riding the echo down

he plays such a dumb character in this movie. (ariel needs legs voice) i can't not fuck him

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 3/5

the plot: remember the cop characters from "it seemed like a good idea at the time"? no? that's ok, it doesn't matter, there's no continuity here other than some reheated gags. john candy's dumb pizza-loving cop kopek and his superior officer, lawrence dane's sergeant broom, end up responsible for investigating a sexy woman's kidnapping. except there's a second kidnapping note for her, then a third. she's supposed to be making an opera debut even though she can't sing and would rather do burlesque at her boyfriend's club, but her rich guardian (played by peter cook phoning it in) is having her kidnapped for an insurance scam and she tries to kidnap herself so she doesn't have to debut. so who's responsible for the third and real kidnapping? broom and kopek do not find out. not on purpose, anyway.

like its predecessor, this is not a good movie. that said, there's a charm to it that the first movie doesn't have at all and it's mainly due to dane and candy. richard monette as a drag queen trying to help strippers with their choreography is an absolute scene-stealer and an instant highlight of the movie. i expect he and dane already knew each other since monette was part of the stratford shakespeare festival in 1965, around the same time dane was getting his start there as larry zahab, before monette went on to become its artistic director in 1994. wish i knew what their interactions were like.... this one is also complicated since it's got some period-typical anti-asian racism and other racisms as well, technically? except they're all typical examples of jokesters trying to have it both ways since every time the point seems to be that the white people are dumb/incompetent compared to the non-whites. arguably more tolerable than something like "sixteen candles" which full disclosure i never finished because of that one character. i don't know what dane would have thought, especially with his experience of being pigeonholed into roles as ethnic stereotypes when he was first starting out versus being treated as white here. the joke where dane's character thinks he needs a spanish translator for someone speaking italian is pretty funny to me tho.

he is also Very Physical With Other Men in this. sure, some of it seems like it's supposed to be along the lines of "ha ha the homophobe is made to look gay and the idea of being gay is hilarious", but i will take it. i will take his unquestioning acceptance of monette's female impersonation and his nervous attraction to the same. a fascinating follow-up to the arguably best and definitely most controversial scene from the previous movie where broom and kopek are dropping anti-gay slurs like there's no tomorrow.

this is pretty easy to find online since it's now marketed as a john candy movie which, yeah, technically. it was one of the very first movies he did, which is still notable even if he wasn't given many chances to shine. (he had a little more energy in his first movie as kopek, versus the writers now seeming more interested in emphasizing his weight and candy seems a little checked out as a result.) the recent john candy documentary included a couple clips from these two movies but didn't discuss either at all, which seemed a little strange to me. (the documentary also completely omitted any mention of the clown murders, which is a shame because it's one of the first roles where he was given something a little meatier.) the documentary didn't really get into his beginnings as a film actor even though it was focused a lot on his feelings as an actor, so i was a little disappointed in that but otherwise it's a fine feature and you should consider watching it. should you consider watching find the lady? i mean, i guess? for dane, sure. he's in it enough that a dane cut isn't warranted, and it's not unfunny imo. mickey rooney as one of the criminals gives a mildly amusing performance in the dane-less scenes. watching it under some kind of influence might get you the best results tbh.

highlight: there was a bit where he was combing his hair while looking in the rearview mirror. very sexy of him

( acab but also. yknow )

the "is this worth watching for lawrence dane" rating: 0/5

he doesn't show up until an hour into the movie (-1); he only has the one scene (-1); the movie's script is weak and the direction is a hot mess (-2); it has charlie sheen (-100000).

the plot: a potentially interesting biopic about the brothers responsible for "behind the green door" and key players in the onset of the brief era known as porno chic. the movie kind of gets into the legality & ethics of it all but cares more about the interpersonal drama between the brothers and doesn't do justice to either topic. maybe if you go into this with rock-bottom expectations you'll find it enjoyable despite charlie sheen?

despite having an almost two-hour runtime it feels like the movie was trying to cram in too much and didn't have a clear vision beyond "check out these two assholes". like, why even bother to incorporate dane's turn as a mafioso if they're not coming back to the mafia poaching the movie due to lax intellectual property/copyright protections for erotica? what was the point? don't get me wrong, great look for him, fun performance, but why was it necessary? there's a lot of scenes that seem like they're supposed to be connected to something else but ultimately aren't. disappointing.

