Bad Ronald

I watched this TV movie in January 1979 on television in England one weekday afternoon when I was off school. I was 15 years old and having a miserable time in my life. Bad Ronald captured perfectly my feelings of loneliness, isolation, being trapped and retreating into myself. You can imagine that I identified closely with Ronald's experience and the film made a lasting impression on me as it seems to have done on others. A couple of years ago I did manage to get hold of it on video and saw for the first time in a quarter of a century. Happily I can watch it now with much greater detachment. The director Buzz Kulik is better known, I believe, for Brian's Song but Bad Ronald deserves to be remembered too.

Another one of the made for TV films that appeared on the ABC Movies of the Week. Perhaps by today's standards it does not have the impact that it did when it came out in 74. However for a made for TV movie the story is intriguing and a level of suspense exists which keeps the viewer interested in finding out what will happen next. Most of the 70's made for TV films consisted of original unique stories with good acting and were all presented in a 90-minute format. All in all they including this one still seem head and shoulders above the made for TV movies of the 90's.

I've been wanting to see this movie for a long time and I'm glad I finally did. This is a TV movie from the glory days before TV movies were all aimed at bored housewives, before you had a rampaging Delta Burke or somebody like that crusading against the drunk driver who sold drugs to her son, turned out her daughter, and molested her dog. I'd watch Lifetime and the Hallmark channel religiously if there was a remote chance they'd ever show something like this! Ronald is a creepy but at the same time oddly sympathetic teenager played by Scott Jacoby (yes, THE Scott Jacoby!). After he kills a neighbor girl, his doting mother hides him in secret room, but then she tragically dies and a new family with three teenage daughters moves in. The dad is played by a young Dabney Coleman WITH HAIR. The two older daughters were played by the sexy Eilbacher sisters, but the perverted Ronald falls in love with the youngest daughter (Cindy Fisher), who the camera leers at as much as he does (she keeps running up stairs dressed in a short tennis skirt--is this 70's made-for-TV kiddie porn?). When the girls parents go out of town, Bad Ronald makes his presence known and all hell breaks loose. There are no important social messages here, no familial problems are addressed, Delta Burke does not appear--it's just two hours (minus commercial breaks) of enjoyable trash.

"Bad Ronald" enjoys quite an impressive cult reputation, despite "only" being a low-budgeted and made-for-TV film from the early 70's, so I simply had to check it out to see what all the fuzz is about. I can't deny "Bad Ronald" has something irresistibly special! The atmosphere is thoroughly unsettling and Scott Jacoby portrays a strangely menacing Ronald. There are no special effects or bloody massacres in this film, yet it's an engaging little thriller with a fairly original premise. Ronald is a geeky and slightly peculiar teenager who lives with his dominant and overly protective mother. He's obsessed with his personally created comic book universe, yet his mother insists on becoming a prominent doctor. When Ronald accidentally murders a young girl after she mocked him one too many times, his mother sees no other solution than to construct an extra lair in their house and hide him from the cops. Then when mommy doesn't return from the hospital one day after a routine operation, Ronald remains hidden in the house and new tenants move in. Slowly going insane from loneliness and paranoia, Ronald mistakes the new tenants' daughter for his comic book heroine. The script is a little too far-fetched to be plausible and it definitely contains too many improbabilities, like the bizarrely noisy neighbor Mrs. Shumacher, for example, and the fatal gal blather operation. But at least it's never boring or exaggeratedly ridiculous, so I'm certainly not complaining. Ronald's parental house provides the film with a uniquely sinister setting, complete with hideous wallpaper & furniture, peepholes and secret cupboard passageways. Especially considering it's a TV-production, "Bad Ronald" is well photographed, suspenseful and it approaches several themes that are appealing to fans of grim 70's exploitation. Recommended!

Several people have commented on the bizarre fantasy aspects of this weird little movie...and for that we can thank the fantastic imagination of its author, the inimitable Jack Vance. Vance is better known as one of the most singular fantasy and sci-fi authors of the last fifty years -- his 'Dying Earth' stories are classics of the genre. Yet as far as I know, Bad Ronald is the only book of his ever made into a movie.

I'd love to see this come out on DVD, along with other classic ABC Movies of the Week like "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" and "Crowhaven Farm".