Film & Water #110 – Honeymoon with a Stranger

THE FILM & WATER PODCAST

Episode 110: HONEYMOON WITH A STRANGER

Rob welcomes TV movie expert Amanda Reyes (MADE FOR TV MAYHEM) to discuss the 1969 TV movie thriller HONEYMOON WITH A STRANGER, starring Janet Leigh, Cesare Danova, Eric Braeden, and Barbara Steele!

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13 responses to “Film & Water #110 – Honeymoon with a Stranger

  1. Well, I now have another podcast to dive into! This was a great discussion. TV movies are something I watched a lot of as a kid…or they were on in my house anyway. My Mom was a big fan of the “movie of the week” notion, and if they interested me, I would stop by and watch too. But there are lots of great ones I’ve heard spoken of I have never seen. Heck, I just saw Gargoyles on Svengoolie just a few months back!

    And even some of the big ones are hard to find. The two Kolchak movies, The Night Stalker and Night Strangler are out of print on DVD, so you have to pay gauging prices to get them off of Amazon or ebay.

    The idea of a missing spouse and folks trying to convince you you’re nuts is also the basic plot of Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire from 1963. Of course the goings on take on a true supernatural bent there.

    Speaking of Hammer, David Warbek’s name caught my ear. More on that guy next week on another F&W show!

    So now I’m off to iTunes for the TV Mayhem Podcast! Oh, and Rob, don’t knock those Gilligan Island reunion movies too hard. The first one isn’t bad, and at least brought closure to a childhood favorite. The idea of retooling the property into a Love Boat/Fantasy Island-like show for rotating guest stars…not great. But hey, our mutual hero Richard Donner directed some of the Gilligan series episodes, so it’s not without its pedigree!

    Chris

  2. Thanks for turning me towards another interesting TV podcast! Your conversation got me to thinking about a 1985 TV movie that I haven’t seen since it aired: “The Execution” starring Loretta Swit, Valerie Harper, Jessica Walter,Sandy Dennis, Barbara Barrie, & Rip Torn. The ladies play concentration camp survivors all living in Los Angeles who discover that their Nazi tormentor (Torn) is also living undercover as a restaurant owner in LA. They decide to draw lots to execute the war criminal (without telling the others who committed the murder). I never forgot this one! I love people who are passionate about more obscure corners of pop culture!

      1. My other all-time favorite tv movie (also from 1985) is “Guilty Conscience” starring Anthony Hopkins, Blythe Danner, & Swoosie Kurtz. Hopkins plays a devious attorney trying to devise the perfect murder to bump off his wife. It’s reminiscent of “Deathtrap” and filled with many unexpected twists and turns. I still have the vhs tape of it somewhere.

        A bit off topic: Does anyone recall “Fresno” (1986) a CBS comedy miniseries that was a parody of nighttime soaps like Dallas & Dynasty? It stars Carol Burnett, Charles Grodin, Teri Garr, Dabney Colman, Bill Paxton, Gregory Harrison, Jerry Van Dyke, & Michael Richards as a clan of raisin tycoons. It was an interesting experiment and I don’t think it was ever re-aired.

  3. Thank you for the fun episode about an often overlooked corner of cinema. I know I watched many TV movies growing up as a kid. Sadly, not many stuck in my mind over the years, other than the two Star Wars Ewok TV movies from the 80s.

    One of the other TV movies that I do remember quite well is Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, which came out in 1975 and was directed by Richard Donner. It featured Linda Blair, Larry Hagman, Verna Bloom, and Mark Hamil, among others. I didn’t actually see it on TV when it first aired, rather I saw it some years later when they showed it to us at school. The main reason I remember Sarah T. is because I was flabbergasted to see Hamil playing a character other than Luke Skywalker. I want to say you mentioned this movie when discussing Linda Blair’s career during your coverage of The Exorcist with Tracy, but I’m too lazy to go back and confirm my memory.

      1. Ah, I must have been thinking of the prison movie, but Sarah T. certainly continues the trend of Blair playing the tragic female protagonist.

        I was also surprised to see Donner’s name attached to the movie, when I looked it up on IMDB earlier today. Kudos to him.

  4. I usually skip the discussion of older/unfamiliar movies, but this episode auto-played while I was driving, and I’m glad for it. Found discussion of the lost art of TV movies very interesting, and Amanda Reyes had excellent insights into this under-charted territory. I’ve got soft spots for a number of made-for-TV and cable movies, which prompted me to see how many were available on DVD, and the answer is not a lot. For instance, with Halloween coming up, I wanted to revisit the 1988 cheese fest “The Midnight Hour” starring Shari Belafonte, LeVar Burton, Peter DeLuise, Dedee Pfeiffer, Dick Van Patten and Kurtwood Smith. I recalled renting it on Netflix in the DVD days. A non-import, non-bootleg copy costs upwards of $265 on Amazon, but at least it’s currently free on YouTube. You can also catch a lot of this stuff on deep UHF Baby Boomer channels like Me-TV and Antennae TV. My mom was a big Tommy Lee Jones fan, and people forget that it was TV movies that kept his career afloat for much of the ’70s & ’80s (and I’m reminded that I need to pick up a copy of Gotham with Virginia Madsen in her best femme fatale role).

  5. Well, that’s one of my favourite episodes ever, Amanda was talking about some films I remember (almost) well… they showed up on UK TV all the time in the Seventies. And while the ones we get these days are pretty low rent, mostly of the ‘Fatal Rival Mom’ variety (bar the sub genre I mentioned in Messenger the other week, Rob), back then they were mainstream entertainment, programmed in the evening.

    I remember Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark giving me the willies despite the silly look of the imps… well, the baddies won. Ditto the Devil’s Daughter with Belinda Montgomery and Shelley Winters. They were both 1973 but a more recent spooky film was The Lottery (1996), based on a story by Shirley Jackson who, of course, wrote The Haunting (so you won’t be rushing to it, Rob!).

    Anyway, I’ve ordered Amanda’s book, downloaded the podcast and look forward to her return!

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