Category: awesome 80s in april

The Awesome ’80s in April: ¡Three Amigos! (1986)

image host

I loved this movie as a kid. I quoted it endlessly.

“Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas?”
“You dirt-eating piece of slime! You scum-sucking pig! You son of a motherless goat!”

Etc. Me and my friends often did the Three Amigos salute – crossing our arms and gyrating our hips. It was a great movie.

Or so I thought back then. At some point I bought it on DVD via one of those cheap snapcase boxes but I didn’t actually watch it until years later when me and my wife were living in France.

When we first moved to Strasbourg we sublet a tiny little apartment from a young university student. She was spending the year studying in England so she let us the place on the cheap. She only had a single bed so she removed it. We eventually bought a surprisingly comfortable futon but for the first couple of weeks we slept on an air mattress with a tiny hole in it.

We’d blow it up of an evening (using an exhausting to use manual pump) and by morning it would be completely flat. In the middle of the night it would be about half full and the weight of both our bodies kept up slightly above the hard floor. But if someone would get up to go to the bathroom the weight of the other would flatten it leaving the sleeping person confused and irritated.

We only had one chair in that flat, and it was uncomfortable so we spent much of those first two weeks sitting on the floor, backs against the wall. I had brought a couple of those old DVD/CD binders full of movies and we would watch them on our laptop.

One of the first movies we watched was Three Amigos, probably because I had all of those fond memories and we wanted something funny to alleviate our discomfort.

Unfortunately, my memories didn’t match what we were watching and our discomfort remained. It was not an enjoyable viewing. So much so that I haven’t watched it again until last week. And only then because our Internet was crapping out, not allowing us to stream anything and so I needed a DVD from the 1980s.

Sadly, I am unable to say that the unenjoyable viewing in France was not due to our uncomfortable setting. As an adult I just don’t enjoy this film.

It was written by Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, and Randy Newman (his only screenwriting credit, he also wrote songs for the film) and it has that disjointed SNL movie feel, but also that early Steve Martin throw all the jokes at a wall and see what sticks feel.

Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, and Martin Sheen play three silent movie stars who had a long run as the, you guessed it, The Three Amigos – gunfighters who protect the vulnerable. But their latest box office returns haven’t been great and the studio head sacks them when they demand higher salaries.

Meanwhile in some Mexican village a woman sees one of the Three Amigos films, thinks it is real, and sends a wire to them asking for help and offering a large sum of money. The message gets garbled in translation and our heroes believe she’s offering the cash for a performance.

You can see where this is going. The Amigos arrive put on a show and then the real bandits arrive. At first they decide to split, because they aren’t real heroes, but yada yada yada, they come back and save the day.

That’s a pretty good set up for a funny farce. And there are some good gags. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I didn’t laugh. But I didn’t find it hilarious.

A movie like this needs a specificity about it, it needs to lay down a solid foundation for the gags to work. There just isn’t much here for the film to work with. We don’t really know the Amigos other than they are actors. Chevy Chase hardly does anything at all. Short and Martin do some funny stuff, all within their wheelhouse, but it never feels more than them just mugging their way through a movie.

And I’m not sure what they are satirizing – silent movies? People who pretend to be heroes but really aren’t? Other than a few funny bits the movie falls flat for me.

I know lots of people love this movie. And I admit I’m weird when it comes to comedy. But after this viewing I’ll be selling my DVD and I hope to never watch it again.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: The Initiation (1984)

the initiation movie poster

The Initiation feels like two different slashers thrown together in a way that does disservice to them both. The first part is a bit of a cliche but it is fun to watch. The other part is also a cliche but it is not fun, a bit of a mess and a kind of a slog.

College girl Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga) is pledging a sorority and for Hell Night her and her fellow pledges have been tasked with breaking into her father’s enormous department store and stealing the security guard’s clothes.

She’s also been having this terrible recurring nightmare about a strange man being burned alive in her childhood home. Unrelated to her story (or is it? – it definitely is) a man with a burned face breaking out of an insane asylum and starts killing people.

She gets cozy with graduate assistant Peter (James Read) of the psychology department who specializes in dreams. This is the part that’s a slow. He’ll analyze her dream and investigate her past and realize the connection between the dreams and the murders. But as an audience we figure that stuff out pretty quickly so the whole mystery he’s trying to solve isn’t mysterious at all.

