Tonight on LMN was the premiere (?) of a Melissa Joan Hart movie called Whispers and Lies. And, I mean, not that we wouldn’t have watched it anyway, but Sally and I dvr’ed it because it had something to do with a creepy, insular town whose residents were immortal, and we just can’t pass something like that up.
But, see, in the grand tradition of stranger-in-a-creepy-community-with-a-secret movies, this one’s secret made absolutely no sense. So, like, there’s The Spring with Kyle MacLaughlin, where he and his son are on a camping trip and he just sort of wanders into this little town and discovers that the water in the town is basically the fountain of youth and all the residents are immortal. But, the town wants to get him out of there because they don’t want the secret getting out. Of course, the son breaks his leg and the doctor decides to dip him into the lake to heal him, which kind of is how the secret got out, I think? So, why didn’t she just not do that? I don’t know. Anyway, but KMac gets REALLY hyper annoying and obsessive and decides that he wants to live there with all these people and he has to actually go to, like, a town council meeting and make his case (my wife died of cancer, boo hoo) and they actually approve him and and his son, but then his son realizes that there’s one other immortal teenager there and he’s kind of not the most fun kid in the world (because he’s really 100 years old, or something) and then he also realizes that being 14 forever will so be the pits, and KMac keeps telling him to back off because there’s a pretty doctor that he has to hit on. But, THEN, this guy that he becomes friends with is all, “It’s my birthday,” and KMac is all excited, but the guy seems all sad, and it turns out that on some birthday, you have to kill yourself in front of the whole town. Seriously! You have to stop drinking the fountain of youth water and die on your … 100th birthday? That doesn’t seem right. 100 years isn’t that long. But, I think it might be 100. I’m not sure. Anyway, so KMac hasn’t started drinking the water yet, but after he goes to the party (and he’s all excited like a doofus and then his friend is like, “Been nice knowing you,” and it still takes him about an hour to figure out what’s happening, like, did he never see the Lottery?) he realizes that killing yourself in front of the town WON’T be fun AND his dippy doctor gf is gonna have to kill herself in about a month and a half, so, tough luck. So, he runs away and he finds this one couple that decided to just stop drinking the water and NOT kill themselves and let nature take its course and they have the worst old-people makeup on ever. And this robo-cop guy chases him and he cries and begs and then they do some kind of thing where they make sure he never comes back to the town or something.

But, anyway, the reason they kill themselves and have a whole meeting about whether people can stay is that they don’t want the town to get overcrowded and become a tourist trap and let their springs dry up. So, that makes some amount of sense.
Then, speaking of the Lottery… That one has nothing to do with immortality, but, there is town killings and creepiness. Anyway, Dan Cortese’s dad dies and he wants to be buried in his old hometown with his wife, so DC goes there to carry out his father’s wishes, but they keep telling him it’s not possible because… he didn’t live there or something. Anyway, they won’t do it, but DC doesn’t get it AND he meets Jimmy James’s daughter Felicity and greases all over her and refuses to leave. But, see, the town is all idyllic (AND CREEPY! let’s just say overall it seemed to be a lot like that polygamist compound the police just raided a few days ago) and beautiful and DC is all, “I could live here forever!” despite the fact that every time he indicates that, everyone gets all shifty eyed. Anyway, he figures out (eventually) that the town wants to keep the population at a minimum because … their town is so great, or something? So, every year, they do a lottery, and the person whose name is drawn has to die. But, not just die! Be stoned to death! Like, what? So, after they blow up his car (literally!) and beat him up and stuff, they drag him in handcuffs to the lottery so he can see what he was disrupting by overstaying his (sweaty) welcome for too long, and then he watches Felicity’s mother’s name get drawn and Felicity TOTALLY STONE HER MOTHER TO DEATH! Like, teeth bared and everything. I saw this movie when it came out, because we were reading the short story in English class, like, that week, and I remember that scene every time I watch Felicity. But, anyway, then he remembers that his mother died in the lottery, and that, when she was calling out to him to help her, he totally stoned her, too. Creepy! But, anyway, so, crowd control? Population control? Anyway, the lottery, I guess, had some sort of purpose. A stupid one, but still.
Then, there’s The Glow, where these wacky old people living in a rent-controlled building in Manhattan (which is a bad sign! there are no rent-controlled apartments there that aren’t being used for nefarious reasons, trust me.) lure Portia DiRossi and Dean Cain into their weird scheme where they kill young, healthy, family-less couples and steal their “glow” and make it into milkshakes that they drink to become immortal. So, they’re just greedy old jerks who want to live forever.

Anyway, Whispers and Lies. I mean, Whispers and Lies? That title doesn’t have anything to do with the movie.
MJH’s cousin Patti met a guy on the “mainland” and recently started dating him. He lives on an island (I’m assuming off the coast of Washington or Oregon, since every Lifetime movie takes place in the Pacific Northwest) and Patti has been invited to visit him, but she brings MJH with her because she wants an opinion, and she’s nervous about going alone. So, they go for the week, and they stop off at this art show to meet the guy (Kyle). While they’re there, MJH starts looking at the (crappy) paintings and is approached by the artist, Chris. (Btw, the guy who played Chris was also in this movie called Cabin by the Lake with Judd Nelson. I’ve never seen it, but based on the imdb description, I think I might have to: “A screenwriter, who lives in a cabin by the lake near Los Angeles, drowns young women, then goes back to visit their bodies and do their laundry.” !!)
Anyway, Patti almost has her purse stolen and her arm gets cut in the process, and when she’s taken to the clinic, the doctor notices this birthmark on her shoulder and tells Patti that it’s actually an indication that she has an unusually strong immune system. Then, Patti goes missing all night and all the next day. When MJH wakes up and realizes she’s gone, she’s all worried, but everyone keeps telling her she’s probably just having a “good time with Kyle, wink wink” and MJH should lighten up. (That’s seriously what’s implied every single time.)
Meanwhile, MJH and Chris are hanging out and having awkwardly worded conversations, and then she gets a text from Patti saying that she’s fine, just got a little carried away and will be back soon. But, she signs her name “Patty” not “Patti” and MJH is just sort of like, “Huh, weird.” I mean, if my sister texted me and wrote her name “Salli”, I certainly wouldn’t think she was just typing fast. The i and the y are in totally different places! So annoying.
Anyway, MJH meets the girl who tried to mug Patti and it turns out she’s just a misunderstood goth teen whose foster mother is the town doctor. She also meets a crazy old man named Eugene who keeps following her and mumbling things about putting people inside of him, and then he grabs her so she’ll listen to him and then the sheriff shoots him and kills him. And then she talks to the doctor and reveals that she and Patti are cousins. Oh, and Chris makes out with her and notices her similar birthmark. And she finds out that Patti up and left without saying anything, and goes to question Kyle, and finds all of Patti’s belongings there, and Chris’s car horn keeps beeping uncontrollably, and then Kyle says that Patti left after an argument and forgot her stuff, and then Chris’s brakes go out and he makes MJH tuck and roll, and then he gets thrown from the car and has to go to the clinic. Then MJH tells the doctor to take him to the mainland and she’s all, “We take care of our own,” but, like, an hour later she gets shifty-eyed and says she took her advice and he’s gone. THEN, MJH sees the teen and follows her to a cemetery and notices that there are no dates on the markers and finds out that there was an epidemic and everyone started dying and then the doctor found a cure, and that all the teen wants to do is run away and live a normal life, and MJH says she’ll help her because she’s a hs science teacher, and teachers don’t break promises, and I laughed and laughed. Oh, and then the teen tells her where Eugene’s house was so that she could nose around, and she finds an old-timey portrait of Eugene and his family, and she takes it with her, and then, when she’s driving back to the hotel, she’s pulled over and the cop tells her that they found Patti and she’s dead. And MJH has to identify the body, and they tell her that Patti drowned (but she was a lifeguard!) and THEN they say that she was seen drinking (but she doesn’t drink!) and that she must have fallen, hit her head, and landed in the water. And the doctor insists on doing an autopsy before MJH can have the body, and MJH is all no way jose, but the doctor’s all I’m a coroner so what? and MJH has to be all fine, whatever, and then the doctor gives her pills to sleep and sends her home.
So… That all happened in one day. That whole paragraph up there! I feel like Richie Tankersley Cusick wrote this screenplay.
The next day, MJH goes to the library and looks at old newspapers and discovers a whole heap of tourist deaths, and that a newspaper from 1862 shows the portrait of Eugene and his family that she saw at his house. And she takes the picture out of her purse and holds it to the screen and looks back and forth a few times. But, like, it’s a really big picture, and it’s not that hard to tell that it’s the same exact photo.
And she’s told by some surly fishermen that her cousin drowned and THAT’S THAT, MISS, and then she hears Chris’s signature hacking and wheezing and sees him driving off with Kyle, and she goes to the doctor’s office to ask what’s up and notices the whole town in line for “flu shots.” And then she gets that teen girl to help her break into the doctor’s office that night and discovers that Patti’s body has been completely drained of blood and that the autopsy report for Patti and every other tourist who’s died includes a picture of their giant birthmarks and MJH is next!
So, she goes to find Chris and he’s, like, totally fine even after the horrific car accident he was in, and he tells her that he’ll explain what’s going on after he gets her to his private dingy and sails her to the mainland, but MJH is arrested, like, the second they walk out the door, and Chris is held back from helping her and told that he’s become a liability, and I honestly don’t know what they do with him or why they don’t bring him to jail. But, anyway, in the jail, MJH does this whole sassy, “What excuse are you gonna use for MY death, huh?” routine, but then, practically as you’re still hearing her talking, they cut to a scene of her crying with her hands over her face. It was weird. Very RTC. Oh! Eugene is alive! And in the jail cell next to her! And the teen has the keys to the jail cells (?) and lets MJH out and she and Chris and the teen go running through the woods and try to escape but don’t. MJH then screeches to the townspeople that she’s noticed they’re all not so immortal anymore, and ARE becoming susceptible to illnesses and the doctor has been acting shady and not letting them in on this secret (?) and they very very quickly turn on the doctor and let MJH and Chris and the teen go, the end.

So, it turns out that super immunity thing that MJH and Patti and the other dead tourists have is something that has been harvested and injected into the townspeople for the last 150-odd years to keep them healthy and make them heal really fast after injuries. So, they had this epidemic and, according to the doctor, the whole world abandoned them and they were on their own to find a cure. So, she found one and used it, and all these people were okay.
But, then… I don’t know how this stuff ended up making them stop aging. But, for whatever reason, it did. What makes NO sense is the fact that they all continued to use it to BECOME immortal. Because, honestly? They all seem miserable! Half of the people in the town seem to be in their late 70s and older, which had to have been very old for the time when they first became immortal, right? So, why did they even want to become immortal at that age? They’re still all old creakers, so it didn’t seem to make them more spry, like the Glow. And they all kind of seem like they WANT to die, despite their protestations. I mean, everyone seems really sad there, so I don’t get why they were immortal. I could see if they all had some kind of disease that meant they had to keep sacrificing innocent people to survive, but they don’t seem to be afflicted with this illness anymore, so why do they have to keep up with the injections? AND, why wouldn’t they just let that teen girl go when she wanted to? If she stops taking the injections, she’ll age like a normal person. And she just wants to leave the island and age and then die one day like everyone else. So, if she leaves, then there’ll be more blood for the rest of them on the next go-round for injections. What is the advantage to keeping her there? She wouldn’t help any of them live more, and she clearly didn’t want to let anyone know about the island.

I mean, all I’m saying is, that if you’re going to do the whole creepy townspeople thing, it should be harder to get away in the end. Like, you should have to blow them up, or something. Not just say, “Live your lives, the best you can. It’s what everyone else has to do…” and watch them nod their heads and just wander away! And, if you’re gonna do immorality… It should either be something beyond their control, like, something they HAVE to do, or something that they’re greedy for.
But, what can I say? Not everything can handle immortality like New Amsterdam. The fact that this guy is this guy’s son? Never gets old. Ever.

Somewhere close to the end of my senior year at NYU, I went to the movies with my friends Molly, Avani, and Jillian, and we saw 13 Going on 30. Later that night, Molly and I went across the street to the Hollywood Video and forwent our usual game of “What Movie Would I Watch From This Wall?” to rent Win a Date With Tad Hamilton. I know, I know. Why? Well, we were in a romantic comedy mood, and kind of wanted to see it. Plus, we liked Topher Grace, so that was something. And, I get a kick out of seeing Leo from All My Children being all quasi-famous now.

It’s funny. Leo was actually one of the only characters on AMC that I always liked. When I didn’t totally hate Bianca and her increasingly shiny and exagerated face, he was friends with her. And he was involved with Greenlee when she was still just bratty and not totally despicable. And, okay, he was married to Laura when she needed a heart transplant, and she became obsessed with him, and Brooke did, too, in this sort of creepy attempt to give Laura something to live for which caused her to keep saying, “Love my daughter,” but I didn’t hate Leo for getting into this whole thing (even though, okay, money may have been involved) even though Greenlee still loved him, because it wasn’t really Leo’s fault that Brooke and Laura were so heinous and awful. He got into it for bad reasons, but he stuck by her because she was dying, and you’ve got to at least give him some credit for that. Plus, his mother was Vanessa! Vanessa was awesome! Well, except for that whole Proteus storyline, because that dragged for months and months and who really gave a crap about Mateo and what he had to do with it anyway? And Chris STAMP? Gag me. Oh, and Leo’s brother was David, who, despite his total obnoxiousness, was actually kind of a great character occassionally, like the time he “accidentally” drugged an entire boatload of people with Libidizone – a hyper-arousal drug of his own invention – and it created mayhem (he did this with the help of his trusty assistant/sidekick Gordon aka Gordo aka that guy that’s been in everything, including Ugly Betty, where his name was NOT Gordon but Sally and I called him that anyway)! Like, everyone on the boat getting all randy, and Greenlee pushing Laura overboard, and Bianca passing out! And then, of course, there was the fact that David slept with Dixie, which was NOT awesome, because despite the fact that Tad had NOT cheated on her that night, she still tried to make it seem like he had and she was just retaliating, and then, when that didn’t work, she just brought up his past mistakes which was so beat of her. I hated Dixie. And that really amped up David’s Dixie obsession, and then he wasn’t awesome anymore. Anyway, so Leo was great, but he died. I mean, it was suspicious, because he was fighting on this rickety bridge over the falls with his mother Vanessa and they both went crashing to their deaths. They found Vanessa’s body, and no one was too sad to see her go, because she was an evil drug dealer, selling to high school kids, and she goaded David’s father into killing himself, AND she had killed her niece and blamed it on Erica Kane. AND, I mean, she was trying to kill Leo! Bitch! But, Leo’s body was never found. All they found was this weird tan, like, member’s only jacket he had been wearing, which I thought was an odd costume choice, seeing as how he had never worn something that old-man-ish before. But, anyway, he’s dead, and I hope they never bring him back, because the new Greenelee played by not-Rebecca Budig is bad enough. A not-Josh Duhamel would be awful.