( scene starts with him holding up a nudie mag so enjoy but also beware )

this time i swear next review will be the littlest hobo episode. he was very cute and charming and one of the main characters to boot. a great palate cleanser after the trainwreck of this movie.

the "is this worth watching for lawrence dane" rating: 0/5

he was listed right after hal holbrook on imdb, and holbrook's is the last "featured" name on the poster, so i thought he might still have a handful of scenes. he had One scene and it was less than three minutes long not even 20 minutes into the movie. i watched the whole thing because i was so sure he was gonna come back given the film's apparent emphasis on the main character's political wheeling and dealing. nope. maybe his character was more prominent in the book?

the plot: i actually watched this while it was on the criterion channel and i still don't understand why it was on there. it was basically just a hallmark movie with slightly better production values and acting. nothing conceptually original or aesthetically inspired to redeem it like scanners. boringly broad social stereotypes (the uptight yuppie falls in love with the hippie radical! he has man pain because she dies following her dreams and he compromises his own dreams so he's seeing or hallucinating her ghost out of white guilt! or maybe she didn't actually die, dun dun dun, waking the dead more like wake me up i'm dead asleep) and the pacing is strange. there's moments with reasonably striking cinematography but they're few and far in-between; i can see how this would've been a better movie in the right hands, but as it is i really don't think this was worth watching all the way through.

the best part was dane sharing the screen with holbrook again. like a rituals au where mitzi survived and he went into politics with harry, lol. even the dynamic between them was similar and dane's character said "fag" just like mitzi in rituals. full circle! here's the scene so you can see for yourself, and the obligatory screenshots are below.

( at least they gave him a suit that isn't comically oversized like the one they made him wear in his tropical heat episode )

it's been way too long since i felt like i had the time and brainpower to sit down and do one of these. feels great to do it again even if this one is on the short side. think next time i'm gonna review his episode of the littlest hobo because it was unexpectedly VERY erotic. he gets chained up!! look forward to it :3

huge huge HUGE thanks to tempural for helping me troubleshoot the video embed coding in this!


(happy pride demon month, here's a new round of homosexuality from yours truly. i even made a new icon for the occasion <3)

the other day i had the bright idea of searching the wayback machine for "lawrence dane" - i've searched the internet archive's website on a regular basis but never thought to do a text search in the wayback machine itself, and was curious whether i might be able to find anyone else talking about him on old sites. (when i explained this to my partner they laughed and were like "no, i think you're the only one who's ever cared this much" lol.)

the first result for my search was lawrencedane.com which would have been quite the coincidence if it wasn't him - going through the site captures it became clear the domain had been taken over by spam squatters before going down entirely, so i went back to the beginning. the domain was registered in 2002, and an early crawl revealed that it had indeed likely been his personal website. but it was mainly based on flash, so i couldn't view it on a regular browser - my only confirmation was a string of text at the bottom of the broken content that read "photo gallery / credits / biography / contacts / what's new".

after some trial and error that night i got the archived captures to be functional! i tried the ruffle extension and it worked long enough to load the home page and verify it as dane's site, but refreshing the page somehow broke the extension so i had to use a portable flash-friendly version of firefox kindly shared via reddit here. that worked much more reliably and i was able to take screenshots of a 2003 crawl - and record the flash animations, lol.

(you can turn off the loop if enabled with a right click, or view a still image here. the video appears a little small here because i had to fight with dreamwidth to get the embed working, so the screenshots represent the dimensions of the site more accurately. you can also open the video in a new tab to view it at the correct scale.)

( further documentation and discussion behind the cut )

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 4/5

he's not the main antagonist - that would be lloyd bochner's character - but his scenes take up a fair amount of the runtime and he opens and closes the episode as well. it's a nice performance too, appropriately intense but not hammy. also, this episode has one of the most bonkers death scenes i've seen him do and that gives it a full extra point on the worth-it-for-dane scale. like i knew he was gonna die but the way it happens.... i've never seen anything like it elsewhere in such a serious context lmao. maybe i'm just sheltered?? a clip of the scene is included at the end of this post so you can judge for yourself. (uploading the whole episode privately to youtube for autocaptions was a bust because of copyright bullshit, so i paid for captions, but it seems as though very short clips are fine so there's that at least. a dane cut wasn't necessary imo since he's in it enough and the rest is interesting enough especially when lloyd bochner is there.)

the plot: two men are working together as diamond thieves at the behest of someone who knows where and when diamonds will be in transit and thus easy to steal - an inside man. dane plays one of the thieves and lloyd bochner plays the inside man. (they were together again in 'it seemed like a good idea at the time' a couple years after this, though they don't interact as much in that.) dane has something of a homoerotic relationship with his robbery partner, played by a fellow named clyde ventura* - we're given to understand that they met in prison and promised each other that they'd buy a ranch together when they had the money, among other intimate little details, and they seem to be peers but dane cares more about the welfare of his partner than one might expect for the average heist team. (dane could have been fun in an episode of leverage but i digress.)

on the one hand, this show was written in partnership with j. edgar hoover and his top fbi agents, which, yuck. but on the other, the screenwriters give the "bad guys" a surprising amount of depth in this context and it seems pretty clear to me that we're even meant to find the situation somewhat tragic. at least, dane gives us a performance good enough to help us believe he genuinely cares about his partner and the pathos of that carries the episode. the narrative ends pretty abruptly and i wished they'd had the space to dwell a bit on how bochner's character is treated versus the working-class thieves, but at the same time if this was produced under hoover's watch they probably weren't allowed to go that far.

while i was starting to draft this post i was reminded of his performance in his first episode of the virginian (aired 1968) and how he feels less natural there compared to this fbi episode. at first i was thinking oh he must've started hitting his stride in 1969 but no, he was very good in yerma and in his episode of jericho (both aired 1967) among other roles. really makes me think that it comes down to the director, something i think i’ve touched on before - with the right director he can be phenomenal, but that isn’t consistent enough to make someone a star. a shame, because he really does do a decent job with the material he's given in this episode.

since this was a procedural show it’s difficult to find newspaper reviews for individual episodes, but there’s a fansite for the show - that site’s rating for this episode is a B and i think i agree. if you enjoy the style of police procedural that's heavier on investigation than on action, it's a solid episode. if you don't enjoy police procedurals at all, well, understandable. but perhaps you can at least enjoy how cute dane is in this one.

i talked a lot about lawrence dane in 2022 without actually taking the time to explain why him of all actors. granted, the posts in my rituals tag get into most of it, but the snowflake challenge made me realize it'd be a good idea to have it all in one place instead of spread out across reviews&c. that way i have a nice little introduction to link at the top of the review masterpost!



lawrence joseph zahab was born april 3, 1937 to two lebanese immigrants in a town in quebec, canada, and raised in ottawa. he grew up very involved in his community - playing high school football, emceeing local events, trying out impersonations at talent shows, and eventually acting in community theater. he was the youngest of six children and his father died suddenly when he was just finishing high school. since he wasn't the oldest son and therefore didn't face the same expectations to care for his mother and sister, he had enough freedom to travel and pursue his interest in acting. he started out credited as larry or lawrence zahab but switched to using lawrence dane as a stage name during the mid-to-late 1960s, when he began focusing on television and film productions outside of canada. in his private life he seems to have always gone by larry. he had several friends, most notably canadian icon gordon pinsent, but stayed a bachelor most of his life; he appears to have been largely single or only had short-lived relationships until 1995, when he wedded a woman named mary laurel macintosh in las vegas. they stayed together until his death of pancreatic cancer on march 21, 2022 and they don't seem to have had any children, but by all accounts he was a lovely uncle to his extended family of nieces and nephews.

his most well-known roles are as braedon keller in scanners (1981) and as lt. preston in bride of chucky (1998). he was a not-infrequent guest on american television in the '60s and '70s, and he was in a handful of early john candy films. if you're a canadian over the age of 30 or 40, you've likely encountered him on television at some point, whether in a drama, sitcom, or advertisement.