The fun part of the film is the group of girls going to the department store and being killed off one by one. The deaths aren’t all that inventive and I’m being generous with the word “fun” here, but it is more more enjoyable to watch than the psychology nonsense.

As a certified horror fan and slasher enthusiast this is very much in my wheelhouse. I love films where characters are trapped in an en closed, but large space and have to face off against something horrible. This certainly doesn’t do anything new with it, and half the plot is a bit of a chore, but there is enough there to satisfy your hard core horror nerds.

The Awesome ’80s In April: Innerspace (1987)

image host

Innerspace was the very first movie I ever saw in Letterboxd.

Quickly, for the few of you who may not know, letterbox is when they put those black bars on the tops and the bottom of the screen. They do that because movies are generally shot in a rectangular aspect ratio that fits the movie theater screen but does not fit the old square TV screens. To make it fit the square TV screen they had to cut off parts of the movie which is called Pan & Scan (pan is the cutting off of the sides, scanning is moving what you see within that cut image). Letterboxing added the black bars to make the image rectangular again thus allowing you to see everything the filmmakers wanted you to see.

I have a vivid memory of renting Innerspace and getting a little pre-movie title explaining what Letterboxing was. I did not understand it at all. I immediately noticed the black bars though. Me and mom complained about it heavily. But also, it did seem to make the movie look better somehow, more cinematic. Sometime later I watched The Empire Strikes Back in letterbox and I was hooked. I became a lifelong champion of the format. Nowadays pretty much everything is Letterboxd, even are TVs are formatted that way.

Anyway, when we plugged in Innerspace this past weekend that’s what I thought about.

Also, it is a pretty fun movie. It is some basic 1980s science fiction cheese but it has a good performance from Dennis Quaid and a hilarious one from Martin Short. And the special effects still hold up quite well.

Quaid plays Lt. Tuck Pendleton a great pilot whose also a bit of a hotshot and alcoholic. He volunteers for a special mission in which he’ll be shrunk down to the size of a pin head and injected into a rabbit. For science you understand.

Short plays Jack Putter a hypochondriac grocery store clerk. For *reasons* Tuck is injected into Putter’s body instead of the rabbit. Our heroes have to find a way of getting him out before his air runs out. Also, some bad guys want the machine Tuck uses to fly around inside Putter’s body.

The film is basically one long excuse to show off some cool effects of this little machine zooming around the inside of a body. Like I said they do hold up. I’m a sucker for classic practical effects. It also allows Short to show off his physical comedy. With the little ship zooming through is bloodstream and the like he has to make all kinds of animated reactions and he’s a master at that stuff.

The rest of the film is just silly 1980s action stuff and isn’t worth mentioning. Meg Ryan is always worth mentioning. She’s Tuck’s girlfriend but isn’t given much more to do than that.

I’ll always remember Innerspace for turning me onto the Letterbox format, but it is worth checking out all on its own.

The Awesome ’80s in April: Flashdance (1983)

image host

I suppose everyone of a certain age knows that scene in Flashdance. If you are of that age then you are already picturing it – Jennifer Beals on a stage in a skimpy outfit. She’s backlit so you can’t see her features but produces a lovely profile. She dances seductively as water pours down from above creating a splash dance if you will (and you probably shouldn’t).

It is an iconic moment, one that is embedded into my memory from my growing pubescent brain. Yet I’d never seen the movie until this past week. I was surprised to learn that scene comes very early in the film. There will be more dances, some of them more creative but none as sexy or iconic.

She plays Alexandra Owens a welder by day (which gives us plenty of actually very well lit scenes in which she sweats while sparks fly all around her) and a dancer by night.

She dances in a club inhabited by guys who wear trucker caps and drink Budweiser but who watch attentively as she does arthouse dances and never complain that she doesn’t bother to take her clothes off.

She likes dancing at the club but what she really wants to be is a ballet dancer. She has an elderly mentor who encourages her to apply at the prestigious dance academy but she’s intimidated by it as she’s a working class girl.

