As We Wait for the Resurrection ...

In this Easter season, why not celebrate the potential second coming of Jesus with a bad sequel or two? Join MovieDeuce for the next two weeks as we sprinkle in some reviews of deucey deuces -- movies that should've never been reborn, but unfortunately were.





Don't let Jesus have all the fun! Stay tuned ...

The Children (1980)

Suggested Title: “A Funny Thing Happened to Our Porno Script”

Tatonka Rating: 4.0

Director: Max Kalmanowicz

Writers: Carlton J. Albright, Edward Terry

Theme Song: The product of what must have been the most annoying string recording session ever, with extra violins.

Starring: A general “Who’s Who” of Hollywood nobodies. Only one of the actors has a head shot in IMDB, and his only acting jobs post The Children were in Law and Order episodes almost 30 years later, proving that anyone’s dad could’ve scored a part in this film.

Suggested Tagline(s): “Gettin’ Huggy with It;” “Don’t Get All Handsy with Me”

Actual Tagline(s): “... thank God they're somebody else's!”
“Something terrifying has happened to the children... pray you never meet them!”
“It only takes five to hold a town in TERROR.”

Plot Summary: A group of vacant-eyed kids are on a school bus in Ravensback, a small New England town, riding home from school on a typical day, and they go missing. A Sheriff named Billy Hart, who looks like Dennis Hopper meets Jim Nabors somehow misses a thousand obvious clues while hunting down the cause of their disappearance. Plot spoiler? The kids have turned into delightfully murderous zombies, thanks to exposure to a gas leak at the local nuclear power plant.

Trailer:



The Other Trailer:



(Spoiler Alert) The Children is a horror romp with a slowly-unraveling plot. It takes its humble first steps with stock footage and innocuous conversation – sprinkled with light blue collar humor – that largely fails to hint at an impending Chernobyl-style disaster, between two nuclear power plant workers, shot from afar, identified in the credits as “Slim” and “Jim.”

Slim: “I checked the intake and the outflow.”

Jim: “Maybe there really was a pressure drop.”

Slim: “And maybe they really will pay us overtime.”

Rim Shot sound bite Cool Sounds sound bites

As we watch noxious gas begin to creep from a pipe, we fade to a bus scene. Never have “99 Bottles of Beer” and “Here’s to the Bus Driver” been so ominous as here, when they are sung by children that have oddly hybrid Boston/Long Island accents. The bus rambles through the woods, and we see pregnant mother Cathy Freemont wave to it before it disappears into the toxic gas cloud.

We skip to a deserted road, where short-shorts, high-heel-wearing farmer’s daughter Suzie and Deputy "Rapey O’Toole," whose real name is Harry, played by the infamous Tracy Griswold talk about traffic suggestively while determining if they have enough chromosomes to one day responsibly mate.

The movie shifts again to pill pusher and lesbian co-mom Dr.-of-What(?) Joyce Gould (played by Michelle La Mothe), who spends her days in the company of her Doberman and her cellulite, sunbathing in weather-worn white bikinis. While her relationship to Ms. Button (one of the children, Tommy Button’s bat-shit-eating-crazy mothers) is unclear, she shields her from life’s truths with copious amounts of prescription drugs and soothing piano music. Here we are introduced to the investigative prowess of Sheriff Billy Hart, who brings an overly-pissy Dr. Gould with him to check out the empty bus, filled only with leftover school books and the bus driver’s fishing hat. From these clues, he is able to deduce that the bus driver and children are missing.

We cut back awkwardly to Deputy Harry, still with Suzie, who answers his police radio while approaching first base and says, “Nothing’s gone by us here” when asked if he’d seen the school bus or any other traffic. We have to trust his report, considering the foreplay to his failed barn kiss with Suzie was to talk about the lack of traffic in the town.

