Throwback Tuesday: Calendar Girl Murders (1984)

Writer's Note: As my faithful readers know, I didn't do a Flashback Friday this past week, so this week, I'm doing two oldies to make up for it. I actually watched the following movie as part of a double feature with the other film I'll be doing later in the week, The Centerfold Girls, which basically has the same essential plot, but less star power- depending on your definition of such, I suppose, or your age, maybe.

In addition, keep an eye out for my promised reviews of Blade Runner 2049, Amityville: The Awakening and I Do ...Until I Don't, as well as two others I saw over the past weekend, Happy Death Day and Wish Upon.

Finally, keep an eye on my social media for a poll as to which franchise I should review: Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Phantasm, Evil Dead, Saw, Alien or the Amityville series. If I do the final one, I'll just include my Awakening review as part of that.

Thanks again for reading my reviews, old and new. My site views are really starting to pick up, and I want to keep that momentum going! You all seem to like the horror stuff the most, so I'm going to focus on that more than anything else, while still doing the occasional retro review or new one. The point is, I'm going to try and keep the new content coming, starting with this all-new review! 😀 

Believe it or not, younger readers, there was a time in which TV movies didn't suck. Oh, don't get me wrong. I know all about the pleasures of bad ones, though most of those Hallmark ones make me want to pound my head into a wall. If they did keep one of my childhood crushes, Lacey Chabert, gainfully employed, I'd say to hell with all of them, but, hey, an actress gotta eat sometime.

True, every now and then, there will be a good one, like Lifetime's surprisingly effective adaptation of Stephen King's Big Driver, which actually made me cringe a bit at times. And if you want to count Netflix, there's actually quite a few great ones made exclusively for them, or pay-cable services like HBO and Showtime.

But when it comes to the Big Five: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and The CW, pickings are mighty slim these days. Such wasn't always the case, as my older readers know. The 70's and 80's were flush with great TV movies, as well as fantastic mini-series. 

Steven Spielberg got his big break on TV, doing the excellent Duel and the under-seen Something Evil (sort of a proto-Poltergeist), as well as a segment of the series Night Gallery. 

Super-producer/director Dan Curtis did some great ones, notably Trilogy of Terror, as well as several Dark Shadows movies, based on his series of the same name, as well as the mini-series Winds of War, among many other TV offerings. 

And, of course, the aforementioned Stephen King ruled the roost in the 90's and early 2000's, before making a recent comeback on the small screen with various TV series inspired by his work. 

But, as wonderful as all that stuff is, you haven't really experienced the TV movie until you've seen some of the trashier side of things. Long before Lifetime asked the proverbial question, Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, old-school TV used to churn out exploitation-style movies like they were going out of style.

We're talking true crime (Helter Skelter, The Deliberate Stranger, no less than three (!) movies about Amy Fisher), creature features (Snowbeast, Ants, Devil Dog: The Hound from Hell, Gargoyles), slasher movies (Deadly Lessons, Home for the Holidays, Are You in the House Alone?), teensploitation (Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, Born Innocent, Sarah T.- Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic), lots of horror (Satan's School for Girls, The Initiation of Sarah, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Bad Ronald), and soap opera-esque trash (Lace, The Thorn Birds, Hollywood Wives). 

Something for everyone, in other words. And these films more than held their own with feature films- some of them are even regarded as being as good as, if not better than a lot of what was going on on the big screen at the time. Hell, some of them were actually remade for the big screen, like Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

They're also chock full of big names, whether on their way up- or down- the Hollywood food chain. Back then, TV-movies were seen as the last stop for many a Hollywood actor, basically one step up from doing soaps, but also could be a launching pad for new talent as well, in the case of their younger stars. 

Witness, for instance, Sally Field, whose turn in Sybil helped propel her into big-screen stardom and respect as a dramatic actress. Another example is the one I'm covering today, Sharon Stone.

Before Calendar Girl Murders, the biggest credits on her resume were a decent Wes Craven flick, Deadly Blessing, a short-lived Steven Bochco series called Bay City Blues and a host of guest-starring roles on various TV shows like Silver Spoons, Remington Steele and Magnum P.I.

While success certainly didn't happen overnight, about five years later, Stone landed a break-through role in Total Recall before knocking it out of the park with Basic Instinct in 1992, a role which would garner her multiple award nominations, including a Golden Globe, and a double win at the MTV Movie Awards.

Stone's role in Calendar Girl Murders is practically a dry run for Basic Instinct and there's no doubt it likely helped her snag the role. She plays a beautiful woman that a detective suspects may be involved in a series of murders- sound familiar? 

For those who haven't seen it, I won't spoil whodunit, but suffice it to say that Stone certainly plays her model character in such a way that, at the very least, seems suspicious. But then, that's sort of par for the course in a film like this, right?

The fun begins when a model known for posing nude in a popular calendar plunges to her death off the balcony of a high-rise, just after a party celebrating the success of said calendar. Was it a suicide? Or something more nefarious? 

Lt. Dan Stoner (Tom Skerritt, Alien, Top Gun) thinks the latter, and despite wanting to retire to a cushier desk job so he can spend more time with his family, opts to take on the case, at the request of his superior officer (Pat Corley, Murphy Brown). 

