Struck By Lightning

Struck By Lightning, (Australian premiere: 11 October 1990).

Catherine plays: Jill McHugh.

I have only recently seen Struck By Lightning thanks to an online purchase, and it is a pretty good movie. While it is a little dated watching it these days, and has some dodgy background music (it sounds very 1980s, and not in a good way!), the storyline is excellent and the acting is good as well. It was filmed in Adelaide, and there are some notable landmarks, such as Football Park (now called AAMI Stadium), the Adelaide Parklands, and Estcourt House in the beachside suburb of Tennyson (which I found out is haunted... apparently).

The two main characters are Ollie (Garry McDonald) and Pat (Brian Vriends). Pat is a soccer teacher at a primary school, who one day, becomes fed up with the amount of junk food that the canteen is serving the kids, so he goes on a bit of a food rampage. As a result of this outburst, he is taken away by police and subsequently fired by the school. After this event, Pat gets a job teaching soccer at Saltmarsh - a home for mentally and physically disabled young adults. Ollie is the supervisor at Saltmarsh, he is an alcoholic, whose idea of a cup of tea is a cup of whiskey or scotch. Jill is his social worker ('the bitch' as Ollie calls her), who hides Ollie's bottles of alcohol, but he always manages to find them. Jill and Pat have a bit of an instant attraction to each other upon meeting, much to Ollie's dismay, because he has a liking for Jill. Though she does not feel the same way about him.

Jill and Pat's new relationship is put to the test at a barbecue with Pat's family, and it seems like they are going to break up. But by the end though, Jill admits to Jody (one of the residents of Saltmarsh) that she might be in love with Pat.

I found it interesting that Catherine was nominated for (and won) an AFI award for Weekend With Kate, another movie which was released in 1990, yet she was not nominated for this one. Her acting in Struck By Lightning is a lot better, and the film itself is too.