Fallen Angel

TV Movie
1981
Not Rated
1h 40m

IMDb RATING

YOUR RATING

Dana Hill and Richard Masur in Fallen Angel (1981)

Twelve-year-old Jennifer is unhappy with her widowed mom's relationship with a family friend. Feeling lonely, she readily accepts the friendship of an adult man named Howie and joins the sof... Read allTwelve-year-old Jennifer is unhappy with her widowed mom's relationship with a family friend. Feeling lonely, she readily accepts the friendship of an adult man named Howie and joins the softball team he coaches. Howie is soon convincing Jennifer to pose for photographs which bec... Read allTwelve-year-old Jennifer is unhappy with her widowed mom's relationship with a family friend. Feeling lonely, she readily accepts the friendship of an adult man named Howie and joins the softball team he coaches. Howie is soon convincing Jennifer to pose for photographs which become more and more revealing. He turns out to be a pedophile who works in child pornography... Read all

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

6.8/10

704

YOUR RATING

See production info at IMDbPro

Nominated for 1 Primetime Emmy
- 1 win & 3 nominations total

Photos41

+ 37

User reviews13

6.8704

Featured reviews

9laurina70

Excellent and disturbing.

I remember watching this growing up. I'm 50 and it still haunts me.

7melissasmail-15-678926

I remember this movie! And that's why I'm going to have my daughter watch it...

I remember watching this movie when I was little...and I think (not sure) my mom and dad may have been wanting to teach me about the monsters out there. I think this movie is the best way to make our kids aware of the sick, twisted individuals that threaten to hurt our kids or change their lives forever. This is a must see for naive young girls who don't seem to "get" fully how there are monsters out there. Yes, some may say it will scare them. I'd rather have my daughter scared than have her end up a victim. I know it made ME wiser when I was little...cause I was just like my daughter....overly friendly-never meets a stranger.

10boopsipookums-117-179420

This movie saved my life.

I wish they would remake this movie in modern day. Or at a minimum, re-release it on DVD. I watched it on local TV (like a Saturday afternoon special) some where around June or early July, 1981, just days before my 12th birthday. I specifically remember sitting on the floor at the foot of my mother's bed. They had a master on the main and we had to roll the TV cart into the French doorway from the living room. I was just captivated as I realized that what had been happening to me for the last 3 years was not normal, but very wrong.

lynnb4321

Disturbing

I first saw this movie when I was a child and had to sneak around my mother to watch it. The movie disturbed me enough that I searched for the title for 15 years, still remembering the movie, until I found it. This is probably not a good movie for children, since the parts I remember are not very good for small eyes to view.

6moonspinner55

Assured performances in an unsteady "warning" film

Richard Masur is exceedingly creepy as a pedophile who lures youngsters into kiddie-porno films, but this vehicle for his character can't quite create a plot out of these dynamics. Masur's relationship with disenfranchised youth Dana Hill is pseudo-friendly (he's really all business), so it comes as something of a surprise when he tells her near the end that he wants to be her lover. This is not consistent with the character, nor is it likely that Hill would find any revelations shocking at this point. What the movie does well is to show Hill almost absent-mindedly falling into the porn racket, turning her from an innocent latch-key kid into someone hard and manipulative (yet the filmmakers have her go all sweet and soft at the tag, as if finding the culprit repairs most of the damage). "Fallen Angel" isn't a great TV-flick, nor has it proved to be an important one, but it does have some frank dialogue and some emotional and disturbing scenes.

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Storyline

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Did you know

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Trivia
Richard Masur once told an interviewer that he got his part because "the other 20 people they went to before me wouldn't do it." He also praised Dana Hill's acting abilities and intelligence.

Goofs
When Howard leaves the boys' apartment before the ball game, The Diamond Head Game (1975) is playing on the living room TV (a series distributed by Columbia Pictures Television, who also packaged this film). The short-lived game show aired for the first half of 1975, yet the film is clearly set in the present time (late 1980, when filming took place).

Quotes
Jane Rizzo: [last lines of film, in voice-over, giving her closing argument during Howard's trial] And so, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we ask all adults to look at those below our eye level. To take seriously America's current adult-child relations. There are one million runaways today. Child suicide has tripled in the last ten years; thirty each day. More than half the patients in our mental institutions are under twenty-one. Many children rarely relate to their parents, to the adults in their community, or the adults on television. And into this void walks the pedophile, the child lover. Now, we don't want to suggest that every coach, every teacher, every adult our children come in contact with is a pedophile. It is possible that he or she might be, but it is not possible for our children to be psychologically seduced by these sick people, if we know and love and discipline and talk to and discover what is in the very bright minds of the youngsters in our lives. We do want to suggest to you, the jury, that we can take one step closer in spanning America's adult-child chasm by finding Howard Nichols guilty.