The Memory of Eva Ryker (1980 TV Movie) User Reviews (4)

Irwin Allen TV Movie Starring Natalie Wood & The Music Composer

[StuOz · 2 August 2003]

Irwin Allen's The Memory Of Eva Ryker is a change from the 1970s disaster movies this man was dishing out left, right and centre. But the sea loving Irwin Allen just had to have a Poseidon-looking ship in this film.

Three things make this film worth watching (1) Natalie Wood, (2) Bradford Dillman as a memorable bad guy, (3) An old-fashioned score by Richard LaSalle.

But the movie has problems. This may have been a fun show 23 years ago, but now, seeing a 1980 movie pretending to be a 1940s Hollywood melodrama, there is now too much of the 1980s in it. And that scene in "The Australian Outback", it seems Irwin Allen knew nothing about Australia as every Aussie detail of this scene is very WRONG! We don't talk like the cop in that scene. And one line from this cop "I don't read" is almost insulting to me as an Aussie.

See this movie for the above mentioned three things.

The Memory Of Eva Ryker Is an Unusual Natalie Wood vehicle

[climbingivy · 9/10 · 28 February 2012]

I just watched this movie a couple of weeks ago, and I just remembered to do this review of the movie on IMDb.I saw "The Memory Of Eva Ryker" when it first aired on television way back in 1980 or 1981.The main reason that I watched the movie back then, and lately, is because I really like Natalie Wood as an actress.Natalie Wood from the time she played the little girl in the movie "The Miracle On 34th Street" with Maureen O'Hara and John Payne,up to her last film "Brainstorm" with Christopher Walken was a wonderful actress in my opinion.She had the something special that made her shine no matter what part she played."The Memory of Eva Ryker" has a huge cast with excellent actors like Ralph Bellamy and the scenery wasn't bad either.This is not what I would call one of Natalie Wood's best movies,but it is fine if only for getting to see Natalie do her magic as an actress.I Have This Movie.

Decent suspense film, a bit too long.

[zeemanguy · 5/10 · 20 January 2003]

Watch this if you like Natalie Wood. She plays the parts of Eva Ryker and in a flashback mode, Claire Ryker, Eva's dead mother. Eva has severe emotional problems that stem from the circumstances surrounding her mother's death when Eva was very young. When Eva's father hires a guy to look into the matter 30 years later the old memories come back.

This made me wish for amnesia, but then I'd forget I suffered through this.

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 5 April 2022]

Poor Natalie Wood had admitted just a few years before while making "The Star" that she was petrified of water, an eerie situation at the Bette Davis AFI tribute. Just a few years before tragedy struck, she was part of a sinking ship, both literally and psychologically, with this messy TV movie, overlong and tedious, so melodramatic that I couldn't even laugh at it. Natalie's rather understated in her double role as the title character and her mother, and that's a relief considering the melodramatic performances of the rest of the ensemble. Robert Foxworth is the focus of the introduction which indicates that this is going to be a rather soapy melodrama filled with flashbacks that are more bizarre than anything in the present day of the film.

Ralph Bellamy overemotes as the father of the modern day Natalie, and Morgan Fairchild chews up the scenery as if Flamingo Road was made of actual fried flamingos. Peter Graves, Roddy McDowall, Jean Pierre Aumont and Bradford Dillman go ballistic as well in their acting. An Irwin Allen production (with a lot of Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins style of trash inside the script), this is just too bizarre with every outlandish twist and tyrhs, compiling twists involving multiple murders, diamond smuggling and a sinking ship, along with an overly dramatic musical score accompanying it all. Bad TV movies, when discussed, should have a lead off with this one for how audacious it all is.