Edward Herrmann Movies

Actor Bob Balaban directed this black comedy for Disney concerning a young zombie's love for a pretty high school girl. Johnny Dingle (Andrew Lowery) is a sweet-natured soul who has been in love with Missy McCloud (Traci Lind) ever since first grade, but he's always been reluctant to ask her out, fearing rejection. Now that the high school prom is coming, he devises a plan to make Missy say yes when he musters up the courage to ask her to the dance. Johnny and his pal Eddie (Danny Zorn) concoct a plan that will make it look as if Johnny saves her life. Unfortunately, Johnny's plan goes amiss and he's actually killed. But even death doesn't dissuade Johnny and he rises from his grave to take her to the prom. Curiously enough, Missy is more attracted to Johnny now that he is dead than when he was alive (despite his falling body parts). ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

In this sentimental comedy, two British World War II veterans (played by English stage and screen veterans Sir Alec Guinness and Leo McKern) have come back to Normandy together to revisit the site of their most harrowing wartime experiences, to look up the gravesite of a fallen comrade, and to look up the prostitute (Jeanne Moreau) who put joy back into their lives. At their hotel, they meet Waldo (John Randolph), an American veteran, who is on a similar mission. Unlike them, however, he is saddled with the company of his disagreeable daughter and her stuffy husband (Geraldine Chaplin and Edward Herrmann) who think they are doing him a favor by coming with him. One highlight of the film is Moreau's rendition of the Edith Piaf classic, La vie en rose. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

When her Mother breaks her hip and needs full-time care, a married woman is forced to a new understanding of the process of aging and the human spirit. Her Mother becomes resentful and fearful in this powerful affirmation of the dignity of the elderly and the power of a family. ~ Tana Hobart, All Movie Guide

In this drama, a group of impressionable students become the unwitting subjects for an evil white supremacist's schemes to twist the teachings of a prominent professor to promote a highly subversive form of neo-Nazism. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Made for television, Return of Hickey is the sequel to 1987's The Prodigious Mr. William Hicks. Both films were based on Owen Johnson's turn-of-the-century "Lawrenceville Stories." Zach Galligan returns as William "Hickey" Hicks, prep-school prankster supreme. Back at Lawrenceville after a period of suspension, Hickey intends to resume his agenda of elaborate practical jokes. This time, however, he is challenged by a imaginative new student (Nicholas Rowe), who has vowed to out-Hickey Hickey. Return of Hickey was originally telecast February 3, 1988, on PBS' American Playhouse. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Mark Twain's essay is brought to life with this video telling the Civil War story of a Confederate troop who has not been exposed to the atrocities of war. ~ All Movie Guide

In this hit '80s hybrid of the horror movie and the teen flick, a single mom and her two sons become involved with a pack of vampires when they move into an offbeat Northern California town. Lucy (Dianne Wiest) and her sons, Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim), move to Santa Carla to live with Lucy's lovable but curmudgeonly father (Barnard Hughes). Lucy gets a job from video store-owner Max (Edward Herrmann), then begins dating him, while Sam hangs out with Edward and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander), a pair of vampire-obsessed comic-shop clerks. Soon Michael falls in with some actual vampires after becoming enamored of one of their victims: Star (Jami Gertz), a gypsy-like vixen who is trying to hold onto her humanity even though vampire leader David (Kiefer Sutherland) wants to play Peter Pan to her Wendy. When Michael visits the cavernous hangout of David and his cronies and unwittingly drinks from a wine bottle full of vampiric blood, he becomes an unwilling member of the bloodsucker biker gang. Soon, it's up to Sam and the Frog brothers to destroy David and his ilk without killing Michael and Star. Shot on location in the coastal California town of Santa Cruz and directed by Hollywood pro Joel Schumacher, The Lost Boys became a pop-culture phenomenon thanks to its attractive young stars, offbeat soundtrack, and hip, clever marketing campaign; the film's tagline -- "Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire." -- perfectly captured its knowing mixture of attitude and gore. The effects team who transformed Sutherland and company into snarling blood-suckers would go on to provide equally gruesome effects for Blade, another revisionist vampire flick, more than a decade later. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide

Director Frank Perry brings Susan Issacs' comedic whodunit novel to the screen with Susan Sarandon as a Long Island housewife who tries to escape her deadening suburban life by trying to solve the murder of a philandering local dentist. The dentist, Bruce Fleckstein (Joe Mantegna), is the kind of swinging ladies' man who wears gold chains and jazzy clothing. He also arranges to meet his lonely housewife patients in hotel rooms for afternoon quickies. When he is found murdered in his office, the suspects are as numerous as the names in the Nyack telephone directory, especially since Fleckstein had the habit of taking incriminating Polaroid snapshots during his one-on-one sessions. Judith Singer (Sarandon) is an ex-Newsday reporter and bored wife of Bob Singer (Edward Herrmann), a stuffy business executive, and she was one of the last people to see Fleckstein alive. Considered a suspect by police detective David Suarez (Raul Julia), she determines to solve the case herself, interviewing suspects and searching for evidence. If she solves the crime, Judith hopes to write an article about it and get her old job back at the newspaper. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Daniel J. Travanti plays a glum, no-nonsense Edward R. Murrow in this made-for-TV biopic. We follow Murrow's rise to prominence as America's foremost news commentator between the years 1940 through 1955, beginning with his on-the-spot radio coverage of the bombing of London. After the war, Murrow hosts CBS television's documentary series See It Now, which eventually leads to his legendary confrontation with Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Murrow's own occasional compromises with his conscience, and his extramarital affairs, are bypassed in Ernest Kinoy's lean, spare script. Of more importance in the scheme of things is Murrow's edict that TV "can teach, can illuminate, and damn it, can inspire." Also in the cast are Dabney Coleman as CBS head-honcho William Paley, John McMartin as Frank Stanton, Edward Herrmann as Fred Friendly, David Suchet as William L. Shirer, and Robert Vaughn as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Murrow debuted January 19, 1986, as an HBO Premiere Films presentation ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this made-for-TV film, Mike Farrell stars as an attorney who finds himself at the center of a surprise reunion with the veterans of his platoon from Vietnam, including Robert Walden and Edward Herrmann. The reunion stirs up painful memories and disturbing secrets for all involved. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

The Gift of Life is a non-sensational study of surrogate pregnancy. Susan Dey stars as Joleen Sutton, a woman with a husband and two kids who agrees to be artificially inseminated on behalf of another woman. Since the surrogate mother concept is somewhat cloudy on a legal basis, Joleen faces conflict from her own family and friends, as well as the state attorney general. Her husband (Paul Le Mat) is particularly troubled by the situation, even though the money Joleen will earn for her pregnancy will help him keep his struggling gas station. But as the baby's birth date approaches, Joleen isn't so certain she wants to give up the child. Admirable in its refusal to take sides in the surrogate-mother controversy, The Gift of Life was telecast around the same time as another TV movie with a similar plotline, Tomorrow's Child. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

While traveling across Arizona with his divorced mother and her new boyfriend, a precocious young boy stumbles onto a grisly murder scene, placing the three of them in mortal danger at the hands of a pair of good-ol'-boy twin psychopaths. It's hard to tell whether the producers of this film decided to "dress up" a standard slasher script with spooky desert vistas and quality actors (including cuddly little Peter Billingsley, who forever endeared himself to viewers of the perennial favorite A Christmas Story), or rather chose to inject gratuitous T&A and gore scenes into an otherwise more sophisticated Hitchcockian thriller to lure the Friday the 13th crowd. Whatever the motivation, the end result is a muddled mishmash of family drama and sleazy dead-teen mayhem that never found an audience. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide