Heaven Help Us (1985)

Director: Michael Dinner
Writer: Charles Pupura
Stars: Andrew McCarthy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kevin Dillon, Malcolm Danare, Jennie Dundas, Kate Reid, Wallace Shawn, Jay Patterson, John Heard and Donald Sutherland

Index: Make It a Double.

While Stephen Geoffreys’s second choice for Make it a Double was the film he’s best known for, Fright Night, he picked this first. It’s an odd mix of comedy and drama that gave a number of young actors early roles: it was the third for Andrew McCarthy and Mary Stuart Masterson, but the first for Kevin Dillon, Patrick Dempsey and, indeed, Geoffreys.

The version I watched still had the original title of Catholic Boys intact, but I can see why it was changed for the American market. It may have misled a lot of viewers, given that half of it is serious drama, exposing everyday life in a strict Catholic school, St. Basil’s in Brooklyn, but the other half is wild comedy, not quite to the degree of Porky’s but far closer than would be guessed with a title like Catholic Boys.

The lead character is Michael Dunn, who we watch transfer into St. Basil’s and try to find a place in the established pecking order, which ends up being as one of five boys who coalesce into rather than naturally form a group. That’s them on the poster.

The Unholy Three (1925)

Director: Tod Browning
Writer: Waldemar Young, based on the novel by Tod Robbins
Stars: Lon Chaney, Mae Busch and Matt Moore

Index: That's a Wrap!

There are other legendary collaborations in the silent era, but the standout on the darker side of film was between Lon Chaney and Tod Browning. That didn’t technically begin here, as they’d made a pair of Priscilla Dean movies, The Wicked Darling and Outside the Law, at the turn of the decade, but this was where their partnership as lead actor and director started.

It spanned eight features over five years and I look forward to covering them all. Well, all of the ones still extant, at least. People claim that they’ve found London After Midnight often but, thus far, they’ve all been liars. Here’s to a true discovery soon! Check your attics, folks.

I’m especially fond of this film because it’s based on a novel by Tod Robbins, whose story, Spurs, was filmed by Browning as Freaks. Fans of that film will recognise Harry Earles as one of the trio of crooks who make up the Unholy Three, with Chaney and future Oscar winner Victor McLaglen. The stories aren’t related but do share a common theme in carnival life.

Tru Loved (2008)

Director: Stewart Wade
Writer: Stewart Wade
Stars: Najarra Townsend, Matthew Thompson, Jake Abel and Tye Olson

I find it fascinating that Vernon Wells chose Tru Loved for his double and it speaks volumes about how he must feel about its message.

For one thing, his part is pretty flimsy and ruthlessly one note. Coach Wesley has a brand of bigotry and, when it manifests, it manifests just how we expect. There’s little opportunity for any actor to get his teeth into the role.

To be fair, the Coach may be just as bigoted about other things that simply don’t arise in this film. Tru Loved is an indie LGBTQ+ drama, so it’s his homophobia that comes out to rage and it does so without subtlety. Maybe that’s why he played up his Australian accent.

Circuitry Man (1990)

Director: Steven Lovy
Writers: Steven and Robert Lovy
Stars: Jim Metzler, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, Dennis Christopher and Vernon Wells

Index: Make It a Double.

If I was on autopilot, I’d start this review by pointing out that Circuitry Man is a “bad movie, but...” and then talk about all the things I liked about it. However, it really isn’t a bad movie. It is, however, a cheap movie, whether I buy into IMDb’s suggestion that it cost a mere $5,000 or not. Then again, if it started life as a thesis film at UCLA, maybe that’s true.

So, Circuitry Man is a “cheap movie, but...”. It isn’t hard to come up with negatives, starting with the opening credits that run weirdly long and alternate with imagery when they should have overlaid it. The text scrolls up as we head down, through the layers of post-apocalyptic underground L.A. But hey, a $5,000 budget. In that context, these negatives are forgettable.

We’re underground because the atmosphere is gone and what air remains is unbreathable. Climate change concerns were big in 1990 and we can only dream about rich politicians who craft policies after watching straight to video sci-fi flicks instead of reading Ayn Rand.

Rampage (1987)

Director: William Friedkin
Writer: William Friedkin, based on the novel by William P. Wood
Stars: Michael Biehn, Alex McArthur, Nicholas Campbell, Deborah Van Walkenburgh, John Harkins, Art LaFleur and Billy Greenbush

Index: Make It a Double.

At first glance, Michael Biehn’s second pick is pretty much the same movie as his first. It’s another story about a psychopath, like Deadly Intentions, with Biehn in the lead and we see it unfold from the act to the pursuit to the trial. However, it doesn’t take long for a whole slew of differences to manifest. And, in the end, it’s a very different movie, often a mirror image.

Sure, his wife leaves him here too but it isn’t because he’s the psychopath tormenting her; it’s because he’s the prosecuting attorney who is given the task of seeking the death penalty for the psychopath, even though he personally opposes it for moral reasons. His wife Kate is a lawyer too who also doesn’t believe in capital punishment and she sees this as a step too far for her to accept in a relationship.

He’s Tony Fraser, who heads Major Crimes either for the state of California or the city of Stockton, and his personal struggle with the death penalty echoes that of the director, the reason why there are two different endings.

