This has nice music and a possibly interesting plot but is brought down by bad acting and is dull. Thelma is a TV addict 9 year old who lives in Florida. Her widowed useless mother (Barbara Bosson of ’Murder One’) needs ‘Uncle David’ to tell her what to do while Thelma’s older brother Richard is banging the maid. Thelma blackmails Richard over this and hangs out with no parental supervision being a bad seed.
Elizabeth’s family comes to Florida for a holiday and Elizabeth and Thelma become ‘friends’. Then Robert Burger (John Hurt) and his younger moll Dorothea (Karen Young) show up and can’t find their holiday home. They are told to ask Thelma and Elizabeth for directions.
It’s a morass of bad 80s fashions and bad child acting as Robert ties to be nice and Dorothea finds the girls annoying. The oceanside town looks pretty and peaceful but it won’t be for long. Thelma and Elizabeth spy on Robert and Dorothea for the lack of anything better to do.
Robert gives Thelma a clunky pink camera for her birthday and patronises her. Thelma uses it to take photos of Robert and Dorothea and the unwitting couple find themselves the victims of a $100 blackmail plot. Robert’s an idiot and Dorothea starts screeching.
Thelma and Elizabeth break into the couple’s house and learn that they have a big dark secret due to the fact Dorothea has inexplicably kept a copy of a newspaper with them on the cover. Robert fails to notice that Thelma is a sly piece of work with an unsubtle manipulative dark side. Elizabeth does notice Thelma’s fake smile and decides to defriend the selfish spiteful nasty Thelma.
Thelma however decides to defriend Elizabeth in a much more drastic fashion. Thelma stirs the pot and gets away with it as she is the person people least expect to do such awful things. Things get dark, the Sherriff (Guy Boyd) gets involved and people act like idiots. This is okay with a nice twist ending.
Based on the novel ‘The Naughty Girls’ by Arthur Wise, this aired on BBC1 on Dec 21 1988 and has never been shown or mentioned by them again.
Best Lines:
“Something terrible is going to happen to you someday.”
“Go buy yourself a coke.”
“Two cokes.”
“Four cokes BITCH, I hope your teeth ROT.”
“Take your butt on out of here, fresh air’s free.”
“Oysters don’t swim.”
“Mine do.”
“Far enough kid.”
“My name is Elizabeth.”
“Good god she hasn’t even made the bed.”
“Friends shouldn’t scare other friends.”
“Other friends shouldn’t make them.”
“He better show up or he gets his head blowed off.”
“We’re friends.”
“No we’re not, you said so."
“Nine year old kids aren’t into blackmail.”
“We’d all be a lot better off without you.”
~
April Fool’s Day (1986)
Muffy St John (Deborah Foreman) has her friends - Nikki, Arch (played by Biff from ’Back To The Future’!), Skip (Griffin O’Neal), Chaz (Clayton Rohner), Rob and Kit (Amy Steel) - over to her island home for spring break. This has nice music but is dull and full of bad acting. Three virtually identical blondes and five bad hairdo sporting slackers descend on Muffy’s house. All sport bad 80’s clothes and are morons. This could have been better but the remake was even worse.
The gang play idiot pranks leading to an accident on the ferry. Muffy and her frizzy hair lurks and acts weird. There are strange items in the guest bedrooms and the guests are vanishing. Plus there is something in the well.
This has no logic or sense and is full of morons blinded by hair products who are all a bunch of bitches.
Best Lines:
“Where’s Skip?”
“That depends what he’s on.”
“Muffy hasn’t been in an institution for three years, she’s been at Vassar.”
“It’s not Muffy it’s her twin sister Buffy. She’s got a twin sister.”
“Sometimes with the tides it can take somebody all night to get here from the mainland and even then sometimes they don’t make it.”