Oh, my God. What was I talking about?

Oh, right. Win a Date With Tad Hamilton. It was awful. I mean, not even the kind of movie I could justify watching again on a rainy Sunday afternoon when it just happens to come on HBO. I tried one day. I couldn’t get through ten minutes of it. However, the thing about that movie is that the premise seemed to have been lifted from this Richie Tankersley Cusick book called Starstruck.

This would be my second favorite RTC book ever. See, I even wrote “Win a Date With Richie Tankersley Cusick” on the cover, because it’s the same story (except with murder, and the movie star never goes to her hometown to make himself a better person, and the guy that she ends up with is not her best friend from the Piggly Wiggly, but a sleazy guy that the famous guy knows … well, the whole win a date with a movie star thing is the same anyway).

P.S. Why are the cover artists for her books so bad?? I mean, he went to all the trouble of trying to do something resembling collarbones, and the inner tube is actually pretty well-drawn, but look at her hairline.

Those sunglasses are pretty awesome, though. (Spoiler alert! That shadow in her glasses is a big statue that’s about to kill her! Don’t say I didn’t say spoiler alert!)

Anyway, so the premise of this one is pretty obvious. Miranda Peterson (mousy, unattractive, yet completely captivating teenager) wins a date through a magazine contest to meet Byron Slater, hunky movie star. Basically, she and two other girls will live in his house for a week and then he’ll pick one of them to have sex with.

Or, star in his movie. Something like that.

The first chapter of the book is her and her younger sister watching a Byron Slater movie, and then her getting the phone call that she won. What’s weird about it, though, is the fact that her sister is only described as “younger”, not “little”, and she’s got a pretty good vocabulary, so she can’t be much younger than, like, 14, yet she’s all, “You want to kiss a boy? Icky!” What’s that about?

Anyway, Miranda’s plane is late, or something, and her luggage is lost, and Lucille, the reporter from the magazine, and she end being totally late to the opening ceremonies of this contest, which I think was just meeting Byron and being shown rooms in the guest house. But, of course, it’s a tragedy.

The limo driver who’s come to meet them isn’t a limo driver at all! He’s Byron’s (the “GOOD GUY”) oldest friend, Nick (the “BAD GUY”). He looks like this:

“Baggy black pants had been cut off just below his knees, and he wore a rumpled white dress shirt, red socks, orange tennis shoes, and a chauffeur’s cap. … His hair looked soft and silky, sun-bleached nearly white. It swung loosely over his shoulder blades, a sharp contrast to the deep bronze of his tan.” Is it just me, or does he sound H.O.T. I think he must look like this:

RTC must have had a thing for guys with long hair, because her ultimate romantic interests almost always have “silky” long hair that “swishes” over their shoulder blades. It’s kind of gross, if you ask me, but whatever. I just pictured them with short hair, because it was a book, and that’s what you can do.

Anyway, they get to the house and she meets Byron Slater and gives him some bs about how she knows how to read palms (she’s totally lying), and then it turns out that there’s no room in the guest house (!!!) so they have to put her in a bedroom in the main house, not three doors down from Byron himself. I mean, shouldn’t they have checked how much room they were going to need for their THREE contest winners before they came there? When Nick shows her to her room, it’s as big as her entire house (of course), and she’s all flabbergasted, and she says that it’s beautiful. And then Nick does this creepy thing:

“‘Close your mouth,’ Nick reminded her, tapping her gently on the chin.”

I mean, dude just met her. A) What is his problem? She’s just excited about what’s going on. And B) Inappropriate!

She starts to unpack and then immediately overhears a conversation between Nick and Byron. Turns out Byron had no idea that this contest was even happening, and he doesn’t like that there are strangers in his house right after he’s come back from “a rest” in a “restful place” somewhere in Italy. (Read: rehab/mental hospital.) He also lets Nick on on a secret: there’s a crazed stalker fan after him, who wants him dead. Her name may or may not be Byron Slater. Spoiler alert! Anyway, Miranda immediately takes this information on as if it were a secret told to her, and starts to take everything having to do with Byron totally personally.

Later that evening, Miranda has a party to attend, and since her suitcase is gone, she’s gotta wear her dowdy plane clothes. The other two girls in the contest are Kelly, who looks like a model, and Jo, who’s fat and entered the contest as a joke. Miranda and Jo wander around the party, get lost, and encounter a tiger on the loose. I am not making this up.

Byron comes to their rescue and, like, wrestles the tiger, and then he and Miranda take a private walk, where he tells her that he thinks his crazed stalker let the tiger loose to kill him. TMI, man! She just met you! Byron also has a “tiny cellular flip phone,” which makes me think that it looks like the phone Derek has in Zoolander.

Okay, so anyway, Bryon tells her his whole life story or whatever, and she thinks he’s awesome, and then she drinks some lemonade and passes out. When she wakes up, he tells her that he thinks the lemonade was meant for him, and that SOMEONE’S TRYING TO KILL HIM! Then Byron’s manager, Robert, tells her all about his stint in rehab for a “rest” and leaves her alone and she finds a note written in a “curious reddish-brown stain, like blood!” (Richie loves messages written in blood, btw – there’s one in every single book she writes) that says:

“TO BYRON FROM YOUR STARSTRUCK FAN – IF I CAN’T HAVE YOU, NO ONE CAN.”

Blah blah blah crying and Byron tells her he wants to keep her safe, as well as survive Starstruck.

The next morning, Byron’s stylist has left Miranda some clothes, which just happen to be cheesier and sexier than her normal clothes. Because it’s a dream come true to wear a high-cut electric blue lace thong. Then Lucille shows up and they look out the window and see Nick, standing on the roof of the guesthouse, wearing a red cape, and flapping it up and down like wings, saying he can fly. Nick is retarded.