Strike (1925)

Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Writers: Proletkult under the direction of Valerian Pletnev
Stars: First Workers’ Theatre of Proletkult

Index: That's a Wrap!

As propositions go, the series of seven silent Soviet Union propaganda films called Towards Dictatorship of the Proletariat isn’t very high on my priority list. However, only one was made and it was the debut of Sergei Eisenstein, who came out seriously swinging.

After a quote from Lenin about the strength of the working class being organisation, part one of six promises us that “All is calm at the factory”. So far, so boring. However, then the cinematography leaps into action.

There’s a great characterful close up, a tasty dissolve, a delightfully choreographed shot of a busy hallway and a gorgeous high dolly shot through a factory floor. That’s the first twenty seconds. No, I’m not kidding.

Deadly Intentions (1985)

Director: Noel Black
Writer: Andrew Peter Marin, based on the book by William Randolph Stevens
Stars: Michael Biehn, Madolyn Smith, Morgana King, Jack Kruschen, Kevin McCarthy, Cliff DeYoung and Cloris Leachman

Index: Make It a Double.

Deadly Intentions wasn’t a feature film nor a straight to video slasher, as you might expect from the poster. It was a three and a half hour TV movie that unfolded over two nights, 19th and 20th May, 1985 on ABC. It was based, as so many such things seem to be, on a true story.

In real life, in 1977, a airport clerk in Tucson triggers a major investigation when he sees A. Donald Vester in a weird disguise. It turns out that he’s Dr. Patrick Henry, a dermatologist at a Baltimore hospital, in Dallas for a conference but on an incognito side trip to Tucson to kill his wife, Christina Bellios. However, he didn’t do it, for some reason, and so he’s tried not for murder but for attempted murder, given how far he’d gone to do it and how close he’d come.

The prosecutor was the chief prosecutor for Pima County, William Randolph Stevens, who received an Edgar Award nomination for Best Fact Crime for his 1982 book about the case. In 1985, that became this two part TV movie.

Roller Boogie (1979)

Director: Mark L. Lester
Writer: Barry Schneider, based on a story by Irwin Yablans
Stars: Linda Blair and Jim Bray

Index: Make It a Double.

OK, this was ripe for a fresh look. I’ve seen it before and I reviewed it back in 2008, finding a lot of bad and very little good. However, Linda Blair chose it for her double very deliberately. After the impactful Born Innocent, one of many such films she made in the seventies, she saw this one as pure unadulterated fun.

And she isn’t wrong. Sure, this has less of an actual story and more of a collision of tropes with a cliché barging in halfway through just because it can. Sure, there’s a reliance on plot convenience that boggles the mind. Sure, her co-star wasn’t even an actor, Jim Bray clearly hired because he was a champion skater. But, like Rock ’n’ Roll High School, another 1979 film I needed to see in a fresh light to appreciate, it ultimately counts as a seventies beach movie. There’s a pride in fun and goofiness.

Dr. Syn Alias the Scarecrow (1963)

Director: James Neilson
Writer: Robert Westerby, based on the novel Christopher Syn by Russell Thorndike and William Buchanan
Stars: Patrick McGoohan, George Cole, Tony Britton, Michael Hordern and Geoffrey Keen

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I’ve met the Rev. Dr. Christopher Syn in this project before. In 2016, I took a look at 1937’s Doctor Syn for the centennial of leading lady Margaret Lockwood. In 2025, I’m reviewing a fresh Dr. Syn movie for another centennial, of George Cole, who I know well on film and TV.

Introducing it is a real challenge but I’ll give it a shot. Dr. Syn was a character created by a British author, Russell Thorndike, the brother of famous actress Dame Sybil Thorndike. The swashbuckling parson/smuggler debuted in a novel, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, in 1915, and it was followed by six more, though it was the last of them chronologically.

Doctor Syn was the first film adaptation and this was the third, the second being Hammer’s Captain Clegg in 1962 with Dr. Syn renamed to Parson Blyss to avoid any copyright clash with Disney, who weren’t actually making a feature film at all, but three episodes of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color TV show, collectively called The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh.

Born Innocent (1974)

Director: Donald Wyre
Writer: Gerald Di Pego, based on the book by Creighton Brown Burnham
Stars: Linda Blair, Joanna Miles, Allyn Ann McLerie, Mary Murphy, Janit Baldwin, Nora Heflin, Tina Andrews, Sandra Ego, Mitch Vogel, Richard Jaeckel and Kim Hunter

Index: Make It a Double.

Linda Blair didn’t start her screen career in The Exorcist but it launched her to stardom in a way few fourteen year olds ever experience. It speaks volumes for her attitude that she took up this tough TV movie next and continued to accept tough roles in TV movies like Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, Sweet Hostage and Victory at Entebbe. She took the harder road.

Born Innocent aired on 10th September, 1974 as an NBC World Premiere Movie and became the highest rated TV movie of that year. It looks at mental and physical abuse, pushing the edges of what network television was willing to do. Its notorious lesbian rape scene was removed from reruns, even though it’s key to the story.

And that story revolves around Chris Parker as she follows a brutal story arc. Arguably the most powerful scene isn’t the rape at all but a closing shot of the face of a counsellor as she realises she’s lost another one because of the system. What we see is how she entered it and how she gets lost within it.