Broken Angel (1988)

Broken Angel is one of those cheap 80s TV movies that are so awesomely lame that you just have to watch the whole thing. The plot is the daughter of William Shatner's character, played by Erika Eleniak, goes missing at the end of a school dance after a gang-related shooting that kills her friend. Shatner and his wife, Susan Blakely, spend the rest of the movie in search of her. They are at first "assisted" by a cop, played by Brock Peters, who is (as is usual for movies like this) actually pretty useless. The true help comes from a woman working for the L.A. Gang Project, a nonprofit to get kids out of gangs, who tells the couple that their daughter is actually a member of a gang herself! There are also a couple side plots too, most notably Shatner's preteen son, who is gay or at least curious, and enjoys trying on his mother's diamond earrings. Of course this side plot doesn't really go anywhere and is not dealt with in any seriousness and could have and probably should have been left out. Another thing this movie has is many lame and unintentionally funny scenes. One of the more comical scenes involves the Chinese gang and the white gang (as it is frequently called in the movie) engaging in a battle of sorts in a children's playground, yielding not guns, not knives, not even chains, but small planks of wood and sticks. Such harsh realism! Another great scene is where Shatner manages to fight off a group of probably 20 members of the Chinese gang (this time armed with small pocket knives) with nothing but a small bag, and then escapes and actually outruns 5 of them. Then, as the search for their daughter continues but hope and leads begin to dwindle, the movie ends. Pretty suddenly, too, in a very anti-climactic way. I won't tell the "surprise," but you don't have to be a genius to figure out that it is going to be predictably happy. In conclusion, both mildly interesting and unintentionally funny, Broken Angel is one really great, super cheesy 80s TV movie that everyone should definitely see!