Her boss at the welding factory is twice her age and, again, her boss, takes a shine to her. At first she lets him know he’s twice her age and her boss and that’s definitely not appropriate, but naturally they wind up a thing anyway.

She’s also got a sister who is an ice skater, and a grumpy Dad. There is a lot going on in this film but none of it really adds up to anything. We never get to know any of the characters and there isn’t much in the way of development or tension or plot. Mostly it is an excuse for a lot of big dance numbers. To be fair those are quite enjoyable and they are set to some great 1980s pop music.

It was directed by Adrian Lynne who’d also direct 9 1/2 Weeks and Fatal Attraction and produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (their first of many collaborations including Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, and The Rock) and that completely tracks as it has that beautiful sheen but empty center.

If you can turn off your brain and enjoy some sugary candy then this is an enjoyable distraction. But if you are looking for something more I’d look elsewhere.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Addition: Dolls (1987)

image host

Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator (1985) and for that he will have my eternal gratitude. That film, along with Evil Dead II (1987) opened my eyes to gonzo horror that mixed crazy violence with comedy and gore, and my life was forever changed.

But while I absolutely adore Re-Animator I’ve never really taken to any of the other Stuart Gordon films I’ve seen. Dolls, his third feature film as a director, did not change that.

Dolls is part of an unrelated series of films about childhood toys that come to life that for some reason were very popular in the late 1980s. The special effects work with the puppets here is a lot of fun, but it comes in very late in the film, and unfortunately the build-up is a bit of a slog.

An obnoxious married couple with a precocious young daughter get stuck in a thunderstorm. A couple of punk girls are hitch-hiking nearby and are picked up by a doofus salesman. They too are trapped by the storm. All of these disparate people make their way into a strange old mansion where they are greeted by a kindly old couple.

Most of the characters are highly unlikable. The punks are petty thieves, and well, punks. The married couple constantly complain and are ridiculously mean to the little girl. The old couple are pleasant enough but of course they are in control of the killers dolls. What’s left is the salesman who is dumb and goofy and the precocious girl.

Naturally, the killer dolls kill the annoying characters first leaving the salesman and the girl to survive the night. Presumably creating and working the puppets was expensive so most of the film they are completely off screen. They don’t really appear until nearly 45 minutes into this 77 minute film. Once they do appear things become a lot of fun, but that’s a long 45 minutes where nothing much interesting happens before then.

I’ll argue that it is worth watching for those dolls. My wife is a doll collector and while she leans heavily into the Barbie world and these are more of the porcelain variety I still got a kick out of watching how they brought them to life (and then found creative ways to destroy them). I’m a huge fan of practical effects and they are well done here.

I just wish their was a better script that moved around the effects.

The Awesome ’80s in April: Highlander (1986)

image host

More so than with any of my other themes, I find that I wind up talking about my experience with the movies during Awesome 80s in April rather than reviewing them. I grew up in the 1980s. I watched a lot of movies during that decade and continued to watch them on home video through the 1990s and beyond. More than any other decade, I have watched movies from the 1980s.

I also remember hearing about a lot of the movies in the 1980s. I remember watching trailers growing up, or hearing about films from Siskel and Ebert, reading reviews in the local paper, etc. These things are implanted in my memory, even for movies I’ve never seen.

So when I watch them now, those memories linger. You’ll find that in these reviews I’ll spend a lot of time talking about watching them as a kid, or at least knowing about them in some way. Sometimes it will be just a memory of seeing the VHS cover a thousand times while browsing for something else to watch.

So it was with Highlander. I didn’t watch the film when it came out in 1986. I was too young. I didn’t watch it in high school or even college. But I was very aware of it. In this case I don’t remember watching trailers or hearing buzz about it as a kid. But later people talked about it being one of the great fantasy movies of all time.

When I finally did see it, probably twenty years ago or so, I was disappointed in it. I didn’t really like it, and I didn’t understand why people loved it so.

Watching it again now, I both understand the hype and my trepidation over it. It has a cool concept. Some great music. Some beautiful shots. A wonderfully ridiculous performance from Clancy Brown. But Christopher Lambert in the lead doesn’t work for me. The mythology isn’t fleshed out very well. And the staging of most of the action is just bad.

