Mary Kills People

No matter what your point of reference is - angel of death, mercy killing, DNR, assisted suicide - it all comes down to the same thing.  Someone, usually terminal, can't live with the pain of life and/or illness any more, and are unable or unwilling to do themselves in, and need a helping hand to end their misery.

I get it, I really do.  I can't imagine anything worse than the helplessness of a body that has turned against you and is killing you slowly and painfully.  The on-the-nose "Mary Kills People," a show out of Canada airing on Lifetime, is the fictional story of Dr. Mary Harris, played by Caroline Dhavernas, who also gets it, and is in a position to do something about it. 

Assisted by friend and ex-doctor Des, played by rugged Karl Urban lookalike Richard Short, Mary helps people in need of such things a painless peaceful send off.  Stalked by a pair of cops, a drug dealer, and raising out of control daughters make things a bit more difficult.

The cast and the story pulled me in almost immediately.  And despite the content, this drama has a touch of black humor that keeps it from getting too depressing.  I'm glad I found this show, definitely worth checking out.  Recommended. 

The Unauthorized Full House Story

Full disclosure up front here, I don't think I've ever seen an entire episode of "Full House." The Bride was/is a fan, so a full episode may have been on while I was in the same room, but... it just was never my thing. I just wasn't watching all that much TV in the late 80s and early 90s, especially sitcoms.

I was aware of the show however. How could I not be, right? It was huge, even before the Olsen twins exploded. And I knew John Stamos, from "General Hospital" of course. But to me, it just seemed like another innocuous sitcom. I like sitcoms, don't get me wrong, but not the unsurprising formula ones like this - or so I've heard.

After the success of the 'unauthorized' treatment of "Saved by the Bell" by Lifetime, it seems as if this type of production will be appearing more often on the network. What's really frightening about this one is that every actor seems to be doing really bad and over the top impressions of the celebrities. But then again, earlier unauthorizeds for "Three's Company" and "The Partridge Family," among others, have done much the same.

Here's the thing though, "Full House" has something special other previous unauthorizeds did not - a unified cast currently working together on a new version of the show to comment on this movie. The cast is presently working on the new Netflix update of the show, "Fuller House." They expressed mostly disdain and disappointment. Having watched it, I'd have to agree.

So where was Alanis Morissette? Wasn't "You Oughta Know" about Dave Coulier? If there's one story from behind the scenes at "Full House" that needs to be told it's that one...

The Jinx Obsession

I admit it, it snuck up on me. I like documentaries and used to groove on CourtTV when it was still around, but I didn't think I could be this obsessed or compelled as I am by HBO's "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst."

The gist is this: Robert Durst, millionaire real estate heir has been accused of at least three murders in his life, yet been convicted of none. His sketchy low mild calm and emotionless tones infuriate prosecutors and interrogators alike. He appears to be a monster albeit with Teflon skin. And he has always shunned the press.

After seeing a movie made of his infamous adventures, All Good Things..., Durst sought out the director, Andrew Jarecki, who also had a crime documentary background. With Jarecki, Durst consented to be interviewed. The sequences with Durst and Jarecki are the highlight of this six-part documentary series.

I recently had a chance to see the movie All Good Things..., with names changed but much of the voiceover narration taken from court transcripts, and Ryan Gosling starring as the thinly renamed Durst. The film also stars Kirsten Dunst as his doomed wife and Kristen Wiig in a rare but brief serious role. Gosling captures realistically (or as real as can be believed) Durst's odd behavior patterns and tics.

The film features excellent performances all around, vastly superior to the average Lifetime movie it resembles at first glance. When you get right down to it, this is an unbelievable story, which is what makes the fact it's based on real events all the more chilling. This also makes the documentary even scarier, because it's real. This creepy guy got away with at least three murders.

When you see the real Robert Durst on "The Jinx," not realizing the camera is still running and his mike is still live, practicing and rehearsing his answers out loud - that's the core of this national obsession with the show. Here we have a mild mannered twitchy monster who has done unspeakable things, and continues to get away with it and lie about it.

