Worth Mentioning - In a World That's Full of Trouble

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Old school thrills and comedy.

FATAL CHARM (1990)

It seems like any time a man is jailed for a serious, violent crime, they immediately start receiving love letters and marriage proposals. The 1990 thriller Fatal Charm is sort of a play on that – but in this case, it’s one of those times when the person who’s attracted to the jailed man believes he’s innocent because he’s so good-looking. How could someone so attractive and charming possibly be guilty?

The man in question in this story written by Nicholas Niciphor is Adam Brenner, played by Christopher Atkins – and when the film begins, he’s on trial, accused of committing six sexually-motivated murders during a three-month spree. Adam maintains his innocence, claiming his missing roommate was the one responsible for the murders... and as she watches TV news reports on the case, teenager Valerie (Amanda Peterson, who gives quite an intense performance at times) fully believes in him. She starts skipping school so she can attend the trial. When Adam is convicted and sent to prison, she starts corresponding with him. It wouldn’t be much of a thriller if it was only about Adam and Valerie exchanging letters, so there is, of course, eventually a prison break – and once Adam is loose in the world again, we find out whether or not he was a killer, or if he was framed...

Niciphor crafted an interesting story here, and there’s more going on than what’s mentioned in that paragraph. Valerie has an uncomfortable home life because her mom’s boyfriend Lou (James Remar) has a tendency to hit on her. Her mom Susan (Mary Frann) works at the courthouse where Adam’s trial takes place, regularly interacting with Sheriff Harry Childs (Andrew Robinson - whose part was cut down in post, according to the actor). And Valerie has a friend named Sandy, played by Lar Park Lincoln of Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, who gets mixed up in the situation because when Valerie sends Adam a picture, she doesn’t send a picture of herself. She sends a picture of Sandy, pretending it’s a picture of her. So when Adam gets loose, he goes looking for Sandy, thinking she’s Valerie. There’s also an appearance by genre icon Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Devil’s Rejects, etc.) as a prisoner who gives Adam a rough time while he’s behind bars.

As we watch scenes with Adam, we start to question his guilt just like Valerie does. He seems like a nice guy, and when violence breaks out around him, he always shies away from it. Is it an act, or is he truly innocent?

Fatal Charm was directed by Children of the Corn director Fritz Kiersch, but Kiersch was so disappointed with the final product that he took his name off the movie. On screen, it’s credited to the non-existent Alan Smithee. Apparently Kiersch was a last minute replacement for the previously attached director, Peter Medak (The Changeling). I don’t know what was going on with the directors on this project, but it’s a shame things didn’t turn out the way Medak or Kiersch intended. I don’t see a reason for Kiersch to have his name removed from the movie, as it’s an intriguing thriller that I thoroughly enjoyed watching.

PARENTHOOD (1989)

In late 1985, actor-turned-director Ron Howard boarded a seventeen hour flight with his wife, their four-year-old daughter, and their seven-month-old twin daughters... and it turned out to be a nightmare experience. Howard and his wife had to ask crew members to carry on baby items for them, since taking care of the infants required more items than they were allowed to carry on themselves, then they walk the babies throughout the plane to keep them calm, the four-year-old projectile vomited all over Howard early in the flight and he didn’t have a change of clothes in his carry-on. After the flight, Howard was sweating, cursing, and covered with puke at the baggage carousel... and he realized he was living out the makings of a comedy. So he brought the idea of making a comedy about parenthood to his producer friend Brian Grazer and writer friends Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. They were the right collaborators, as Grazer had two kids, Ganz had three, and Mandel had six (including a set of triplets), so they all had parenting experience. In the midst of development, Howard’s wife informed him that they were going to have a fourth child. A son that was born in 1987. So by the time Parenthood was released, the four men who put the project together had fifteen children between them. (Then Grazer would go on to have two more a decade later.)

It was a great idea that Howard had, because the movie that came out of his awful flight experience earned more than $125 million at the box office (and those are 1989 dollars!), landed Oscar nominations for supporting actress Dianne Wiest and Randy Newman, who composed the score and recorded the original song “I Love to See You Smile,” and would go on to inspire two separate TV shows.

Parenthood isn’t a movie I have watched many times over the years, but I remember enjoying childhood viewings of it, and – even though I have never become a parent myself – it’s a movie I still enjoy when I watch it all these years later. There are so many characters packed into it, and there is so much going on with these characters, there’s something in here that pretty much anyone could relate to in some way, whether it’s something they’ve experienced themselves or something they’ve seen family members go through.