The Highlander is Connor MacLeod (Lambert), an immortal living a simple life as an antiques dealer in New York in 1985. Our film begins with him watching a wrestling match in Madison Square Garden. Bored, he leaves before the match is over only to be attacked by some rando in the parking garage. They fight with swords, and MacLeod beheads the other dude.

Flashback to the Scottish Highlands in the 1500s, and MacLeod is living a simple life as a farmer or whatever Scottish villagers were in the 1500s. His clan fights another clan. The Kurgan (Brown) is another immortal, but he is a badass and evil. He’s fighting for the other clan. But really he just wants to kill MacLeod because when one immortal beheads the other, he gains the dead guy’s powers or something.

Kurgan gives MacLeod a good stabbing but is unable to behead him. The thing is, MacLeod at this time doesn’t  know he’s immortal. Nor do any of his clan. They have a funeral and everything. But then MacLeod wakes up, definitely not dead, and freaks everybody out.

He’s banished and eventually meets Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez (Sean Connery), a good guy immortal who teaches McLeod in the immortal ways of living, fighting, and not dying.

There are a bunch of immortals on Earth, and the only way to kill them is beheading. Every once in a while these guys get a tingling, and that means they gotta come together and try to kill each other. Someday there will be a great tingling and everybody will gather together and fight until there is only one immortal standing. That guy will get all the power and become God or something. They very much like saying “There Can Be Only One” right before they try and kill each other. It is unclear why they need to kill each other. They don’t always, as MacLeod and Ramírez become friends. And later MacLeod will hang out with another immortal, and they definitely don’t try and kill each other. So maybe it’s just the evil guy who likes killing.

It is all kind of vague and nonsensical if you ask me. I don’t think the writers spent a lot of time working the details of the mythology out. There are sequels and a TV show, so maybe it makes more sense later on.

The film moves back and forth between the 1980s, where MacLeod has to fight the Kurgan again, but he also makes a lady friend and deals with the police over the decapitated dead guy from the garage, and the past, where he gets all his training and stuff.

The film looks great. The Scottish scenery is stunningly beautiful, and cinematographer Gerry Fisher gives the modern stuff a cool noirish feel with lots of shadows, backlighting, and fluid camera movement.

Christopher Lambert is stiff as MacLeod, never making me believe anything that happens to him. But Clancy Brown is clearly having a lot of fun while Sean Connery does his best Sean Connery. He’s playing an Egyptian who has been living as a Spaniard, but he’s still got Connery’s very Scottish accent. I’ll take that over Lamber’s attempt at Scottish. In the modern scenes he’s doing something like German for some reason.

The fight scenes are poorly choreographed and terribly shot. It is hard to believe the same crew who creates such interesting images in all the other scenes managed to screw up the many fight scenes so badly. But here we are.

But that Queen soundtrack rocks.

So what we’re left with is an interesting mythology poorly told and some very pretty images. That’s enough to make me recommend it, but not enough to make me want to dive into the sequels.

The Totally Awesome ’80s in April: 2025 Edition

princess bride movie poster

I feel like I’ve been a bit remiss in my movie theme watching (and writing) this year. I don’t know why exactly except that I’ve been busy. Busy with work. Busy with family stuff. Busy watching (and writing) about movies for Cinema Sentries. I thought that giving up on my music blog would give me more time to write for this one. And it has to an extent, but I seem to be posting more about things that aren’t a part of the month’s them than are.

It is also difficult to get into that groove. For so long I posted music everyday it had become a habit. I’m still working on making this blog a habit.

Which brings us to the Totally Awesome ’80s in April. This will be my third year with this theme and I’m excited about it. Historically I do really well with it. Since it tackles an entire decade and not a specific genre it is much easier to find movies to watch. I especially love the 1980s because I grew up in that decade and have a ton of memories watching movies as a kid, but also because there are a ton of movies geared towards adults that I didn’t watch.

It has been really fun to dive into a lot of those movies these last two years and watch films that would not have interested me as a pre-teen.

I’ve already watched three movies from the 1980s this weekend and I should have some reviews posted this coming week.

Now that’s what I call awesome.

