The Waltons

Olivia, Jim-Bob and Elizabeth have their car break down. They walk into the woods. They come across a cabin with a still outside. Instead of getting as far away from it as they can, they knock on the door because Elizabeth keeps whining that she's thirsty. The moonshiners drive them off somewhere and dump them in the woods. Elizabeth continues to whine that she's thirsty, then that she's hungry. She was the cause of all this to begin with.

There was an episode of Little House on the Prairie where the crops fail and Michael Landon takes a job transporting a wagon load of nitro glycerine a la The Wages of Fear. This thing was The Waltons' inoffensive answer to Deliverance. They walk through the woods. They're menaced by a non-venomous snake and later slip quietly away when they run into a bear.

It seems like other shows taught important lessons to the viewer. Like the importance of leaving people alone and not letting mountain people know you've witnessed them committing a crime.

Jim Bob uses forest survival tips he got from his father and grandfather. He catches a fish with his bare hands and chases a bear away by hitting two rocks together.

If they had watched From Russia With Love, they might have done what James Bond did and offered to pay the hillbillies to let them go.

In The Seven Beauties, the Italian guy seduces the German woman concentration camp commandant. Captain Kirk used that ploy a few times, but that would be out of the question here.

I haven't watched The Waltons in over forty years and here I only caught the last part of the episode. I've thought back to it over the years. The grandmother seemed like a horrible person, and there was an episode set during World War Two where Olivia tries to cheer up a Gold Star mother by telling her that at least her dead son won't come home from the war an emotional wreck. For some reason the bereaved mother doesn't take that well.

There was one weird episode. Every time one of the cast entered the room, they were buttoning their clothes or fastening their overalls. Like what were they just doing? That was the episode where one of the girls says she witnessed Ben going to the bathroom on the barn.

R.O.T.O.R. (Texas, 1987)

Somebody somewhere said that seeing something bad is going to do much more to spur creativity than something good. If you watch a bad movie, you can think about ways to improve on it. You watch a great movie and all you can do is imitate it.

R.O.T.O.R. came on a science fiction channel on broadcast TV. A really terrible low budget movie made in the late '80's apparently meant to imitate both Robocop and Terminator 2. Someone accidentally fires up a robotic motorcycle cop in Dallas. It pulls a young couple over and murders the husband for speeding, then it chases the wife (Margaret Trigg) and tries to kill her, too.

I'm usually amused by bad movies, but this one wasn't even funny.

I stopped paying attention halfway through and looked it up on IMDb. Directed by a guy whose other credits were mostly Saturday morning cartoons.

Margaret Trigg got top billing. She went on to do a couple of other things including a TV series, but she died in New York at age 39 of a heart attack caused by prolonged use of amphetamines.

I googled her and found a long article about her in New York magazine. She had come from a small Texas town. She came to New York and was actually successful performing stand-up. She was offered a role in Dana Carvey's short-lived TV show but turned it down. She instead starred in a sit-com which paid her twice as much.

Mental illness, eating disorders and an addiction to plastic surgery destroyed her. It sounds like she could have done pretty well otherwise. But she ruined her health and eventually died in Bellevue hospital.

R.O.T.O.R. was apparently popular in Argentina. Available for $1.99 on Amazon Prime.

Coronavirus Lego video

Tara Reid being mistaken for Tara Reade

Sharknado actor Tara Reid is distressed that people keep confusing her with Tara Reade, the former Senate staffer who, let's face it, Joe Biden sexually assaulted 27 years ago.

Is Tara Reid another victim of the Sharknado Curse? Jared Fogle, Anthony Weiner and Matt Lauer appeared in those things and were exposed as sex criminals. Fogle is still in prison, Anthony Weiner is out of federal prison and Matt Lauer was never prosecuted.

Or maybe this is just what the doctor ordered to somehow jump start Tara's career. Her twitter feed has been swamped with threats and abusive comments.

Seems like, rather than simply pointing out that she's not Tara Reade, that Reid might call on people to stop attacking and threatening Biden's victim.

Last Resort (1986)

Charles Grodin starred in this movie made for Roger Corman. An American family goes on vacation at a resort on an island somewhere. It's not terribly good, but it has Grodin, Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz and Mario Van Peebles. Also has that guy who went on to play a cop in Beverly Hills Cop and a bounty hunter in Midnight Run also with Charles Grodin. With Scott Nemes, the kid from It's Garry Shandling's Show.

Made in 1986. Full of gay jokes. Not actual jokes----just the existence of homosexuality was the joke.

Grodin talked about it in one of his books. To save money, they didn't scout locations before flying the cast and crew to the island. The cabins were so hot, Grodin demanded air conditioning and said he would pay for it himself if he had to. Grodin said on his talk show that he thought it was one of his funniest movies.

Might make a good double or triple feature with one or two of those Fyre Festival documentaries.

Directed by a woman, Zane Buzby, who went into direct several TV series. Produced by Julie Corman who was married to Roger Corman.

Available on Amazon Prime.

What Richard Did, Ireland (2012)

Thank God I wasn't a popular athlete in high school, especially in Ireland. I don't think I could handle all the hugging.

18-year-old Richard is a popular bourgeois alpha dog athlete of some kind. He and his friends have a party out at his parents' beachhouse. They take along a younger fellow. They're nice to each other. They're perfectly pleasant the way some school athletes are, trying to live up to the position they hold in school.

Richard is at a drunken party. He gets into a fight with his drunken friend then they walk off. The next day, he learns that his friend died. He apparently killed him.

I knew this was going to happen because it was in the description, but it didn't happen until 40 minutes in.

Will guilt stricken Richard admit what happened? Will he lay low and hope the cops don't take him away? Will he start peeling off the witnesses one by one?

Based on the novel Bad Day at Blackrock based on an actual murder in an Irish nightclub in 2000.

According to the internet, the minimum sentence for manslaughter in Ireland is a fine. The maximum sentence is life in prison. If you're sentenced to life in prison there, your case will usually be reviewed in seven years.

Available on Amazon Prime.

The Big Country (1958)

Watching westerns, I usually think about what I would do if I had to live there. How I would scrape together money for train fare to get back east. But, of course, there was an economic depression from the 1870's to the early 1890's, the cities were full of disease and poverty and you'd have to work in a factory or a slaughterhouse; if you lived on the coast you could get Shanghai'd. That's probably what drove people west.

The Big Country (1958), directed by William Wyler, starring Gregory Peck, Burl Ives and Charles Bickford among others was a two hour forty-five minute epic. Gregory Peck arrives in a tiny desert town. The children laugh at his suit and his tiny hat. His fiancee arrives to take him home to her father's giant ranch. On their way, they're attacked by local ruffians, Chuck Conners among them. They don't shoot at his feet and make him dance, but they take his hat and lasso him.



Gregory Peck doesn't think it was a big deal. He went through worse at his college fraternity and his shipmates had fun keelhauling him in the Navy.

Gregory Peck is tougher than anyone else but he doesn't want them to know it. Charlton Heston and the other cowhands try to initiate him by getting him to ride a bucking bronco. He refuses, then breaks in the horse later when the men are gone.

As an actor, Burl Ives was like Ernest Borgnine or Andy Griffith. I always thought he was folksy and grandfatherly, but he was really good at playing the heavy.

Weird that Ives got into the movies by way of folk singing.

In this case, Gregory Peck's future in-laws are in a violent feud with Burl Ives and his kin, ostensibly over water.

The movie was long but not boring. But that may have been because of the caffeine I took before watching it. The desert looked better than it does in most of these movies.

Available on Amazon Prime.