Special Bulletin (1983)

Sorry, this movie sucks

Please don't spend money on this.

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

It's now 2007 and I'm still impressed by this 1983 super movie! It was on Dutch television, I recorded it then and watched it for so many times. The dutch title is: Hier volgt een extra bericht. Please, can this movie be on television every four years? The makers deserve that! This is very good scenario-writing and acting. An example for everybody how to choose a theme for a movie and how to puzzle it out...it's ahead of it's time. I was so glad that there were still filmmakers with fresh ideas, who could wake up the public from their long sleep. The Dutch television made a bar in the upper end of the screen, because you think as a viewer, that it's all real happening now....like breaking news...so realistic. This movie and makers may not be forgotten!! Watch it!

Having someone from Toronto, Canada pontificate about what is and isn't said by people in The South is like having Gandhi comment on what it's like to be a mass murderer. He's never done it, so how would Gandhi know? "No one refers to the Civil War as 'the late unpleasantness with the North'." Really? My beloved Grandmother referred to the 'late unpleasantness' as "The War of Northern Aggression" and as the "Late unpleasantness with the north" - she never referred to the north with a capital N. She also followed ANYONE who said 'Civil War' with an admonition that "There was nothing civil about that war!" People in Charleston still to this day speak in a reverent tone of the men and boys killed on both sides."That's not what a Wheeling, W.Va. accent sounds like." I beg to ask the question, how does someone in Toronto find out what persons from Wheeling West Virginia sound like? I admit the person in question may have traveled to Wheeling, but the probability seems rather low."Local TV news reporters don't use words like "flabbergasted", except in teleplays written by novices. And so on." This person has likely never watched the local news in Charleston, SC. It never ceases to amaze me at what local newscasters, especially Southerners, say on the air.I'll say that for the record, I was born and raised in Charleston, SC and know a bit of the history of The Holy City and The South. It's referred to as The Holy City because it has more churches per square mile than anywhere else in the world.Ancestors of mine fought in The War of Northern Aggression, some of them for the North, some for the South.Oh, yes, don't let me forget. I was actually IN the film. Un-credited extra, I portrayed a Charleston City Police Officer. Since I had the costume already, and the motorcycle, I was 'typecast' as the only motorcycle cop in the film. I was on screen for maybe 1.5 seconds, if that. Chasing looters with a pal of mine in a CPD cruiser, I was following his cruiser on the Honda 750 police motorcycle.All in all, I enjoyed the film being made as much as getting to watch it. I also enjoyed being able to talk with Lane Smith; he was friendly, personable, and a pretty sharp conversationalist. (Mr. Smith, himself a Southerner from Memphis, Tennessee has been famous as Perry White on the 'New Adventures of Superman' with Dean Cain in the title role.) Working off duty on the film's security detail, I was able to me lots of other interesting people as well. No one from Toronto Canada though. ;-)

I saw about the last 20 minutes of a rerun at about 3am, without the precautionary warnings used in the original airing, and still remember how believable and intensely effective the movie was. Based on what I saw of it and remember after about 15 years [I probably saw this in the late 80s or very early 90s], very well done. I might even add it to my "to rent" list so I can see the whole thing :-). I even woke my grandfather [I was living in his house at the time] to ask him if we knew anyone in Charleston. Once we worked out that it had only been a movie, he was sympathetically amused. His sister had been taken in by the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, so he apparently readily understood how easy it had been for me to be confused by an apparent newscast with no commercials or warnings.

There is no doubt in my mind that SB was one of the best tv movies ever made. It was the first of a series of "nuclear war/nuclear confrontation" movies that aired within about a year of each other, including "The Day After", "Threads", "By Dawn's Early Light", and the sadly now-oft-forgotten "Countdown To Looking Glass". But where all of those dealt with nuclear war or the onset of it, SB was about domestic terrorism. Ed Flanders, David Clennon, and David Rasche were excellent in their portrayals of the harried anchorman and two of the terrorists he spoke with on the live coverage of the event. Shot to look like an actual news telecast, NBC freaked when they first saw it and put disclaimers everywhere, but people who tuned in late flooded local stations asking if it was real, though not on a scale that Orson Welles and company had happen when War Of The Worlds was broadcast in the thirties - and that's the difference between television and radio for you...It's hard to believe that this movie, which won several Emmy awards including best TV Movie or Miniseries that year, was put together by the same team that later produced the intensely annoying "Thirtysomething" (and Clennon was also on that show). But when they do something right, they DO IT RIGHT. As Leonard Maltin's review book puts it, "Way Above Average".Now if we can just get them to release it on DVD....My score: 12 on a scale of 1-10 (yes, that's how much I think of this movie...)