[Nerdspresso] Can't Forget Dabney Coleman. Or Remember Bad Ronald!

The legendary Dabney Coleman passed away recently at 92, leaving behind a legacy of unforgettable roles. His patented brand of snark and bravado will be missed. Coleman was THE character actor in the ’80’s, spicing up genial comedies by playing obnoxious jerks and misanthropes. He was the misogynistic boss in 9 to 5, the sleazy soap opera director in Tootsie, and he tried to scam Kermit the Frog in The Muppets Take Manhattan.

If you didn’t know Coleman by name, you knew him by that trademark mustache. He popped up in movies that played non-stop on HBO back in the day. He was the guy you loved to hate in so many flicks. But he could be a good guy, too. Yes, he almost blew up the world in WarGames, but he was well intentioned about it. He was Jane Fonda’s nice guy boyfriend in On Golden Pond and Henry Thomas’s imaginary friend in Cloak & Dagger.

He was memorable in everything he did, including bit parts later in life in You’ve Got Mail, Boardwalk Empire and Yellowstone. Coleman was like the perfect addition to any film or TV role. His gravelly sarcasm punctuated even the most mundane line readings. Rumors say that when a character in the Martin Short/Charles Grodin comedy Clifford was described as a “Dabney Coleman type,” Grodin convinced the director to just go to the source.

Before he became the template for cinematic jackasses, Coleman was a working actor grinding it out in episodic TV and B-movies. You’ll find him pop up in reruns of ’60’s classics like The Fugitive, The Invaders, and even I Dream of Jeannie. My favorite Dabney discovery was a lost treasure called Bad Ronald, courtesy of my lovely bride. We were dating at the time and while discussing our favorite movies, she unironically said that her apex was Bad Ronald. She had watched it on TV as a child and was enraptured by this story of a creepy kid with some serious boundary issues.

Shocked that I had never heard of this one (I was a confirmed movie nerd after all), we went on the hunt for a copy. In the remote back shelves of our neighborhood Blockbuster, we found a forgotten VHS of Bad Ronald. We rushed home and quickly devoured it as if it were an M&M we’d found wedged in the sofa cushions. And just like that metaphorical candy, Bad Ronald was twice as dusty but three times as sweet. This made-for-TV gem from 1974 is about a weirdo living in the walls of an old house and spying on the unsuspecting occupants. Dabney Coleman plays the dad of the family, identified only as “Mr. Wood.”

Mr. Wood doesn’t do much in this movie beyond drink coffee, go to work, and tell his daughters to be home by dark. There’s nothing in Bad Ronald that would foretell Coleman’s rise as Hollywood’s jerk du jour, but he’s a solid TV movie dad. While fans the world over will be rewatching Coleman’s filmography over the next few weeks, celebrating his more famous roles (and rightly so), I urge you to do some googling and locate a copy of Bad Ronald. Let your dedication to Dabney serve as a bridge to the best bad movie you have never seen. It’s delightfully cheesy and unrelentingly cringy as only a ’70’s TV movie about a delusional teenage peeping Tom can be.

Based on a 1973 horror novel by Jack Vance (who also wrote mysteries under the pseudonym Ellery Queen) Bad Ronald feels heavily influenced by both the book and movie version of Psycho. Ronald is a sensitive and imaginative teen, played by Scott Jacoby (who did a handful of horror movies in the ’70’s and early ’80’s, including The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane with Jodie Foster). He lives in a big Victorian house in Smalltown USA with his loving but overprotective mother (Kim Hunter, who played Zira the Chimp Psychologist in the Planet of the Apes but looks very human here).

Ronald is kind of a loner, preferring to spend his time at home, writing and drawing stories set in his own fairy tale kingdom. He’s mocked relentlessly at school and after he’s rejected by his crush, Ronald loses it and accidentally kills a little girl who teases him on the walk home. He freaks out and confesses to his mom. Being a caring parent with a tenuous grasp on reality, she builds a secret room in their house, stashes Ronald and then tells the police that he ran away. The plan is to let him out after things cool off, but Mom has a heart attack and dies so he just waits, stewing in his own juices and vivid imagination.

Ronald’s aunt sells the house to another family with him as a secret tenant. He spends his time drilling holes in the walls so he can observe the family, especially their three comely daughters – Althea, Ellen, and Babs (hey, it was 1974, just go with it). The movie creates a nice paranoid atmosphere with Ronald peeping on the family while they constantly feel like something’s just not right. How he’s able to navigate effectively through the infrastructure of this house makes me a little curious about architecture. There just seems to be an awful lot of convenient crawl spaces. But I guess sometimes you just need to let art flow over you.

After so much time alone with a limited diet and relaxed hygiene, Ronald gets lost in his fantasy world. It looks like he hasn’t bathed since he entered the secret room months earlier and his thoughts get as dirty as his clothes as the story progresses. He imagines the youngest daughter is the princess from his beloved stories and he is her handsome betrothed. Then things get really weird. Bad Ronald is kind of hardcore for a TV movie. The claustrophic setting adds to the tension as Ronald becomes more and more delusional.

The movie builds to a dramatic conclusion with Ronald attacking the girl’s boyfriend who he believes to be a dangerous prince from a neighboring kingdom. And then everybody is like “Holy Crap, this kid has been living in our walls!” It’s some freaky stuff, but in many ways, the movie’s premise is better than its execution. The pacing is symptomatic of TV movies of the day and wastes no time getting into the meat of the story. You do wish there were just a little more set-up; a little more character development. Something more to help you suspend disbelief to embrace this crazy idea.

The cast really sells it with Scott Jacoby all in as Ronald and Kim Hunter is the epitome of a helicopter mom flying with one eye open. She’s just the right mix of loving, overbearing, and unhinged. This whole idea of a weird kid living in your walls and spying on your nubile daughters is a pure nightmare fuel. And there’s so much potential left to be explored. It is a movie that’s screaming for a remake. Think about what a modern filmmaker with today’s resources could do with this idea.

Put an accomplished horror director adept at claustrophobic settings and voyeuristic villains on the case and see what happens. Someone like Saw’s James Wan, Hostel’s Eli Roth, or Barbarian’s Zach Cregger could turn Bad Ronald into a righteous spine-tingler to thrill and disturb a whole new generation of movie watchers. But who would replace Dabney Coleman as the dad?

That’s a tough call, because no matter how you improve the storyline or increase the ick factor, you can never truly replace Dabney Coleman. He had an incredible gift for making you love even his most unlikeable characters. And he didn’t do it by showing you their warm gooey center. These guys weren’t redeemable, but they were funny as hell. He was really good at being bad and his departure leaves a space that will be difficult to fill. We can console ourselves by enjoying his movies so go watch one today. You won’t regret it. Even if it’s Bad Ronald.