"Here lies Walter Fielding. He bought a house, and it killed him."

 In an 80's re-telling of MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOME, Tom Hanks and Shelley Long play a yuppie couple who realize that purchasing your own home, comes with a price! RACCOONS! THE MONEY PIT is one of Hanks' greatest comedies and in this day and age of a major housing crisis, THE MONEY PIT seems even more telling. Forced to deal with shady contractors, runaway wheelbarrows and the rising cost of living, the couple do the unthinkable. They start repairing the house themselves. Their love and lives will be put to the test as they build from the ground up and realize that the American Dream is only possible if you do it yourself. And sometimes you get stuck in a hole in the floor for a really long time!

 Sleazy Carpenter Scene.

DON'T: HELLO AGAIN.

Don't come back from the dead.


I had the most befuzzling evening the other night. I have recently found myself on this weird Shelley Long journey. With a madcap romp through OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE and TROOP BEVERLY HILLS and I decided it was time to say hello again to HELLO AGAIN.

As it started I realized that I had not seen HELLO AGAIN in over two decades. It perplexed me, because I remembered it vividly or did I? If you had asked me two days ago what I thought of HELLO AGAIN, I would most likely have replied, "It's pretty funny and I love Shelley Long". Today things changed.


The credits started and I already felt off balance. The name Susan Isaacs popped up as writer, producer and CASTING DIRECTOR! I could have screamed with delight and slight dread. Ms. Isaacs is world famous for her novel SHINING THROUGH. Yes, that Shining Through! The movie where Melanie Griffith fights Nazis and gets some of the best FOR THE BOYS aging make-up ever. That is all beside the point though. We get a close up of Long's big eyes and some of the cheapest ass rom-com music I have ever heard. We get a hurried back story of Long's character, Lucy Chadman. She is an ordinary gal with an okayish husband, played by Corbin Bernsen in his hottish years. Her barely legal son is a dreamboat though. He is an aspiring chef and wears an apron with a bandanna decorating his neck. A look that is possibly one of the fastest ways to get me in sack. But what you really need to understand is that Lucy Chadman a KLUTZ! A big one too! She falls down at the drop of a hat. She walks into a fancy party and her skirt falls down around her ankles! HA! It's funny, yo! It's like 20 minutes into the movie and I thought, "Ain't this hag dead yet? HELLO! AGAIN"!

OH! Sela Ward is in HELLO AGAIN as a best friend/arch enemy to Long's "ordinary lady" and she is the shit! She gives us some DIE NASTY realness and shoot glamor out of her ass. Judith Ivey is on board as Long's sister and she is super satanic. The director, Frank Perry, seemed to want to stir away from scary super satanic, so Ivey is funny super satanic. Problem is, she is terrible. I usually love me a Judith Ivey supporting role, but this is the pits. Shelley Long chokes to death and we have to watch her funeral with her son completely losing his SHIT and everyone super sad. FUN! Cut one year later and super satanic sister has stumbled on a spell that will bring her beloved sister back from the dead. ONE YEAR LATER! Honey, I read Pet Sematary, I know what they come back like! HELLO! AGAIN!

So one day, Lucy shows back up and has discovered that her husband has dealt with his grief by banging Sela Ward (is there any other way?) and marrying her! Lucy bust up in her home and finds Sela getting busy in her OWN BED! Also, her son is a famous cook and married to some ugly girl,but no one cares.

She is not a ghost, because you cannot walk through her. She goes to the doctor to get blood test and x-rays, once AGAIN (!) proving she was dead but now isn't? I'm cornfused. Well, now what do you do with her? She loves her Coke (proud sponsor of HELLO AGAIN) and she is DYING to know what is happening on Knots Landing. My kinda fresh out of the grave gal. We get baker's dozen dead mom jokes, all flat lining, a couple more pratfalls in which you hope they result in a death inducing accident and lots of leg! Oh, Shelley has legs for days and she is gonna show 'em off. Then, Super Satanic Sister informs Lucy that she needs to find true love by the first moon after her revival and she has less than a month to do so! GIT IT GIRL!! There is some pre- Troop Beverly Hills high fashion, which is fun, but without the yuks. She also is forced back into the hospital for some reason and meets cutie Gabriel Byrne M.D. She has to take some Exorcist 2 testing and walks down the hall with her hospital gown flapping open and showing her BUTT! There is the yuk!


Lucy decides to embrace her dead self and say to the world….all together now….HELLO AGAIN! She embarks on a world wide rainbow tour of the continents kissing babies, giving lectures and shopping and apparently forgetting her "must find true love in a month" curse. Or maybe there was not a moon that month and she got a get out of the grave free pass. She morphs into a fame monster for a little while but learns a valuable lesson and helps troubled kids. There is this little girl named Lil' Debbie who won't stop looking at the camera. She tries really, really hard not to do it, but she just can't help it. I would look too.