Yes, I'm rushing to judgment. Yes, I'm forming opinion on circumstantial evidence. And yes, I'm basing it all on a TV show and a movie. But that's all part of the game, is it not? That's what they want us to do, and in inviting this documentary, it's what Robert Durst and Andrew Jarecki want us to do as well.

One of the more emotional moments in this series is when Durst's late first wife's mother expressed hope that this documentary will produce evidence to put away her daughter's murderer. I'm with her. "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst" concludes this Sunday evening on HBO.

The Unauthorized Saved by the Bell Story

Full disclosure first. I have never seen more than a few fleeting moments of any episode of "Saved by the Bell." I know it was a sitcom about high school, I could probably pick the guy who played Screech out if a line up, and I know one of the girls from the show eventually starred in Showgirls, but that's about it. I am virtually a "Saved by the Bell" virgin.

So why am I watching this Lifetime drama about the show? You could say I'm a masochist, or a glutton for punishment, or, like testing weird potato chip flavors over at French Fry Diary, I do it so you won't have to.

"Saved by the Bell" was a sitcom, sort of, on Saturday mornings. It began on the Disney Channel as a show about a teacher played by Hayley Mills, when it turned out viewers were watching more for the kids, it was turned into "Saved by the Bell" on NBC on Saturday mornings. The kids were basically templates of the Archie kids, with an African-American girl added for diversity.

This all seems very cookie cutter and formulaic on the surface, but it worked. Today, we're up to two spin-off sequels, two TV movies, at least two unauthorized musicals, and this movie, based on the book "Behind the Bell" by Dustin Diamond, the actor who played Screech. Later, Diamond would recant much of the blaming his ghost writer for making up some of the juicier bits. With Diamond as an executive producer, I wonder how much of the juicy stuff made it into this flick?

For me, with no real background in the show, I actually kinda enjoyed it. Perhaps unencumbered by facts this was a good movie, and that's about as left handed as I can get about it. I liked the breaking the fourth wall storytelling of the young Dustin Diamond character, and being a child of the eighties, I liked the soundtrack, even though none of the songs matched the years.

Again, I can't say whether it's true or not, but it was fairly entertaining, even if there were a lot of subplots left unresolved. A pleasant pass of two hours, even if I had to sit through ads for the new Brittany Murphy movie fifty times.

Petals on the Wind

Petals on the Wind ~ When Lifetime did Flowers in the Attic and it was even a little bit successful, it was pretty much guaranteed they would do a sequel... especially when there's one tailor made as part of the book series it based on. I should note however this was given a green light before Flowers even aired. That's how sure Lifetime was of the source material. So here's Petals on the Wind, which was just as popular as Flowers back in the day, but didn't have a crappy movie version to tarnish it. Let's see how good or bad the Lifetime treatment is.

Just as Flowers artfully used a cover of "Sweet Child o' Mine" to promote it, Petals similarly uses a cover of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight," a song that was actually around when the book came out, and intros the movie almost as if this was a series rather than movies. Is it? "Last time on Flowers in the Attic..." makes me wonder. Not that I would mind a well done TV series...

It begins ten years after Flowers, and the children have been recast. I guess the shooting schedule for the final season of "Mad Men" might interfered possibly for Kiernan Shipka. And while the book picks up immediately after Flowers, the movie is a decade later, necessitating older actors. Chicken or the egg here, I have to wonder what came first - time shift or recasting? Either way, Rose McIver as Cathy is a weak sister to Kiernan Shipka.

The ten year jump that begins at Paul Sheffield's funeral does happily evade the creepy doctor character who adopted the children and tried to marry Cathy. Sometimes gothic romance and horror take a left turn into soap opera so bizarre, it really is better left forgotten. Not that a story that centers on incest isn't already inappropriately creepy... but you know what I mean. Good move, Lifetime.

The sad news is however that all of the rest of this seems very forced. From Cathy's abusive relationship with Julian to Carrie being bullied at school, and on top of it all is Heather Graham and Ellen Burstyn's characters being shoehorned roughly into the story. I had a lot of trouble with Burstyn especially after literally just watching her brilliant comedic turn on "Louie" just before this.