We cut without warning for the third time back to Dr. Gould searching for Tommy frantically near the bus after Sheriff Hart leaves her to go cock block his deputy. The vehicle is abandoned eerily in front of a cemetery, which makes our first sight of black-fingernailed, Goth Club ready Tommy even more impactful. Dr. Gould sees Tommy and chases after him, tripping over the burnt-out shell of the bus driver. She also gives us our first visible death scene via the “Hug of Death,” delivered by a male tween in a striped polo, and thwarts our expectations that she will be a main character. As he hugs his ornery second mom right into her grisly, burning death, his eyes are believably lifeless, potentially because he was already dead inside, or simply was given LSD during filming so he wouldn’t be weirded out by having to hug a bunch of girls from whom he might contract serious cooties.

And now, some quick FAQs about the gas-induced hugging disease:

How is it contracted?

It is airborne, but only for a limited time and in limited areas. It comes from unidentified gas produced by nuclear power plants.

Is it contagious?

It’s deadly, but not contagious.

Will it live on?

Apparently it will, but only in children that contract it in-utero when their mothers drive through a cloud. It probably was supposed to produce a sequel film, but that didn’t work out so well.

After the first visible death, we get a delicious taste of the Plaid Ginger Twins, Hank and Frank, who are both balding fans of plaid and denim shirts. They introduce us to the small-town charm of the corner store that buys roadkill, especially dead birds from townspeople and sells things like ether and other confusing auto repair supplies. The store is staffed by the saucy, NRA-card-carrying grandma, Molly. The “that’s what she said” conversation between Molly and the brothers further shows us that the writers of the script were really aiming to make an adult film, but somehow the kids got in the way.

Hank/Frank (about the birds they’re selling): “If you want ‘em any bigger, you’re going to have to wait a couple months. This is as big as they are right now.”

Molly also has access to a CB radio, presumably so she can boff truckers on their way through town and also keep tabs on the admittedly senile school bus driver.

Next on the agenda is for Sheriff Billy to visit one of the other children, Janet’s mother. Dee Dee Shore, played by an actress whose only other role was a hooker in a different movie also filmed in 1980, has hobbies that include sunbathing topless on overcast, chemically-polluted days and watching her heavily-mustachioed boyfriend Jack lift weights by the pool in a grey Speedo that perfectly matches his ashy skin. He gets visibly winded holding up his giant, oiled torso, and angrily turns down a cigarette from Dee Dee while calling into question the not-so-thinly-veiled message Sheriff Hart is delivering: “Exactly what are you trying to tell us Sheriff?” The prospect of a kidnapping inappropriately excites Dee Dee, who exclaims, “A kidnapping in Ravensback! Oh Jack, how exciting!” In an attempt to deflect the twisted nature of the situation, Hart strikes up a conversation about an art “piece” he finds and many awkward silences ensue.

We are introduced to one of the main characters, John Freemont, a father of two of the “Children” and owner of a regularly-broken car. As he waits for Sheriff Hart to help fix his car, girl zombie in a fuscia jumper, Ellen looks on from the trees, but is forced to delay her attack.

Ellen takes real pleasure in her work:



One of the skills of this movie is to switch between sex and death awkwardly with zero transition. After Ellen kills both her parents, we cut to the Ginger Twins spying on Harry and Suzie. They talk about how pretty her hair is, likely eying it as potential stuffing for future pillows. While the purpose of this scene seems to be to give the writers an excuse to wax philosophical about hand jobs with homoerotic overtones, it is really to introduce a character that serves no future purpose in the film. Enter a man in a Pimpmobile, who may or may not be Terry Kiser, but is definitely styling with his giant car phone. He is there to see Dee Dee Shore and her boyfriend.

When Dee Dee’s name is mentioned, Hank and Frank, now the official Greek Chorus of this movie say,

Hank: “I’d like to hump that bitch.”
Frank: “Well, you’d have to take her on your own then.”
Hank: “I’d take her on my own.”

At this point, Suzie dies at the hands of her brother, Paul. Initially, we think she might get away, since in her only perceptive moment she finds his incessant attempts to hug her inappropriately out of character and starts to slap him repeatedly. Unfortunately, the spinning bike tire and gurgling scream tell us Suzie is dead. Paul then kills his before-now-not-introduced father.

The magic really happens when Harry finds three children in the darkness and tells Molly over the CB radio, “Hey, hey, hey. Harry the Hawk does it again” right before he alliteratively gets hugged to death. Billy comes across his lifeless body and morphs into full-on Gomer Pyle in order to more appropriately display his grief over the situation.

