Helen Hunt Filmography Part 5: Eighties Overview
Our girl was BUSY in the 80s!
During the 80s Helen Hunt made a lot of TV movies and guest appearances on TV shows. Most of those parts were small, and today I’m doing an overview of the movies and shows I thought were interesting, but didn’t quite warrant a dedicated blog post.
Unfortunately a lot of this TV work is unavailable or available on YouTube in barely watchable quality.
Just because it’s barely watchable doesn’t mean I didn’t watch it.
The most memed Helen Hunt performance from the 80s is from a 80s anti-drug after school special in which she plays a teenager who takes drugs and immediately throws herself out a second story window.
I couldn’t actually find this movie, just the gif.
80s anti-drug campaigns were many things, subtle was not one of them
I didn’t make the poster, but I apologize nonetheless.
Bill on His Own (1983) is a sequel to Bill, a movie about a mentally challenged man who is rescued from an institution by a photography/documentary filmmaker, played by Denis Quaid.
In the sequel, Bill is living relatively on his own, and his friend is moving to California. This is a big shift in Bill’s life. He is taken on as a thesis project by Jenny Wells played by Helen Hunt.
The premise is a little bit cringey, but I feel like attitudes towards disability in 1983 were even less enlightened than they are today.
Helen Hunt’s character is well-intentioned and does have some character growth to see that trying to fit Bill into the parameters of her program without a much regard for his desires is not respectful or helpful or kind. She learns to value him on his own terms, as he is, which is a positive arc. It just causes a lot of needless distress on his part for her to get there.
A strong female lead with a locker room full of remarkably non-toxic masculinity.
What’s not to love?
I liked Quarterback Princess (1983) way more than I expected too. I found it on YouTube, and it’s almost unwatchable due to poor picture quality. However, it’s an utterly wholesome sports film, but with a bit more nuance and feminist messaging than typical in football movies.
The movie is based on a true story. Helen Hunt plays Tami Maida, a high school student who wants to play on the football team. She has to win over the school board, who are kind of out of luck because of Title IX, and the coach, and the team, and the fans. She manages to do all this by being a good quarterback and winning games.
The best part about this movie is the way the team supports her, and the absence of locker room sexualization. There’s a really young Tim Robbins as one of her team mates. And God bless the eighties and football players practicing in short shorts and crop tops.
I also really appreciated that being a quarterback was just one part of the character’s personality. She has interesting relationship dynamics with her sisters and her (non-football playing) boyfriend. Her femininity is not sublimated to her athletic ambitions.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
In Choices of the Heart (1983) Helen Hunt plays Melissa Gilbert’s (Little House on the Prairie) roommate in the early part of the film. the movie is based on the true story of some Catholic missionaries who were murdered in El Salvador. I watched this on YouTube, and the picture quality is really awful.
I don’t think Melissa Gilbert is that great as an actress, so the best parts of this movie are a really young Martin Sheen playing an Irish priest, and Helen Hunt existing for like three scenes.
“Hey, Boomer”
Helen Hunt had an 8 episode arc over 3 seasons (1984-1986) on St. Elsewhere, a hospital drama. I only watched her episodes, because Helen Hunt is my thing and hospital dramas aren’t. She plays the girlfriend of one of the residents, and nicknames him “Boomer”, which is funny in 2023.
In Season 3 Episode 1: Playing God Part 1 Helen Hunt’s character, Clancy, is having a conversation with her boyfriend and she says “the rabbit died”. I literally rewound the episode to see if I had missed some conversation they’d had about a rabbit or some appearance of a rabbit because it was really a non sequitur.
There was no previous rabbit reference, but apparently in the 80s when you took a pregnancy test you didn’t just pee on a stick. They performed some sort of enzyme test on rabbits, and if you were pregnant the RABBIT DIED!
So saying, “the rabbit died” was a euphemism for “I’m pregnant”, and I did not know that.
Eight year old me probably would have liked The Frog Prince (1986) fine. As I’m not eight, it seemed to drag on forever, and felt very stagey and the musical numbers seemed interminable.
