I
found a website that lists all of the movies shown on LIFETIME. I
imagine most of these are Movies of the Week made specifically for
LIFETIME. You’ll notice several recurring themes. These are actual
titles; I’m not making any of them up. I gotta watch LIFETIME MORE.Life Without Dick
A Woman Hunted
Bastard Out of Carolina
Co-ed Call Girl
Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life
Dead at 17
Death of a Cheerleader (which just might be the remake of Dead at 17)
Honeymoon With Mom
Human Trafficking
I Do (but I Don’t)
I Me Wed
I’m With Lucy
Little Girls in Pretty Boxes
Miracle on the 17th Green
My Stepson, My Lover
Nora Roberts Old
Robin Cook’s Terminal
Secret Lives of Second Wives
Single White Female 2: The Psycho (as opposed to the well adjusted girl in Single White Female 1)
The Trophy Wife’s Secret
To Be Fat Like Me
Too Young to Be a Dad
7 Things to Do Before 30
Ambulance Girl (this might be a superhero movie, not sure)
Confessions of a Go-Go Girl
Hostile Makeover
Jack & Jill vs. The World
Love ‘Em, Love “Em Not Weekend
Mafia Doctor
Mom, Dad, and Her
More Sex & the Single Mom
Mother, May I Sleep With Danger
Our Son, the Matchmaker
Sex & Mrs. X
The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer
The Wives he Forgot
Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
What if God Were the Sun?
Why I Wore Lipstick to my Mastechtomy
I thought the last one was a joke. I started typing the title in the search and the whole thing popped up. Yipes.
ReplyDeleteYou left off the classic Write & Wrong starring a certain Cheers alum... And the Natalee Holloway Story, which Suspect Joran van der Sloot himself watched the film one evening in 2010, according to his friend John Ludwick, and said that some parts were true while others were not...
ReplyDeleteWonder which parts Lifetime got wrong?
These sound like half the query letters I ever submitted (only half, mind you)... I mean, after reading these, who could have resisted greenlighting SHE-MALE PRESIDENT, TERROR AT THE COSMETICS COUNTER, and THE NIGHT MY TEACHER TAUGHT ME...
ReplyDeleteAll, of course, BASED ON A TRUE STORY else they wouldn't even be considered for Lifetime.
ReplyDeleteWasn't "Life Without Dick" remade as Transamerica?
ReplyDelete(Sorry.)
From the title "Ambulance Girl" does sound a bit super hero like but it is about a woman who faces a crisis when having spent years organising her recovering alcoholic husband has to deal with him being able to organize himself. It's actually not bad with a decent cast in Kathy Bates, Robin Thomas and Gordon Pinsent.
ReplyDeleteAndy...AMBULANCE GIRL is the real-life story of authors Jane and Michael Stern, who write about food and pop culture (Ken...you ought to check out their book SIXTIES PEOPLE).
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of an early-1980s New York Magazine competition (the weekly feature run by Mary Ann Madden for many years, now sadly defunct) - the idea was to come up with TV-movie titles at least as awful as the actual TV-movie title of the 1970s, Ski Lift to Death. Together with she-who-later-introduced-me-to-my-wife, we created more than a dozen entries and submitted them in our names and those of friends, and actually got four or five of them published as Honorable Mentions, including All the Kids a Guy Could Want and Leap Year Luau. (The deserving winner: Give Me Back My Face.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, Queen Sized, with my longtime crush Annie Potts and the versatile Lily Holleman in supporting roles. Pretty good for a Lifetime movie, actually. Didn't go where I thought it was gonna go.
ReplyDeleteIn just 2 years in the mid-90s, Tori Spelling starred in 5 of them -
ReplyDeleteMother, May I Sleep with Danger?
Co-ed Call Girl
Deadly Pursuits
Awake to Danger
A Friend to Die For
This is hilarious :) though I will admit to having watched (and really liked) Little Girls in Pretty Boxes which was based on an investigative journalism book looking at eating disorders among and abuse of elite female gymnasts.
ReplyDeleteNot that it matters in the general scheme of things, but LIFE WITHOUT DICK and I'M WITH LUCY both did get modest theatrical releases (I worked for the company that distributed them).
ReplyDeleteI've read the book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, which is a sesrching and well-documented look at the problems with top-level women's gynmanstics in the early 1990s or so, and the many injuries and sad stories that resulted. I think the book was instrumental in the creation of the age eligibility rules that have seen the average age of world-class competitors rise.
ReplyDeletewg
Before Lifetime, when the networks made their versions of these types of movies, they always seemed to have those double titles, like Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. I always wondered why.
ReplyDeleteI once saw this network referred to as Lifetime: Television for Victims. That was years ago. Not much has changed.
ReplyDeleteBut what's I'm With Lucy doing in there? That's actually a cute movie.
Cadavra...I thought THINGS YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT HER was also released theatrically.
ReplyDeleteLifetime is the anxious woman channel. It's all about women's fears and anxieties. They vary from year to year. For a while it was my rebound boyfriend, teen aged daughter, best friend, boss at work is or is dating a serial killer. Then there was the problem child year, or was it two years. It's really kind of funny.
ReplyDeletePfffffffffffffffffftttttttttttt Lifetime.
ReplyDeleteI expect someone has pointed this out already, but BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA is a well known novel by Dorothy Allison - often taught and pretty well regarded.
ReplyDeleteMany of the others sound like adaptations of genre romance novels, which are obviously not addressed to men but which have a great deal of meaning to many women. It's okay to dislike them though - many of us loathe sports and war movies :)
Wasn't Bastard out of Carolina directed by Anjelica Huston? I haven't seen it but I hardt ut was great.
ReplyDeleteNever use autocorrect on your phone ;-) I meant to write "I heard it was great ".
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Tori spelling, one of our holiday time guilty pleasures is A CAROL CHRISTMAS, starring Tori as...wait for it...Carol.
ReplyDeleteSpecial guest star: William Shatner.
Paul: No doubt, plus BASTARD was produced by and originally aired on Showtime. I just mentioned those two because I had first-hand knowledge of their big-screen lifespan.
ReplyDeleteAnd... BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA has a lovely score by the legendary Van Dyke Parks.
ReplyDeleteBastard out of Carolina might have a funny name but it doesn't belong in this list (even though it may have aired on LFM). It is based on a semi-autobiographical novel, originally aired on Showtime not lifetime, about a young girl surviving an abusive childhood in Greenville, SC.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite of the list though is "Mother may I sleep with Danger", I'll admit I've seen it, when it was an actual movie of the week starring Tory Spelling!
Garrison Keillor had a monologue about a guy stuck on his roof waiting for a family member to come out and find him (not wanting to admit to chatty passersby that he'd gotten into a mess). Much of it was given over to a description of a generic uplifting Lifetime movie the guy was sure his wife was watching. It worked.
ReplyDelete