Now there are officially feral children on the loose, but Sheriff Hart’s fear of dogs is what almost prevents him from going in to check on Dr. Gould at the Button house. The only thing more horrifying than finding burnt, dead bodies on the scene is that the phones are dead.

The next stop is back to Molly’s store. She provides us a new twist on an old expression when Hart bangs on her door, presumably because she is used to warding off the gentleman callers she phone sexes via short wave: “Alright, keep your pants zipped!” She makes a loose and fast promise to protect herself by adding, “Anyone tries to get in here, I’ll blast their ass to kingdom come!”

Having still not put together the very conspicuous pieces of the mysterious “The Children” puzzle, Sheriff Hart and John Freemont join forces and find a missing child, Janet on the highway, who thankfully for them is not feeling very affectionate. They repeat her name 100 times, thus turning her into the most well-developed character in the movie.

Then, the death toll really mounts … again.

The film picks up additional steam when bodybuilding, eye-candied Jack dies. Thankfully, his death is more dignified than his life, as he is found lounging by the pool wearing a nice dress shirt and slacks. The death of Jack’s amazing mustache – the only thing left on his burnt carcass that is recognizable – finally helps John and Billy discover that Janet and her friends are part of the problem rather than the solution.

And now, a still from the moments before Molly’s very anticlimactic death:



After the sad demise of the town’s only badass grandma, we cut to a scene in which an adult is slowly killing a child, as we see pregnant Cathy Freemont smoking, with apologies to her baby. Since – spoiler alert – the baby ends up being infected in the end, perhaps the whole movie is a PSA against exposure of children to toxins of any kind.

When Billy and John arrive at the Freemont home, going through major caffeine withdrawal, they demand that Cathy make them coffee. At this point, Goth-nail-infected Freemont daughter Jenny attempts to break into her own house. Cathy almost gets the hugging of a lifetime, but the hug is brutally rebuked. John and the Sheriff start to wrangle the children into the barn/tool shed, and John learns the hard lesson that you should never hug a child that’s gone full Goth when his hand is singed by touching Jenny. A barrage of threatening hug attempts ensue as all the zombie children rally.

Billy sets up a firing-squad-style shooting post inside the Freemont house, but the children are immune to the blasts. They are also apparently excellent climbers, and start to try to invade the Freemont house to hug the crap out of their families. A game of hide and seek goes horribly wrong as yet another Freemont child, Clarkie, starts to kill …



but gets ass-blasted in dramatic fashion over the railing of the stairs. At this point, we discover the Achilles Heel of the infected: cutting off their hands cuts off the disease and also kills them.

Likely this movie was an excuse to satisfy the urge to kill child actors without the authorities being alerted. The fact that these young actors and actresses completely disappeared from show biz after this could be more than just a career side effect of starring in this.

“God … if they get those hands on you!”

Giving up any hope of salvaging the movie, the writers decide to make their characters adopt a passive aggressive stance on solving the problem of the zombie kids by having them propose waiting it out and seeing what happens, echoing our sentiments about what we might be able to do after watching this film to erase it from our memories: “Maybe it will just go away.” However, like the characters and also the actors, we know we will never get that hour and thirty minutes of our lives back.

While debating, they manage to cut off the hands of Ellen, the girl that had the most unquenchable bloodlust. The end of the movie is a series of flashlight scenes, interspersed with John’s conflicted feelings about filicide. He almost succumbs to the power of his daughter’s high-waisted khakis (Jenny is truly ahead of her time in the fashion department, as such pants were not seen in their full glory until the early 1990’s). As she advances on him in her zombie hug stance, he is saved by the Sheriff, who systematically kills the children in the shed one-by-one.

Unfortunately, losing one “Huggy Hand” does not fully kill Ellen, and she delivers the final death blow of the movie to Sheriff Hart from the backseat of his police cruiser, bringing about the untimely end of one of the most majestic movie bromances of all time.