Will Kemp is great as Julian, Cathy's husband in the book, boyfriend here, as long as you stop visualizing him as Starsky from "Starsky and Hutch," a comparison that gets difficult when you see his car. Rose McIver is no Shipka as I mentioned but she is certainly as hatable as Cathy should be. She deserves what she gets in so many ways. This was okay, not as good as Flowers, but a suitable sequel. The over the top revenge ending is well worth the two hour watch.

Lifetime has already announced plans to do the next two books in the Dollanganger series by V.C. Andrews, If There Be Thorns and Seeds of Yesterday in 2015, but there's been no word about the fifth and final installment, Garden of Shadows, probably because the ads refer to Seeds as the final installment. Interesting.

Lizzie Borden Took an Ax

A fairly vivid memory of my childhood is the fight for Lizzie Borden. Not so much about whether I could stay up to watch the infamous TV movie, it was more about would I even be allowed to watch it. The Legend of Lizzie Borden, starring Elizabeth Montgomery of "Bewitched" in the title role, was one of 'those' shows. It had a warning label that it was for mature audiences only.

Other than fighting with my parents, the warning label, and that all the kids at school were talking about it the next day, I remember very little about it. I know it was theatrically released in Europe with scenes of Elizabeth Montgomery committing the murders in the nude. And of course there was the jump rope rhyme - "Lizzie Borden took an ax, and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one."

We had all heard it was a true story, or rather that the movie was based on a true story, one of a horrible murderess who took out both her parents with an ax. I learned later the facts of the case, and that Lizzie Borden was actually acquitted of the crimes and went on to live in the same town of Fall River for another four decades, albeit in infamy, but a free citizen.

Now, for the second week in a row (first with the Flowers in the Attic remake) the Lifetime Network makes a splash with a movie event, the both humorously and horrifically titled Lizzie Borden Took an Ax. In the title role this time is Christina Ricci, and as much as I love her, she's no Elisabeth Montgomery, despite the resemblance.

As with the aforementioned Flowers, Lifetime uses music as a lure by playing the hypnotic "Psychotic Girl" by The Black Keys over the opening credits. The alternative soundtrack continues throughout as if music supervisor Tree Adams didn't know if he was scoring a Lizzie Borden movie or Marie Antoinette 2. I'm not complaining, I was digging the tunage, I just question the appropriateness of it.

Christina Ricci imbues her Lizzie with a believable cold detachment. Clea DuVall, perhaps best known from HBO's "Carnivale" and more recently "American Horror Story," gives one of her best performances as Lizzie's sister Emma. They are the showpieces of this gothic crime drama with all the proper trappings of a crime of the century.

This is a good version of the legend, and while not necessarily sticking to the facts, it's a good story. I loved the music, I loved the muted colors, but I wish we could have had Elizabeth Montgomery instead of Christina Ricci. Worth watching.

Flowers in the Attic

When I was a kid, a coming of age kid in the late 1970s, this was the book (and in rather quick succession, series of books) that not only everyone read, it was the one you had to read, and were forbidden to read.

"Flowers in the Attic" by V.C. Andrews is at its core a tale of forbidden love. A rich girl has an incestuous relationship with an uncle, and both are cast from the family. They live almost happily ever after outside the family, with a teenage son and daughter as well as pre-teen twins, until the uncle dies in a car accident. The mother must return to her family for help. The children are locked away in a huge attic because her parents are a bit deranged. While the mother is accepted back into the family slowly, the son and daughter enter puberty in the attic, where it's sinisterly intended they never escape from.

That's the first book. It continues in "Petals on the Wind," "If There Be Thorns," "Seeds of Yesterday," and "Garden of Shadows," a Gothic horror series of books telling the repeating incestuous history of this family, all with cool cut out peekaboo covers. Because of the content, they were banned in many schools, but everybody, including boys like me, read them. They were mostly narrated by the daughter, Cathy Dollanganger, and there was much speculation that the stories were true, and Cathy was actually the wheelchair-bound V.C. Andrews. Oh, the rumor filled days from the before the internet!

