What Are Friends For? (1980)
The Stage.
A girl who’s parents are going through a divorce moves in with her mother and befriends a very damaged tween named Michelle Mudd.
The Review.
I was up really late one night this past week playing Rocket League, and normally when I’m on there I’ll listen to music or a podcast, but for some reason I just wanted to watch something on my laptop on the side, so I jumped on YouTube. Recently I’ve been listening to the Made for TV Mayhem Podcast, which is an awesome show that is obviously about stuff that was made for TV, and they did one about After School Specials a while back that really stuck with me so I typed in ‘ABC After School Special’ and just hit play on the first one that came up.
For those unfamiliar with ABC After School Specials, I’ll give you just a little backstory. These short films ran from 1972 until 1997 and were basically 45 minute dramas based on hot button issues that were affecting kids at the time, and most of the time were targeted towards teenagers. They were essentially warnings that were intended to be watched as a family to foster constructive conversation afterward about things like teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drunk driving, drugs, hell, even the dangers of hitchhiking. Growing up, I really never watched these because no one else was home when my brother and I got home from school, and I’ll be damned if I was going to let specials like ‘The Day My Kid Went Punk’ or ‘My Dad Lives In A Downtown Hotel’ get in the way of watching The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
So I hit play on What Are Friends For?, and I’m almost instantly hooked. Like, put the controller down, this has my complete attention, because the opening shot feels like the opening of a late 70’s horror film. We see various creepy dolls being placed in frame for closeups, and when I say creepy, I mean it. These things are dreadful. The dolls are part of Amy Warner’s collection - she’s a twelve year old girl who’s in the process of unpacking them as she and her mother just moved into an apartment because of a divorce. Amy hates her dad because of it, even though her mother continuously explains that the divorce had nothing to do with her and she should still talk to her father, who has since moved on to a woman who has three kids of her own. Fortunately for Amy, she’s not the only tween in the apartment complex. Unfortunately for Amy, the first one that she befriends is Michelle Mudd. At first glance, Michelle is kind of an odd kid, someone who marches to the beat of her own drum. She and Amy bond over the one thing they have in common, divorced parents - something that was more rare in 1980 than it is today. The other girls who live in the complex, like Nora and Barbara, warn Amy about being friends with Michelle. In Barbara’s twelve year old words, her mother didn’t think Michelle was a proper playmate. Let’s just say Barbara’s mother was right.
On a trip to the beach, Michelle ponders if there was a way to get Amy’s dad’s new family to disappear, and then we cut to the movies first black magic scene. Yes, we get a fucking black magic scene, a Tibetan seance during which Michelle makes Amy promise her loyalty, ending with Michelle saying, “You realize if you break our bond of friendship, you’ll probably die.” It turns out she’s got a morbid fascination with loyalty, and loyalty for her means never being friends with anyone else. If this sounds weird, it only gets fucking weirder. Turns out Michelle has serious emotional issues that we can imply came from her parents’ divorce. She’s a compulsive liar, continuously pretends to be sick, and has a habit of stealing things. And when her father announces he’s getting remarried during Michelle’s birthday dinner, she goes off the deep end. Amy walks into her apartment hearing some of that Tibetan chanting and walks into the bathroom, where Michelle is on her knees in full ghost white Kabuki makeup and robe, in front of a symbol painted on the wall in red, drowning a doll that looks like her father’s new fiance in a bathtub full of what appears to be blood. This reveal is scary as shit and I can only imagine how many twelve year olds were scarred by this when it aired. Later on, Michelle sneaks into Amy’s house and drops off a package wrapped in a newspaper, and I swear to god I thought it was going to be Barbara’s dead dog. Fortunately, the reveal was much more innocuous than that.
Now, most of these ABC After School Specials had a message to them. Don’t drink and drive, don’t hitchhike, don’t get knocked up, that sort of thing. About thirty minutes in, I seriously thought that the message here was going to be don’t get caught up in the occult, and that people would start spontaneously bursting into flames. I was wrong, of course, but the message was no less heavy for kids. The message is that sometimes, relationships aren’t worth salvaging for some people. Amy kicks Michelle’s crazy ass to the curb, and in doing so, learns that just because her mom and dad couldn’t salvage their relationship, it didn’t mean that she and her dad couldn’t have one. Of course it wraps up in a pretty neat bow, because of the audience it was intended for…no murders, just words.
These ABC Specials helped launch the career for many actors over the years, including people like Jodi Foster, Rob Lowe, Jennifer Grey, Michelle Pfieffer, Ben Affleck, and Sarah Jessica Parker. There are a few familiar faces here as well - the character of Amy was played by Melora Hardin, who has had a long career in movies and on TV but is probably best known for playing Jan Levinson on The Office. I actually thought she did a pretty good job here as a clueless kid. Her psychotic friend was played by Dana Hill, who had a long voice acting career in Hollywood and played Audrey Griswold in European Vacation.
The End.
As far as After School Specials go, I thought this was highly entertaining with some really creepy shots and the character of Michelle Mudd is one that I won’t soon forget. It was available on disc as part of an After School Specials set, but is long since out of print, so if you want to catch it, it’s available on YouTube in pretty decent quality, which is linked below, and I suggest that you watch it just to see how screwed up these forty-five minute time capsules could be.
