This week…
BLIND OBSESSION (2001)
Brad Johnson, Megan Gallagher, Roxana Zal

I CAN'T IDENTIFY more than five elements on the periodic table - oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, espresso – that’s my limit.

Yet I can casually flick past a made-for TV movie on a Sunday afternoon and spot a long-forgotten ingénue of the late-70s/early-80s catalog of shows and made-for-TV films. Then I can list off her contributions to the genre, then her characters’ names, then her clothing for each scene, then, well, it just gets freakish and creepy.

You could catch les ingénues in a lot of places: the ABC Afterschool Specials, the NBC Monday Night Movies, the CBS Sunday Night Movies, the occasional Battle of the Network Stars, and countless Very Special Episodes of various sitcoms and family dramas. They were the Mischa Bartons of their time, unless that makes Mischa Barton sound unduly significant.

To name a few, there’s Tracey Gold, Danielle Brisebois, Melissa Sue Anderson, Melissa Gilbert, Denise Miller, Kristy McNicol, Kim Richards, and of course, Roxana Zal.

Roxana who?

Roxana Zal had the misfortune of starring in two of the most depressing made-for-TV films of all time, let alone the 80s. She made her debut in 1983, in Testament, a compelling but unbearably sad look at the aftermath of a nuclear war.

The next year, as if yearning to further plumb the depths of despair, she found an even more depressing topic in the groundbreaking but unbearably sad made-for-TV film Something About Amelia. It tackled the difficult subject of sexual molestation by one’s father. Jeepers, hey? Ted Danson, sensing an opportunity to ruin an otherwise burgeoning career, inexplicably took the role when he already had Cheers in his back pocket. Somehow, his career emerged unscathed.

But for Roxana Zal, all her future held was a string of bit parts in TV shows and cable movies. Surely there were many failed pilots as well, an endless series of screen tests where the director liked her a lot, but then remembered she was in that icky incest film and took a pass. This may explain why Shannen Doherty got so much work in the 80s and 90s, but I can’t prove this.

In Blind Obsession, Roxana plays Bedelia, the loopy younger sister to Rebecca (Megan Gallagher) a lonely woman saddled with guardianship of her crazy sis while trying to ward off spinsterhood through various creepy machinations. Got that?

There’s a long and tedious back story here, the kind that would be compelling if crafted by a competent writer. Here, it just drags out endlessly. Luckily I gave up on it to focus on the fantastically bad acting that was busting out all over, like chlamydia in a Columbian brothel.

Zal’s Bedelia is off-the-charts crazy, with saucer-like eyes and a sing-songy speech cadence. She appears to have borrowed from Bette Davis, Jack Nicholson, and Bronson Pinchot, when he played Balki on Perfect Strangers. But still, she’s kinda sexy, raising the question, could a woman be hot enough to make her twisted, tortured psyche irrelevant?

In other words, would you %$^# Angelina Jolie?

Add that question to your next game of Scruples, then let me know how it turns out.

Bedelia won’t let her sister have a normal life, because it might mean she would end up warehoused in a loony bin. So she manipulates her with guilt trips and mock suicide attempts, and by murdering her sister’s boyfriends. You know, just the stuff that sisters do to each other, all the time.

Gallagher’s Rebecca is no prize either. Seemingly innocent and noble, she’s a rehab counselor who helps newly-blind people adapt to their new reality. She falls for a client (Brad Johnson), and then stalks him. Hello, ethics? And besides, can you truly stalk a blind guy? I mean, you can stand right beside him and he would have no idea you were there. What kind of challenge is that? It’s like arm-wrestling an infant, sort of. Just saying.

So we have a wacko and a stalker sharing the same house. Like liberals and conservatives, you know you can’t put them in the same space without some fireworks. Sure enough, Bedelia figures out her sister is stalking the blind guy, the better to make him…love..her... (insert eerie stalker music), and she has to put a stop to this nonsense, pronto.

She journeys to the blind guy’s house, toting a large handgun and a Ziploc bag o’ bullets. I’m not kidding about the Ziploc bag, but mind you, if I was a crazed killer, I’d want my bullets to be at their peak of freshness too.

See? The green seal means the freshness is locked in!

Bedelia tries and fails to eliminate the object of her sister’s affections. I think the seal on the bag had been compromised, and you can’t kill someone with stale bullets, you know.

Consumed with rage and frustration, she heads home and knocks out her sister with a vase. Hey, you've gotta improvise when your bullets have gone moagy, right? She binds her to a chair with duct tape, a psycho’s best friend since 1911. This is how life will be from now on, says Bedelia - two sisters housebound, with one taped to a chair. Yahtzee, sis? Here, I’ll roll the dice for you, since your hands are bound with duct tape…

The blind guy infers something has gone amiss, what with the uninvited presence of a shrill moonbat in his home, and the sudden disappearance of his rehab counselor. Could the two events be related?

Hey, why don’t I get in a cab, drive to their home, and walk blindly into the middle of this mess, mmkay?

His plan proceeds perfectly, right up to walking blindly into the mess. From there, crazy Bedelia tries to kill him. Evidently, she found a properly sealed bag of bullets in the lettuce crisper.

Improbably, Blind Guy bobs and weaves and shoulder-rolls as Bedelia empties a fresh clip into every piece of furniture in the house, missing him completely. Hey wacko, a few visits to the firing range couldn’t have hurt, you know? Just saying.

The producers then pull out one of the worst contrivances ever, revealing that Blind Guy has a temporary condition known as hysterical blindness. As he flees, Blind Guy starts to see light, and fuzzy objects. Minutes later he acquires 20/20 vision. Amazing, and ever so helpful to the plot, groan.

Bedelia’s aim improves, as she takes down a cop who arrives on the scene, then plugs her sister, who somehow chewed through the duct tape, perhaps with her newfound beaver teeth.

We reach the inevitable stand-off, where the no longer blind guy and the ailing Rebecca must convince the crazy sister to Put Down That Gun, because It Doesn’t Have To End This Way, right? I mean, you could just put it down, and then Nobody Gets Hurt.

Fortunately Bedelia stays crazy to the end, turning the gun on the no longer Blind Guy but getting plugged by the police officer we had assumed to be dead. Then Rebecca dies, and the town is suddenly short two nutjobs. But I’m sure they’ll be replaced, allowing us to enjoy Blind Obsession II: Girls Gone Wild, starring Soleil Moon Frye and Nancy McKeon.