And since Miranda is an idiot, this doesn’t phase her. Nor does the fact that she changes into the skimpy bikini (and sheer matching jacket – CLASSY) that was left for her, looks in the mirror, and turns around to realize that Nick has “flown” to her balcony. Stalker! Maybe he’s Starstruck. Hello, Miranda! He watched you change into a bathing suit! That’s so creepy and wrong and inappropriate!

Then she goes to the pool, where everyone else has already gone onto their makeover consultations (she’s always late for everything – what a fool). She floats around in an inner tube for a while, ala the cover of the book, and then she hears this scraping sound, and a giant human-sized statue falls into the pool, landing on her inner tube, and trapping her under water for a few seconds (oh, my God, maybe this story is true, and it’s about Coral!). Still, nobody’s around, but when Bryon, a few minutes later, calls to take her for a drive through the mountains, she tells him about the statue and instead of being freaked out by the fact that this thing almost drowned her, and also, almost LANDED on HER, she’s just indignant about the fact that she thinks someone pushed it into the water. That Starstruck is not only after Byron, but is now after her, because how could life go on if it weren’t completely and totally about her?

Anyway, they drive around maniacally for a while, and then they make out, and then they drive fast through the treacherous mountains some more, and then this ridiculous thing happens. The car suddenly just starts violently lurching back and forth on the road, and then lands halfway through the guardrail, where Byron has to rescue Miranda from plunging, with the car, to her death over the mountain. But, there’s no talk of a car actually hitting them, and it’s daytime, so it’s not like Miranda wouldn’t have been able to see another car. I mean, doesn’t she wonder why the car was just careening all over the road for no reason? And how was he making it seem like the car was being hit? It doesn’t make sense!

Anyway, he rescues her, tells her again that SOMEONE’S TRYING TO KILL HIM, and then she says that now they’re TRYING TO KILL HER, TOO! And then they make out some more. Suddenly. Nick shows up. And, of course, Miranda suspects him.

Later that afternoon (because in RTC’s head, days last long enough for four years’ worth of adventures), they get makeovers, and then she has time to take a nap, and then she puts on a short, strapless black cocktail dress (right), and opens up the corsage box that Byron was supposed to have sent her. Except it’s not a corsage. It’s a heart.

But, surprise, surprise, it’s gone when she tries to show people! Because she couldn’t possibly have carried the thing downstairs with her! It’s not like it’s in a box or anything.

Anyway, when they go to dinner, Byron’s security guard is stabbed and killed, and Byron and Miranda assume that he was killed by Starstruck, who they’ll never find because they were being herded through a million people outside of the restaurant. So, obviously, they go back home, and everyone’s stunned and upset, and then there’s this awesome exchange where Kelly, Jo, and Miranda are saying that they don’t want to be alone, and Miranda goes, “I thought I was gonna die,” and the other two look at her all, “Bitch crazy,” because it has NOTHING TO DO WITH HER and someone SERIOUSLY DIED, like, an hour ago! And then they make the three of them watch a Byron Slater movie, like, what?

And then Miranda wanders around some more (this is still the SAME DAY) and Peg, Byron’s bitchy agent, is in a hot tub and Robert is talking to her and there’s some dumb dialogue that makes it sound like Peg is Startstruck. Finally, the day is over, and Miranda has an entire chapter’s worth of dreams that basically recap the entire book for you.

The next day, they’re taken on a shopping spree, and Miranda and Nick wander off to have a serious discussion about what the two of them know about what’s really going on with Byron and then they make out. No lie. And he tells her that Byron was also stabbed. Uh oh!

Then Peg dies in the hot tub.

And then Byron finds Miranda and tells her that he knows who Starstruck is. It’s Nick! And he has to save her! From Nick! So they go to his creepy deserted cabin in the woods, where he, of course, reveals that HE’S Starstruck, and he’s going to kill her.

Well, I mean, any convoluded story works when you just say that the person doing the killing is crazy, right? Blah blah blah, Nick saves Miranda, Byron and Nick struggle on the cliff, Byron throws himself over the cliff to save Nick, Byron dies, Miranda heads back home with Nick in tow. What. Ever.

If they ever make this into a movie, Josh Duhamel can still play Tad Hamilton aka Byron, because he knows all about fatal falls off cliffs.

So, I realized the other day that I make a lot of references to the Babysitters Club on this blog, but I’ve never actually said anything substantial about it. And, I mean, it’s so awesome that I’m kind of surprised at myself.

See, the Babysitters Club isn’t just a series of hundreds of incredibly similar books about a group of 13-year-old babysitters who run their own business (with a crappy model – like, I don’t think they ever made any money). It’s also a series of awful Disney Channel show episodes which you can now buy on tape if you find a library that’s trying to purge itself of topically unimportant vhs tapes. And, it’s a feature-length film from 1995, starring Rachael Leigh Cook, Schuyler Fisk (you know, what’s her name’s daughter), AND Alex Mack.

Basically, the girls are 13, so they’re screechy and hysterical and loud and overly dramatic and excited about EVERYTHING and I SO wanted to be their friend when I was little.

Anyway, the books are absolutely great. Each one is written from a different girl’s perspective, in first person, and they follow the same format every time: there’s an establishing chapter; then a chapter where the girl painstakingly details the club, its inception, and each member with nauseating accuracy (which was a highly skippable chapter after you read, like, the first book, except for the fact that Ann M. Martin gave amazing clothing descriptions … I’ll get to that in a second); then the story is told interspersed with boring chapters where they talk about babysitting jobs they went on. Like, I’m reading a story about Mary Anne finally getting a boyfriend. Do I really care about the fact that a 3-year-old peed his pants and Claudia stepped on the dog, and it was such a disaster until somehow she completely saved the day by making a mural on the wall of the living room that the parents didn’t even care about?
I’m getting ahead of myself.

The babysitting wasn’t that interesting, and while it fascinated and intrigued me that these girls had basically the enitre run of the household, including the psychological development of their charges (like the time they learned all about this fat boy with wispy hair hiding food in his room, therapy-ed him, healed him, got his sister to stop making fun of him, and then didn’t even tell the parents what had went down) , I was also kind of annoyed that they were so “we’re babysitters and you’re not.” So, what I was obviously more interested in were the soap-opera-like stories that were going on between the girls. You know… Mary Anne gets a makeover and everyone hates her! Stacey gets a boyfriend and stops hanging out with the babysitters! Claudia breaks her arm and becomes terrified of children!

I thought that the Disney channel bringing the show to life was the most awesome thing ever. The girls they got to play the characters were sort of so unlike the books that it made it like an entirely different story. And the soap opera-y elements were even MORE soap opera-y (what can I say? I was watching All My Children before I was even born). Dawn and Mary Anne are caught in a love triangle! Stacey travels to New York to tell her Dad to BACK UP OFF trying to get her to move in with him! Claudia holds a seance in her attic!

Awesome.

