By Kiki Myport
When we settled in to watch Callie and Son I was somewhat optimistic. I was young. I was naive. I was yet to truly be burned by this infernal collection of cheesy movies from the 70’s and 80’s.
After a very long 2 hours and 20 minutes the light had left my eyes. I will never be the same.
Callie and Son is a made for TV movie from 1981. Now, I can get down with some lifetime movies so I thought this could possibly be my jam. The synopsis was promising! Callie, a teen in a bad situation, is forced to sell her baby on the black market and vows to get him back.
The movie starts as promised, with a (very 30 year old looking) teenaged Callie giving birth to a son who is then taken away from her and sold on the black market. No explanation is given for why or how this happened. Who arranged it? Callie doesn’t seem to want to give her child up so what in tarnation is happening here?
I should point out that much of the exposition in this movie is told to us by a narrator named Kimball Smithe who Callie later meets at a party and eventually dates?
After this traumatizing experience Callie runs away to Dallas, TX and moves into an apartment where she meets her neighbor Jeannie who introduces herself by insisting Callie come over to her place. They go out line dancing and pants some cowboys. Jeannie’s husband dies in the war, and she calls Callie out for having a child stashed away somewhere. Callie gets a job as a waitress at the cafe with Jeannie. You know, typical best friend stuff.
Callie meets a wealthy newspaperman while acting as the appointed stenographer for a deposition in which he’s the defendant. Oh yeah, she went to stenography school. They fall in love, they get married, but something is still missing. Callie’s son. He is literally missing, having been sold on the black market. No worries though, her super rich husband just buys him back! Son is now 5 and his name is Randy after his stupid-rich adopted father Randall.
End of movie!
Right? The plot has been fulfilled! She got her son back!
Wrong!
Now we are going to skip ahead several times and follow son throughout his entire life until his late 20’s!
So much stuff happens and most of it is super boring.
Callie meets our narrator at a party, and then we don’t see him again for a long while. Her son gets older. Her relationship with her husband starts to disintegrate because she’s obsessed with her son. Her son gets older. Kennedy dies!!!! Her son gets older. Her husband is murdered by a guy who thinks the newspaper did him dirty. Her son gets older.
At this point we are 53 minutes into this movie. 53 minutes! It’s nearly 2 and a half hours long and as far as I’m concerned we reached the logical endpoint of the film 20 minutes ago.
A bunch more stuff happens, and I don’t care about most of it.
Callie has taken over the newspaper and is in a relationship with the narrator, maybe. It’s hard to tell because she has very little interest in any man aside from her son. Son is a stoner who doesn’t want to go to college. Then eventually, due to his mother’s urging and machinations he becomes a politician.
I will be honest, at this point we started to get weird. This movie was soooo loooong for no valid reason. So please try to understand that this self-inflicted torture is why at this point we began to root for incest. We just needed anything interesting to happen.
Now that Randy is on the road to becoming a politician things finally start to get good, because a very young, attractive, Michelle Pfeiffer shows up as Randy’s love interest.
Callie is clearly threatened by this development and tries to sabotage their relationship. It doesn’t work even though it probably should because this relationship is super unhealthy and abusive. Randy and Sue Lynn elope.
Things are really heating up with Randy’s career; unfortunately, Sue Lynn and Randy are being blackmailed because Sue Lynn took some…compromising photos with several men in a hotel before she even met Randy.
Randy becomes the new Congressman of the 24th district, so naturally, Callie throws a celebratory bird hunting event. Callie calls her son on stage, gives him a kiss on the mouth, says nice things about him then gives him a second, inappropriately passionate kiss while Sue Lynn saltily chugs a vodka martini from a plastic party cup.
I believe this was when we began chanting “Incest! Incest! Incest!” We were so bored, and we totally called the incest thing.
Then, everyone goes off to shoot stuff, including a very intoxicated Sue Lynn.
Callie follows Sue Lynn and an argument ensues during which Sue Lynn calls out Callie for wanting to have relations with her son. It’s not just us. This is a plot point. We weren’t just depraved sickos! They wanted us to root for incest the whole time!
Anyways, Callie gets pissed and shoots Sue Lynn. Sue Lynn dies and Callie tries to make it look like an accident but doesn’t do a very good job because Randy ends up going down for murdering his wife. And Callie lets him go to jail for it!!!
But wait! It’s not over yet…
Jeannie and our narrator Kimball Smithe adopt a baby or buy one from the black market? Regardless, a nurse hands them a baby on the front steps of the hospital. They immediately hand off the baby through a limousine window to none other than Callie, the last person on the planet who should be given another child.
We watched this movie a while ago, and I didn’t realize I had blocked out the ending until I rewatched parts of the movie to remind myself of details. I thought it ended with Randy going to jail. I’m sure it was out of self preservation, because as bad as this entire movie was, the ending is the worst part. It needs no elaboration so I’ll just transcribe the last lines for you here:
Kimball Smithe: We watched Callie and Son drive away. When the limo was just a little black ant speck Jeannie whispered, “Maybe she’ll do better this time,” and I said, “We’ll see, hon. We’ll see”
Slow fade.
Maybe she’ll do better this time? You’re just going to give this wretched, manipulative, incestuous murderer another son and hope that she doesn’t fuck it up as bad!? Incredible.
To wrap this up before this review grows longer than the movie, I’d rate this movie a 1 out of 10. This movie was tortuously long. Yes, a lot of things happened, but at no point did they give us any reason to care about any of it. It outgrew it’s plot in the first 30 minutes. The main characters were unlikeable and only grew more unlikeable as the movie progressed. I ended up hating the only two characters I liked because they gave an innocent child to this known shit-show of a human being. It felt like they just didn’t know how to end the movie so they just kept adding storylines and padding the movie out until it reached the most insidious and bizarre possible conclusion. The only redeeming quality of this film was it’s penchant for long slow zooms paired with dramatic stings. When bad editing is the best part of a movie, you know you’ve gone wrong.
Now on an incest scale I’d give it 7 out of 10. There was definitely incest. It was intentional and not just implied. We are not sickos. It’s this movie.
Also, we are almost definitely sickos.
Sunday Night Screening Society 