Sela Ward gets mad and holds a press conference to prove that Lucy Chadman is a fake and a phony. She claims that Lucy never really died because she doesn't have cobwebs in her pussy or worms under her skin or smell like dirt for that matter. The great part about the press conference is two fold. First, it looks like it held in that gross Chinese restaurant in Ballard. I forgot what it is called, but I have had lunch there more than three times and it is creep out city. Secondly, a roving reporter is played by that lady on Where the fuck is Carmen Sandiego? We found her!!! She is at the HELLO AGAIN press conference! Score! And she is throwing some MAJOR attitude. Shelley blows off the crowd and the nay sayers and walks out the building ala Pia after delivering her Award Presentation Ceremony speech.

Later! At a fancy party that the entire cast has been invited too, sans Lucy, Sela Ward is the queen of the ball. That is until Lucy crashes the party along with her super satanic sister. SSS starts conjuring up the spirits and someone flashes the lights on and off and on and off quickly. At this very moment something fell in my back bedroom and scared the shit out of me. So now I can say I got scared during HELLO AGAIN. Lucy's husband dumps Sela Ward, but Lucy dumps her husband for Gabriel Byrne M.D. and everyone is happy I guess. The end. This has the stink of a two hour made for TV pilot.

The final credits play over a montage of photos of the entire cast marrying one another, then a montage of photos of the married couples with their children. Shelley Long is, of course, the last and she has what all girls dream of…ZOMBIE TWINS! TOO CUTE!!!


Shelley Long's portrayal of Lucy Chadman hearkens back to Ally Sheedy in MAID TO ORDER or for Deena Jones' sake, Madonna in WHO'S THAT GIRL? On paper the role seems like a good idea, but once visualized you want to kill! You want blood after having to sit through it. All in all, it is a pretty miserable experience. Director Frank Perry who created two of my favorite movies, MOMMIE DEAREST and THE SWIMMER, seems to have just filmed some shit, turned it over to the studio and let the editors have a go with their chainsaws. I imagine this is one of those films that the studio tested and preview audiences hated, so they went back and changed more stuff and filmed more scenes. Evidenced through hair styles going from shorter to longer. Not Sela Ward though. If she showed up to do any more re-takes, she made sure she looked exactly the same. Where is her OSCAR?




*******And now I can't stop calling this movie DEAD AGAIN!!!********

LOOK AT THE CHEAP ASS DVD MENU!!!

Gay Cinema: TROOP BEVERLY HILLS

One of the greatest challenges in life is trying to decide which Girl Scout cookie to buy? It can get intense. You are low on cash, you aren't exactly when they stop selling them and the low octane/adorable peer pressure can make the strongest crumble.
I just always get Samoas. Done. I don't have to work about it, but I still long for a good Tagalongs or the "healthy" Thin Mint.
Those darn Girl Scouts of America work their buns off to bring this country something that keeps us moving forward. They deliver us a little spot of joy for a very limited amount of time and never really ask for anything from us. They never come around knocking my door and bugging me. You hardly ever see a Girl Scout troop roaming around. They stay out of sight. I have always thought they deserved more. My older sister was a Girl Scout for at least six months. My younger sister not so much. Where is THEIR TV show? Where is their Broadway musical?! YEAH! YEAH!! The truth is that they don't need anything because it was written in BadMovieArt lore that there would come to pass a Shelley Long vanity vehicle that would bring The Girl Scouts of America onto the big screen. Credit Due. Just tooted up a bit!


Directed by Jeff Kanew, who had given us REVENGE OF THE NERDS and written by a couple of critically acclaimed female TV writers, TBH has this weird mesh mash of a two hour pilot for a TV show and a mean streak of "BLUE" humor. There are also a lot of curse words and a couple of dicks jokes. Not raunchy, but a shade bluer than a made for TV movie. Shelley Long successfully broke away from a beloved Emmy winning TV show and moved right into movies with ease. The Money Pit and Outrageous Fortune (a BMA mainstay) were wildly popular and remain classics to this day. HELLO AGAIN went on to gay and girl cult status, but TBH's unsuccessful run at the box office would send her back to television. Her performance as Truddi Chase in Voices Within: The Lives of Truddi Chase is a true GIT IT GIRL moment. I have only seen it once and that was enough for me. I will never forget it. Then I read the book When Rabbit Howls, which is kinda like The Further Adventures of Truddi Chase and it fucked me up. Thanks Shelley. At the time it seemed Troop Beverly Hills would just fade into the back of comedy sections in video store. Shelley didn't care. She continued to work and had a massive comeback with The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel. Both are comedy masterpieces. Troop Beverly Hills had something that most movies of the time didn't have. An entire female cast! Girls rejoiced! None of this only two girl Goonies bullshit or no fucking Lost Girls in Lost Boys. This one was strictly for the ladies. HEEEY!!!