By far, though, the best episode is Dawn Saves the Trees. The girls are supposed to be from Connecticut, and Dawn is supposed to have grown up in California, but the actress playing her has this insane midwest accent, so every time she gets hysterical (which is all the time), it sounds really funny. And she’s even more hysterical in this episode than in the one where she likes a boy who thinks he’s asking out Mary Anne on the phone and she gets totally embarrassed showing up for their date and he’s all, “You look nice. Where you headed?” Wait. I should tell you about the girls first.

That’s Dawn. She’s an environmentalist – like, an insane one that would probably grow up to blow up buildings in protest or something. And she only eats health food and she has looooooooooong, looooooooong, super light bloooooooooonde hair, and her style is “California Casual”. Whatever that means. She’s always indignant and crosses her arms a lot.

Then there’s Kristy. She’s the leader of the club, ’cause it was her idea. She’s also a bitch. And a lesbian. She coaches a softball team and is “dating” the male coach of another softball team (like, how many little league softball teams coached by 13-year-olds does one town need?). She doesn’t care about clothes! Or boys! And she doesn’t wear a bra yet! She rolls her eyes a lot, and she’s bossy and mean and doesn’t really care about other people’s feelings.

Mary Anne is Kristy’s best friend, and she’s the sappiest because her mother died when she was little, and her father, in this creepy move, made her wear her hair in braids forever (because that will keep her from liking … boys? I don’t know), but then he eased up, and now she’s getting more interested in clothes and Kristy feels left out! She cries a lot, and she’s soft-spoken to the point of frustration and she wears a lot of frumpy jumper dresses. She’s also the only one with a boyfriend, which is kind of strange.

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Dirty Dancing is actually 20 years old as of yesterday, I think. A 20th anniversary! Of something that I was actually alive for! God, that’s weird.
Anyway, the more amazing thing to me about its 20th anniversary is that people actually cared enough to put it back in the theatres for a couple of days to mark the occassion, which seems like a little more money spent than need be. I mean, it’s already got two, count ‘em, TWO collector’s edition dvds. And that’s not a 2-disc set, that’s two separately released collector’s editions. I mean, what?
This isn’t to say that I don’t watch the movie (every couple of months ::ahem::). It’s just to say that, despite Eleanor Bergstein’s obsession towards the contrary, I am fully aware that it is among the worst movies ever made. Sally and I have pretty much the whole thing memorized ’cause we’ve seen it so many times, but there’s just something so gross about the whole experience. I mean, there are few things in life more unsatisfying than seeing physically unappealing people sweat all over each other. The entire movie has this sheen over it. And especially knowing that Eleanor Bergstein wrote this movie to not only reflect things that happened on one of her own summer vacations, but that she actually used to, at least up until the movie was being made (and possibly still!), dirty danced herself. Ew! I’m not adding more exclamation points because frankly I don’t think there are enough exclamation points in the world to equal my horror.

Anyway, better than just seeing the movie again for the umpteenth time in the theatre, I’ve prepared a bit of a list of the Top Twenty Grossest Dirty Dancing Moments.

20. That Stupid Guy With the Blue Socks

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That would be the Dirty Dancing Concert. If you’ve never seen the concert, you have to watch it on the Collector’s Edition dvd. It’s from 1988 and they went all around the country with Eric Carmen and Merry Clayton and the Contours and Bill Medley and all those nasty dirty dancing dancers, and the audience is filled with huge hair and huge glasses and big button-down shirts tucked into high-waisted calf-length skirts, and it’s just awful.

Thankfully, they didn’t invite Zappacosta along, but you still have to hear that disgusting song Overload, performed by Merry Clayton who actually might make it worse than the original, if that’s possible.

The concert on the dvd was filmed in LA and no viewing of Dirty Dancing is complete for us anymore without watching the following awesome bits:

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This is where it all started:

Tapered. It’s bad on pants. It’s worse on a dress. And we’re not talking slinky, hug-your-curves, fitted dresses. I’m talking a sack dress that inexplicably suddenly cuts in below the knee and turns an otherwise dowdy and shapeless dress into a giant ass mess.

The interviews on the new Pretty in Pink dvd would have you believe that there’s nothing wrong with that prom dress, considering no one mentioned it AT ALL. But, I assure you. There was something wrong with it.
Exhibit A:

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There’s this movie called The Watcher in the Woods. And it’s not like I haven’t seen it probably 100 times before tonight, but tonight? Tonight, it scared the crap out of me.
(And just an aside, my speaker just inexplicably fell off of my desk. I seriously didn’t touch it or the wire. WHAT??)
Now, I have to say, that I get scared fairly easily. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I LOVE scary movies. Especially a good ghost story. I’ll watch something ridiculously cheesy, or I’ll watch something authentically awesome. But, either way, there’s probably gonna be something to scare me. And it really honestly doesn’t take much. I mean, I was just reading the description for a scary movie I’ve never seen and I got just a little bit teary.
Oh, yeah. Did I mention that? When I get scared, my eyes water.
I was made fun of a lot for that by some of my high school friends back when we’d have horror movie nights.
But, anyway, if I watch something scary, or see something scary, forget it. The room where Sal and I watch movies also has the back staircase in it. And two giant sliding French doors which look out onto the backyard. Not that it’s very big or anything, but … it’s dark out there. And the staircase is a black metal circular staircase, so it’s dark over there, too. And, there’s a window that looks out onto the side garden, which is just barely illuminated by the neighbor’s backyard light, and you just can’t help but look out of that window when you’re walking up the stairs.
Oh, yeah. Did I meantion that I’m scared to look out windows? Yeah.
It might have something to do with the fact that our mom has been playing the “What would you do if that creepy guy was looking in your window game?” our whole lives. That, and the, “What would you rather have looking in your window…?” game. So, I’m kind of always thinking something or someone will be looking in my window.
Anyway, so, the staircase is at the back of the house, and my room is at the front of the house. Which means a pretty decent sized walk down a pretty decent sized hallway. A dark hallway. A hallway that extends a little bit beyond my room to an even darker curve of the hallway, where our parents’ room and the front staircase is. And the attic steps.
And the problem with walking down that hallway is that I’m scared if I’m not looking behind me because something could always be following me. But, then I’m scared that when I look back in front of me, something will suddenly be in front of me.
THEN, when I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth, there’s a big mirror.
Oh, yeah. Did I mention that I get scared of looking in mirrors?
Two reasons, actually. Alice in Wonderland, the version from 1985 … Alice comes back home and tries to find her parents, but then realizes that she’s not really home, and she can see her parents IN THE MIRROR. But, they’re not really in the room with her. Aaaaah! And then, of course, there’s the Shining. Plus, my bathroom mirror overlooks the bathtub. I try to avoid looking in the mirror completely, lest I see something in it. Besides me.
And then after all of that getting myself worked up, I end up trying very hard to walk calmly back to my room, but I always end up running. Which Sally can hear and laughs at me about. And then there’s the window at the front staircase that I try to avoid looking at as I jump into my room.

Now, I don’t mean to indicate that I have a phobia of things like the dark, or mirrors, or windows. Because I really don’t. On an average day, I can look in a mirror all day, and I don’t mind when it’s dark outside, and I can even look out of a window when it’s dark without getting too freaked out. It’s just that, when I’m already scared from reading something or watching something or hearing something scary, everything else starts to scare me, too. Everything. Sounds, shadows, everything.