Steve Martin stars as Gil Buckman, who is married to Karen, played by Mary Steenburgen. Gil is already feeling overwhelmed trying to be a good dad to their three kids, especially the high-strung oldest one that has him worried all the time, so he has a meltdown when Karen tells him she’s pregnant with a fourth child, just like Howard’s wife told him when Parenthood was in the works. Gil has three siblings himself. One sister is Dianne Wiest as Helen, who is a single mother to two teenagers: Joaquin Phoenix (then credited as Leaf Phoenix) as Garry, who feels abandoned by his father and has just discovered pornography, and Julie (Martha Plimpton), who is diving into adulthood with her dimwitted boyfriend Tod (Keanu Reeves). Another sister is Susan (Harley Jane Kozak), a teacher who is married to a scientist (played by Rick Moranis) who is extremely focused on his over-the-top method of raising their young daughter as a miniature adult. And the youngest of the Buckman siblings is also the black sheep, Larry (Tom Hulce), who shows up at their dad’s place with a previously unheard of son named Cool and a large amount of gambling debts. The patriarch of this family is Frank (Jason Robards), who was admittedly a bad father to his four children and didn’t make enough time for them. He was too busy working. Frank is still with his wife Marilyn (Eileen Ryan), but the writers didn’t give that character much to work with. Frank’s mom (Helen Shaw) is also still around, and she has a few memorable moments as the film plays out.

The writers may have been slacking a bit when it came to the Marilyn character, but they did a great job of writing most of the other characters, giving them plenty of material to work with and covering a lot of ground when it comes to the issues faced by parents and kids (of all ages). Howard assembled an awesome ensemble cast to bring the characters to life, and it all works so well that Parenthood still holds up as an amusing, true-to-life, entertaining movie thirty-five years after it was released.

BLOOD RELATIONS (1988)

When director Graeme Campbell’s 1988 horror thriller Blood Relations, which the director wrote with Steven Saylor, was shown on a 1990 episode of the Movie Channel series Drive-in Theater where host Joe Bob Briggs was joined by a guest host / hypnotist Sharon, the movie was described as “a weird merging of The Bride of Frankenstein and Harold and Maude”... but if somewhere were to watch Blood Relations for the first time today, their description would probably come down to something like “the Get Out of the ‘80s.”

The film stars Lydie Denier as a young woman named Marie, who is in a passionate new relationship with Thomas (Kevin Hicks), the son of a wealthy brain surgeon named Andreas (Jan Rubes) – so passionate that Marie and Thomas have barely gotten through the door of his father’s mansion before they’re jumping on each other and tearing their clothes off. On the flip side, Thomas has an antagonistic relationship with his father, who he blames for the death of his mother a year early. Apparently Andreas and the Mrs. Were heading home from a party where Andreas had too much to drink, but not enough to dissuade him from driving. There was a car accident. Andreas was wearing his seatbelt. His wife was not. She was paralyzed for two years before she passed away... and Thomas suspects his father might have crashed the car on purpose.

So Thomas has come back home to kill his father and inherit his wealth, and Marie seems to be totally on board with that idea. Even though she’s the heroine we’re, I assume, supposed to be concerned for and maybe even care about, we also know from early on that she’s willing to participate in murder... At least, she is until she starts to get to know Andreas better and the guy starts taking every opportunity to hit on her, saying she could do better than Thomas – he being the better man for her. Marie might be weighing her options. Meanwhile, Andreas is sleeping with another younger woman, Sharon (Lynne Adams), the girlfriend of his lawyer Jack (co-writer Steven Saylor). 

Also in the mix with this group of weirdos is Thomas’s ailing grandfather Charles (Ray Walston), a bed-ridden old man who’s in his last days. One moment, he tells Marie that she reminds him of his daughter. The next moment, he asks her to strip for him. And she does.

Even though there’s murder brewing, the characters are odd, a cat gets killed, and there are moments where it seems like Marie might be drugged and taken advantage of, horror is absent for a long stretch of Blood Relations’ running time. It’s looking like we’re dealing with a straightforward thriller where we have to wonder if Marie is going to end up with Thomas or Andreas (or even Charles), or just find a way to get rich by offing all of them... or if one of them is going to take her out first. But the horror finally kicks in once we head toward the climax, and things go in an interesting direction.

Blood Relations doesn’t tell its story in a great way and might test the patience of some viewers as they wait for the film to take a turn into the horrific, but it ends up being decent enough overall. It’s not difficult to understand why this movie hasn’t been referenced much over the decades, but if you get the chance to watch it, it’s worth a look.