( what's so interesting about this guy anyway? )

so that's lawrence dane! as always i'm happy to answer any questions you might have, or to just fawn over him together lol. thanks for reading ^^

the "is it worth watching this for lawrence dane" rating: 0.5/5

tbh this could easily be a zero but he does manage to salvage his role, which still isn't saying much, and in a way i feel like this film is worth watching once if only so you can re-evaluate your criteria for "worst fucking movie you've ever seen". my worst is still dreamcatcher because that one makes me so angry, but this one is basically a tie minus the rage reaction. this movie mostly just confuses me?

the plot: a reviewer from the globe and mail saved a synopsis of the plot for his last paragraph because "I don't know how to talk about it; a simple summary is going to sound like a personal attack on the screenwriter" and, yeah, fair. but here goes my attempt: a law professor (donald sutherland) learns about a development project nearby where native seals are being killed to clear the land for a future military base, and decides to embark on a legal crusade that takes him up against the american air force but mostly against the corporation contracted for the development. and somehow it's a comedy? a sex comedy at that. A COMEDY THAT SHOWS REAL LIVE FOOTAGE OF SEALS BEING BRUTALLY SLAUGHTERED WITHIN THE FIRST 20 MINUTES OF THE FILM.

oh man, you guys. jeez. this movie. it might have been a passable drama, especially with a big name like sutherland - when i saw he was the lead i was like "oh, ok, he was great in invasion of the body snatchers" and yet. he has zero charisma in this, zero chemistry with his co-star suzanne somers, and he mangles the delivery of most of the few jokes there are that i barely laughed at even when i was watching this the first time completely drunk. somers also was not funny - her character is supposed to be a lawyer but seems to be more interested in trying to bone than in doing her job, and it's just uncomfortable rather than endearing in any way. her mugging doesn't play well opposite sutherland's stiff acting; perhaps if the movie were a proper farce like "find the lady" her acting would have felt better suited. if i can't even laugh at a comedy when i'm wasted that's a bad sign. probably the fact that it opened with REAL ANIMAL SLAUGHTER was a mood killer, maybe? just maybe. hard to say. at least it never shows the footage again.

what's extra frustrating about this movie is that dane does a fine job with his role as the head/public face of the corporation in charge of the development. fortunately he doesn't show up until about 30 minutes in so he is not involved with the seal-clubbing footage. he's also very cute in this (i know i know i say this every time) and his character is super touchy-feely for some reason?? like i want to know if he was coached to do that or if he just decided this guy was gonna take every chance he could to touch his business partner, played by dabney coleman. (now there's an idea for a fanfic lmao.) if this had all simply...been in a different, less-terrible film.......

this movie was widely regarded as bad by critics at the time and is officially a box office bomb, but it was a tax shelter project so i guess the people in charge just didn't give a shit since they got to walk away with that bonus. this washington post review describes how lousy this is pretty well, setting aside the reviewer's weird sexism towards somers (though to be fair the script itself is really fucking weird towards her character), and closes with the only redeeming feature of this movie: "Overcompensating [for my intense dislike of Sutherland in this role], I developed a perverse affection for Lawrence Dane and Dabney Coleman as the corporate baddies. The quality of the roles aside, their teamwork certainly puts the stars to shame." they're honestly the best actors in this trainwreck, though there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance by a very young eugene levy. gary reineke (d.j. in rituals and he's also in the clown murders) has a couple scenes in this as a mildly amusing pompous air force officer, but the first time i watched this i was more tickled to see him in the same room as dane yet again - if only at the very end of the movie.

another review, this one from the new york times, also praises dane lol. that's generally the pattern with the contemporary reviews i've found - either they don't mention him because they're too busy being appalled by everything else, or if they do mention him they're complimenting him like he's a drink of water in the middle of a desert. which is totally what it felt like every time i watched this. the garden-variety 1970s-style casual racism towards native americans doesn't do the film any favors either, but there's not too much of it, i guess....

yeah, i watched this more than once. why? i wanted to watch it sober to see if i was just too drunk to follow it or something and no, it was that bad. and then another time because i needed an objective third party to confirm that i'm not crazy and this movie is just incredibly fucking bad. but! i put together a video that only has dane's scenes so i no longer have to suffer through the rest of it. you can view it here.

and i guess that's enough about how bad this movie is, lol, let's look at how cute dane is instead.