But if you want to see young Helen Hunt wearing poofy dresses and being an absolute bitch to a perfectly nice 10 year old—and trust me, you do—this movie is a gem.
It was available on Hoopla through my library.
Step aside, Marty McFly!
Helen Hunt plays the adult daughter of Kathleen Turner and Nicholas Cage in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). She appears very briefly in the present-day scenes at the beginning and end of the film, but doesn’t have much to do, so there isn’t much to say about her.
But let's talk about this movie!
I like this soooo much better than Back To The Future. Directed by Francis Ford Copolla, in a surprisingly light turn, this is the story of Peggy Sue (Turner) who on the night of her 25th high school reunion passes out and travels back in time to her senior year of high school. She has choices to make about friends and romance and her boyfriend/ex-husband (Cage).
As with every Nicholas Cage performance, one must ask “Is this genius or imbecility?” Let’s just say he’s committed to his choices. Also Cage and Jim Carey are in a gold-sequin-jacket-wearing doowop group?!?
The best part is that when Peggy Sue returns to the present day, she doesn’t just automatically take her ex-husband back. She has a different perspective on their relationship, and maybe it will work out. But she also has a better perspective on herself and what matters to her, and she decides to take the time to sort things out.
On this blog we support nuanced portrayals of women; women finding themselves outside of romantic relationships; and women making healthy choices for themselves and having boundaries.
Also on this blog, having an adult consciousness inhabit a child/teen body, and behaving in un-child/teen-like ways is our brand of humor.
This Project X (1987) is not to be confused with a house party movie from 2012.
I went in thinking that a movie from the 80s with Matthew Broderick about monkeys in the Air Force would be a screwball comedy along the lines of Monkey Business. However, it’s actually about the unethical treatment of monkeys by the Air Force, and how Jimmy Garrett (Broderick) comes to appreciate the value of the chimp he’s training and to disobey bad orders to preserve his integrity and humanity.
So, not so much a comedy.
The monkeys do get up to some entertaining hijinks because they’re monkeys, and people would demand their money back if a monkey movie had no monkey hijinks.
Helen Hunt bookends the film, but is unfortunately absent through most of it. She plays Teri, a psychologist who is researching behavior and learning or something, and has trained our main monkey, Virgil, since he was a baby. But she loses custody, when the funding for her research stops, and Virgil is sent to the Air Force.
Teri rejoins the movie when Garrett calls her to help him save Virgil from being nuked to death—Air Force bastards. Together they defy orders and help the monkeys escape.
This really needed more of Helen Hunt. Broderick is okay, but in my opinion can’t quite carry this movie on his own. The movie’s development would have benefited from having more of Teri’s moral compass as a counterpoint to Garrett’s moral ambiguity.
Helen Hunt brightens up the two scenes she has as the best friend from Kansas City.
There’s cool, and then there’s Kansas City cool…if you’re from Iowa.
In Miles From Home (1988) two brothers deal with the loss of their family farm and the weight of paternal expectation. Richard Gere is quietly unhinged as the self-destructive older brother who burns down the farm when the bank calls in the loan and then embarks on a generalized crime spree dragging his reluctant younger brother with him.
Well this movie exists.
In Next of Kin (1989) Patrick Swayze plays a former hillbilly turned Chicago cop, who’s younger brother (Bill Paxton) is murdered by the mob. This prompts his older brother, and current hillbilly, (Liam Neeson) to set out seeking vengeance as Liam Neesons are wont to do.
Eventually an entire hillbilly militia makes their way to Chicago to take out the mob with bows and arrows and a van full of snakes (nope).
Helen Hunt plays Swayze’s violinist wife. She exists for two things: to win over his hillbilly family with her playing when they go to Kentucky for the younger brother’s funeral, and to take a trauma shower after the mob attacks her.
If you’re unfamiliar with the movie trope of the trauma shower, it is a shower that a character—usually a woman—takes after experiencing trauma.
She usually does this with all her clothes on, and is often joined by the male lead, also usually with his clothes on.
The most iconic trauma shower.