Awesome ’80s in April: Starman (1984)

poster

I have this very vague memory of watching Starman as a kid. This would have been the mid to late 80s, I was in my early teens, definitely pubescent. I think Mom rented it. I wouldn’t have known who John Carpenter was at that point, but I’d definitely known Karen Allen from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I’d probably seen Tron by that point and known Jeff Bridges from it.

Starman seems like a very mature movie for me to have watched at the time, so I’m guessing Mom got it for her and since I knew those actors and I liked alien movies I gave it a watch. I definitely remember not liking it, finding it rather boring.

I know I was pubescent because Karen Allen has an early scene in her underwear and that image has stuck in my brain all these years later.

I’ve since become a very big John Carpenter fan, but have put off watching this since that early viewing for having that memory of it being dull.

But it is the Awesome 80s in April and I’ve been watching a lot of early Jeff Bridges movies so I decided to give it another shot.

I still found it to be kind of dull.

Boring means something different to me now, and Starman definitely has its merits, but there is still something flat about it that didn’t appeal to me.

Karen Allen plays Jenny Hayden, a woman living on her own in an isolated lakeside cabin in Wisconsin. She’s a widow, having recently lost her husband in an accident. She spends her nights watching old home movies of him and feeling sad.

The Voyager 2 space probe makes contact with a distant alien race. They send Jeff Bridges (or rather an alien form that eventually takes the shape of Jeff Bridges – or rather Jenny’s late husband who is played by Jeff Bridges).

He immediately decides the planet is hostile and takes Jenny hostage on a road trip to that big crater in Arizona. They eventually become friends, and fall in love. Meanwhile, they are being chased by the Military led by Mark Shermin (Martin Cruz Smith) who is really a scientist interested in aliens, and unlike the rest of the Army men, doesn’t want to hurt the alien.

Basically, it is a road movie with the two leads getting romantic while Bridges is a fish out of water.

Allen and Bridges are great (Bridges was nominated for an Oscar). He gives his alien a lot of physical quirks and ticks. Carpenter and cinematographer Donald M. Morgan created some lovely images. Some of the effects are a little dated, but there’s nothing cringe-worthy.

It is a fine little film, but there’s just not much to it. Carpenter says he was inspired by The 39 Steps and It Happened One Night both of which are much better films. He also says he was trying to get away from the thriller/horror films he’d become famous for. But it should be noted he made Big Trouble In Little China after this.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: X-Ray (1981)

poster

It wouldn’t be the Awesome ’80s in April without at least one dumb slasher. You may not believe this when I tell you, but I’ve actually grown rather particular when it comes to watching dumb slashers. I no longer have the patience for low-budget, dumb slashers if they are poorly made or have no sense of style.

I have this thing on my streaming service device that lets me browse through every movie ever made. I can sort by genre, or the year it was made. I can browse by actor or popularity, etc. It gives me a brief synopsis, and details on who stars in the film and even connects to YouTube to let me view the film’s trailer.

Tonight I sorted by year, clicked on 1981, and then went looking for horror films. I skipped past the big ones, the popular films, the ones I’ve seen already – films like The Evil Dead, Halloween II, and Scanners. I found a couple of films that looked interesting but when I watched the trailer I could see they were cheaply made and looked bad.

Finally, I landed on X-Ray (also known as the superior title of Hospital Massacre). It looked like a dumb slasher flick, but the trailer indicated it was well-lit and had a sense of style so I found a copy and hit Play.

The plot is simple. Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton) stops by the hospital to get some test results. She can’t find her doctor and is detained by another one. Everyone who looks at her test results and x-rays makes disturbing faces as if she’s ready to die right then and there, but they won’t tell her anything. She’s forced to take more tests and stay overnight. It is Kafka-esque in its absurdity. Also, a crazed killer is on the loose.

When she arrives at the hospital no one seems to know where her doctor is. She’s told to look for her on the eighth floor. The elevator takes her to the ninth floor where she’s met by some creepy dudes in masks who say that the construction on that floor is making the air toxic. On her way back down the elevator gets stuck.

Her doctor isn’t in her office. A friendly medical student directs her to another doctor who looks over her test results and frowns. She’ll have to stay and take more tests he says. He makes her strip down and does a full examination of her body. He takes some blood.