John is distracted from his corpse-holding grief by the cries of Cathy from inside the house. The baby is being born, bringing about the swelling of the violin-heavy string theme again. He finds her in the bathroom, and she starts to list the usual laundry list of items – boiling water, sheets, scissors – you’d think you’d need to carry out a successful home birth, even though she does not use any of them in the end. As the sun rises, the true horror of the film unfolds as the creepy sounds of Cathy giving birth that are likely indistinguishable from what conceiving it sounded like fill the house.

John exclaims, “The head’s clear! You did it, Cathy!” And the baby is born – a girl … with Gothy fingernails.

The moral of the story? If your kids die, you can always have some more; but they might turn to the Goth lifestyle to fill the emptiness you created when you told them they failed to meet any of your expectations.

Review by Julia Rogers

Stranger with My Face (2009)

Tatonka Rating: 2.0
Director: Jeff Renfroe
Writer: Based on the Book by Lois Duncan



Lifetime Movie Network’s Film Synopsis: After the shocking and untimely death of her husband, Shelley Stratton (Catherine Hicks) moves her daughter Alexis (Emily Hirst) and her adopted daughter, Laurie (Alexz Johnson), to their remote summer house in hopes of giving her family a fresh start. As Laurie begins to settle in and put her life back together, she gets the eerie feeling that she is constantly being watched. Laurie's uneasiness grows when people start claiming to see her in places that she has never been. The family’s delicate state begins to unravel when Laurie unearths the dark past, discovering a twin-sister that she never knew she had. Laurie is forced to delve deeper into her twin’s secrets, for as it turns out her twin has been locked up for years! Laurie must now understand their strange connection in order to prevent her sister from taking over her life and harming her loved ones. Based on the book by author Lois Duncan.

My Film Synopsis: After the chick from Devil’s Diary’s father dies (in this movie named “Laurie" instead of "Dominique"), she moves to the island where her family has a summer house. She has a hard time making friends, because all the boys she made out with during summer break really didn’t expect to have to see her at school every day (and now they have to explain who she is to their girlfriends). After telling everyone else in the world except Laurie that she is adopted, her mother (the nice lady from 7th Heaven who has been playing a mom in movies and on television since she could speak) finally tells her the truth, and supernatural hijynx ensue.

Suggested Tagline: “Because Your Twin is a Crazy Slut …”

Stranger with My Face is an evil twin movie with a twist that was pretty disappointing in terms of being really entertainingly bad until about the last hour, and also in no way followed the book I remember. In the book, the main character finds out she has Native American roots, which helps to explain the spiritual aspect and makes it a much more interesting story (and can you imagine the magical crap Lifetime could’ve spun out with some clichéd Native American folklore? Even one tomahawk would’ve gone a long way).

The first thing I noticed was the score, which was most likely royalty free and also sounded like a sampling of variations on the Law and Order theme song … or the soundtrack from one of two hundred romantic mystery comedies starring Julia Roberts.

As the movie begins, we get about one minute of plot set-up; we see the main character, 16-year old Laurie painting in her living room (which is apparently in a large city … which can only mean we’re in New York City, as we learn later) and visited spiritually by her father seconds before he dies when he is hit by a car just outside. I do appreciate how fitting it is that Lifetime killed off the father (who did not die in the book), because we need him gone to understand that women are much more powerful when they’re on the loose.

The great lesson learned immediately (and never really recanted or revisited) is, “When your husband dies, the right thing to teach your children is that you need to run from your problems in order to be happy again.” The family packs up their apartment in New York and heads for their summer home on an unnamed island. We are reminded of how painful death is (and why running is justified) when they arrive to find family photos (that look like they came with the frame or a wallet) at their new home.

The first night in their new home establishes that every single night on this island is so stormy that the power goes off, and they search for batteries, only to find the opportunity to tell us for the first time what the now dead father did for a living; because they find fully-charged batteries for which he was responsible, they remark, “He was pretty practical for an artist.” As we know, typically artists can’t even figure out how to put their pants on the right way, often needing to be taken care of by other people who are charged with changing their diapers, providing them with clean drool cups, etc.