So, I very quickly brushed my teeth tonight, and did my hoppy, runny thing back to my bedroom. And all because of Watcher in the Woods. And if you’ve seen this movie, you’re probably thinking, “WHY?” Right? Well, it’s all because of the new DVD with the alternate ending.
Now, just a summary, for those who’ve never seen it. Jan (a screechy, goofy teenager with horrible blonde hair) and her family moved into an old country house in England. The owner, Mrs. Alewood (played by Betty Davis), lost a daughter about 40 years before the start of the movie, due to some strange shenanigans involving an eclipse of the moon. And there’s been something haunting the woods outside the house this whole time. And when Jan and her little sister Ellie move in, they immediately start becoming possessed by this thing in the woods. Anyway, Jan figures out that it’s something holding Karen, Mrs. Alewood’s daughter, hostage. She somehow figures out exactly how to get her back, and … she gets her back.
In the ending that we’ve always seen, Karen comes back, takes off her blindfold (oh, yeah, she has a blindfold on in the entire movie until the end), and everyone is all amazed that she’s back. The end.

Now.
The DVD has these alternate endings, which, I guess, were what the director had originally intended to use. But, Disney thought they were too scary for their movie, so they had them redo the ending.
Now, there was nothing inherently scary in the alternate ending. The “watcher” in the woods turns out to be this thing from another dimension which was accidently transfered with Karen 40 years ago and has been trapped. For whatever reason it needed an eclipse and the help of Jan (who happens to look like Karen) to get back, and to help return Karen. In the theatrical ending (the one we’ve always seen), Ellie shows up and says, in her possessed voice, this whole story. So, we get the gist from her.
In the original ending, there’s this strange creature that looks like it was made entirely out of colored cellophane that comes floating over to Jan, picks her up, brings her to another planet, and then returns both her and Karen back to the woods. Karen takes off her blindfold, Jan brings her back to Mrs. Alewood, the end.
Sorta the same, right?

Okay, except for these things. The Karen in the alternate endings is played by a different actress. She was supposed to have been suspended in time, so she’s supposed to still be a teenager. And I mean, she’s totally creepy looking? But, that wasn’t intentional. And she’s wearing a wig. I don’t know why. The Karen from the theatrical ending has aged (well, she looks like she’s maybe 40, and her contemporaries are around 57, so I don’t know how that worked, but … no matter, she’s supposed to have aged).
Also, the girl who plays Jan looks TOTALLY WEIRD when she comes back from the other planet! I mean, she looks really old and Sally said she looked like she was on drugs. But, I don’t think that was intentional, either. I think she just happened to have looked weird that day, or something.
AND! When Bette Davis leaves her house and sees Karen, she’s suddenly got BLONDE HAIR! What? She had old-lady scraggly gray hair for the whole movie, and suddenly she’s got quaffed blonde hair? It’s so weird!

So, anyway, watching this other ending scared me. But, it wasn’t because it was a scary ending. I mean, as I said, we’ve seen this movie so many times. We’ve been watching it since we were kids. And to have seen this movie, with the ending we’ve always known, and then to suddenly see a different ending? With different actors? I mean. It just freaked me out. Like, I was having a nightmare, or a stroke, or some kind of mental episode. Like I was imagining this ending. Or that I had been imagining the other ending my whole life. I mean, it would have been really scary if Sally had had the foresight to turn to me and say, “What alternate ending? This is how it always ends.” *creepy smile*
I was already teary. I would’ve started crying.
It’s different from seeing a deleted scene from a movie you know really well. Or seeing an alternate ending for a movie you’ve never seen before. This is a movie with an ending that is so ingrained in my memory that seeing it played out differently and with a different actress was just so wrong. It went against what I knew.
It would be like … when you find out that another actor was up for a part that you’ve always known as played by someone else. Like, Duckie in Pretty in Pink was supposedly almost given to Robert Downey, Jr. instead of Jon Cryer. Now, you know Jon Cryer as Duckie, of course. And to think about Robert Downey, Jr. playing him is odd. Even kind of amusing to imagine what it would be like.
But, imagine if one day, you’re watching tv and Pretty in Pink comes on, right? And you see those Converse shoes coming down the hallway, and that bass-line kicks in, and the camera pans up to show you the whole Duckie outfit with the reconstructed blazer and everything. And you know the words, “Good morning! Welcome to another day of higher education!” are coming up. Just like they always do. And then the camera pans up. And you see Robert Downey, Jr.

You’d freak out. You’d cry. Don’t lie.

I’m glad my shade is down. I’m going to bed.

The Lost Boys. Is a terrible movie. It really really blows, and it’s kind of funny, because it’s considered by a lot of people to be really clever. But, it sucks. Which is why it’s no surprise that Sally and I own a copy.
And it’s not like it’s any surprise to anyone that the fashion would be really bad (it was the 80s, after all), but this is a different kind of bad fashion from other 80s movies. See, Molly Ringwald had this awful salmon-colored hospital smock thing over a brown skirt and boots on in The Breakfast Club. And of course, there was Bender’s fifteen layers, and that bandana he tied around his leg. But, that seems like something you would’ve walked into a classroom in 1985 and actually seen people wearing. And, you obviously can’t forget Andie’s just completely heinous prom dress in Pretty in Pink, but that was less about the fact that it was the 80s than it was about the fact that Andie clearly wasn’t a good fashion designer. If you check out the other prom dresses at that prom, with the poofy sleeves, and the miles and miles of emerald green satin, you’ll get a better idea of an 80s prom dress. I had a Barbie paper doll book that my mom got me in probably 1988 and it had Barbie and Ken getting ready for the prom. It was awesome. One of the dresses was like a mermaid costume, but it was a dress! And Ken had two tuxedos – a black one and a white one. And even then, I would not put him in a white tuxedo, because I knew it was cheesy. But, I loved the prom dresses. They were poofy and insane, but … it was 1988. Even when you’re six, you know what cool people wear. And cool people wore poofy prom dresses.
But, see, The Lost Boys wardrobe department was just a whole different kind of awful. And because I just know that there are people out there who are crying foul and angrily shaking their fists at me, all, “The Lost Boys is the best movie EVER and I’ve derived ALL of my fashion sense from Corey Haim!”, I’ve put together a list. Because We Like Lists (Inc.).

