Helen Hunt is an award-winning actor identified for Mad About You, Tornado, As Good as It Will get, and lots of extra movie and TV roles. She took residence the Academy Award for Greatest Actress in 1997, and over the previous 20 years, has largely pivoted to directing on each the massive and small display. However everybody’s acquired to start out someplace. And earlier than all these well-received roles — and even earlier than Ladies Simply Wish to Have Enjoyable, the 1985 teenybopper romp that gave her her first main position — Hunt performed a teen so affected by the drug PCP a.ok.a. “angel mud” that she launches herself from a second-floor window, bounces off the pavement, and begins slashing at her wrist with shards of damaged glass.
The TV film in query is 1982’s Determined Lives — and whereas it will get lumped in with afterschool specials of the period, it truly aired in primetime. Determined Lives definitely has its advocates — one IMDb reviewer known as it “the perfect film I’ve ever seen about teenage drug abuse in our colleges” — however others discovered its over-the-top dramatics laughable, together with Hunt herself.