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Broken Angel (1988 TV Movie)
Cheesy TV movie from the 80s
14 August 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Broken Angel is one of those cheap 80s TV movies that are so awesomely lame that you just have to watch the whole thing. The plot is the daughter of William Shatner's character, played by Erika Eleniak, goes missing at the end of a school dance after a gang-related shooting that kills her friend. Shatner and his wife, Susan Blakely, spend the rest of the movie in search of her. They are at first "assisted" by a cop, played by Brock Peters, who is (as is usual for movies like this) actually pretty useless. The true help comes from a woman working for the L.A. Gang Project, a nonprofit to get kids out of gangs, who tells the couple that their daughter is actually a member of a gang herself!

There are also a couple side plots too, most notably Shatner's preteen son, who is gay or at least curious, and enjoys trying on his mother's diamond earrings. Of course this side plot doesn't really go anywhere and is not dealt with in any seriousness and could have and probably should have been left out.

Another thing this movie has is many lame and unintentionally funny scenes. One of the more comical scenes involves the Chinese gang and the white gang (as it is frequently called in the movie) engaging in a battle of sorts in a children's playground, yielding not guns, not knives, not even chains, but small planks of wood and sticks. Such harsh realism! Another great scene is where Shatner manages to fight off a group of probably 20 members of the Chinese gang (this time armed with small pocket knives) with nothing but a small bag, and then escapes and actually outruns 5 of them.

Then, as the search for their daughter continues but hope and leads begin to dwindle, the movie ends. Pretty suddenly, too, in a very anti-climactic way. I won't tell the "surprise," but you don't have to be a genius to figure out that it is going to be predictably happy.

In conclusion, both mildly interesting and unintentionally funny, Broken Angel is one really great, super cheesy 80s TV movie that everyone should definitely see!
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So bad. So, so bad.
22 January 2008
This movie was bad. Just bad. It wasn't scary or interesting or even unintentionally funny in the slightest. The acting was so wooden and unbelievable it was like a high school production. The lines were some of the corniest I have ever heard this side of "Stay Alive". The plot made absolutely no sense. I really didn't care who Dakota or the serial killer were or where the Aubrey had gone. This is Screen writing 101: You need to care about the characters! I guess the writer of this movie missed that class.

So much of it was just disgusting, too. Some scenes were so graphic I actually had to turn my head away. For example, where Dakota sews on a bloody and gangrenous finger with a needle and thread, or where the "killer" or whatever puts Aubrey's hands between dry ice and when he pulls them apart her rotting hand is pulled in half. Other repulsive scenes were the ones where Lindsay Lohan was pole dancing at a strip club. It's like the writer couldn't decide which avenue he wanted to take the movie down, gory violent thriller, or a drama/suspense movie, and in the end compromised with a boring, lifeless story with lots of blood and gore.

And what was with all the blue items everywhere? Did the director think he was being "artsy"? The blue computer, the blue curtains, the blue roses, even the knife the killer used was blue! It was not like "The Sixth Sense" with the color red, where it was subtle and if you weren't looking for it you wouldn't notice. Every item was blue, and the whole film looked tinted blue like the director was using a blue filter. That was one of the only things consistent throughout this movie. It was as if the director needed to make certain you couldn't forget which movie you were watching, just in case you nod off for a few minutes or something.

Another irritating thing were the police officers. Honestly, I don't know if the writer/director of this film figured that no one would have the slightest idea of how real cops work, or if they just didn't want to put in the research to find out for themselves, but every scene with the cops was so unbelievable, and the actors portrayed them too like they'd never seen one before. Maybe it was the lines that were poorly written, but they had no emotion! Turn on Law & Order or CSI once and a while and see how cops really talk and what terms they really use. And then they just suddenly inexplicably disappeared for the rest of the movie, like so many other plot holes. Did they solve the case? Did they lose interest? Or was the writer just too lazy or disinterested to fix that particular plot hole? There are so many nonsensical parts to this movie it's just embarrassing.

Towards the end of the movie the "plot" starts unraveling and the ending itself makes absolutely no sense, and you really don't care to make sense of it, you just want it over! I guess there's an alternate ending that might shed some more light on this, but I haven't seen it and all I have to go off of was the movie I saw in theaters. I wasn't able to figure out if Dakota was just made up or if she was real, and by the end all I cared about was leaving the theater.
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