Now, there are a few exemptions. Michael and Sam’s mother, for example. I mean, she did wear a whole bunch of shapeless, floor-length sack dress type deals, but it wasn’t so over-the-top that it would be considered worse than the worst.
Also exempt is Michael. I mean, he pretty much wore a grey t-shirt and a pair of jeans (un-embellished, un-ripped, and only slightly unflattering in their totally taperedness) for the whole movie. Even passable by today’s standards. Of course, there were the constantly crooked and slightly feminine sunglasses:

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Wednesday night, we watched The Skulls, which is just beyond awesome. PLUS, we watched this little making-of feature where the director went on and on about how great he thought Josh Jackson did every day, but he kind of danced around Paul Walker’s performance in this way that a high school drama teacher would – he doesn’t want to lie, but he doesn’t want to hurt feelings. Because Paul Walker got a ton of pretty, but no brains to speak of.
Then last night, we watched the finale of I Wanna Be a SoapStar 3, which was so unbelievably disappointing that it actually makes me glad for once that we watch All My Children and not One Life to Live. And we watched Whistler, which … who cares if neither of us is even close to being a teenager? We want to know how Beck died!
But, then we got right back into awful movie that you can’t even watch twice mode tonight. Really, because this movie happened to be coming on when we came downstairs and neither of us wanted to have to pick out anything else. So, part three of my three-part all-written-at-the-same-time post…
#3. Friday night. The Devil’s Child
Was it a made-for-tv movie? A direct-to-video? No idea. And, admittedly, we missed the first ten minutes, so we’re a bit fuzzy on some parts. But, I don’t know if they necessarily would’ve been cleared up with the beginning of the movie. I’m willing to bet we would’ve been just as confused.
Anyway, Kim Delany was pushed off a roof or something when she was 12. And her mother (played by Grace Zabriskie, who’s better known to you as Susan’s mother on Seinfeld, AND the mean-spirited “you’re gonna have a heart attack if you use heavy cream” woman from The Glow) is sort of snuck up on by the devil, who looks JUST LIKE Greg from Dharma and Greg and is wearing a big hooded robe. And he makes a pact with her and he saves her daughter’s life.
Okay, now here’s where I’m confused. Because Grace Zabriskie totally looks like a hooker, down to the shiny, straight-haried, blunt-bang-ed, black wig. And I seem to remember her wearing vinyl. And I don’t know if she had anything to do with the girl being pushed (like, if she was out turning tricks when she could’ve been keeping this girl from hanging out on the roof of a building?), but when we came into the movie, she was in the church begging God to be merciful and not punish her daughter for her sins. But, the sin could just be making a pact with the devil. I don’t know.
Anyway, (the flashbacks, by the way, showed her falling, like, ten stories, and the only injury she got resulted in an inability to have kids – but I guess the devil could bring you back to life if you fell out of an airplane, huh?) Kim Delaney is now a successful(?) photographer who wears a lot of leather pants which, no matter how in shape Kim Delaney is, look AWFUL on her. Then again, it might just be the fact that this movie was made in 1997 and the look was still way-high-waisted.
Matthew Lillard (I know) is her assistant with facial hair that – Sally pegged it – looked totally fake. And he’s in love with her, with no problem admitting it. But, he’s, you know, Matthew Lillard and he’s goofy and kind of an idiot and she has no interest in him other than her friend/assistant. And I don’t know if this was supposed to be so in the movie, but there’s a ten-year age difference between them. So, I don’t know if M.Lillard was supposed to be older than he was, or Kim was supposed to be younger, or what. But, that doesn’t even matter.
Anyway, when we started watching, as I said, Kim’s mother was at the church. And she died. Probably from the devil! Kim’s all sad, but not really, because they didn’t really get along all that well, I guess, except that Kim was living on practically nothing because she was giving her mother a bunch of money to help her along. But, then inexplicably Kim’s mother turns out to have had hundreds of thousands of dollars, which she left half of to Kim and half of to the Catholic church. Kim’s dumbfounded for about twenty seconds, and then she’s kind of over it, but never once questions where all this money came from.
Then, she’s out and she runs into this guy who I guess had something to do with a magazine and finagled his way into a job that had been promised to her(?) and then a car turns itself on and rolls its way down the hill towards Kim and the guy, who are arguing in the middle of the street. The devil shows up without his robe and hood and pulls her to safety right before the car kills the guy she was fighting with. At the funeral, she finds out that the magazine wants her to have the job back.
Then, Kim’s friend, who wears these GIANT silky flowy outfits and is married to a much older man, tells her that there’s an opening in her building and convinces Kim to move in. It’s big and more than she thought she could ever afford. And she takes it. As she’s moving in, the devil arrives at her door (still in regular clothes) and acts totally creepy, but Kim’s all into him knowing way more about her than he should and just happening to live across the hall from her, so she wanders over there that night and knocks on the door. He pulls her inside and starts dancing with her to this loud terrible music – and he’s a hideous dancer with one move and he looks like he’s going to kill her, but she totally loves it.
He comes over the next night for an indoor picnic (lame). Matthew Lillard shows up and gets upset that there’s another guy there, he leaves and spends the whole night looking up the guy’s name for some background information on him. But, Alexander Rotha doesn’t exist. He should’ve googled “the devil.”
Back at the apartment, the devil and Kim sleep together and he tells her that he’s a visiting theology professor at the college. And then this dog that barked at the devil (’cause animals always smell evil) jumps through a window and kills himself. And Kim Delaney is interested for, like, a second, and then she goes back to taking her cheesy photos.
The next night, she goes to see the devil’s class and take pictures of him. And it’s awesome because it’s a big lecture hall and it’s a Wednesday night class, so everyone taking it is probably tired as hell and just wants to get dinner and go home, but they’re stuck there listening to this lecture, and then Kim shows up with her loud clicky camera and leans all into this girl’s space to take pictures of the devil. And the girl keeps turning around and giving her that “shut UP!” look.
Then Maya Rudolph (I KNOW!) answers a question that the devil asks the class about good vs. evil. And she’s speaking in this creepy, whispery, lispy voice, so I don’t know what that’s all about. And he starts off a conversation with her in the normal professory kind of way. Then he asks her if she thinks sex is evil, and everyone giggles, and Maya Rudolph seems uncomfortable, but she’s having fun, so she keeps answering his questions. Then he totally busts out with, “How about your affair with Professor Johnson last year? Was that evil? How ’bout the fact that he has kids and a wife? You still think you’re not evil?” And the whole class is stunned and Kim Delaney looks PISSED and Maya Rudolph gets all teary and then leaves the class.
So, now she doesn’t want to see the devil anymore. Meanwhile, Matthew Lillard meets Ivana Milicevic at a bar and she REALLY looks like a drag queen thanks to this horrible wig. They go back to his apartment and she rubs herself all over these creepy manequins he has there. Then the next day, Kim is all pissed because he didn’t show up for work, she goes looking for him, and finds him tied to his bed, DEAD! But, she saw Ivana Milicevic, who she says looked JUST LIKE the devil, like … Compare for yourselves: Ivana vs. Greg from Dharma and Greg. Come on, now. They could’ve gotten a less good looking woman to play the female version of the devil if they really wanted to get that point across.
Anyway, so, it’s another death, Kim’s being bombarded by phone calls from the devil, and she wants none of it. Then, she starts to feel sick and goes to the doctor, who tells her that, miraculously, she’s pregnant! It’s the devil’s, obviously, and as Kim has been slowly going back to her Catholic roots, she’s realizing that something totally weird is going on ever since this devil guy showed up. Plus, she knows that something was up with her mother and that the family priest KNOWS what it is. But, when she goes to the church to talk to him, he totally jumps through a stained glass window to kill himself. ‘Cause, you know, the devil’s spawn was approaching. So, now he’s gone. And Kim has finally realized that her mother’s big secret was that she made a pact with the devil to have a baby through Kim if her life was spared following her accident.
She has the baby, her loose-clothed friend helps her deliver it, and then she wakes up to find out that the friend had made a pact with the devil, too! What? This really came out of nowhere. Apparantly, the friend’s pact was created so that she could marry a rich old guy and get this fabulous life filled with yard upon yard of silky Golden Girls inspired garments. But, I think that her end of the pact was also to get Kim to go through with having the baby of the devil? I think? I’m not sure.
So, Kim gets this quick as anything explanation from her friend who goes, “Are you okay? I’ll go make us some tea. But, you’re gonna have to give your baby up to the devil, okay? But, he said that you can have more, so, that’s something.” Then she walks away, and Kim goes, “I’d like some chamomile.” And I thought she was seriously okay with this, because there were only about two minutes left in the movie. But, then she knocked the friend out, grabbed the baby, ran to the church, and got him baptised amidst all this paper flying around. ‘Cause see, the devil was standing outside the church, in his robe (which seemed unnecessary), and he was trying to prevent the baptism. But, flying paper? A little wind? He probably could’ve had the church start crumbling, or set something on fire. Something that would’ve made the priest and Kim want to flee the building so that he could grab his baby and run. He just didn’t try very hard.
So, the baby was baptised. And that was the end of the movie.
Definitely the worst of the three, and it has the biggest unresolved question: so, after everything blew over, was she still gonna be friends with that woman who sold her out to marry a rich guy? I’d like to know.