A disastrous movie starring Victoria Tennant, Louise Fletcher, and Kristy Swanson followed in 1987. To say it was disappointing would be a serious understatement. It was almost as if the producers didn't know anything about the book(s), and the result was at best a primer for the book, if that. It was a bad movie in both execution and performance.

Now, almost three decades later, the Lifetime Network is trying to take the Dollanganger clan the movie route. This production has Heather Graham as the mother, Ellen Burstyn as the grandmother, and Kiernan Shipka as Cathy. While Graham is seared onto my eyelids eternally from Lenny Kravitz' "American Woman" video and hard from me to imagine as matronly, I think Shipka is perfect casting. The simple fact that so many times I have wanted to slap the crap out of her snotty and rebellious Sally on "Mad Men" makes her the perfect Cathy - because really, the character is just a spoiled bitch. I loved the books, but by the end of them, I kinda felt she deserved the tragedy that was her life. Just my opinion.

I really liked Lifetime's ad campaign for the movie with Trees' haunting version of "Sweet Child o' Mine" and the teasers calling it 'The Book You Were Forbidden to Read.' Nice. Shipka fulfills suspicions, Graham overcomes my perceived limitations, and most surprisingly, Burstyn is not only properly evil in her role as antagonist, she even manages to garner sympathy at some points.

This is perhaps not a perfect version of Flowers, but it is easily light years better than the first movie version. Anyone chased away by the 1987 film should check this out, it's the movie we should have gotten, and a much more satisfying translation of the book.

WE Empowers Women

In the most recent cable upgrade from Comcast, we were presented with a new channel - We. Now I thought that I had heard of it before, and what I thought I had heard was that it was a 'women's channel,' similar to Oprah's Oxygen or the grandmommy of them all, Lifetime. Their website even says WE Empowers Women. Upon looking at their schedule, I'm not so sure.

Their weekend programming seems to be composed of nothing but old "48 Hours" reruns, something called "Rescue Mediums" - about female psychics who make housecalls, and "John Edward Cross Country." Seems more like a psychic network to me, and wasn't John Edward revealed as a fraud a few years back, and wasn't that why he was taken off the air? Perhaps I've heard wrong on that, but I still don't trust this snake oil salesman. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want to believe I have dead relatives following me around, watching me, all the time, even when I'm on the toilet. Somehow I think there might be better things to do in the afterlife than that.

The We schedule during the week doesn't promise much more than curiosity, the same sort of curiosity one might have to see a freak show maybe. Programs like "Cruel and Unusual Transgender Women in Prison," "Bridezillas," "Unwrapping Macy's," "Girl Meets Cowboy" and more reruns of "Kate & Allie," "Hope & Faith" and "Dharma & Greg" than you can shake a stick at.

And even though it does seem like the psychics/weddings/sitcom-rerun network, I will still give a try. Heck, some of this stuff does sound interesting, especially "Cruel and Unusual Transgender Women in Prison." Hey, at least Comcast didn't give us another golf channel...

The Glass House

THE LATEST ABC MOVIE OF THE WEEK

A Video Review of The Glass House

Copyright 2003 Glenn Walker

Remember all those ABC movies of the week from the early to mid-1970s? You know, stuff like Trilogy of Terror and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark? Or how about all those cautionary tales with teens babysitting for psychos, nannies who steal families and young girls who hitchhike with serial rapists? Wow, the 1970s were great, weren’t they? Sarcasm mode off.

The Glass House is a throwback to those movies of the week, but that’s not a bad thing. It is the story of two children orphaned in a sudden car accident and taken in by old family friends. *Spoiler Warning* As it turns out the whole thing was a scam to get money. The new foster parents are as evil as any that might be found in an ABC movie of the week.

LeeLee Sobrieski is amazing here as she is in most flicks. The only problem I have with her is one that can’t really be helped. She is such a dead ringer for Helen Hunt that it’s distracting. I wonder if they’re related? The brother is played by Trevor Morgan who did such a great job in The Rookie and The Sixth Sense.



The suspense is real and despite plot comparisons much more real than your average Lifetime Network flick or Afterschool Special. See it. An underrated thriller for all.