his name was Nick Velano wasn’t enough of a clue. (For the record, Nick is Italian.) Though Jennifer says that she doesn’t date the people with whom she works, she makes an except for Nick. It turns out that Nick, along with being Italian, is an amateur photographer. After Jennifer says that she’s never felt attractive, Nick snaps a few pictures of her to prove her wrong. Jennifer is so impressed with the pictures that she mails them off to Centerfold Magazine. Nick, of course, is a huge fan of Centerfold, though he insists that he just reads the articles. That said, Nick is not happy when he discovers that Jennifer is going to appear in a pictorial. For that matter, neither is the police department. Neither are Jennifer’s parents. Neither is Tommy, especially after a bunch of older kids beat him up for having an attractive mom. (I’m not really sure what the logic was there.) However, Jennifer finds the experience to be liberating and she refuses to apologize for her decision. When the chief of police attempts to kick her off the force, Jennifer goes to court.

Centerfold Magazine is obviously meant to be a stand-in for Playboy. Of course, when I say that, I mean that it’s a stand-in for the way that Playboy liked to present itself as opposed to the reality. In Police Woman Centerfold, Centerfold is a progressive magazine that only employs the most professional and polite of photographers. In real life, Playboy was a tacky left-over from the late 60s and Hugh Hefner was a creepy old weirdo who lived in a dilapidated mansion and who was notorious for abandoning his models once they had fulfilled their purpose. In Police Woman Centerfold, Centerfold Magazine is so idealized that its portrayal verges on parody. It’s like one of those dreary communist propaganda films, where everyone in the collective can’t stop smiling and singing about how happy they are because there’s someone off camera pointing a gun at their head.

Fortunately, Melody Anderson gave a good performance in the main role, playing Jennifer as someone who had been beaten down by life but who still refused to give up hope for a better future. The film itself may not have always taken Jennifer’s story seriously but Anderson herself did and, as a result, this film a bit better than it has any right to be,

Horror on TV: Baywatch Nights 2.9 “Night Whispers” (dir by Reza Badiyi)

Posted on October 9, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

On tonight’s episode of Baywatch Nights, David Hasselhoff versus a vampire!

Yes, it’s just as silly as it sounds. I mean, Hasselhoff vs. vampire pretty much tells you everything that you know. The thing that amazes me about this show is that, even after confronting a different monster every week, Mitch still always seems to be somewhat skeptical.

“Okay, I’ll admit that sea serpents and aliens exist but vampires …. c’mon, there’s no way.”

Enjoy!

Horror On TV: Baywatch Nights 2.6 “Cabin” (dir by Reza Badiyi)

Posted on October 6, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

On tonight’s episode of Baywatch Nights, Mitch and Ryan discover a cabin that transports them through time! Suddenly, they’re no longer on the beaches of California. Now, they’re in a New York brothel in the 1890s and there’s a serial killer on the loose….

Okay, here’s the thing with Baywatch Nights. And yes, I know I’ve mentioned this before but now seems like a good time to mention it again. How exactly can anyone go from traveling through time at night to working as a lifeguard during the day? I mean, we’re 6 episodes into the 2nd season of this show and already Mitch has discovered that sea monsters, aliens, and now time travel are all real things. It just amazes me how calmly he’s able to accept all of that. Me, if I traveled through time, I doubt I would ever be able to just go back to my normal life. I would honestly be spending too much time obsessing on the fact that time travel is real.

Anyway, tonight’s episode is a bit ludicrous but kind of fun. So, enjoy!