To clarify: I mean that you didn’t know anything about it, had never seen it before, and decided to watch it for the first time on AMC?
My choice: Baby the Rain Must Fall. Yeah - the acid rain, onto the only copy of this movie, so that nobody ever has to see it ever again. I’m at home sick, the only thing else on is a Law and Order episode I’ve seen a hundred times (the judge that had an affair with Claire threatens the child of the actress who plays the mom on Malcom in the Middle), so I see that this movie is coming on AMC. (Cue AMC “coming next” catchy happy tune). Starring Steve McQueen and Lee Remick. Hmmm, maybe I’ll give this a try. Bad idea.
The plot: Lee Remick stars as the most patient and / or stupid woman in the world, who arrives in town with her incredibly cloying child to “surprise” ex-con husband Steve McQueen. A local sheriff, played by the most uninteresting actor who ever lived, gives her a ride from the bus station, then hangs around to no effect for the rest of the movie. Steve and Lee reunite after all his time behind bars in a scene of gripping banality. Meanwhile, Steve would rather play the worst song ever recorded (“Baby the Rain Must Fall”, badly dubbed) than go back to school. Unfortunately, a local judge will send him back to prison unless he goes back to school at the request of his foster mother. The judge continues to abuse his power illegally until Steve can’t take it anymore and crashes into a fence. The End.
High Seas Hijack was the worst one I ever saw on there. A very bad terrorist/kidnapping flick with Peter Graves as a newscaster (but only in the English language version according to IMDB). The terrorists are all stereotypical angry black militants, very insulting. The authorities fool them into thinking that they have blown up some oil refinery that the terrorists thought they wouldn’t by airing leftover footage from a film of an exact model replica of the refinery being destroyed (good thing we had that lying around, eh guys). Didn’t msake a bit of sense for one damn minute.
I tried to watch Baby The Rain Must Fall years ago on A&E, when they still showed films late at night. I never could make it through more than 30 minutes of it.
Is there any way to locate my long-lost Kiss Her Goodbye thread of a year or two back? Yikes! A movie meltdown of Enron proportions. Imagine that Joihn Waters had written a script and convinced Ed Wood to direct it . . .
To be brutally frank, AMC has been showing a lot of total crap, lately. At least, it’s crap if you don’t like cheesy monster movies, Backstory installments about forgettable films, and teenybop movies from the early 60’s. Oh well, I guess TCM has the higher quality catalog covered.
Not that they don’t still show a real gem, occasionally.
I must have missed all the critical praise heaped upon Predator that turned it into an American Movie Classic. And they even did a Backstory special on it!!!
Dear, John and I are good friends–but you KNOW the kind of dialogue he wrote for, say, “Female Troubles” and “Multiple Maniacs?” That’s what they spout, with po-faced sincerity, in “Kiss Her Goodbye.”