Love. (#3)

It’s not like this is a different day from the last post, since I’m writing these at the same time. But, it’ll look like we have more posts, huh? I’m so sneaky.
So, the next movie that we watched was just as bad as Poison Ivy 2, but it was bad on the opposite end of the spectrum. There was a plot, which PI2 didn’t have, but it was predictable to the point of insanity. PI2 at least was so ridiculous that you couldn’t figure out what the hell was going to happen next.
#2. Tuesday Night. The Colony
John Ritter is married and has two kids and he lives in LA and he developed this security system that is super sophisticated (for 1995) and his friend and boss gets him a meeting with the owner of this gated community (called The Colony) to install the system in his homes. The meeting goes well and he’s very excited about it and takes his wife to dinner, and they park for no reason on this deserted street outside of a Starbucks and talk about whatever. And then they get carjacked, and when the carjackers drive away, they lay on the street for a real long time. But, it’s a dark street! They could’ve been run over.
They weren’t.
So, they think about moving out of LA to this suburb where John Ritter’s lumpy faced brother-who’s-a-cop lives, which also happens to the be the town of residence of this big gated community. Hal Linden, the man who runs The Colony, decides that J.Ritter has had enough of LA life and wants him to not only install the security systems, but move into one of the houses in this fancy mortgage switching venture that will enable the modestly-incomed Ritter family to afford a giant ugly house in the development. So he’s all excited and he tells his wife and kids by driving them to the house and saying, “We’re gonna live here!” and no one seems to find it creepy that, while they’re wandering around the empty house checking it over, Hal Linden comes out of the shadows of the second floor to say that he’s already installed high tech computer-related stuff in the bedroom for the teenage daughter (who loves computers SO MUCH that she took a two-week grounding rather than have her computer taken away for a week – Sally says I would’ve done the same thing, and Sally is right). Lurker!
Then he tells his mother and brother (who’s been on an episode of every show ever: Family Ties, Fame, Who’s the Boss?, The Golden Girls, Matlock, Full House, Seinfeld, The X-Files, 24, JAG, Star Trek Voyager, CSI… no wonder he looked familiar), who pull the old “I’m happy for you… No, really, I am!” *shifty eyed looks at each other* “As long as you’re happy!” routine.
So they move in, and there’s this giant rule book and J.Ritter is in violation of a million codes the first morning (including inappropriate jogging gear). Then the mother brings the kids to the Colony’s on-site school where June Lockhart lets her know that there is NO parent involvement whatsoever, and the school even goes so far as to lock the doors while school is in session. But, it’s June Lockhart! CELIA MARTIN! Donna Martin’s grandmother who knows that David and Donna belonged together, no matter what Ray or Noah or Joe or the firefighter or the guy who was in the fraternity or the guy who did her website OR the guy who she wanted to be her fit model said about it. She couldn’t be that bad, right?
So, in the span of about a week, here’s what happens with this family: their young son turns into this creepy Hitler youth, he pushes his former best friend into a pool, J.Ritter finds out that they put hidden cameras in the sprinkler systems, the brother informs them that the previous tenents of the house died in a fiery SUSPICIOUS car crash, their neighbor “commits suicide” after flipping out one night and trying to paint his house a different color, Hal Linden tries to convince J.Ritter to stop inviting his brother to the Colony, the daughter finds a mysterious cd that was hidden in the garage, the daughter tries to upgrade cables and is immediately caught and told to stop by the evil head of security, J.Ritter keeps coming up against violations for everything he does, he notices that his plans for the security systems have been changed to include hookups for cameras, he and his wife discover that there is a rule against any public displays of affection including in your house if your neighbors can see you, their dog is kidnapped and given surgery to stop him from barking, a fern they planted is ripped out of the ground, the mother sneaks into the school to find propoganda-like assignments that are turning the son into a snob, the daughter finds out that the disc she found includes a program connected to every hidden camera in every room or every house, their neighbors make fun of their friends, their son is taken from school for “ice cream” by the evil head of security, and Hal Linden gives them a housewarming gift of a sharp mirrored sculpture that they find inappropriate to have in their house with children around.
And during all of this, they’re not oblivious. They know it’s creepy and not for them and they know that they hate it there. AND, the find out that they have no equity because the crazy mortgage-switching scheme was more like a crazy soul-switching scheme and now the family is basically ass-broke and paying rent for the house, which they thought they owned. But, they keep just sighing and going, “Well. This is what we wanted, right?”
How about MOVING OUT?
Anyway, lumpy brother finds out that the recent deaths were definitely performed by the head of security, who juices up a fence to electrocute him when he tries to get into the Colony. He also has this spray can that causes people to pass out and he uses it on the entire family when he discovers that they have the disc that could get the Colony SHUT DOWN. J.Ritter battles EvilHeadofSecurity and Hal Linden, and then knocks EHoS over the balcony onto the sharp sculpture below, killing him. Hal Linden runs out the door straight into a barrage of bullets from his OWN security team who thought he was an intruder.
And then, the next thing you know, the whole family is gathered for a barbecue (with some seriously burned burgers) at this house that the mother had looked at before they moved into the Colony. Like, how is this house still on the market? But, there’s no word on whether the son stopped being a Hitler youth. He’s not even in the last scene.

I don’t even have a good way to conclude this entry, because the movie was that bad.

Love.