The story progresses at a snail’s pace, and we realize that Laurie has been seen quite a bit in town when she hasn’t even left her bedroom. She’s even accused of hooking up with the school cripple in a boat house. If you’re going to have an astrally-projecting twin sister, you better hope she’s not a total skank, or that she has good taste.

Laurie starts to sort of make friends on her first day and befriends Helen, the school deviant, played by an actress who might turn into Shannen Doherty in 30 years. Helen’s rebellious acts include reading true crime novels on the steps when she’s supposed to be in class and acting as an armchair psychologist for anyone that tries to befriend her. She also gives Laurie permission to “go nuts,” which she seems to follow for the rest of the movie. Despite only being in the movie (at least awake and not in a coma) for about 10 minutes, she is Laurie’s best friend in the world.

I have to hand it to LMN for saving money on production costs by re-using teen couples from other Lifetime movies. Laurie hooks up with Jeff, played by the actor who was also Alexz Johnson’s one-dimensional male counterpart in Devil’s Diary. Do I smell an epic serial romance a la Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks? I think maybe there was a sale on creepy location rentals and they just decided to film two movies in one shot.

The most confusing element of this movie is its time line. I would expect some confusion of place and time, given there is a major focus on astral projection, but we never get deep enough into a traditional plot to understand how the plot gets screwy. At one point, as Laurie is going to meet Helen near the cliff outside her house, she sees herself (her twin) on the rocks. As she walks further to find Helen, she says, “Earlier tonight, I thought I saw someone on the rocks that looked just like me.” Earlier tonight as in 30 seconds ago? Most likely this type of definition of time is what makes the plot drag.

Not only does the plot not make any sense, but the mother is largely unresponsive to major events, even when Laurie is suspected of trying to strangle her sister Alex in her sleep. Whether it’s bad writing or Catherine Hicks’ complete resignation to the fact that she’s never going to have a real career, she is barely awake in most of her scenes. Her revelation to Laurie about her adoption is also treated by her as a non-event, and she explains that they left her twin behind because they were dirt poor and essentially could only afford to buy one baby.

One of the most entertaining things about this movie is the way it bases all its male characterizations on blatant stereotypes. Gordon, the douchey school stud, is the ultimate panty peeler. In order to seduce Laurie, he uses clever phrases like, “You’d rather curl up with that book instead of me?” He also tries to get her to succumb by attempting to convince her that his desire to do so is motivated by wanting to take her mind off her troubles and heal her pain. If Laurie’s twin hadn’t thrown him across the room from the next dimension, he certainly would’ve tried, “If you don’t do me, my balls will fall off and I will die,” or “If a guy stays a virgin too long, his penis explodes.”

Jeff is another excellent stereotype; the misunderstood, damaged (in this case, crippled) boy that seems to be bad but is actually good. He is also a vehicle for showing how boys (especially the cute ones) prevent girls from having super powers; Leah tells Laurie that Jeff is in the way of her truly being able to astral project. Jeff is entertaining because he does intelligent, completely logical things like walking to Laurie’s house in the middle of the night along a busy highway and hanging out in deserted places alone or standing near cliffs when he’s almost been killed by the soul of his girlfriend’s twin four or five times.

Another thing this movie does well is avoid explaining complicated topics. If you don’t want to explain astral projection, all you have to do is show a montage of a character reading every book under the sun about it. We see Laurie learning everything she can about astral projection at the school library; when she pretends she doesn’t know what her twin Leah is talking about later, Leah simply calls her on it and we then don’t have to ever know what astral projection really means or any details about it beyond the generic. We just have to trust that someone else in the movie understands the concept and will lead us down the right path.

The movie doesn’t really get entertaining until Leah convinces Laurie to astral project so she can take over her body. And she does really dastardly things when she gets in there. Her evil deeds include, making breakfast for Laurie’s family, making friends with popular girls at school by giving them compliments about their outfits, trying to sleep with hot guys that like her and trying to fix Laurie’s reputation for being a total nutbag around school by behaving like a normal teen girl.

If you can make it through the first hour and a half, this movie gets pretty good, especially if you have Schadenfreude badly enough that you might enjoy watching a crippled boy get beaten by a semi-ghost with his own cane.

Reviewed by Julia Rogers