It's a "Women on a Rampage" weekend! (“Sweet Evil” and “The Perfect Marriage”)

This weekend, you get two posts in one from the Late Nite Landfill. The reasons are simple:

• This has been a crazier week than usual for yours truly, The Phantom. Time is in short supply for me.
• The themes of this weekend’s movies both involve women behaving badly, making it easy to pair them together.

So let’s start with Saturday night’s movie, “Sweet Evil,” a 1996 release also known as “Final Vendetta.” As one TV listing described it, this direct-to-video jaunt features “a psychotic surrogate mother” causing trouble for the couple she’s moved in with.

Since this one comes from the “relative or houseguest secretly plans to rip apart the family and do us harm” genre which I covered in depth before, it affords me the opportunity of simply providing the link to my post on “The Stranger Game” which you can read by clicking here.

Since I’m on a time-crunch, I’ll only mention a few cast members. And just for this week I’m eschewing the usual links to video clips for each (perhaps when the smoke clears and I have more time I’ll add those links at a later date):

• You know Scott Cohen from a bunch of recurring TV roles including Max Medina on “Gilmore Girls,” and his detective characters Chris Ravell on “Law & Order: Trial by Jury” and Harry Denby on “NYPD Blue.”
• The late Peter Boyle – do you really need me to tell you? Tip-of-the-iceberg highlights include the monster in “Young Frankenstein,” patriarch Frank Barone in “Everybody Loves Raymond” and as the brutal Wizard in “Taxi Driver.” Oh, and John Lennon was his best man at his wedding.
• Oh yeah, there’s a lead actress in this – Bridgette Wilson. She was Adam Sandler’s love interest in “Billy Madison,” a horror victim scream queen in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and the remake of “House on Haunted Hill,” and she’s the real-life wife of 7-time Wimbledon champ Pete Sampras.

View the trailer to “Sweet Evil” here:

visit videodetective.com for more info

Or watch the entire movie on Saturday, August 9, 2008 at 11:35 PM... if you dare!

NOW... onto Sunday night’s movie, “The Perfect Marriage.”

In this one, an adulterous woman schemes with her lover to murder her husband and collect a huge inheritance.

This plot is older than Hollywood, has been done to death, and quite frankly no one’s really improved upon the classics like “Double Indemnity” or “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” But that doesn’t stop these movies from getting made by the dumpster-ful.

Again, I’ll single just a few folks out:

• The femme fatale is played by Jamie Luner, who like Scott Cohen from the previous night’s movie has tons of recurring TV roles including one of the clan in “Just the 10 of Us,” a pair of seductress sirens in the prime-time soaps “Savannah” and “Melrose Place,” and as the title investigator in the 4th season of “Profiler.”
• William R. Moses played major recurring roles in two series of made-for-TV mystery movies, the “Jane Doe” series and the 1990’s “Perry Mason” series.

The rest of the cast features the usual quotient of TV actors, mostly from Canada, who have had guest-roles on TV series and in TV movies.

The trailer I found for this one is not of the embeddable kind, so you'll have to click here to view it.

Or watch the entire movie on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 11:35 PM... if you dare!