It doesn't hurt that he gets to spend a lot of time with hot models, much to his wife's chagrin. Barbara Bosson, in The Last Starfighter the same year, and later, Hill Street Blues and Murder One, plays the wife, in a wry, wonderfully sardonic turn.

Stoner- great name!- wastes no time interviewing all concerned, and suspects are many. They include boss-man Richard Trainor (Robert Culp, I Spy, The Greatest American Hero), sleazy photographer Alan Conti (Alan Thicke, father of Robin and then-future star of Growing Pains), modelizer Nat Couray (Robert Morse, Mad Men, American Crime Story S1), Trainor's right-hand woman Cleo Banks (Barbara Parkins, Valley of the Dolls, Asylum) and all the other models in question.

Before too long, another model drops, Kara (Claudia Christian, The Hidden, Babylon 5), and this time, there's no doubt it was murder. Police protection is amped-up on all the calendar girl models, including retired one, Cassie (Stone), who left the biz for an old-fashioned desk job, just like Stoner wants to. The two get close, and Cassie soon makes it clear she'd like to get closer. Will Stoner remain faithful to his wife?

After a brazen murder attempt at a party on Heather (Wendy Kilbourne, who went on to appear in two great TV mini-series, North and South, Books 1 & 2), things heat up as the cops close in on the killer, this time intentionally trying to draw them out at an outdoor event. Will it work? You'll just have to see for yourself.

In addition to the aforementioned stars, the film also features a supporting turn as a cop by Robert Beltran, then-hot off of one of my all-time fave cult flicks, Eating Raoul, as well as the underrated Night of the Comet the same year, and who would later achieve success as a cast regular on Star Trek: Voyager. 

TV regular Silvana Gallardo plays another cop, in a slyly forward-thinking turn. She was previously in Windwalker and Death Wish II and would continue to work steadily in TV until the early 2000's, in everything from Starsky & Hutch and Kojak to The Golden Girls and MacGyver.

Also, Jonathan Aluzas, who plays Stoner's horn-dog son, Todd, was in the cult favorite Monster in the Closet, before dropping off the radar completely afterwards. 

Look quick for a cameo by, of all people, comedian Rip Taylor, who I mostly know from Jackass: The Movie and a cameo on an album by The Bloodhound Gang, but who was a regular fixture on 70's TV, especially game shows like The Gong Show and Hollywood Squares.

You might also know him from his rare serious turn in Indecent Proposal, of all things, or Wayne's World 2. He also did a ton of voice-over work, notably as Uncle Fester in the Adams Family cartoon series in the early 90's. He's quite the character, and his scene with one of the brain-dead-about-to-be-real-dead models is a definite highlight. If he'd turned out to be the killer, this movie would be pure win, but alas, such is not the case.

The film is ably directed by TV-regular William A. Graham, who also did the exploitation flick Honky (yep, it means what you think), the apocalyptic sci-fi movie The Last Generation, the West-ploitation movie Cry for Me, Billy (with Harry Dean Stanton), the movie adaptation of the grade-school favorites Where the Lilies Bloom and Sounder, the women-in-prison flick Women of San Quentin, true-crime stuff like Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, Mussolini: The Untold Story and The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer, and three episodes of The X-Files, including the classic "E.B.E."

Plus, the likes of Beyond the Bermuda Triangle, Shark Kill, Contact on Cherry Street (with Frank Sinatra), The Last Ninja, The Last Days of Frank & Jesse James, Billy the Kid (with Val Kilmer), the belated sequel Return to the Blue Lagoon (with a young Milla Jovovich) and lots of Lifetime-type stuff like Beyond Suspicion and Sleeping with the Devil. The guy's a workhorse! 

This movie practically screams the 80's, from the synth-driven score by Brad Fiedel (former keyboardist for Hall & Oates, the same year he did the ground-breaking, award-winning score for The Terminator- he also did the sequel- plus, Fright Night, Just Before Dawn and The Serpent and the Rainbow, among many others), to the painfully-80's fashion and hair, which, as a child of the 80's myself, is SO my wheelhouse, so I loved this.

Granted, it's not that hard to puzzle out the killer- though the why is a bit more elusive- and the script is a bit by-the-numbers, but it's well-acted, and it's fun seeing a lot of familiar faces in the early years of their careers, or, in the case of Skerritt, elegantly slumming it.

While it may not make anyone's list of the best that TV-movies have to offer, and it's no, say, Eyes of Laura Mars, it's a lot of fun, and certainly qualifies as a guilty pleasure worth seeking out. 

Last I saw, it was readily available on Netflix, as well as YouTube, for the record. Here's the trailer as well, so you know what you're in for, and can tell if it's likely to be your cup of tea.

Be sure to join me later in the week, for my look at this film's trashy big-screen counterpart, 1974's proto-slasher The Centerfold Girls. I'm going to also try and catch Click: The Calendar Girl Killer- yet another variation on said theme, obviously- which I will review at a later date. Thanks for reading!