The blood sample comes back and the doctor makes more frowny faces. He talks to the nurses in hushed tones. Over and over Susan asks what’s going on, is there something wrong? But the hospital staff won’t tell her anything. Just that she needs to stay overnight for observation. She’s put in a room with half a dozen other women, all of whom leer at her and openly discuss how she must be dying.

Meanwhile, the psycho killer is brutally stabbing anyone who gets in his way. It was he who switched her lab results and x-rays to indicate she was terribly sick. It was he who killed her original doctor.

In the opening scene, which amounts to a flashback we see young Susan making fun of a young boy who gave her a Valentine’s Day card (naturally this film takes place on a Holiday as Halloween and Friday the 13th had proven to be very popular and profitable). So we know who the killer is and what his motivation is, though we aren’t supposed to be able to figure out which adult in the hospital he is (it isn’t actually that difficult to guess.)

When Susan realizes a killer is on the loose she tries to tell the doctors and the nurses but they don’t believe her. They give her a sedative and tie her down. There is a feminist reading of this film where Susan is being treated like every woman everywhere – always being controlled by the men around her, never, ever listened to. I’m not sure the film is smart enough to have pulled that off on purpose but that reading mostly works.

It is well-lit. The Cinematography isn’t deserving of any awards but it looks good. A part of me always scoffs when films like this have hospitals lit by lamps and pin lights instead of the huge fluorescent real hospitals use, but it’s stylish and looks nice on the screen. Director Boaz Davidson has a sense of style, and there are several striking images. My favorite is when the killer holds a sheet up in front of him and is brightly lit from behind. It makes no sense plot wise but it sure looks cool.

The story is nonsense. The killer’s motivations are dumb even for this type of movie. His method of gaslighting her makes no logical sense since his ultimate plan is to just kill her. Etc., and so forth. It is a dumb slasher. But like I say it has some style and it looks good (and it does have some depth if you want to read it that way) and sometimes that’s what you want on a Friday night.

Awesome ’80s in April: The Killer (1989)

cover

I naturally think of action movies when I think about 1980s movies. Action films along with slasher horror and romantic comedies defined the genres of 1980s cinema. When I think of 1980s action films I think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris. I think about big explosions, increasingly bigger guns, and witty one-liners.

Big, bigger, and biggest defined American action films in the 1980s. But in Hong Kong, they were making a different kind of action film. Led by director John Woo, Hong Kong action films were much more stylized and interesting than their American counterparts. Woo’s action films were operatic in tone. They utilized slow motion and close-up gunfire. They also relied more heavily on telling a compelling story with thought paid attention to developing its characters. The explosions weren’t always big, but the emotions were.

I’m not extremely well versed in Hong Kong cinema, and I’ve only seen a few John Woo films, but watching The Killer reminded me that I need to dig further into them.

The Killer stars Chow Yun-fat as Ah Jong a hitman. Paid to assassinate a Triad leader he accidentally injures a nightclub singer named Jennie (Sally Yeh), leaving her partially blind. Ridden with guilt he begins visiting her secretly and eventually, the two become friends, without her ever knowing who he really is.

Hot on his trail are the gangsters who paid him to kill the Triad leader (his face was seen during that hit which may lead others to know who ordered the murder in the first place) and Detective Yi Ling (Danny Lee).

Ah John and Detective Ling develop a respect for one another as they both have a moral code and are both quite good at what they do. I was reminded quite a bit of Heat while watching this as the games they play with each other are reminiscent of Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in that film.

The action sequences in this film are incredible. I’ve watched several other 1980s action films this month and most of those big action sequences pale in comparison. American films tended to rely on the bigger is better principle. As long as things were constantly blowing up they called it a day. But Woo injects his film with a real sense of style. His action sequences are exciting.

And beautiful. All those close-up shots done in slow motion with operatic music playing really give those sequences a delicate beauty. There are a few scenes located in an old church filled candles that are stunningly gorgeous.

The story itself is fine. I can’t say I’m really moved by any of it, but I appreciate that the film is making an effort with it. It is definitely better than what they were doing with Rambo III.

But nobody watches action films for the story and what Woo and company provide us with those action sequences is more than enough to make The Killer highly recommended.