Yeah, okay fine, I still haven’t seen Lawrence of Arabia. I’m sorry. I have this problem; one could even call it an addiction. I keep accidentally watchingDesperate Lives, a 1982 made-for-TV movie starring Helen Hunt. Well, at least the first time it was an accident. I was eight years old and it was an after-school special that burned fear into my brain.
I can honestly say—more than any other factor—this 53-minute movie is the reason I never tried hard drugs. It may also be the reason I avoided Mad About You. (No, wait that was because every utterance on that show was spoken as a whine.) For the readers’ perspective: if NBC’s “The More You Know” campaign is a cigarette, then a “very special” Family Ties episode would be a bong hit, and that makes Desperate Lives a fistful of heroine, freebased, whilst sitting next to a lady of the night with a nasty cough. The tagline is “who’s killing young kids with drugs and crime”. Yes, indeed who?
The plot follows Scott Cameron (Doug McKeon) and his sister, Sandy Cameron, (Helen Hunt) who attend a suburban high school with a greater supply and variety of drugs than the DEA evidence lock-up. They both fall in with the wrong, drugged up crowd. Sandy dates a boy name Steve (the guy from Hardbodies!). Steve (fine, his name is Grant Cramer) uses bulletproof persuasion like “Sandy, don’t be a bummer,” to convince Helen Hunt to celebrate their two-week anniversary by snorting PCP he made in the chemistry lab.
Then, Helen Hunt jumps out a second story window. And lives.
The rest of the cast dies.
Or at least a good chunk of them do. The new guidance counselor Eileen Phillips (Diana Scarwid) delivers some of the best lines in the film in her android Georgian monotone. Imagine this spoken as nearly one word: “dammit, I am not your parents. I was here just eight years ago—[eyeballs the camera] only then it was just straight cigarettes. I do know what’s going on, I know about grass, marijuana J’s, pot. “ Apparently, Ms. Phillips knows more than me, because I thought these were all the same thing. In all fairness, these kids do seem to have an answer for everything: “C’mon Ms. Phillips, adults do liquor, even toke, everybody does it”. It’s hard to debate that, most adults I know do liquor. In the end, Ms. Phillips turns things around at Opium Den High at the big pep rally (where else?). The students are now safe to grow up and whine at Paul Reiser. If you listen—very closely—you can hear him whining back.