In the grand tradition of all great comedies, the animated opening credit sequence is to DIE for. Up there with Mannequin and Who's That Shitbox? TBH sells it! Long plays Phyllis Nefler a spoiled, fashion forward Beverly Hills housewife who loves to shop and cannot seem to finish anything she starts. It's so bad that both her estranged husband, played by hunky Craig T. Nelson, and her daughter, not played by Craig T. Nelson, bring it up to her on a daily basis. Well, when she catches wind that her pre teens wilderness girls troop has run another troop leader out of town, she decides that she is the right gal for the job!


Phyllis has to deal with the politics of the Wilderness Girls upper management and makes an enemy out of the head Wilderness Lady. The sexual chemistry that crackles between these two will melt your sugar free chocolate chip cookie right in your hand! Betty Thomas plays the lesbian predator, Velda Pendor. She is tough as balls and has a set of nuts to prove it! She is the salt in the saccharin sweet limbo of Phyllis. Oh, yes! You almost want them to start making out by the end of the movie. We all know arch enemy sex is ALWAYS the best sex. But anyway...

The rest of the cast is made of the ever hardworking BMA lifer, Mary Gross and Pia Zadora playing herself! NICE! The girls of Troop Beverly Hills are made up of a great lil' redhead, Hillary Whitney, Everyday Girl, Nerd Girl, Nina Simone and mini Jackie Collins. Everyone is great in it. We even get arch enemy team, The Red Feathers. There are a bunch of girls in the troop, but only TomBoy and Tori Spelling get any screen time. Which is fine with me.


The movie is broken up into two major pieces of gay work. B.C.T.( Before Cookie Time) and A.C.T. (After Cookie Time). The musical number "Cookie Time" is a sorta messiah to a certain sect of gays and girls. If you know, then you know. If you don't know, then you are about to know.

B.C.T. is full of the Shelley Long getting us to doing something besides be fabulous and the girls starting to develop their story lines. They all get one. Short and sweet, but at least a story line. Think Babysitter's Club but with badges and sashes, but no babies. A very GREEN affair. We get to dance along with the girls as they go for their "Dance Womanship" badge. Basically, it is a call for all the girls at slumber parties across the this great nation of ours to get up and make as much noise as possible to drive parents insane. But, the show stopper is something called "The Freddie". I had lived a full decade and some change when I first saw this thing called "The Freddie" for the first time in TBH. Even Shelly Long's face when she has to say, "This one is called The Freddy" can't muster up any humor in it. And I'll be goddamned if you don't haul your ass up to try to do it. It's is freakish and impossible to do, but it sums up the tone of the movie.

OH! DEENA!! The camping scene. Shit. Fondue, floppy hats and flash floods! Three of my favorite things that start with the letter F. I love when they say, "Fuck it" and go to the fancy hotel. Quite possibly one of the best ghost stories involving a perm is told and everyone has a great time. Sounds like my camping fantasy come true.

We also get a hot cop who teaches the girls CPR and Shelley gets to make out in front of a bunch of pre teens girls to a song called, "French Kissin' In The U.S.A". Great song. The plot really kicks into gear as the girls MUST sell the most cookies so they can go to the Country Bear Jamboree. At first the fucking Red Feathers one up them, but never ever piss off a Wilderness Girl whose zip code is 90210. Cuz this is what you will get! IN YOUR FACE RED FEATHERS!!!! They launch a full scale attack on their counter parts that the military should start using. Dancing, Singing and selling those cookies are all part of a days work for these girls. COOKIE TIME IS ON! Everything changes!


Winning by a landslide, we morph into A.C.T. It is the last 20 to 25 minutes of the movie and A.C.T. plants the entire cast in the middle of the woods and they have to bond together and learn the true meaning of what being a REAL Wilderness Girl is. Lots of girls screaming, running around, breaking legs and more screaming. But at the end, Phyllis and her troop triumph over evil and send Velda Pendor to Kmart to make some end of credit blue light special jokes. Those were huge at the end of the 80's and really funny!

TROOP BEVERLY HILLS has to be one of the most consistantly funny movies for gays and girls ever made. I swear, Lady Gaga stole ideas from Phyllis Nefler's wardrobe. The entire cast is likable and really into their roles. The rewatchability of TBH is very high and seems like a perfect movie to throw in the VCR when you have a bunch of screaming girls at your house. Or screaming gays as the case may be. I am going to say it right now.... LONG LIVE TROOP BEVERLY HILLS!!! What a fucking thrill!